I woke up at 4 a.m. on Friday to fly to New Orleans for a talk with the amazing community improvement non-profit called Keep America Beautiful. There are 700 affiliates and millions of volunteers, picking up litter, planting trees, promoting recycling etc, and I was their keynote speaker Saturday at their convention.
So good old Friday, not a care in the world--well, you know, except for the nightmare of air travel, presence of evil all around us and the dismantling of democracy and that silly old Constitution. What ev. But it turned out to be an easy flight, and a dear friend lives in the city. We cruised City Park and Pontchartrain for a few hours while listening to Ella Fitzgerald. Heaven.
I had been feeling more hopeful since the SCOTUS ruling on tariffs. I live by the line in the book of Joel that God will restore what the locusts have stolen. (My Sunday School kids always loved this passage because they got to draw terrifying locusts being defeated by plain old decent humans, typically resembling themselves.)
I went to bed early because I was to speak at 9 a.m. and also am tired and old.
Dum de dum. Nothing to see here folks. I slept okay, and started to check my messages, and then noticed the word Iran flitting around and, well, you know the rest.
War had broken out in the Middle East while I slept. I caught up as fast as I could while I drank coffee and prepared to go spread hope and gratitude to the 500 volunteers. Horribly, I couldn't call my husband and ask for his thoughts on what it all meant, and what did he think would happen next. It was only 5:30 a.m. back home.
But then I heard in my head the mantra he teaches his clients: "I don't know."
People badger his clients about whether they will stay in the job or marriage, or offer advice to their grown children and they learn to say, "I don't know." He teaches that "I don't know" is the portal to freedom, wiping out all your preconceptions, fixations and prejudices, so you have a sense of spaciousness, as you consider the future.
So: I don't know. I've told this story here before (what else is new?) but when my mom was getting sicker with Alzheimer's, on top of diabetes, my panicky brothers and I spilled to an elder care nurse at our HMO our fear and confusions about her future, and our not knowing much of anything about what to do next.
She listened gently and then said, "How could you know?"
How can we know what it means, and what to expect and what to do?
We can't. But I do know that when we take the next right action, glimmers of insight follow.
We'll read and listen to the voices we trust, and they will help guide us.
I will be marching as soon as I get home, because really I hate to scold but you can't just go and bomb sovereign countries to produce regime change without consulting Congress.
I will alternately and obsessively watch the news reports and force myself outside with a finger-pistol. I will be exquisitely kind to myself. I will overeat, and nap.
If you can't look away, that's okay, and if you can't bear to watch, that's okay.
The do-gooders are on to something. They file into their neighborhoods together and they pick up litter and plant trees and flowers. This fills them, guides them, and brings them hope even in the deep national darkness.
I'll donate to a few humanitarian candidates I love--Mary Pertola in Alaska, Jon Ossoff in Georgia (the most vulnerable Democratic senator, who now, miraculously, looks poised to win), Sherrod Brown in Ohio (be still my heart.)
These seems like good things to do in the next few days. The news will change. This is a given. I would like for that to happen next Tuesday, right after lunch, but this is not the nature of life. Time takes time. I hate that. I would like peace restored now. Also, I have tiny trust issues with the guys in DC. They don't seem very, well, sophisticated when it comes to geopolitics. Unintended consequences, anyone?
But the plates of the earth shifted when the bombs fell, and will shift again, like weather.
It had been pouring solidly for a week before I left for New Orlean, with no end in sight, and it was all hopeless and bleak. But despite the weather report, the rain stopped sometime in the night. So on awakening, I basked in the non rain, in the weighty heavy grey swath of clouds hovering over the ridge, with light grey sky right underneath. It meant we could go for a walk after a week inside. Puffs of fog rested in ridges and a runaway cloud snuck off to stand in front of dark trees. Later the sky was filled with light, and right out the window, I basked in the visual theatre of our laden lemon tree, like sunny Christmas tree ornaments.
Do good, make good trouble, take gentle care.
