Maybe it’s all easier to take smaller, at the edge where my vision blurs.
I take it into focus anyway.
My writer’s craft dances like the flame in a tall glass cylinder candle that burns beside the fall bouquet on my dining room table. Glass holds these red and orange flowers, also.
I’m not sure what holds me anymore. It isn’t my mind, though it ticks beside me in wide patience. I watch the unfolding universe with a sense of a broader picture. I find it horrific, beautiful, enchanting, and trust it.
My fundamentalist Christian relatives suggest President Trump’s election is God’s will.
It appears to be what will be. Clearly, if there is a larger plan, this is part of it.
Me, I’d choose for us a straighter path from here to a win-win world where people partner with nature intelligencee and we restore balance through myriad co-creative endeavors. The sooner we get there, the fewer howling monsters will reach through the forest and take down the weakest among us.
I’m not a big fan of suffering. I’d like us to hurry up to the part where we work together to find solutions.
It didn’t go my way, though, on Election Day.
After a night spent crying beside our drooling, panting basset hound-Jack Russell Terrier-Chihuahua, Kipper, we met the afternoon of Nov. 8 at the vet’s to say our goodbyes and send him with mercy and infinite love into the beyond. Election night eve, Harmony and I held him on the bed between us and took turns telling him how much we loved him until his joy filled the room. We recounted how we used to walk a circle in our neighborhood—me, Kipper, and 2-7 neighborhood children in a pack. When we got to the midway point—a raised sewer drain on a pedestal of concrete—I’d lure him up on his throne where he’d sit regally as we all danced around him saying “King Kipper! King Kipper!” for no reason other than it made us all happy.
We started this when he he wasn’t our dog yet, because our neighbors left him all day long in the garage, where he’d have to poop and pee and sleep on a towel on the hard concrete. I asked if we could walk him, and thankfully they said yes, and these outings restored his bliss and his dignity as much as we could for a few minutes each day.
My blood drains at the transition when the spirit leaves and the body turns hard, cold, and lifeless in a few seconds, almost like someone closing a blind. “No!” my already sobbing teenager cried, saying goodbye to her companion of much of her childhood, through the torturous tests of adolescence, through her parents’ divorce, and—most recently—in a present filled with lots of playing with him and snuggling him and dancing around him and letting him enjoy being the center of our family.
We must go on with our burning hearts, the same hearts that tingle with happy memories. Inside and perhaps above, Kipper runs on his short legs with a smile as wide as heaven and those floppy velvet ears waving in the wind.
Oh, and we lost the election too, by a wide margin, the presidency too.
Also on Nov. 8, someone stole my credit card number. The fraud department at my credit union caught it right away so I likely won’t have to actually pay for either the online dating service or the $300 purchase of shoes at a fantasy footwear store. My credit union is a nonprofit owned by its members. They take care of me and my money in a way that’s both affordable and grants me my dignity. They aren’t forever trying to find new and creative ways to steal more and more from me.
We wanted to create a cooperative like this to pay for our health care in Colorado. We wanted to kick those big health insurers out of making decisions about our health and stealing our money. They fought us with lots of money and they won by a large margin.
But that’s not the whole story. More Coloradans than ever understand and 20 percent of them voted for universal health care. You had to really understand the mission in order to say “Yes!” to ballot language that began: Shall taxes be raised $25 billion? They knew it would save everyone money and hassles and that we would finally have a health care payer with people’s health as its primary motivation. They said yes! That’s one-fifth of a whole entire state who says yes and now understands what’s possible. Together, we will keep working for and insisting on universal health care until we do this.
Today, during my morning meditation/check-in with my spiritual and natural allies, they suggested that the best response to Trump is to ask, “How do I want this world to be/come out, and envision the answer. Then, they said, “Put your whole being into that vision.”
My beloved, Christopher, agreed:. “Yes! Use what you don`t want in order to pivot yourself into what you do want and then pursue that boldly. There`s no turning back.”
A bold, brave friend posted on Facebook that he feels—as an openly gay man—the back of his neck in the cross hairs of the trump supporters. “Privilege is real and it blinds,” he said.
Holy shit. If this is God’s will, that is exactly what we’re looking towards: Holy shit. Sometimes redemption requires kicking ass, or fighting hard for the light, or playing the bass guitar like my life depends on it.
Dark times may lie ahead. And while it might not mean my specific individual life is at risk per say, the darkness can take down light workers through despair. Music will be my lifeline.
It’s each of our sacred job to rescue as many as we can from the dark garage dungeons, and take ourselves on a sprint in the sunshine, put the underdog on a throne (even if it is a raised sewer drain) and dance in joy for King Kipper.
Thanks, dearest dog ever. Thanks, God. Thank you, nature.
(Want to do something really powerful and radical for the good? Begin a co-creative partnership with nature intelligence. Begin it now.)
Envision that world you want to see and put your full weight behind it.
Love yourself. Love others. Love those with whom you disagree.
Your burning, frightened, joyous heart will thank you.
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