Being quiet

 

 

I have been feeling as if I don’t know how to write here anymore. As if I just need to be quiet. If you want to know the truth, all the analyses of the election outcome simply don’t add up to me. I don’t think Anne Seltzer’s Iowa poll got it wrong. Rather, I think in addition to all the voter suppression methods put in place over a period of years, there was something buried in the algorithm of the machines in the districts where the far right over performed, and certainly Leon (as I now call him), with his self driving cars and space rockets could have handled that “little secret”—perhaps it was the “little secret” Orange couldn’t help crowing about at his Nazi rally a week before Election Day. But of course, I sound as crazy as all the election deniers from 2020 saying that. And what even is the point, as nothing will be investigated or corrected. We are heading into the darkest of days and I feel a fair bit of dread. So I’m keeping my head down. Being quiet. Waiting to see what it is that I need to do. I’m not in denial or delusion. But I am in limbo. Suspended. Not knowing just how bad it’s going to get. No more unicorns and rainbows of hope. We’re beyond that I think. We’ll need clear eyes and true hearts now.  

Untitled

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

 —Carl Jung

Back to work

The man and I have made a conscious choice to turn off the news. We are uninterested in post mortems about why Kamala lost, though I did read one compelling article that finally broke through to me about the degree to which most of the country is immersed in news coverage of the far right, that the things I hear and believe to be true, simply are not part of their universe of belief. It is as if we exist in two completely different realities. My son, who works with a lot of men who vote red, in firehouses where Fox news blares day and night, has tried to tell me that we are in a silo, that I have no idea of what most of the country is consuming as fact. I finally get it. And in this moment, there is nothing I can do about it but preserve my own peace, protect my own sanctuary. 

One morning a few days after the election, I looked around my house at the light pouring in just so, and I thought, well, the forces out there who would wish to do me harm are not inside this space, not at this moment, and so in these rooms, I will breathe full, free breaths, and I will live my life one day at a time, and meet whatever comes, and take whatever opportunities present themselves to make things just a little bit better in our hurting world. I’m remembering something an enlightened man I once interviewed proposed to me: It's a beautiful paradox, he said. You don't have to change the world. You only have to change yourself. That is how you change the world. So I'm over here, inside my house, trying to become immersed in the work that has been given me to do. The new book. To find the story's momentum. To lose myself there. To let the world happen as it will and as it won't. To be my own clay. For now, anyway. At least for now.

Within the all of it

The light in my house seemed somehow different this morning, as if I had awoken in a world that was not the same as the one I had gone to sleep in two nights before. And yet I was in the same country, only now all the masks, all the hopes and platitudes had been stripped away and the true nature of us was plain as the very day. Out on the streets, New York was dead quiet. People nodded to each other, bleary eyed and shell shocked. The only other time the city felt as hushed as it was today was on 9/11. 

As we all now know, Trump marched red across the electoral map last night, just as he did in 2016. I felt as if I was suffering from PTSD. I went to bed feeling weirdly disconnected from myself and I woke up numb. I was aware of emotions stirring in the depths but they felt papered over. Occasionally one feeling or another broke through. Betrayal. Grief. Disbelief. The bitter realization that so many in this country just did not care about those who their vote put in jeopardy. Anger at the bomb threats in some 40 heavily Democratic voting precincts in Georgia. Ballot drop boxes burned with votes inside in the Pacific NW. Hundreds of thousands of mailed in ballots in battleground states that never showed. Untold numbers of voters turning up to find their names nowhere on the rolls despite their having registered. So many such stories. Were votes suppressed? I have no doubt, but here we are. What happened, happened. 

I sat alone in my house all morning after my husband went to work, the TV off, my thoughts swirling, and finally the salient emotion rose to the fore and it was sadness, deep surpassing oceanic sadness at the state of us, and the world we have bequeathed to our children. 

