"How Are You Holding Up?"

…with all this going on? Asked my friend (also poet and Catholic Deacon) Chris Anderson, in an email exchange last week, following an appreciative response I’d sent him about a recent post of his own.

In the process of replying, I gained some clarity about that “how” that I hadn’t had before. So I decided to share it with “Are You With Me Here?” readers in turn, as an invitation into that conversation within and among us; a conversation that is maybe not so much about opinions and reactions as about response.

Hi Chris.

Good question.

I am holding up in part by way of poems and posts such as yours, and of other soul-friends who remind me of how crucial (literally, as in "the essential crucible") is a dedication to living (including thinking and feeling and speaking, as well as other kinds of doing) in alignment with how love behaves.

Last night we watched the film "White Bird" , and were both super-moved by it. An unapologetic, blatant morality tale of the kind I might have dismissed for that very reason alone in an earlier time, it was JUST what the doctor ordered in this time: the reminder of the crucial, essential power of kindness.

So that's where I am trying to anchor myself these days: in love...not in lieu of social activism (per that false "contemplation ‘or’ action" binary), but so as to ground my activist-action (whatever forms that may take in the days ahead) in the right place: in love, and not in/from hateful reaction, which just adds more fear and rage to the world.

I am also continuing to be upheld by Sherman Alexie's poem, "Bad Back" which appeared in the Rattle "Poem a Day" series a couple of weeks ago (be sure to listen to the audio version of Alexie reading it). Something about that poem just meets me so powerfully, I think in Alexie’s honesty (vs false piety) and expansive surrender, which itself is a form of faith.

And, it’s in summoning the courage to allow myself to grieve, purely and simply. So much of what gets alchemized by evil into hate through us is our untended wounds and un-grieved losses; all that softness that gets hardened-around when not fully felt, and held. So I am also trying to just feel and to hold my own and others' sorrow in its raw, un-walled-up state. Which does in fact involve feeling more pain, rather than less, but that's where the courage and the faith are: that that, too, is right-action.

After all, it doesn’t seem as though all that collective, self-righteous hater-hating has done us a lot of good over the eight years since the 2016 election, has it?

So backatcha, dear soul friend [and “Are You With Me Here?” readers], how are YOU holding up?

Peace,

D

Postscript

Our inner work is an important as our outer work. The real question is, who do we have to be to endure and transform this moment? […] If we continue to act out of anger, cruelty, hate, retaliation, fear...that's what we'll create in the world.
(from Tom Amsberry, in “These Our Times”)

***

When we woke,

we found hate had been chosen
to run the show.

We were frightened and angry,
a little groggy from sleeping,

but awake to the thought of a future
with hate in charge. We knew to do

something, so went marching together,
wearing art on our heads, our hearts

on our sleeves. But when hate didn’t
listen we hated to not be heard,

so we started campaigns
to write hate letters together.

We put signs on our homes that read
This is a hate-free zone,

so the haters would know our care
no longer included them.

We called on the names of King,
the Buddha, and Gandhi

(mostly leaving out Jesus since the haters
seemed to have claimed Him),

as we held hands and chanted,
To hell with the hating ones!

We avoided the neighbors
we’d decided believed in hate

or we pretended politeness,
then judged them behind their backs.

And it consoled us to hate them;
we even felt kind of happy,

since knowing their wrongness
made us feel so good, and right.

As hate, untroubled as always
by questions of right and wrong,

simply felt itself growing. Oh good,
hate gloated happily, more of me.

(Donna Henderson, January, 2017)