Autumn is Here and the Leaves Are All Changing

Or: metabolizing the election

After the election, the first thing was the bleak disappointment. Then the pain. My back and neck tightened and a dull note of anti-pleasure whined through my body. Then this deep exhaustion. A kind of torpor and fog. Words distant, decisions incapacitating. I kept waking at five AM in mind-racing dread, walking through my day without that rest.

That Thursday I went to see a friend’s show in a little underground venue near Pike’s Place Market. Full of pasta and wine and exhaustion, I sat on an agelessly old brocade couch in the low-lit room, half drowsing, half drinking in the music. Everyone seemed as underwater. But we were there together, letting the music carry us through waves of feelings.

I remember when Biden was elected, a low-grade tension in myself released, a tension I’d been carrying for years. We went to the party in the park and a stranger gave A a blue balloon. Four years before, I remember shock, stunned grief, a sense that everything was wrong. I’d just lost a pregnancy. State after state soaking red.

I think, and my body tells me, that what is coming is scarier and worse than what came before. But I feel a different kind of resolve.

I don’t want to live these years nerve-shot in fear and grief and disbelief. At least not in the despair of it. This is what is. What will we do with it?

A. is learning to write. She brought home a line from a fall poem that she copied. Autumn is here and the leaves are all changing. Of course, I put it on the fridge. Every time I walk by it, I turn it over in my mind. It is here. It is changing. This is what it is. Seasons come and seasons go. Pretending it won’t be winter doesn’t stop the cold.

S. and A. and I walked around the arboretum at the peak of the leaves this year. What a long glorious exhale of color it’s been. Here they are, the leaves, done photosynthesizing, about to return to the soil, and in that last moment, they become something so vibrant it’s almost drinkable. We sink into the wonder of that. I don’t know if I’m the only one thinking I hope I live like that.

What the leaves do is something different than despair. It’s not denial either.

In some of the environmental circles I’ve moved through, they talk about the “wall of grief.” How when people begin to connect with nature they hit this enormous grief about environmental destruction. It can feel impassible. Some people retreat into less connection. Some people spend their lives railing. But it is also possible to feel through that grief, which is not a wall after all but a great wave that carries you deeper into the work and the belonging.

I hope something similar happens for us now.

When my sister Heidi was a kid, she wrote a poem about going outside into a dark and stormy night. She wrote (this is a rough paraphrase because my copy of her poem is buried in some box) “that you stand there in the dark and wind and you realize/ that every person has as much power as each other.”

I keep thinking of this poem these last two weeks.

There are many kinds of power, of course, and in some ways, of course, power is an unequal, oppressive force. This is putting it mildly. That kind of power is power over others.

But there is another kind of power, an inner kind of power. This is the kind my sister felt as a child on that dark, rainy night. Each of us creates the future. Each of us shapes the world. We can all harm or heal

National Peace Quilt 1984 by the Boise Peace Quilt Project

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I keep thinking of you all, dear friends and readers of this little project towards mutual flourishing. There are, as I write, 47 of you. You include:

A teacher whose work gave my work its model.

Parents who show up daily in the world-changing work of raising healthy, capable kids.

People doing their healing work. People choosing not to pass on the pain passed onto them.

You are farmers and farmer-educators, doctors and herbalists, social workers and therapists, musicians and artists and writers, gardeners and wilderness-lovers, policy wonks and lawyers and fundraisers, teachers and grandparents.

Some of you were part of the Boise Peace Quilt Project, which was just that: people in Boise making quilts as actions towards peace. My face is on one of those quilts, along with the faces of both American and Russian children, in a collaborative project across Cold War lines, and that’s just one story in a larger story of people working for peace wherever they were, in whatever way felt natural to them. Choosing to act, even if they were far away from any center of power.

One of you helped create the freaking Mars Rover and also helped keep Missoula’s water supply from being privatized, not to mention ensuring, through the magical powers of Stanford Jersey Wearing and Candle Lighting, that Stanford’s football team achieves glory.

One of you made an art piece that reached into and healed my longtime nightmares.

One of you is my favorite ninja.

Some of you are in the marriages I most admire. Some of you are joyful independent people who showed me beautiful lives come in many forms. Some of you are the people I call when my heart is broken.

One of you is, by the most wild and joyful happening, unbreaking it.

This list is hardly doing you all justice.

Some of you can probably do anything. You bring life and magic to everything you touch. Some of you just are: the way you live is a process of attunement, survival, delight.

Some of you I don’t even know so I can’t even name your magic.

But what I’m saying through this listing and love is that I believe in you all and in people in general. I believe in the alive brightness of our humanity.

History isn’t over. The people of this country are the exact same people as if Harris had won. The work that’s needed now has always been needed. It’s just gotten louder and clearer. There has never been a day, at least in this country, where there was not liberation work, care work, healing work, educational work, visionary work to do. Whatever your work is, we need it.

The wind came in today and blew the trees bare. Walking with A. we could see how the new buds were already there on the stark branches.

My lights flicker. The wind roars on. When I’m done here I’ll stand up and go outside and stand on the dark porch. I’ll smell the wind and feel its intensity. I’ll feel my exhaustion and my own strength. Then I’ll go inside, brush my teeth, go to sleep, get up tomorrow, and teach.