My niece in Texas texted the family chat that she did not intend to risk another pregnancy so we better love on Harper all we can. And we will. But why did so many not care one whit about the question of Trump's character? One Black podcast host summed up Trump in this way: “He is a masterclass in white privilege. He can't say enough racist things to be a racist. He can't commit enough crimes to be a criminal. He can't fail enough times to be a failure. He can't say enough stupid things to be stupid. The idea of him overshadows any reality. The “Christian savior" who doesn't know the bible, the adulterer who f*cks porn stars and steals from charities. It's the promise of the protection of whiteness he represents.” That's part of it for some people for sure. Another part of his win is outright misogyny. In the end, Kamala Harris is a woman, and a great majority of men, and as it turns out, most women, too, were just never going to vote for a woman. Not Black women, though. Ninety-two percent of us voted for the Harris/Walz ticket. It wasn't enough in the end.

And now—a luta continua.

But I’m tired, y'all. 

I might need a minute.

Little girl in costume

Her second Halloween. That precious little face. Also, a corner of innocence to keep in view while we wait for news of our collective future. 

At the center, love

This beautiful man who holds our hearts had a birthday on Monday just past. For some reason I love this photo I snapped a few weeks ago, when he was updating our children on some news about the impending sale of his childhood home in Antigua, a long and complicated transaction that, somewhat miraculously, will be accomplished this week.

The "kids" all showed up to celebrate his birthday, bearing cupcakes, wine, flowers, snacks, to add to a particular store-bought strawberry shortcake, his fave. He opened gifts and we chatted and told stories as uproariously as we do, and a lovely evening was had by all.

And now we are a mere two days away from election day, and everyone is barely drawing breath, waiting to see what will unfold. The only thing we know for sure is that whatever the outcome of the voting, there are hard days still to come, and may we be equal to them, may we be set on a path to a future in which we can move forward from a place of courageous reclamation, shared humanity, and above all, love. That may sound corny in the world we know, but that doesn't make it any less worth dreaming.

Two more weeks and a birthday

Were he alive, my dad would have turned 101 years old today. When I hold my memories of him up to the light, I see so plainly the ways he tried to make the world better, easier, kinder for those near him or far. He started out as a prosecutor, like the little girl above, before he became a judge and eventually chief justice. Today, honoring his memory with unalloyed hope, I pray we'll be able to say the little girl in the picture, whose own birthday was three days ago, grew up to be not just a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a senator, and a vice president, but also president of the United States. 

Whatever you may think about Kamala Harris's candidacy, she is a far superior option to the felon in orange make-up who is running against her. Vote Harris/Walz, and then vote blue all the way down the ticket, too, because only then will you have a chance to fight like hell for the battles crying out to be fought in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Vote for the other guy—who is really only a feeble and demented propped up Trojan Horse meant to usher in the real Project 2025 implementer Vance—and the centuries old, admittedly imperfect, yet still stubbornly hopeful American democratic project, not to mention Trump's openly threatened "enemies within," will be dead. 

Nicole Wallace said on TV last night that girl dads might be the secret sauce in a Harris/Walz win, that they don't want to see their daughters suffering under the Republicans' outlawing and criminalizing of life-saving reproductive health care that has already caused hundreds of thousands of women and their families untold pain. I hope she's right. I suppose it's too much to extend that hope to the idea that every man or woman who loves a woman or girl will do the right thing at the polls on or before November 5—but whatever, collective thought is a powerful driver, and hope is free.

In celebration of my dad's birthday, here he is in May 1946. He was 23 years old and working as a clerk of the courts in Spanish Town, Jamaica. This photo was taken the year he met a young postmistress who would one day become my mother and three years before they would wed and leave our little island for London, England, so that my dad could study law. Till the day she died in 2015, almost twenty years after my dad left us, my mom kept this photo of him between the tattered pages of her bible.

