The wisdom of age constitutes the ability to accept reality, which is the knowledge of certain death--substantial, personal, individual extinction. It no longer seeks to disguise the fundamental cruelty and terror of life because it is too weary for further struggle. It is not the acceptance of destiny so much, as the succumbing to it... It's not pessimism but a joyous acceptance of life!
10,000 starlings have gathered in my bare maple tree over the past few weeks. My car, which gets parked under this tree, became completely covered in bird poop.
Today my husband Bill and I finally decided to find a car wash. I knew of one in my area - Thundermist on Pulaski Boulevard. It was completely automated from payment to wash and rinse. The big cobalt blue rag brushes twirled on metal arms passing back and forth along both sides of the vehicle giving the illusion that we were moving. Then there was a sudsy rinse and a blow dry that felt like a hurricane. It was my first amusement park ride.
When we arrived back home and got out and inspected the clean car I noticed my rear driver's side red plastic taillight cover was gone. Bill suggested that we go back to the car wash and see if it was there. I imagined that if it was it would be crushed, driven over by patrons. My husband was more optimistic.
There was a man at the car wash with a pickup truck off to the side tending to the grounds and I walked over and told him what happened. He asked me which bay of the two and then walked right into the car wash to look around for it while it was spraying water on a customer's car. He's going to get completely soaked, I thought. My husband followed him and, Mr. Physics that he is, thought to check the corners and guess what? He found the tail light cover and it was intact. We thanked the man who turns out was the manager. He said, Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Bill dismantled the whole tail light from the vehicle and it was clear that it had been glued on in the past, probably by the previous owner. Now we have glued the cover back on with special glue that we purchased at the neighborhood auto parts shop. We now have to wait 30 minutes for the glue to set before we it reattach it to the car.
Many people drink a mug of coffee first thing in the morning because caffeine gives them energy. However, caffeine also stimulates the body’s fight-or-flight response, leading to symptoms such as nervousness, stress, anxiety, low mood, heart palpitations, and panic attacks. Quitting caffeine can make you less anxious, especially if you are prone to anxiety or a depressed mood. source
I am striving to make order out of chaos, which is the sweetest pleasure I know. When I succeed, I have a thing, this story, to offer. It isn’t me. It isn’t even a facsimile. I have used my life — rather than my life using me — to make something more beautiful and refined than I could ever be.
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The
more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what
is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been
the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men
who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized
man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others.
His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after
volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read,
somehow transmuted and transformed into me. Alice in Wonderland. the
Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job.
Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W H Auden. The
Tale of Mr Tod. Howard''s End. What a strange person I must be. But if
the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else
who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and
only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me
make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I
am my literary DNA.
―
Susan Hill,
Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home
In a time when many voters
feel despair following the presidential election, it’s key to remember
this is not the end. Americans still have their freedom and there are
ways to remain politically active in this critically important time.
Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder joins Ali Velshi to explain the
work required to keep moving forward with dignity. “Freedom means you
decide who you are, and then when things change around you, you continue
to be that person. And in so doing, you do constructive work. You set
an example for other people. You meet new people who are also trying to
remain themselves.” source
I think we have a lot of thinking to do and probably this website is not the place to do it.
I'm sad. I know you are too.
In 2004, I was crushed and furious when the country RE-elected a lying, vindictive war criminal president. It felt permanent. Damning.
4 years later the same country elected a first-term Black senator with the middle name "Hussein" to the highest office in the land.
Things change quickly in politics, is all I'm saying.
It's a big country, and there are still massive levies protecting democracy.
Right now, if I'm being honest, I don't know if I believe in our system. But I believe in us. I believe in you. I know you want what's best. I know you're scared and angry and hurting and I know you will bounce back and so will I.
I think the levies won't break. They will be tested, maybe damaged, but they will hold. The pendulum always swings back the other way. First the midterms, then 2028.
