Welcome to the series wherein I share my take-aways from church. The things that, I think, are beneficial to all of us to know or think about, whether or not we believe in any church-related things.
This week in church, we talked about moving on.
It's the story in the Bible about the followers after Jesus has been crucified but has not yet risen. In their minds, they have gone through a terrible disappointment. Not only is their friend and leader dead, but the movement they had given their lives up for was also dead. Everything was gone. So what did they do? They were on the road heading home, going back to put their lives back together.
It struck me how, after these huge events, whether they are massively disappointing or thrilling, our lives may have been temporarily overturned, but now they are the only thing waiting for us, so we go back. Back to our jobs. Back to our homes. Back to everything that was before. Often the only difference is that we feel different. And that's just... a thing. In life.
This week in church, we talked about being seen.
Again, in that same story, the disciples are met by a resurrected Jesus on the road, but they don't recognize him. The point was made that even though they couldn't see Jesus, they were being seen by him.
This stuck with me: how often in our lives are we unable to see that we are being seen? When do we feel ignored, alone, lonely, isolated, and unseen by others but really they are there with us, all along?
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This Week's "I want to go to there": This bright and laid-back world seems ideal right now, don't you think? Photo by Inside Weather.
Tree Hugger
Here's some advice for those of us who can't hug other people: hug some trees! It's not the same, but it's pretty great.
Hero Portraits
I know it's become a bit contentious to refer to our frontline workers as heroes, seeing as so many of them aren't necessarily volunteering for the gig that's been foisted upon them, but I do love Caroline Glover's 40 Days 40 Heroes art project.
Breaking Point
"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it." -Arundhati Roy
Honestly, I generally am not optimistic that anything in our capitalist, colonial social structures will change all that much after this pandemic. But it feels really good to imagine the possibility sometimes. And at the VERY LEAST, we all have the option to imagine another world on a personal level, and to walk lightly into it.
Inuit Women Transformations
I love this video of women from various Inuit tribes, transforming themselves into their traditional dress. The regalia is beautiful and it's stunning to see the differences and similarities between them.
COVID Affirmations
An activist and counsellor shared 15 affirmations with regards to the pandemic. Below are a few that really stood out to me, but you can read them all here.
"I rebuke the capitalistic conditioning that drives self-shaming, whenever I prioritize much-needed rest over grind culture and productivity." "Small contributions to my community and within my networks are helpful and meaningful, even if I’m not on the frontlines." "I’m allowed to feel simultaneously fortunate/grateful and miserable."
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Have you heard about the concept of playing bigger?
As a woman who is into wellness, marketing, art, writing, feminism, and business, I feel like the "play bigger" mantra gets repeated around me quite a lot.
Dream it and do it!
Go big!
Make it happen!
I'm supposed to have a vision for where I want to be and then go to that place, and it is supposed to be a BIG place.
What does big mean? Influencing large groups of people. Selling millions of copies (or very few copies at a coveted high price). Being visible. Being sought after. It means massive email subscription lists, network television, TED Talks, Shondaland, Cheryl Sandberg, Instagram Influencers, and six figures.
This is, it often seems, the right way to live a meaningful life as a feminist: to go BIG. Which is too bad, because BIG also seems to mean that nothing is ever good enough. Because once you get to your first BIG place, you can see other, bigger places and need to go there.
Don't get me wrong. I like working hard. I like having a project or goal and pursuing it. I like developing productivity and organizational systems and working at them every day, seeing incremental growth that sometimes leaps ahead.
I get a lot of joy out of that.
But you know what I don't get a lot of joy out of?
The sense that my accomplishments are what define me.
The push that there always has to be more.
The need to monitor and tally up engagements, followers, likes, and sales to measure success.
Comparisons to others who are hustling harder, doing more, or who just started in a more enviable position than I did.
I know what the "play BIG" response to this is: your goals while playing big should be your own. Big is what you want it to be. Playing big is about YOU and no one else. It's about following your heart and just going for it. Just go for it! DO IT!
You're supposed to track the things you can control, not the things you can't. Have process goals, the work is the reward.
