on the past week

time, action, and response

a lot has happened this past week. we had an election that will undoubtedly change the course of the world. here, we have also had our first real rains and the field outside my window is a patchy green. i saw my first migrating geese in formation last night. tonight in the darkness of 5’o’clock my family and i will walk in the smallest child’s lantern walk. lights shining, voices singing, a promise of something warm and sweet to drink at the end.

i have made a distinct choice that the focus of this space will not be one that responds to each thing as it flickers by my screen capturing attention pulling me this way and that. this has meant that each time the catastrophe appears and they do with regular intervals, i make a decision to write about it or to focus the writing on a different and no less alive focal point. and this week as i sit here and digest our post election reality i want to write about why and how i think that matters in the context of showing up to our own lives, the broader web of life, and how we imagine life as it continues in the future.

to begin i am a deeply political person, i have been involved in organzing and working on creating a more just and livable world for many years. i remember this actually as one of my first memories. there was a distinctness about wondering how the world could and does feel so broken and what each of us might do to inhabit it in a way that held it better. as a child and a child in the 90’s

i imagined we might recognize and do something about climate change that would stop it, recycling felt hopeful. i grew and partcipated in the anti-war movement, in the struggle against the multinational corporations decimating communities, the food sovereignty movement, anti-racist organzing, the struggle to center indigenous voices in movements directly impacting them.

each of these made tangible gains. these movements and moments have supported and effected change. these movements have been gifts and i will continue to seek them out to imagine and act together for a world that exists when we make it.

and right now at this moment personally and collectively i am overwhelmed. i am tired. i am not surprised but i am disoriented.

and that is okay.

i was not excited by our election choices.

or the tenor that they existed in.

i was not hopeful at the idea either candidate at the top of the ticket winning becuase of who they were.

i was voting because for me there was clear action to take to set up more favorable conditions of negotiating parts of the future. even if the noegotiating meant accepting the deeply painful and problematic reality of these current dying systems.

i didn’t find on that ticket a vote that was for something.

it was a strategic move and i know that it was one that some of you deemed impossible.

i get that and i am not an apologist for a broken legacy.

but i don’t want to over state it. i

don’t want and i wont give them more of myself.

i wake up and i live the gift that is living.

there is work in my day. i do that labor but i don’t live for the labor of it.

when i wash the dishes i notice the warm water on my hands and appreciate it.

when i do the work of scraping poop out of underwear and teaching people how use the toilet and take care of their own bodies

and their bodies needs i think about how we do this for each other all the time.

we feed each other.

we step out into the rain to make a place for someone to sit who needs to.

we choose to respond to someone seeing their dignity

when i attend the organizer meeting, the school meeting, the doctors appointment i aknowledge the possibility there to listen, to be heard, to move in tandem or apart. to keep making.

when i show up in my studio with an empty head as i have for many months i still am here for the making of the world.

when i watch the clouds turn bright each november evening i settle in to some kind of reality that reminds me of my own scale.

my own kind of making

the doing, the making, the resting, the breathing

and i think, actually i know that you too are doing that.

i find great solace in that reality

even while i don’t get to know all the ways you do this

this is not a note to say we got this.

or not to worry.

but it is one to say, steady your feet. look around. stare into the fire and let yourself get lost. attend to the imagining in ways that let possibilities emerge.

be curious in that moment of upset. let’s start there.

i’ll be here doing that, reach out and let me know how you are.