Sometimes it bleeds gray, drained of hue, drained of shade.
It’s hard to find much hope when we’re still in January.
Still, I follow the light. It shifts, it slides, it changes ever-so-slightly.
When the sky begins getting that Maxwell Parish glow, and the clouds look painted when the sun hits them in the afternoon, I know spring is on the way. Maybe not arriving tomorrow, maybe not next month, but not long thereafter.
When the days have become horrific, and the world is in the throes of angst and agitation, all we can do is hold tight to loved ones, and take a moment to simply breathe. A daily meditation is barely enough, but it’s the enough that counts, not the barely. In the flickering candlelight, I sit on the floor and slow my breathing. Eventually, with each elongating inhalation and exhalation, the mind clears, or at least stalls its racing thoughts.
A moment of mindfulness feels as silly as it does imperative for my own mental health and emotional well-being. At fifty, I know myself well enough to know how to navigate such trying times, but this past week has been especially challenging. Mostly I’ve felt rage and anger at the injustice of it all. It’s important to acknowledge that, at least for my mental processing. I don’t say it often enough, and I don’t express it, but I know I have to get it out. Maybe this post will be enough to let the rage subside. Maybe it will be enough to let the anger go. It doesn’t fix anything, it doesn’t change the world. It makes it easier for me to reach out again to others, to be a better husband, son, brother, uncle and friend.
And I’m sad – sad at the state of our country, our world. It helps to say that out loud too.
Finally, I’m tired. Exhausted of all of it. I haven’t given up… but I’m tired. It takes a toll.
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
There isn’t much more to say about the past week in this country – a country I no longer recognize, as much as I am unsurprised by where we are. Most of these silly posts were programmed in advance of recent days, but there are a few that address it because our silence is our complicity. People may not like political posts, but when politics become a question of morality, it is our obligation to speak up. Now, a look back at the previous week, when just a few days ago things felt only slightly less awful…
A post of pause upon the murder of yet another American citizen by ICE.
Hey MAGA, didn’t many of you vote for Trump to protect your 2nd Amendment rights? Well, the government just shot and killed a man for legally carrying. They took his gun, THEN they shot him, point blank, multiple times. It’s on video and we can clearly see what happened. They are treading on YOU.
Someone suggested it was because they were voting for FEMA money (which Trump has already proclaimed won’t go to blue states, so what were Suozzi and and Gillen even thinking?) but regardless of that, the time for nuanced political games has long since passed. To our Democratic leadership, and I used the term loosely, catch the fuck up and meet the perilous moment already at hand.
If there are elections in the future – a very big ‘if’ that grows increasingly unlikely with each passing day – we need to primary these elected officials because we did not vote for this. Then vote out the entire next generation of GOP candidates – they are hellbent on continuing their destruction as long as it keeps lining their pockets with money and power.
“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk with guns.” ~ Donald Trump
Hey MAGA voters who only wanted their 2nd Amendment rights: the government just shot and killed a white male American citizen for legally carrying a firearm. Multiple ICE agents took him down for filming them, beat him, grabbed his gun, then fired multiple shots at him, point blank, instantly killing him.
Sitting down to a cup of peppermint herbal tea, still scalding hot and sweetened with just a spoonful of honey, I would normally send out a volley of texts with the photo you see here, captioned simply, “This is cafe culture.” A silly and foolish way of staying in touch with friends.
Today, it feels pointless and stupid and too sad to do such a thing, as our own government just ruthlessly murdered yet another American citizen on our own soil. Watch the video and see for yourself; don’t listen to the media or the White House at this sad point.
You wouldn’t know it here in the sanctuary of a cafe. The staff still serves its coffee and tea and food stuffs. Clients still find their friends and sit down amid laughter and bonhomie. Talk of football, snowstorms, and the typical winter banter spills out from other tables. Because really, it’s just another Goddamned day in America, and this is what we supposedly voted into office. Well, not me, and not most people I know, but too many to stop what some of us knew was coming. Here we are.
And so I pause.
I read. I sip tea. I meditate.
Selfish self-preservation, because no one seems to care.
What’s important is that I’m here, sitting in the cafe, honoring ritual and tradition and carving out a new set of habits to see me through the winter.
These words are mostly hollow and empty – vapid vessels that give my hand something to do in pushing pen across paper – and it’s good, it feels good. There is joy enough in physically writing, in finding the flow of letters, slowed in my head for having to write them all out. Writing, in its physical hand-wrought form, is becoming a lost art, and a favored indulgence.
At one of my early jobs with the state as a Keyboard Specialist (now called Office Assistant) I remember the head Secretary (now called Administrative Assistant – we have come so far!) being given something to type out, and the person doling out the assignment asked somewhat sheepishly if she would mind typing it out.
“No, it’s been a while since I got to do straight typing, and I kind of missed it,” the Secretary said.
I understood exactly what she was saying, how good it felt sometimes to execute a routine, especially one at which you excel and do well. Going through such physical practices can be soothing, almost meditative in a way.
There’s a similar feeling I get as I write out these words on lined paper. It is structure, it is order, it is ritual – all at a time when those things move further from comfortable reach. Most of all, it is a process – and I’ve always loved the process and the practice more than the result and finished product.
The little pockets of time in which humans sometimes have to wait have always fascinated me – and I usually attempt to make them mean something more than the killing of time. What an awful phrase and concept – killing time. I’ve always hated the expression, as time is one thing I’ve genuinely valued, perhaps more than anything else.
When given a time window – for furniture delivery or furnace repair or that hour for letting a batch of cinnamon rolls to rise – how do you prefer to spend the minutes? While I say I’m going to read or write something, more often than not I simple pause and let my brain roam wildly, recalling all those other suspended hours of waiting – the day I waited for a new bed in Boston, watching th sun slowly pass over the hardwood floors – or the morning I spent in the waiting room while Andy had his most recent medical procedure. Losing myself in thoughts is how I spent those moments, and a little philosophical exercising is good for the mind.
(PS – The featured photo shows the average number of spam calls I get of a day, which is why the ringer is always off. It won’t even vibrate because I don’t want to know.)
I happened upon two knitting clubs in the span of three days, surely a sign that I need to get back into the yarn game. The first was at a yarn store, the second at my usual cafe. The yarn store group seems a bit more serious – the members sat quietly and intently at their work, the leader guiding them with a general stitch comment, while the cafe group seemed looser, with food and drinks and more talking.
My knitting journey will likely not be part of a group, and will actually not be knitting at all, but crocheting, as I can barely handle one hook, much less two needles. The loose and gentle plan is to improve and practice technique with the basic granny square and grow from there. My first project – this blanket that took literally forty years to complete – was too long and too ambitious to be a good starting point. In the end, I conquered it, but I’m not going to do it again; I don’t have the years left. So granny squares it shall be for now. Baby steps, baby stiches… they pass the days of winter.
That’s a bitter little pill to swallow, and I’ve had a persistent and lifelong prescription for it because I make as many mistakes as anybody else. The most difficult lesson for me to learn has been in acknowledging those mistakes, and then learning from them. The learning past has been easier than the acknowledging, but both have come a long way these past few years.
Life teaches you when you are ready to receive the lesson, and it will keep trying until you get it.