Except for the implicit, or often explicit, statement that follows, "and then when you are truly living your mission and doing the work, the people and the money will follow."
Which is just not true. If simply clicking into your mission in life led to money, power, and fame, we would live in a very different world.
Also, why do I want money, power, and fame?
Literally, the only reason I may want those things is that I live in a world that prizes them. That more money, power, and fame are ultimately supposed to give me some kind of freedom and happiness.
We all know that's not true. We know that pursuing freedom and happiness through money, power, and fame is a trap. But it is a trap that comes with room service, high thread-count sheets, speeches that sound very empowering, and the ability to be taken care of when we are very old, which are all very appealing.
The problem is that whenever I set out to pursue a goal that could lead to any of those things, I might start off feeling jazzed to work towards it, but I very quickly am left feeling insecure, comparing my "numbers" to others and waning in motivation.
The play BIG mindset would say that I am letting others define success for me and letting fear get in the way of my true work.
Honestly, this is possible. I have always waffled on really laying it all on the line and going for a dream. Instead, I tend to do just enough to get into it without actually risking anything.
Sometimes, this seems like enough. I don't need to go big on one particular dream. I am happy to have a life that lets me dabble without pressure or expectation while also having the stability and satisfaction that comes from my other, more steady work. It seems like the best of both worlds.
Other times, it seems like I am selling myself short, letting fear drive, and missing out. Or even just like I have a full-time job and then another job and that's a lot of working.
Usually, the second feeling strikes when I have seen someone else's life and compared mine to it. The first feeling comes when I am feeling the need to simplify life or feeling particularly secure in myself.
I'm sure there is a middle ground here. Or maybe there's a radical way to live that rejects the premise entirely.
What do you think? Is the "play big" mantra the capitalist patriarchy disguised as feminist empowerment? It is the real deal and shying away from it means shying away from your true potential? Or do you just take the parts that you like and ignore the rest?
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One thing my counsellor tells me is that I can't pick and choose my feelings: if I want to turn off the negative ones, I'll have to turn off the positive ones as well. A new study sort of confirms her claim. Turns out that people who turn off emotional responses to negative stimuli have a more notable reduction in positive emotions than negative ones. Plus, while they think they are experiencing less negative emotion, their bodies are actually still having the same response as ever. So basically, by trying to turn off the negative, you turn off your positive and mask the negative!
For most people, their current mood will influence the activity they choose to do next: if they are feeling down, they are more likely to choose an activity that cheers them up and if they are feeling overly positive, they will choose something to bring them down to a more balanced place. However, people with depression and chronic low mood have a reduced or even absent ability to regulate mood in this way. Honestly, this explains why I have such a hard time making myself get up and DO something when I am feeling in a funk.
Zoom Eye Contact
Making eye contact in real life is a nice part of human interaction (at least until it becomes a creepy part of human interaction). Now that we're only looking at faces over Zoom calls, it turns out that our bodies react similarly to eye contact over video chat as it does in person! One effect: the smile muscles in our faces are activated while the frown muscles relax a bit. That's nice.
Eye Tracking Secrets
It's pretty common these days for researchers to use eye-tracking for studies. Where once it took a pretty large and awkward device, eye movements can now easily be tracked using the cameras built into all our devices. Well, it turns out that a person's eye movements and what they spend more time looking at (something that is generally considered to be subconscious) can reveal a lot about you: gender, age, race, personality traits, drug consumption habits, skills, fears, sexual preferences, and more. MORE! Wild.
Like most people, I have folks in my life who I love while deeply disagreeing with them on core issues like politics or religion. Sometimes, that means there are subject matters I simply avoid with them and other times it means that I know we'll have a spirited debate every time we see each other.
Around the time Trump got elected, however, I noticed a lot of people putting out the call that it is everyone's responsibility to disown anyone in their family with the "wrong" politics. Suddenly, shunning became mainstream for progressives.
For obvious reasons, I was not on board. I won't say that I will never cut someone out of my life, but it's going to take a heck of a lot more active damage than someone who has the wrong political views.