Four Days in LA

My week in LA that went as well as I could have hoped. My new subject and I forged a warm connection in person and made a good strong start on the book. Little by little the narrative arc is coming into view. I think I have decided on a first chapter, centered on an event that chronologically occurs in the middle of her story, but it brings together all the threads of the book, so perhaps I can start there and hopefully engage the reader, then return to the beginning, working my way back to that climactic moment, then moving beyond it. I do worry about stealing a narrative high point that could help pace the middle section of the story, but there's a lot that happens in my subject's life after this event that will be equally as compelling, if told right. I just have to figure out how to tell it right. I started this post on my phone while at the airport in LA. I'm back home now, listening to tapes to get my subject's voice in my head and reflecting on the work we've begun. I have many more interviews to do, but now my subject and I have identified the people I need to talk to, who can help to widen her story's lens.

The first morning, she was very apologetically running late from an early meeting. While waiting for her on a bench outside her office building, I snapped the selfie above at the same moment that my daughter texted me. 

My subject arrived soon after, and we went inside and set up for our morning session. Later, when we were heading out to have lunch, I laughingly shared what I'd told my daughter and confessed my abject avoidance of stairs. "The irony of you and me together," I said lightly while climbing gracelessly into her car. "What do you mean?" she said, looking at me sincerely. "I'm an athlete. I definitely understand injury." By then, I had already seen that she was as kind and considerate a human as she'd appeared to be back in July when we first met on Zoom. And how lucky am I, because now I am working with yet another subject whose energy I will enjoy channeling in the coming year.

__________

A big part of why I wasn't nervous on the morning I was to meet my new book subject was because the night before, I had been enfolded in the most generous and non-judgmental atmosphere. I'd arrived in LA on Monday afternoon, and faced with a free evening, I texted my friend Elizabeth Aquino, mother of beautiful Sophie and her princely brothers, Henry and Oliver. Elizabeth and I first connected in this virtual community in 2009, when she was blogging at “A Moon, Worn As If It Had Been A Shell.” These days you can find Elizabeth's exquisite writing about life’s vicissitudes here. She and I met in person a few years ago when she was in New York with her youngest Oliver, and the three of us went to breakfast at Sarabeth's on Amsterdam Avenue. Our connection was immediately easy. We bare our souls here in ways we don't often speak, and so when we meet in the non-virtual world, we discover that we already know each other in a deep way. The moment I hugged Elizabeth and Oliver back then, I realized I already loved them.

Still, I wasn't sure Elizabeth would be able to meet up given the last minute nature of my text, and the fact that I didn't know how far away from her my hotel was. She's in LA proper and I was in Valencia, and I had no mental map of the distance between us. But Elizabeth texted me back right away, eager to meet up, which made me eager too. I quickly assessed that getting to her would be akin to getting from Harlem to Brooklyn to see my daughter, so I jumped into an Uber and was on my way to her home. I was thrilled that I would get to meet Sophie, and I would also see Oliver, as we’d made a plan to have dinner at the restaurant where he works. "Oliver was excited to hear you were in town," Elizabeth said, and she can have no idea how much that touched my heart. I also met Carl, Elizabeth's partner, who is just the gentlest and kindest of men. Elizabeth, Carl, and I sat and talked around her green mosaic table that I've seen in pictures on her blog. Elizabeth also gave me a tour of her home, an artistically nurturing space, filled with visual and literary treasures. 

When Sophie got home from her evening stroll around the neighborhood with her lovely caregivers, I was able to hug her gently, moved by her great presence, her dark eyes taking me in, allowing me. Soon after, Elizabeth, Carl and I went to dinner, where the servers treated us as if we were special guests, and Oliver kept checking on us, and the chef and everyone else came by to talk to us and tell us how much they love Oliver. How could anyone not love Oliver! 

Oliver and Elizabeth drove me back to my hotel after he got off shift. I loved hearing him talk about the dreams he holds, and I would bet on that kid every day of the week. All these people are the reason I woke up the next morning feeling as if the world is a munificent place, where the only harsh judgment of me is my own. As an unwitting antidote, Elizabeth and her beloveds gave me a gift heading into my first interview with a new subject. I felt grounded. Filled up with love.

