Morning gives me a hickey. I’m a pound of butter yellow in the warm sunshine. My kitty licks at a puddle of moonlight. I can have my cake and eat it too. I’m warm, finally warm. The bright sunlight mistakes me for gold. I go all orange. I’m a tabby. I’m shuffling, cajoling, harkening into this most amazing day. The God of all life made me using forces of evolution that beat in me still. I can do this. Slowly, little by little, I turn my fears into truth.

So much for receiving a pass. I wanted that for so long, but life steps me up, and I acquiesce. Okay, okay already. I’ll give in and grow. It doesn’t take so much pushing and prodding like before. I’m God’s willing student. Now, I try to learn before they have to send in the demons. I’ve been waiting my whole life for just one day, and it’s this one. There has never been any other, don’t you see? I’m losing myself inside of time.

I want to pull away, I do, but instead I sit and breathe with the tension like a bull. My writing exasperates me. Everything else would be easier. Distraction beckons me. No, I say. No, I can conquer the endless titillation of information and go beyond it to what’s at the heart. I can feel into my fear and give it my heart’s attention until, at last, it melts open into light. Transformation transpires everywhere, and it hurts. Where is Mr. Rogers? Where is my 28-year-old young pretty mother? Is she in fact the 70-year-old silver-headed woman who seems smaller since her surgery for breast cancer? She is. I shudder, for my own transformation heads along the same continuum. I face this with tension almost unbearable at the kitchen table that doesn’t yet feel like my own. I thank you for this life even though I don’t understand. I thank you even though, for some reason, I’m scared out of my mind and would rather hover like a dipshit in the clamor on social media because it’s easier than facing the raw truth. I type for a living. I’m scared. Everything wrong just doesn’t affect me yet, not here, not now. Yet I can hear the screams of everyone in Puerto Rico.

Last night, it was like the stress dam broke open. I wrestled with the screams—yes screams—in my head. There seems no other way to respond to this wretched presidency. Humor falls flat because it cannot help. I begged to become enlightened. Please use me, I told God. Please let my words and my actions be an instrument of your divine light. Please, I said. Please help me move through my fear into the light.

Somewhere beyond the hurtle and yell of the news (God bless our journalists, brave truth tellers, the independent free press) lies a truer true. But to get there I must wade through all my protestors, through all the noise, through everything that scares me most inside myself and outside myself, and it hurts. It’s not for wimps—nothing is. Except the Earth. The mild, gentle, and quiet people shall inherit it.

I won’t have any choice but to be mild soon just from fatigue. I wrestle with all my demons and I breathe in their pungent salted-meat-garlic breath, and I refuse to go unconscious though I tremble. Lord, do I tremble. Lord help me. I’m so afraid. I want what’s best for my country and my family, and for this Earth and I don’t know how to help. Show me the way, God. Please. I’m willing to will thy will.

It’s so easy to choose not to feel, but then we project our demons out onto other people and do terrible things to them, beginning with telling them to fuck off in traffic. And then, dear ones, then we become part of the problem, not the solution.

The only way through is to feel it all, even though it feels like to do so may kill you, even though you have to surrender everything you’ve ever held onto for security and ride on through. I have done this enough times to think that… but no, it doesn’t get easier. It melts me every time.

I want be one with God. But I have to feel through all the world’s suffering and let it break me open and trust.

I simultaneously ask God to use me as an instrument of her divine light and I ask God to pick on someone his own size.

I’m tired but willing.

Okay, morning, have your way with me. Love me open to God.