Fast forward to relatively-recent life when I came across a Facebook post from Vanessa Rochelle Lewis that articulates this issue perfectly.
Ms. Lewis is one of these people I find intimidatingly cool, who has combined her politics with her artistic and professional identities, pushing boundaries and actively making a better world.
"I'm becoming more and more clear that part of being in intersectional spaces also means being open to connections with people who don't have the same radical education, language, and even politics as me...
For a long time, I thought that authentic care meant being invested in certain politics and constantly educating yourself, but I'm realizing that this is actually exclusive and gatekeeping for a lot of people who genuinely do care about other folks and who want to do there very best to be loving and compassionate people. I'm understanding that people can be really kind, really try their best to love and respect every one, and know not one iota of queer, qtpoc, transformative, restorative justice rhetoric. And other people can know all the rhetoric and be SO judgmental, so critical, so exclusive, so shallow, and so mean to people."
This part reminds me of the truly life-altering realization I had when, as a young and devout Christian, I saw that there were lots of people who were Christians, knew all the right words and rituals, and yet were genuinely terrible people.
Meanwhile, there were lots of people who not only weren't Christian, but were decidedly anti-religion, yet they were living with more love, joy, peace, goodness, and generosity than most Christians I knew.
Turned out, the label someone put on themselves was not a predictor of what kind of person they were.
Lewis goes on to list her new rubric for judging a person's character, and it is EXACTLY what we need:
"Instead, I'm looking to see:
- How people treat other people in the moment?
- How open they are to connecting with a diversity of people?
- How they talk about people when they aren't around?
- If they move with curiosity or judgement?
- Are they open to lovingly connecting with people different from them (as opposed to saying who they ally or are in solidarity with)?
- Are they generous with their resources, heart, time, and intention?
- Do they have compassion and grace for failure, mistakes, confusion, and missteps?
- Do they attempt to correct their failures, mistakes, confusions, and missteps - even if they are clumsy.
- Can they practice direct and non-violent communication?
- Can they be responsible for their emotional processes or are they constantly looking for someone to be at fault?"
Just like those anti-religious folks who were enacting Jesus' teachings better than some church leaders, there are those who, for whatever reason, aren't interested in getting into political activist spaces and yet live through this lens.
Heck, I have very close relationships with some classic conservative white men who will say things that, at first hit, come across as problematic or just plain prejudiced. However, more than once I have found that, if I dig deeper, it becomes clear that their hearts are actually in the right place and even that they are actively living my progressive values better than I am.
What a concept: someone can say or even believe the wrong things while doing the right things.
Language matters and labels matter. But actions matter more.
(PS: Can someone please develop a dating app that filters for the qualities listed above? I'll be one of your early testers!)
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This Week's "I want to go to there": I want to go browse a bookstore and not think about anything but the lovely books in front of me! Photo by Kenny Luo.
I love the general concept of defaulting to kindness as well as an attempt to aid the person in reading a message in the intended tone. However, my contrarian nature means that anyone suggesting I default to kindness will automatically leave me feeling annoyed. Something in the phrasing implies that I wouldn't otherwise be kind and then I feel a little defensive about it, so then I would have to try to re-read the phrase itself with a sort of forced kindness before I continued.
So this is a good idea, but let's workshop the text itself.
Animals Take Over
Russian artist Vladim Solovyov has embraced a surreal time of life by ramping up the weird. His images of giant animals roaming around cities are whimsical and just what I needed to look at.
Depending on where you are in the world, you're probably at least a month into your isolation life and if you're anything like me, your personal pandemic survival kit has done some shifting during that time.
In the beginning, there was a lot of over-compensation for what I was missing. I crammed each day full of video calls and exercise until my heart couldn't stand another screen-mediated connection and my knees hurt too much to squat.
Now that the days have morphed into years (what is time?), I have chilled a bit in how I insist on passing my time. I want to share with you my new and improved pandemic survival kit for mental health and something resembling happiness.
Sure sure sure, it includes the things everyone says you should do: going outside, judicious scheduling of video chats, baking (and other small, achievable projects like organizing closets), exercise (that doesn't kill my knees), delivering the aforementioned baking to friends, and the like.
