Pandemic postcard #37: 'We are still here'

Eight miles west of Highway 101, I had a decision to make: Continue straight to La Push on Washington 110 or turn right to Mora. I had a reservation at the Mora Campground near Rialto Beach, but check-in was many hours off, so I thought I'd spend the morning at Second Beach near La Push. As I neared the intersection, I saw the choice had been made for me: The temporary road sign flashed "QUILEUTE RESERVATION CLOSED."

Good for them, I thought.

As the pandemic took hold last spring, tribal governments up and down Washington's coast closed their lands to visitors. When summer came and the spread of the virus slowed, many adjacent areas in Olympic National Park opened to stir-crazy Americans seeking outdoor relief from isolation. I saw license plates from all over at Rialto Beach and cars parked a half-mile down Mora Road. But just across the Quileute River, its eponymous tribal nation remained off-limits to outsiders, as did the Makah reservation at the northwestern tip of the contiguous United States and the Quinault Indian Nation in southwestern Washington.

I applaud tribal nations for doing whatever they can to keep the coronavirus at bay, especially given the long history of indigenous people dying from diseases brought by outsiders and the high COVID-19 toll some Indian nations are facing in 2020. The closures are a reminder that the 574 tribal nations in the United States are sovereign and have the right to self-determination as well as the right to receive benefits from the federal government.

At least most of them do. Here in Seattle, we live on the unceded land of the Duwamish people. Our city was named for Duwamish Chief Si'ahl, who famously said, "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know: all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected." 

The Duwamish are a federally recognized tribe under the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, but they are not currently on the list of federally acknowledged tribes. According to the Duwamish website, in 1978, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs basically amended the treaty by adding seven new rules with which the Duwamish must comply to receive land, benefits, and services. The case has been under review by the Interior Department's Board of Indian Appeals for more than five years. 

Meanwhile, despite being in the heart of one of the wealthiest areas in the United States, many Duwamish people cannot access health services, nor can the tribe profit from tourism and gaming, as so many others do. (Seattle is surrounded by high-end resorts run by the Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Suquamish, and other neighboring tribes.) Even if the Duwamish prevail, I'm not sure how likely I'd be to hit a future casino. But along with more than 10,500 other people--half of whom have signed up in 2020--I've decided it's time to pay a small, symbolic amount of rent to the Duwamish people in recognition of the centuries they've spent caring for the land where I live today.

In last Sunday's online service, my minister Rev. Beth Chronister advocated for Real Rent Duwamish, and she also acknowledged that our physical building is on Duwamish land. I am part of a faith tradition that is grappling like never before with our nation's history of settler colonialism and enslavement. But Rev. Beth cautioned us against absolving ourselves with what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." We can pay token rent and say a land acknowledgment and call it good, or we can go deeper, into real relationship and covenant with each other. 

I can think of two ways beyond church that I will try to do this. Early in my freelance writing career, I authored two guidebooks that explored the Oregon Trail and the Lewis and Clark Trail. I know I tried my best--given my body of knowledge in the 1990s--to offer a nuanced view of how the United States expanded westward, yet I am sure I fell fall short. As I get future opportunities to write about history, I will do better.

Second, I recommit to living as lightly as I can. I retain a small footprint by American standards, dwelling in 400 square feet, yet like Henry David Thoreau, I need to leave my cabin now and then. I usually go on foot, but I have a car, and I occasionally use it to visit nature that's not within walking distance. A paradox, I know. So when I go into the woods and walk beside the waters, I want to be as mindful as I can of what I find there. "We rarely care for that we cannot name," says British writer Robert Macfarlane, who has worked with artist Jackie Morris and musicians to re-animate lost words from the natural world, just as many Americans seek to authentically connect with indigenous wisdom.  

This is not wisdom from the past. Its practitioners are here now, seeking the right to harvest salmon and protect their water from oil spills. As best I can as a 21st century urban creature of comfort, I want to know plants by their names and birds by their songs. I want to invoke spirits and spells and "sing the things I see," perhaps gaining a tiny fraction of the knowledge possessed by the people who have lived here for millennia and who still live here today. I honor their wisdom and would be grateful for a small measure of it, if I am worthy. Spirit of life, let me be worthy of these gifts, and let us share them widely.

_____

Thank you for reading Surely Joy. You can find the new version of the blog here.

