After three whole glorious weeks of fall weather, winter has arrived here in Salt Lake. A couple of days ago, I drove to Provo in a snowstorm to a beautiful home that my friend Ally built, for a writing retreat with a few other women. To my left is a woman writing. Downstairs is a woman writing. We’ve all been talking about how rare and wonderful it is to feel, for a few days, free of responsibilities and schedules, to have food put in front of us three times a day and to be forbidden from doing dishes.
(The freedom from responsibility is a bit of an illusion, of course. Everyone here but me is a mom, and a couple of them are parenting as recent divorcees and have special needs kids and there’s never truly time off. I’ve been texting my husband this morning about scheduling a plumber to replace our toilet. I lost all of yesterday to a migraine. But even the pockets of feeling unburdened and the freedom from feeding and cleaning up after ourselves, let alone anyone else, goes a long way.)
Tomorrow night we set the clocks back and the season will truly shift.
Tuesday is election day—another shift.
No matter what happens on Tuesday, it’s clear we’re in for more difficult and divided times. There are going to be more policies that cause suffering for people who need the most help and compassion, more fear-based rhetoric to keep us amped up, more normalization of vitriol and hatred.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about how to live differently in current reality than I have been. This piece on “pandemic forgiveness” gets at some of what I’ve been processing. I can’t operate at the level of helpless anger and frustration I have been for years. I need to find a path through, one where I can let go of whatever isn’t useful for channeling into action, and start seeing the humanity in…humanity.
The piece on forgiveness seems to me a good companion to the podcast We Were Three, from someone who lost her brother and father—what was essentially her whole family—to covid conspiracies and then the virus itself. She’s angry and sad about her childhood and everything that led to the final loss. It’s a lot about grief and how our anger is tangled up in our losses.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who’s thinking about how to leave the country and establish a life elsewhere. How necessary it feels to him, and how tragic. I could feel his agony and heartbreak over the way he’s felt the loss of the country he loves, or the idea of it that he loved in the past. He’s a Pulitzer-nominated political cartoonist who is regularly threatened and feels a different kind of urgency than I do, though I relate to the feelings.
The anger and the loss, the grief and the fear, those things are real to me and I don’t believe they should be suppressed. Still, I want a path through that both acknowledges reality and doesn’t strip more of me away than has already been taken.
This opening of Denise Levertov’s poem “Making Peace” hits me where I’m at right now:
A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
She wrote that in 1987. I was 16 or 17, and we lived under the threat of nuclear war with the USSR. History repeats.
I haven’t been to church in a long time, but the Christian season of Advent starts at the end of this month and I feel a pull to observe it somehow. It’s a season of anticipation and also repentance, of hope in the dark of the gap between what is and what should be, and what true believers say will be. I know I’m not one of them anymore but I’m also not immune to the hope. Or I don’t want to be immune to hope. It needs tending, though—even in the midst of the grief and the anger—if I want it to stay alive.
So I may find a nice mainline church where I can hear a choir and light candles through the season, and participate in the ritual of hope even if parts of me resist and doubt it. I also like to observe the Winter Solstice—the longest night of the year and the rebirth of the sun, acknowledging the long dark and inviting the light.
I want to find meaning in these seasons, in these rituals, in the embodied and concrete routines of the season, and also do the less tangible inner work of finding a way forward. Politicians won’t save us, but they could harm us. Ditto for ideology and religion. Faith might, if it includes faith in the human capacity for compassion as much as for fear and anger. I have to start by exploring that capacity in myself, because I can’t stay where I’ve been stuck.
Levertov writes:
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
On my long day of migraining, I listened to about 18 hours of The Great Courses on The History of Christianity. If you have Audible, that stuff is free! I’m finding it helpful to revisit my tradition from a historical standpoint and the teacher is very good.
I recently read Beeswing, a memoir from Richard Thompson, who’s one of my favorite musicians. If you know his music and especially if you’ve ever seen him live, the book is exactly what you imagine an RT memoir would be. In other words, it’s great.
My husband and I listened to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain and the reader, Adam Lazarre-White, was perfection. His voice really lets you bathe in the language.
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Your writing about the church and wanting to observe the rituals, hit me so personally. You put into words almost my exact feelings. I am a retired teacher and have used many of your books in my middle school. You get through to both adults and teens. I appreciate the Inbox Variations so much and your writing personally. Plus, I love poetry and Denise Levertov. My favorite poem of hers is "Living" but I also love the one you posted. Thank you for your insight and writing. Denise Whisman