If I am honest, though, there is much more to it than that. Here are the less-advice-column-friendly, but equally vital items in my pandemic survival kit:
- First of all, I am not even trying to avoid social media. It's fine. Or maybe not. Who could know?
- Engaging with Mennonite Twitter. Bet you didn't know Mennonites are on Twitter, did you? OH WE ARE EVERYWHERE. On Twitter we mostly evaluate the Mennonite-ness of recipes and snark about church. It's a gift.
- Doing those Instagram filter quizzes where a thing pops up on your head and then gives you a question or sorts you into a Hogwarts house or what-have-you. I do many in a row and instead of posting them, I save them to my phone, which might qualify me for a weird digital hoarders show.
- Posting a Q & A with myself, "how are you spending your one wild and precious life?" or "what do you do for a living?" and then answering with the very specific, dull thing I am currently doing. (I find this to be incredibly clever.)
- Going online shopping and then not actually buying anything. (This makes me feel absurdly good about myself.)
- Watching people exercise in the park. It's an intense, choreographed dance and it is hypnotic.
- Changing my clothes multiple times a day. Either because I am leaving the house and need pants or because all of a sudden wearing my sweats just seems wrong and I simply must change into stretchy shorts and over-the-knee socks.
- Truly turning off all value judgements for everything.
What about you? What are the un-glamorous items in your pandemic survival kit? What ways are you getting through that only make sense because right now nothing makes sense?
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Literally, after an astronaut is in space for a long time, their brains increase in volume. Unfortunately, this just creates more intracranial pressure and actually makes their eyesight worse.
As much as we might like to think (or hope) that teachers are somehow "better people" than the rest of us (a tempting belief, since, you know, they hold our children's fragile minds in their hands), teachers are just as likely to hold unconscious racial bias as anyone. Turns out that just because they wanted to teach kids doesn't mean that they are immune to the white supremacist society we live in.
Late-Night Feelings
Night owls already have a rough go of things in this society, what with the fact that their sleep schedule completely contradicts how society has established work and life should happen. Well, science just made it a little worse for them: people who are night owls have worse emotional regulation and assertiveness than early risers or even the "regular" people who don't fall into either extreme.
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Welcome to the series wherein I share my take-aways from church. The things that, I think, are beneficial to all of us to know or think about, whether or not we believe in any church-related things.
This week in church, we talked about reversals.
The world is not as it should be. Certainly not right now, but in many ways, regular life is not what it should be either. The normality that many of us are longing to get back to is rife with deep inequalities, systems that destroy the planet, and personal pain that tears us apart inside.
Not as it should be.
But also, it is not entirely as it seems. There is beauty. There is redemption. There is hope. There is connection. There is love.
The Easter story is one of resurrection and death defeated. It's a story of reversal where the "not as it seems" wins over "not as it should be." Instead of waiting around for that to happen for us, however, we can work to participate in it. We can help redeem our not-right world by actively working to reveal its hidden glory.
This week in church we talked about changing the question.
Instead of stewing in our anger or fear or sadness, constantly asking why (why me, why now, why this), we can try asking "what now?"
What now doesn't mean we have to stop feeling angry or afraid or sad or whatever else. It just means that we stand where we are, look around at our surroundings, and then figure out what we want the next step might be.
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This Week's "I want to go to there": Truly cannot WAIT to hug someone again. Photo by Omar Lopez.
Pockets of Relief
"You are not betraying your grief by feeling joy. You are not being graded. You are not receiving extra credit for being miserable 100% of the time. Find pockets of relief, even happiness, when and where you can. Keep moving."
-Maggie Smith
Light in the Darkness
Photographer Lucas Zimmerman has a collection of photos of traffic lights casting coloured light in the darkness and dang if it isn't the perfect combination of beautiful and desolate, hopeful and lonely, for this time.
I listen to a lot of podcasts. About two weeks ago, all of them, the comedy podcasts, true crime podcasts, and weird paranormal podcasts, suddenly all became COVID-19 podcasts.