Pandemic postcard #35: Hindsight and foresight

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been, 

A place that has to be believed to be seen ... Walk On, U2 

"Understanding the pandemic this week requires grasping two thoughts at once," Robinson Meyer wrote yesterday at The Atlantic. "First, the United States has never been closer to defeating the pandemic. Second, some of the country's most agonizing days still lie ahead."

We do seem to be at a pivot point. Clearly, we have several very dark months ahead, especially if the outgoing administration continues to impede an orderly transition of power, and if people gather over the holidays with the virus surging. At the same time, the good vaccine news of the past two weeks signals that by next spring, our long-sought "new normal" should finally arrive.  

How will we be different, as people and as a society? I revisited my first pandemic journal the other day--I'm now on volume three--and found what I'd written at the end of it, in mid-May, in the form of a letter to myself next May. 

Of "the things I'd love to see made manifest," one will happen for sure: We will "have a new president and leaders who are actively planning to manage future crises in a more proactive way." But I thought a vaccine wouldn't be "nearing production for widespread availability" until next summer, and we seem likely to beat that timetable now. The results of the upcoming Georgia special election will likely determine whether my prediction of health care for all--maybe via an Affordable Care Act expansion-- will happen in 2021. But thank goodness that the Supreme Court, even with its two-thirds conservative majority, doesn't seem inclined to overturn the ACA as we emerge from the greatest public health crisis in a century. 

Alas, as I write this, schools that had reopened are shutting again, and it seems unlikely that many will remain open this winter. But there's certainly hope that by spring, in-person learning may be happening anew. I'm not sure what to make of my prediction that kids might only go to class every other day; I guess that is for social distancing, and it may be happening in some places. Ever-shifting schedules seem like a hardship on families. Then again, many parents may be splitting their work time between home and office, so maybe it could work. And let's all have more art and music supplies!

Some more mixed news: Greenhouse gas emissions are down largely due to COVID, though this year's bad wildfires mean emissions aren't down as far as they could have been. And with car sales on the rise and people shunning transit, long-term progress could be marginal. We must find the will to make progress toward a healthier planet without the devastation of a pandemic. 

As for my vision of a life where "rest, creativity, community, and connection are paramount" and where work is less central to our lives, that still seems like a dream worth hanging onto, and one that we might be a little closer to than I'd imagined in May, before the murder of George Floyd. That horrific event and its cataclysmic aftermath launched a reckoning that continues to reverberate as we ponder our individual lives and our collective destinies. Why are we here if not to love life and love one another?   

This Thanksgiving season, I am thankful that we may soon be emerging from one of the darkest chapters of history. I love this quote from Pema Chodron: "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." In hindsight, we've all learned a lot this year, and with foresight, we may put some of it to good use.

Pandemic postcard #33: Loving the half-full of it

My sweetheart spent most of his adult life as a proud teetotaler. When asked about his aversion to booze, Tom would describe how he'd had too much to drink one night as a young man, and while it wasn't the first time, he decided it would be the last. Yet sometime in his last few years, he bought a bunch of drinkware and stashed it in the back of our bedroom closet.

Months after he died in 2018, I was still deep into the long work of sifting through Tom's stuff: dozens upon dozens of boxes of old receipts and legal papers, shelves full of compact discs (he'd made a living first in radio, then in choosing music for businesses), and bags stuffed full of promotional items, trinkets, and tchotchkes. When Tom discovered something he liked--be it a Justin Trudeau bobblehead, home plate-shaped doormat, "Enjoying My Coffee" bumper sticker, or a movie about the criminally forgotten songwriter Doc Pomus--he'd order it in bulk, keep one for himself, and give the extras as gifts, except sometimes he’d forget about them. 

That’s how I came to find the six “half-full" glasses. Designed for the eternal optimist, only the top half of the glass could be filled--the bottom half was sealed off--so it would automatically be at least half full. I wrapped up the glasses as Tom’s last gifts to us, and when Tom's children and their mother and her husband and my daughter and I gathered on Christmas morning, we drank a toast in Tom's memory.

It's been a half-full week for America. After two years and $14 billion spent, the 2020 U.S. presidential elections has essentially ended in a draw, and there's a 50 percent chance you are disappointed by the results. We've now been more or less evenly divided for decades and there's little indication how--or when--we'll break the deadlock in Washington, D.C., never mind between the blue metros and the red retros.   

For many of us, our thirst remains unslaked. We'd dreamed so long of a resounding rebuke to the mean, fear-mongering, self-centered bully who has held the presidency these past four years. Amid this year's reckoning over racism, we were sure tens of millions of Americans would turn out as never before to vote for love and justice, and we did. But anxiety and dread were on the ballot, too, and their appeal was just as powerful to folks who may be feeling more half-empty right now.