I'm signing off for awhile. Going to go regroup and spend time with my kids, tell them I love them, remind myself why we fight, why I will never ever give up on the only country we call home. I love you all. -M
Hollywood Park
A new memoir by Mikel Jollett (I loved this book!)
A few of you may, too, like possibly 69 million of you. Sigh. If you are anything like me, you can barely remember having ever felt so stunned, and doomed, except when someone very close to you died, or divorced you, or the godawful biopsy results came back.
It’s a little as if the godawful biopsy results came back, and 73 million people cheered and gloated.
So, yes, definitely, this is not ideal. We are in for a dark and scary ride. My response to crisis and the end of the world has always been to figure out whom to blame, how to numb the pain, and how to fix miserable realities.
I have not been having much luck with any of these. Reality seems nauseatingly real. We got skunked, but good.
We can’t even blame it on the electoral college this time. I hate that.
I don’t know. God, do I not know. I majorly megatron do not know. So at first that might seem like the end of the discussion, but if you listen to my personal husband, Neal, that’s actually the beginning.
“I don’t know,” he suggests, is the portal to freedom. I was raised by atheist intellectuals, and my parents’ solution to everything was to know. To figure it out. But when Neal’s clients are being badgered by themselves or family to answer a difficult question or challenge, he teaches them to say, “I don’t know.” It opens up possibilities. This gives us a shot at being curious, rather than certain, which is a dead end.
Paul Tillich wrote that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. I am a jello mold of uncertainty right now, with horrible shredded carrots in it. I don’t know how things are going to shake down, except that #47 will almost certainly destroy the economy with his tariffs and tax cuts for the very rich and corporations, and then the plates of the earth will shift again. I don’t know what we do next, although I am going to take a walk and a nap at some point today, take care of people who are really suffering, and get everyone a glass of water.
Why aren’t I freaking out more? I don’t know. I just believe in goodness, radical self care, and that grace bats last. So sue me.
Also that more will be revealed. We’ve only been in this new reality for a few days. When Chou En Lai, the first premier of China, was asked his thoughts on the French Revolution, he took drag on his Gauloise (bleu) and answered, “Too soon to tell.”
Wednesday, a pundit whom I respect tweeted that the resistance seemed muted. I loved this: It had been ten hours since we lost. But when? I don’t know. Beginning with what? I don’t know. How do we keep the faith in goodness? I don’t know. We just do.
What happened Tuesday had been in the works for years but we weren’t paying attention or couldn’t quite believe it. Jung said, “What we don’t bring to consciousness, comes to us as fate. And we need—eventually—to take a look at that. Not today.
Today? We take care of ourselves and those we love. We always, always take care of the poor, with donations, or bags of groceries to local food pantries. We get outside: Wednesday morning, at 7:00, Neal suggested we take a walk. This was the last thing I wanted to do, but I headed out beside him and our spiritual service dog. After ten minutes or so, I said grimly, “This was not a good idea.” Everything was too intense and real. I felt like a burn victim. Then ten minutes later, I began to see beauty all around me, in nature and neighbors, and our good dog. When I noticed how droplets sparkled amid grass stems, it helped me begin to breathe again. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breeeeeathe: this, and kindness, are all we need to know right now; today. I send you my best love and a big hug. You are all so amazing to me.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably
rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for
the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human
trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will
imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices,
steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the
fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to
rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's
death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is
responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness
from which we come and to which we shall return.
―
James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time
“F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “The test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the
same time, and still retain the ability to function,” but the
summations of the state of the world often assume that it must be all
one way or the other, and since it is not all good it must all suck
royally. Fitzgerald’s forgotten next sentence is, “One should, for
example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined
to make them otherwise.”
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch,
feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.
Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you
have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of
the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal...
To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the
future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
“Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that
you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win.
Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to
throw away.”
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.