It didn't take long for me to just skip past any episode that talked for more than a minute or two about the pandemic. I am getting my reliable info from other sources and don't really need to hear someone who talks about Harry Potter for a living pontificate about a pandemic, thanks.
All My Relations is a podcast hosted by two Native women about their relationships with the planet, other creatures, and other humans. It is generally enlightening an delightful.
This episode is a mix of interviews with medical professionals as well as elders and folks invested in their ancestral, Indigenous practices and medicines.
I had two big takeaways.
One was to learn about and explore traditional medicine more deeply.
I am interested to learn the traditional medicines of the people whose land I live on now as well as to explore any traditional health practices from my own lineage that might be out there.
How did my ancestors maintain a healthy relationship with their bodies, community, and land? What about the Indigenous folks whose land I live on? What can I learn from how they relate to one another? How does all of this relate to modern medicine? (And to be clear, my understanding is that modern medicine is a fully respected by those who practice traditional medicines, so there is no conflict there.)
The other takeaway is connected to the first: our emotional life is a very important part of health.
That means it's important to do things that make us feel happy, connected, satisfied, useful, or otherwise good as often as we are able.
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Another hit from my crowd-sourced playlist of HOPE! This one's got some sweet, slow vibes and a nice sense of support from the folks we love. I'll take it.
Okay, okay, it's a correlation, so all we know right now is that there is a relationship between self-compassion and healthy behaviours. But I am still getting excited about it.
Turns our Willy Loman was right, being well-liked matters. (That's a Death of a Salesman reference, for the non-theatre-nerds among us.) A new study shows that kids who are popular are less susceptible to illness than those who are less popular, even though they come into contact with more children (and should be exposed to more germs).
Welcome to the series wherein I share my take-aways from church. The things that, I think, are beneficial to all of us to know or think about, whether or not we believe in any church-related things.
This week in church, we talked about the seasons.
Despite the fact that it feels like the axis of the earth itself has shifted, the planet actually continues to do its thing. Spring is coming! In earnest! Here in Vancouver, the cherry blossoms are in bloom and the rain has given way to warmth and sunshine (thank goodness).
It's good to remember that the seasons continue to change no matter what we do as individuals. Our lives may have flopped over and spilled into a brand-new container, but we can't stop spring. They keep changing, with or without our input.
This week in church, we talked about lengthening and forced lent.
Another season that has just concluded is lent. (This is a season in the church calendar for the time leading up to Easter.) Did you know that the word lent actually comes from the Old English word that was used for spring, lencten? It simply means "lengthening."
These days, many people think of the season of lent as a time of contraction. It's a time when those who participate give up something they love and their life gets a little bit smaller.
What if we thought of this as a season of lengthening instead?
Perhaps giving something up clears some clutter, creating more space to stretch our minds and hearts. Or maybe we can find other ways to lengthen our perspective on ourselves, our lives, our concept of God, or the world around us.
Lent may technically be over, but the light is still extending a bit further every day. Our lives probably feel tighter and more restricted as we all grapple with the ongoing lenten sacrifice we were forced to make, giving up in-person community and the freedom to stand within 6 feet of strangers, whether or not we even believe in this stuff, but where can we find space for growth? For something new?
(Caveat: I am in NO WAY saying that you have to use your quarantine as a time for self-improvement or growth. If you can only handle the trauma of whatever is happening in your world by bingeing Netflix, I send you affirmations and air hugs. I am simply suggesting a slight mental reframe from constriction to spaciousness, whatever that might mean for you.)
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This collection of photos captured at exactly the best moment is a joy to scroll through. Some are professional and others are just lucky moments captured on someone's phone, and they are all fun.
Sisyphus
This comic by J.A.K. has become a bit more timely...
Metrics of Success
"Having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another."
-Bill Waterson
Bill Waterson (who created the Calvin and Hobbes comics) gave the commencement address at Kenyon College. It's wonderful, even though Mr. Waterson uses "he" as a generic term to mean "a person."
Here is a little more of it:
"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them."
Business Hours
At least we can laugh about it?
Not sure the original artist on this, but it was posted to jjjjound's Instagram.