And so here we are, pretty much where we started, except the kinder candidate has apparently prevailed in the presidential contest. Given all that Joe Biden has endured in his life, it's little surprise that he's bearing this time of uncertainty with patience and calm, and that is what our battered country needs now and over the next four years. While we will not fully realize the changes many of us would like in these divided times, at least our nation can rejoin the world community and make progress on the margins at home, especially for the most marginalized.

At a post-election vespers service the other night, my minister told the story of a couple in the church he served early in his career. Long unable to have children of their own, they finally became parents, but their daughter was born with developmental disabilities. They chose to love her and raise her as if she were perfectly and fully human, and so she surpassed the life expectancy and limits she'd been dealt. Likewise, my husband spent his last decade living with multiple myeloma, yet Tom's glass was always at least half full, and often spilling over the brim as he threw himself into passion projects like launching a community radio station in the last years of his life and embracing a new romance despite previous disappointments.  

Half of America feels wounded over the election results, while the other half are saying "meh," but it doesn’t have to be that way. In this time of mingled disappointments, as we continue to deal with COVID-19 and a faltering economy, may we choose to see possibility over peril, lift repair over despair, and--knowing the infinite promise of this country--declare an end to our hostilities. Together, let's raise a glass to freedom and love the half-full out of this broken, beloved nation.  

 

Pandemic postcard #32: In search of a clean slate

Last week, I promised a story about what I was doing on November 9, 2016. I'm pretty sure that whatever happens next week, it won't be any weirder than what I lived through four years ago, both because this year's election may take a long time beyond Tuesday night to resolve and because Tom had his stem cell transplant the morning after the last election.

 

The 2012 election was one of only a few in my adult life that I wasn't working in either a newsroom or for a campaign on election night. I felt at loose ends and nervous about the results, so I went to a movie. I was one of a handful of people who attended a showing of Argo at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. I stopped in the restroom afterward and heard two women sharing the news that President Obama had won re-election.  

 

When someone gets a stem cell transplant, their immune system is wiped clean and they are home-bound for many months afterward, so Tom and I thought a movie date night sounded like the best way to spend election night 2016, too. We were staying at a hotel near the hospital, and we walked a few blocks to see Moonlight. The night held lots of promise: We’d had a Black president for eight years and we’d soon have a woman in that role. Love and demographic destiny seemed ascendant in America, and Tom would have a new lease on life the next morning.   

 

I knew something was amiss when we left the theater and walked toward a bar on the next corner. Several people were crying on the sidewalk outside, big-screen TVs flickering in the windows behind them, swaths of red slashing across the maps. Despite being far behind in the polls, Donald Trump had won several key states where balloting had already closed. Yet the night was still relatively young for those of us on the West Coast. Things could change. 

 

When we got back to the hotel, I tucked Tom into bed so he could get a good night’s sleep. I stayed awake a few more hours and saw more states—and ultimately the election—called for Trump. Dazed, I climbed into bed and slept badly before waking Tom for our pre-dawn appointment with the transplantation team.  It was a strange morning for everyone, but it was also a relief to have something to take our minds off the news, at least for a few hours. And for Tom, this was the first day of the rest of his life, however long that might be. We still had that fact to celebrate.

 

Six months post transplant

Tom's stem cells gave him about 15 months of remission before the cancer came back in early 2018. Running out of options, we began a clinical drug trial that didn’t go well, one that saw Tom in and out of the hospital for blood transfusions and other interventions. In June of that year, we got married on Tom’s 62nd birthday, our family crowding into the hospital room to wish us well. It was another day of possibility and within days, Tom’s doctor sent us home for a brief honeymoon.

 

It was a risky gift, with Tom’s white blood cell counts still low, yet it was one we embraced. On the fourth night at home, after Tom collapsed twice while trying to get to the bathroom, I knew the honeymoon was over. He died in the hospital two days later, but not before his children and their mother had a chance to visit with him on what would be his last night on Earth. We'd hoped to go home with hospice care the next day, but that was not to be.  


 

I miss Tom every day.  I have no idea what he would have made of what we’ve endured as a nation in 2020, and I am especially grateful that his final months did not come amid COVID-19. But I understand that his brother, who lives in a swing state and usually votes Republican, will vote for the Democrat this time. “This one is for Tom,” he has been saying, and this gives me hope. All of us alive in 2020 have seen our ability to bear the unthinkable bend to the breaking point—and when it comes to discarding old opinions and habits that no longer serve us, breaking free is an act of courage. 

