January 1, 2021
Life amidst death. Right now, this is how I choose to capture the year 2020. Within these three words — life amidst death — there is a universe. An ever-evolving, ever-adapting, beyond comprehension, heart-wrenching, heart-expanding, destructive, chaotic, sensible universe.
If not for 2020, it may have taken me far too long to learn — contrary to what I had been led to believe — life and death are far from opposition. In fact, life amidst death is truly a model for the fallacy of the binary. As mortals who can only exist in linear time, life can feel like a journey that moves us closer to our own deaths. Our hearts are beating and our brain synapses firing, and then they are not. That is mortality; that is not life.
Ravaged by the rapid fire coronavirus, our collective mortality has come much closer into view and humanity on Earth is forever changed. We tell ourselves to “keep on living” and hope that the deaths will end soon, as long as we trust in science and politics and all such else that in the same breath has historically proven to dehumanize and violate the majority of us.
Within this, we are actively and unceasingly in a process of grief. Within that, a vaccine is being injected into bodies deemed essential by the medical industrial complex. Will this vaccine bring back my community member who died of COVID-19 a week ago? Will it cure the cancer that killed my mentor who died in July? Will it bring back my beloveds who overdosed throughout 2020 and for decades before? Will it create a system that would have actually loved each and every one of the dead and living from the moments we entered life ?
I am angry. To be angry about death right now is an asset. It is an anger within love. I love my anger. To love. To be loved. On January 1, 2020 I ruminated on love. A readiness for walking in the power of my love. Abundance, transformation, revelations, and complexity.
I am now an angry, loving, living being in the future. I am living in the year 2021. My love has brought me here. My anger pushes me forward. I catalyze forward movement towards an ocean of life filled with radical love. I grieve the dead, I carry on legacies, I weep for joy as my Amma gets her COVID-19 pt.1 vaccine, and I use an invisible network to send silly videos to my chosen family and order frivolous gold shoelaces purely to engage with joy.
Life amidst death. I have lived amidst this deadly year, and I will live amidst the next one.
(Image below: a poem I wrote and published on social media on January 1, 2020)
rajani gudlavalleti 