 

Conditioning

My husband did flowers for church today. They are in celebration of the tenth anniversary of our beloved rector, who we call Mother Mary, taking the helm of our little activist community. The sun was on the blooms as they rested in a bucket of water yesterday, being conditioned, and I snapped the picture. I love the colors. 

Speaking of being conditioned, the candidates on the right are promising us fascism if they win, and a bloody siege if they don’t. They are promising purges of government personnel and military round ups and concentration camps and deportations and executions of enemies—yes, they’ve used these actual words—and yet the race is still deadlocked. How can this be? Now Trump is planning a huge Madison Square Garden rally in New York City to echo the  Nazi rally of February 20, 1939 that took place there. The man is telling us everything we need to know about what’s coming if he wins.  It will be enough of a hellscape if he doesn’t win but at least then we’ll have a fighting chance to slay this beast of evil at last. 

I’m traveling to Los Angeles this week to start work on a new book project. I’m as anxious as can be at the mere prospect of packing, during which I will have to contemplate every occasion of showing up. I have only vague clues as to what strands of my history converged and tangled themselves such that I should feel this way. I confessed to a friend yesterday that it feels like a mental illness how excruciating it is just to make myself appear. She understood completely. I hate that she also struggles with this conflicted sense of being but in that moment, she reached out a hand to me, graciously and without judgment, and I felt comforted, seen. 

Restoration

My friend Janice drove into the city and we met up at the Arthouse Bar to sip margaritas in the balmy New York night and catch up on our lives. That was our sidewalk view. We had the best time, dissecting recent happenings and internal evolutions of self, talking as mothers do about our children, and enjoying the whimsy and soul baring made possible by going on three decades of friendship. We did bemoan the fact that our little circle of friends who found one another when our kids attended the same grade school, did not survive the covid years entirely intact. Though we still text one another in frequent bursts, we gather as a group hardly at all now. Some of the mothers still get together one on one, or in threes or fours, but seldom the whole posse anymore. One friend in particular has drifted farthest away. Her first grandchild was born on the day in March 2020 that covid lockdowns went into effect, and to the rest of us, it seems she has fully disappeared into that enchanted country. 

I see Janice much less often, too. During covid, she retired from her job as an art teacher and moved upstate to make her beautiful ceramic sculptures full time. Another one of the group, Isabella, bought a country house upstate with her husband, and now spends her weekends there. She usually comes back to the city on Mondays for her therapy practice, and we occasionally meet for dinner on a weekday evening. Some weeks she stays upstate, as the covid years normalized talk therapy via Zoom. Isabella still prefers to see clients in person at least some of the time, but she now has options that allow her to enjoy the changing colors of the trees in beautiful New Paltz, a bustling college town with al fresco cafes, wine bars, farmers markets, and a lively student vibe. We've visited her and her husband there, and grilled lunch on their patio while looking out at the woods. It was charmed. Another of our group still has not quite come back from covid quarantines; she is nervous in crowds now, so it was an act of love when she attended my daughter's wedding unmasked. 

For my part, work has sometimes been all consuming, though I do look up from my screen and allow myself to touch the nostalgia, the ache I feel for the greater connectedness of our pre-covid days. Maybe I'm just imagining that it was so. Or maybe we all just got used to being at home more, to being in a little bubble with immediate family. Maybe we discovered the joys of being still, not having to show up anywhere, of unstructured time to fill as we chose. And yet, I miss my friends. I miss the gathering of women, sometimes with our husbands and children, the pot lucks with mismatched hand-made crockery, the rooftop evenings basking in the pink orange glow of the setting sun. I miss the New Years eve nights around tables laden with food, watching the ball drop on TV, then texting our children and other beloveds in the minutes after. I realize we're all in a new stage now, and life may simply be asking me to practice acceptance of our respective journeys.

Still, Janice and I agreed that we two Taurus women together, old friends meeting up to share hearts in the New York City night, was a kind of spiritual restoration.