The Thread

I was talking with Sara,
one of those oldest friends
you can sit beside in the heaviest questions.

I told her I believe
we are all part of one vast consciousness,
threads in a single fabric,
the Whole breathing itself through us.

She stopped me.
She asked,
then why?
Why would that consciousness starve a child?
Why would it allow cruelty?
Why suffering at all?

And I couldn’t blame her.
Some days I feel the same.
Some days I want to burn the sky.

Maybe her question is right.
Maybe Consciousness is indifferent,
not waiting on us at all,
just watching,
cruel and neutral,
while children starve and bombs fall.

Maybe nothing is sacred.
Not suffering.
Not resistance.
Not even love.

But I can’t live there.
I can’t build a life on that ground.

So here is the truth I choose:

Maybe Consciousness isn’t a director,
not a playwright scripting tragedies.
Maybe it is a canvas,
a wide-open field of possibility.
And we are the brushstrokes.
Some paint beauty,
some paint horror.
Consciousness does not want suffering.
It simply allows every possibility.
That is its terrifying neutrality.

Cruelty comes from us,
from human hands
that profit on starvation,
that legislate fear,
that drop bombs and call it strategy.
Not puppets of some divine plan.
Us.
Still threads in the fabric,
but twisted, knotted, cut off from empathy.

And I believe this:
suffering itself is not sacred.
Children starving is not divine.
Racism is not divine.
War is not divine.

What is sacred is the refusal.
The spark that rises against cruelty.
The grief that refuses to go numb.
The fury that will not stay quiet.
That is the holy part.

I think of Black mothers here,
with every reason to burn it all down.
The way this country treats them
and their children
is beyond cruel.
And still, they rise each morning.
They send sons to the corner store,
they hold their daughters close.
They get louder, as they must.
They get angry, as they should.
But they do not lose their love.
They refuse to lose their empathy.

I think of our immigrant neighbors,
picking food,
doing the holiest work,
feeding us,
while the world tears at them,
ripping them from cars, from fields.
And still, they show up.
Still, they tend.
Still, they feed.

I think of Bisan in Gaza,
young, brilliant, tired,
still speaking, still bearing witness,
when she should be basking in joy and sun.
Weary, yes,
but she has not surrendered her voice.

These are the ones who teach me resistance.
Not by giving up,
but by insisting on their humanity
when the world tries to strip it away.
Their voices must be carried higher.
Their light must be held.

So maybe Consciousness needs us.
Maybe it is not up there, choosing cruelty.
Maybe it is right here,
inside us,
waiting to see what we do with our thread.

Some will knot it into violence.
But some of us,
we will take the same thread
and embroider tenderness,
even with shaking hands.

Cruelty is born of humans,
of systems we build,
choices we make,
hearts that turn away.

And the Thread,
it doesn’t want the suffering.
It demands our response.

If we want to change it,
we must act.
Resist.
Create.
Refuse.
We must stitch beauty back into the fabric,
again and again,
until it holds.

Your rage, your grief,
your refusal to go numb,
that is as much a part of the Whole
as sunlight on water.

And maybe,
just maybe,
the very act of saying it,
and doing it,
again and again,
is how the world begins to change.