It
is a shattering result. The return of Donald Trump feels like the end
of something, more than a reversion. The end of a certain idea of
America, the end of an era, the end of so much hope and faith and
belief. The end of a complex of institutions and ideas.
For many
of you, the result will break your trust in America and in the people
around you. You may be tempted to turn away. That is entirely
understandable. For some, it might be the right choice for right now.
But
for those who, as ever, believe in America, the work remains. It
becomes all the more urgent. It doesn’t go away just because a carnival
barker wants to be a king.
What
is important now is to find the right way forward, to lend the love and
support the people around you will need in the coming days and weeks
and years, and to give yourself that love, too. And not to lose hope.
How
can we go on right now? Where can we locate hope? Can the grueling
years ahead also be a time of rethinking and rebuilding, so that another
country from this becomes possible again?
On these questions there is no better voice we can bring you right now than Rebecca Solnit. We encourage you to visit her Facebook page and her books, and revisit the conversations we’ve had with her this year.
And read this special message from her below in the wake of Tuesday’s result.
The fight for the future continues. We hope on.
The
Ink, I hope, will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and
reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. On this dark day, I want to
thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do. And I promise
you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there
for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and
for what it can be still.
By Rebecca Solnit
They
want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample
everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and
neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we
cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may
need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no
matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth
gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember
in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what
you love.
The Wobblies used to say don't mourn, organize, but you
can do both at once and you don't have to organize right away in this
moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at
once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up
tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who's upset and check
your equipment for going onward. A lot of us are going to come under
direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building
solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical
ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People
kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and
1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting
right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no
alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good.
You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of
yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important
part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the
ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been
stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well, they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
I was asked, "Do you still hope?" Yes, hope is born in darkness. It reminds me that there is still so much work to be done to make this world better, to bring light into the darkness, to not give in to despair, to cynicism, to hate.
How am I processing this? By showing up at my school to teach & take care of kids who will be deeply impacted by this. By loving them & creating a safe space for them in my classroom. I don't know what else to do right now.
As someone who's always felt like an outsider, I have had a heart for & a connection to those on the margins. Those who are are too often forgotten. Immigrants, refugees, the poor, the powerless. Those who are often viewed as "other ." I now do so even more.
I wonder if the most generous act we can do for another is to listen. To be fully present to them, without waiting to say something; listening without judgement, without trying to give answers. Just be present with them in whatever they're going through.
Kamala Harris didn't lose, America did.
As a nation, we collectively failed her—and in doing so we failed girls and women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the people of Ukraine, and Gaza, and the planet.
It's unthinkable, that instead of being able to celebrate a beautiful, hopeful new chapter in the story of this nation with a leader who appealed to the best of our natures—we will instead be holding a postmortem for democracy as we enter our 250th year, stewarded by a malevolent sociopath who despises empathy and shuns the law.
I truly thought we were better than this, that our shared humanity would show up. I thought we would reject this hatred and ugliness once and for all.
I hate being wrong about the majority of the people of this nation.
I don't know what's ahead. All I know is that good-hearted human beings are more necessary now than ever.
We did all that we could to avoid this moment, but now that it's here we'll just have to decide who we will be.
There is no way to comprehend or measure how grievous an error this is, but the only thing the decent people of this nation can do is wake up tomorrow and fight like hell for what we still believe is worth the fight, and we will.
I'll be doing that with whoever has the strength to join me.
I'm mourning the country we could have been and the one we apparently are—but I refuse to give up believing that compassion is the right path, that diversity makes us better, and that love is greater than fear.
I dreamed I bought a shiny red fire truck for eight hundred and fifty dollars. It was an impulse purchase. I drove it in a small loop around the city. It was difficult and overwhelming to drive. It was a stick shift and I was stalled in traffic. I decided to sell it. My husband said, Don't worry many people want to buy a fire truck. Someone else will buy it.
Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well. And the
fact is if you don't sit there every day, the day it would come well,
you won't be sitting there. Flannery O'Connor
