Category: Opinion

All is rising

My loves,

All of you with the open hearts and the hard earned souls, the curious minds, the writers and poets and painters and thinkers, all of you who believe, and pay attention, and fight the good fight – all of you who fell to your knees with the shock of it all — I thank you for being in this world.

I have been so heartsick, and angry, and most spectacularly blindsided. I have wondered if all the good does any good at all. If good even matters. If kindness is just a kind of naiveté, that lives inside the bubble along with my French press and my fair isle sweaters and my cranberry chevre. If silence is just a way to stay deaf. If words are a just a way to stay still. If prayer is just a white man’s way around. If light can really illuminate dark.

In the last few weeks, even my pond feels privileged, like its tucked itself into the prettiest trees and proclaimed itself complete. And all the fields feel haunted by the ghosts of civil war, and all the birds circle for prey. Even the sea is creaking and chained, even the branches hang waiting, even the flame is frightful again.

Even Gilligan — who the hell gets a Boston Terrier? Why didn’t I adopt a shelter dog?

As I prepare for Thanksgiving, Trader Joe’s seems ridiculous. So does my Macbook Pro and the way that man just smiled at me.

Why arrange the flowers? Or tell you how the moss looks? Instead let me tell you about my first boss, and my second, and my third – all of whom grabbed my pussy, too.

Why laugh? Or turn the word hope over in my teeth? Instead let me live just one day in the constant despair of the marginalized – or even meet someone completely unlike myself.

Why forgive? Or try to see the other side of things? Instead let my rage destroy this horror of humanity.

And oh, my very soul! All of these things I’ve been writing – all that work bubbling up from the deep well of my center – suddenly looks like it’s floated on the surface all its life – just skimmed off the top by my uppity Brita filter. Pointless. Useless. Just one less plastic bottle in an ocean of debris.
I have tried all the usual things – wine, bourbon, cake – but still, I can’t be calmed. I have been rudely awakened, horribly startled by an alarming orange face. I want to slap it hard and go back to sleep, but I can’t.

Waking up is hard. I am humbled, to my knees, because I thought I knew. And I am once again struck, as I have been so many times in my life, that what I knew to be true was not true at all.

Everything is different, now. As it always is, with every new awakening. Everything is different. And as my eyes adjust to a whole new world, one that’s always been there but I didn’t have the capacity, or strength, or courage, or experience to see, I hear people say come back to bed. While others work to convince me everything is truly well and I need not be so heartsick.
And still others call me forward to lead new armies. I am astounded by the mobilization of so many of my friends. The constant call to arms. The instant organization.

There is urgency. All is rising, as am I. All is rising, as are the seas. All is rising, as is the dawn.

All is rising, as is my gratitude for the good in the world. For you, my loves. For you. Because to be awake means to see it all – the bird, and the prey. The man, and the monster. Goodness holds it both and all; not blind, not myopic, not half asleep. But both, and all.

All is rising, now. As are we. And with it must come gratitude for the beauty of the world, for the poet, for the prayer, for the stillness of the pond. For you, my loves. For you.

Optimism Takes Guts

Optimism is not for the faint of heart. It may look like life dressed in tulle, one grand plié across your grandmother’s guestroom; it may seem all pink and fizzy and innocent; but more often than not it’s a girl at a barre with a shot glass full of blisters.

Skepticism is easy. Apathy is easy. Road rage is easy. Waking up and hating your job, that pile of bills, CNN, Fox, bullies, the IRS, homophobes, racists, rich people, Nickleback – all of that is easy. But coming face to face with a world that smells like Kardashian-ass and still believing? That takes guts.

Optimism takes guts. Hardcore, feel-the-bern, guts. It takes guts to stand up for the truly marginalized in this world: possibility, hope, change and the next generation. And because we haven’t found an adequate shared language for it, it’s not easy to speak on behalf of the glass-half-full without sounding like you have a brain-half-empty. But in fact, optimism is not naïve. It’s hard won.

Optimism moves against the tide of darkness — but the reason it can, I think, is because it was born there. It is born from a backstage story and has to feel its way to light, to arrive front and center just where it’s needed most; in a voting booth, in poverty, in prayer; in the collective conscious of an apathetic audience.

And while it doesn’t always look tough, optimism fights hard. So yeah — you may find it wandering around Mr. Roger’s neighborhood wearing a sweater. But it puts its sneakers on every, single, day. It shows up, it goes out in the world, it says good morning. And if that’s not fighting, I don’t know what the hell is. Just because you don’t hear about it on the nightly news, make no mistake. It’s not trapped on the Oprah channel wearing pink tights. Optimism is out there carrying a pitchfork and torch long after all the other villagers have gone home to watch the Sound of Music.

Optimism shows up, with or without an audience. Day after day with its blisters and barres, it shows up and stays on pointe. It’s where activism lives, where hope comes for lessons, where change comes true. And while others swan dive toward despair, optimism fights for balance, stands on tippy toes, reaches, and arches across a darkened stage to remind us why we live.

Addict

I smoked my first cigarette to fill the tiniest gap; a fragile moment where I couldn’t find a witty thing to say, where eye contact had been accidental and uncomfortable, where there was no distraction from the empty space between me and this strange man. My first cigarette was a cover story for my time away, but he didn’t even notice I was gone. And so I groped for a cigarette and he for a match, and we burned a bridge across our empty hearts.

It’s been a year since I quit smoking, 4 months since I gave up cake, 3 months since I was forced to break it off with Jon Stewart. And still sometimes my own breath feels too insubstantial; I inhale an emptiness, I grope for what used to be, I channel surf my way through time. I yearn for something solid to fasten myself to. And it’s not a goddamned carrot.

I don’t think it’s always the monumental losses that lead to addiction. One giant broken moment you can point to and say “ah HA! That’s why he’s a heroin addict, a smoker, an alcoholic. That’s why she sleeps with Little Debbie.” I think sometimes addiction sneaks into the second between things; between Jon and Trevor, you and a stranger, you and your own sadness.

Love is created in relationship. And so is grief. And in the heartbeat between the two, treacherous and glorious things can happen. Like bridges that last. Or bridges that burn.

Poverty

Yesterday I was asked what poverty looked like to me. It’s a great question, made greater by being asked at all, because there is relativity in the word. I know there is an official number that marks the line between “middle class” and “poor”, but as they are crumbling into one another faster than you can say “Dollar Store”, I can say with certainty that the face of poverty is changing, and may not look like what you think.

For me, the face of poverty is fear. It holds it’s breath at the grocery store checkout, in that endless moment after the card is swiped and before the word “approved” appears.

It wakes you in the middle of the night with thoughts of preventable colon cancer; it flinches when the phone rings, when the car doesn’t start right away, when you feel a cold coming on, when April comes.

The face of poverty mocks you with prescriptions you can’t get filled, the concert you can’t go to, the happy facebook post. It laughs at your annual haircut, your un-pedicured toes, the choices you’ve made along the way.

The face of poverty is pain. It throbs in the broken tooth; it aches to buy your son a gift; it cries for those who have so much less.

Maybe the face of poverty looks different to everyone. But please, let it not look like shame. It does not have to hide in the shadows, nor does it need to be defined in the same way by everyone. Poverty does not only belong to third world countries, or marginalized populations, or the homeless and the starving. It belongs to us. It’s in the face of the single mother, the artist, the aging; it is alive and well on the seacoast; it is everywhere.

When you see the face of poverty, may you look it in the eye with compassion and leave shame to some poor urchin in a Dickens novel. When you become the face of poverty, I hope it softens you enough to ask the question of others; what does poverty look like to you?