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Recently, on the podcast Hurry Slowly, Jocelyn K. Glei posed the question, "what if you're not broken?"
This question has hung with me since then.
There are times when I would have said that I was broken. When my self-hatred and depression were so severe that I was defective. I needed to be fixed.
But really, that's wrong. I wasn't broken. I was still my whole self. What was broken was the way I saw myself. That's what I needed to fix. When I worked through it and found healing, what I was changing was the beliefs I held about myself, not myself as a person.
Even now, I know that my focus on self-improvement sometimes comes from overly focusing on my flaws. I wouldn't call myself broken, but I might say that I have things that need to be fixed.
In the podcast, Jocelyn shares a story about falling and splitting her shin open at the same time as when she was going through heartbreak. She told herself that when her shin healed, she would be ready to love again.
It's the perfect example of thinking we have to be somehow better, somehow fixed, to earn the good things in life. We have to improve our habits, keep a cleaner house, take better care of our appearance, exercise more, confront our demons, banish our insecurities, love ourselves wholly, and otherwise be different to be "ready." Ready for what? For love, peace, happiness, and ultimately, acceptance for ourselves.
And of course, we are secretly afraid to just accept ourselves, as is. We believe that if we love who we are, as we are, then we will somehow give up on learning, growing, or getting better. We can't embrace who we are because we will then turn into - what? Slovenly pigs? Lazy jerks? Self-aggrandizing, delusional fools? Stagnating pools of nothingness?
Or maybe we won't turn into anything. We will stay just as we are and we are not good enough to be accepted as-is.
Here's an alternative scenario: that we are wonderful, whole people and we can love (or even just like) ourselves right now, while we are mending, changing, and growing. Two things can happen at the same time. In this scenario, we aren't changing because there is something broken in us, but because we want to keep experiencing life and ourselves in newer and fuller ways.
“It’s not a binary decision: Acceptance or healing. You can have one but you can’t have the other. It’s one of those complex contradictions you have to hold in the mind. It’s self-acceptance and healing at the same time. It’s self-acceptance and knowing that you can improve at the same time. It’s self-acceptance and being present even when everything around you is going totally off the rails.”
From Jocelyn's lips into our hearts.
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Sharing another song from my crowd-sourced playlist of hope! I had never heard of Johnnyswim before, but dang if they aren't incredible! And this song's urgency and insistence that we are forming (or already formed!) into something beautiful is perfect for today.
DIAMONDS
by Johnnyswim
In the wake of every heartache
In the depth of every fear
There were diamonds, diamonds
Waiting to break out of here.
Don't you think I hear the whispers
Those subtle lies, those angry pleas
There just demons, demons
Wishing they were free like me.
We're the fire, from the sun
We're the light when the day is done
We are the brave, the chosen ones
We're the diamonds, diamonds
Rising up out the dust.
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
All your curses will surrender
Every damning word will kneel
They're just mountains, mountains
About to turn into fields.
We're the fire, from the sun
We're the light when the day is done
We are the brave, we're the chosen ones
We're the diamonds, diamonds
Rising up out the dust.
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
Oh oh... rising out the dust
Oh oh... rising out the dust
Oh oh... rising, rising, rising, rising...
You've taken down
So many others
Oh but you'll know my name when you see
And in these ashes I'm stronger still
You'll learn to fear my pain, yeah you will.
You've taken down
So many others
Oh but you'll know my name when you see
And in these ashes I'm stronger still
You'll learn to fear my pain, yeah you will.
You'll learn to fear my pain, yeah you will, yeah you will, yeah you will.
We're the fire, from the sun
We're the light when the day is done
We are the brave, we are the chosen ones
We're the diamonds, diamonds
We're the diamonds, diamonds
We're the diamonds, diamonds
We're the diamonds, diamonds
Rising up out the dust.
Oh oh... rising out the dust
Oh oh... rising out the dust
Oh oh... rising out the dust
Oh oh...
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
Oh oh... rising up out the dust
Oh oh... rising, rising, rising
Oh oh...
Dang if these two (the singers of Johnnyswim) aren't the cutest! Giphy.
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