 

There will be no election night movie for me this year; I'll be working for my county elections office as a drop-box attendant. Your vote is your voice, so if you haven't yet made your voice heard, please do that by Tuesday. 

 

Visualize what it will be like to have a clean slate for our nation. I'll see you on the other side.    

Pandemic postcard #31: Waiting to exhale

My phone ring tone has been the same for a very long time, "Right Here, Right Now," the upbeat 1990 song celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall and authoritarian regimes in Europe. I've lately thought about changing it since there definitely are other places I'd rather be than in the middle--is this the middle?!--of a pandemic and a bonkers election season. But then there's the line that keeps giving me hope, the one about "watching the world wake up from history ..." 

 

We are on a cusp of a new dawning. You can feel it, right? (You've already voted, by mail or in person with early voting, yes?) America has occasionally flirted with a meaningful reckoning over the kind of country we want to be, but we've never quite made the commitment. But this year, amid the manifold crises of 2020, it feels like Decision Day is finally here.  

 

Of course, Decision Day will take a while. Folks have been voting for a few weeks, and we may not know the results until well into November. Meanwhile, I want to know: What do you plan to do on November 4 and beyond, regardless of the election results? I asked this question on Facebook the other day. A few folks answered with notions of day drinking, shopping for flights out of the U.S., and watching riots on TV. I sympathize with the long-simmering stress that those replies belie.

A little escape, for a day or a week or more, was a common theme. Meg and Joan, who've been especially active this campaign season, say they plan to finally take a day off. Frances says she'll either be glued to the TV, "or I might be in the mountains for the day breathing deeply knowing politics and the virus are not there." Eileen reports that she'll be on her first vacation in several years, newly retired Joanne is on a personal retreat exploring a possible relocation, and Elaine mentions the possibility of "a COVID-cautious trip to see friends and family."  

 

Some folks admit they may be adrift, uncertain what they will do, which is such an understandable response given the vast emotional energy we've put into surviving four exhausting seasons of The Trump Show. Others mention the importance of routine. Carol, a doctor, will continue to heal the sick. Felicia will keep up pro bono legal aid work to help small businesses navigate the pandemic "and a recession that is likely to get worse before it gets better regardless of election outcomes." As he has every day since 2013, Joe will get up early and take a music-fueled walk (and knowing Joe, with every step, he'll be thinking about what he can do next to help his friends and his community).

 

Everyone knows that no matter what happens, there will still be plenty of work to do, as activists and humans. Nonprofit executive Rene has a staff meeting planned for 9:30 a.m. November 4 "to help us remember EITHER WAY that much, if not all, of the work we do will carry on." Dennis says he'll continue to advocate for the world he wants to see for his children and brand-new grandchild. "First though I will hug and play with that little boy and be comforted and inspired by his smiles," he adds. That answer made me smile, as did Nathan's, who notes he'll be celebrating his daughter's first birthday the day after the election and working to protect the election results. 

 

Fellow longtime blogger Tom says he'll continue to metaphorically chop wood and carry water. Kristen has been volunteering to monitor election irregularities and misinformation, and Katherine will start a new discussion group the week after the election, pairing chapters from the book Becoming Better Grownups: Rediscovering What Matters and Remembering How to Fly with episodes of On Being With Krista Tippett. (Of course I am signing up for that.)  

Theresa and Diana and David plan to continue to cultivate joy through cooking and music. Rebecca will seek balance through caring for family, "doing what is in front of me to do," and "finding energy in intentional interactions and the random encounters I experience with people ... I have to hold on to my belief that what weaves us together is stronger than what would pull us apart."

I say amen to all of this.

 

As for me, here's how I envision how my November 4 will look: I'll wake up and spend no more than a half-hour getting the latest news. (I'll set a timer.) I'll write in my journal. I'll take a long walk and spend some time near Puget Sound. I plan to avoid the news for most of the day, but I'll check in for an update by late afternoon, and I'll attend a webinar on advancing the National Popular Vote. Night will come early, and I'll end the day at an online vespers service with my faith community. Beyond November 4, I'll continue working to write the change I want to see in the world, here at Surely Joy and also through a revival of my circa 2010 project, Write the Change. 

 

It won't be long now. In a few weeks, we will know whether a majority of Americans have collectively decided to reject division and build beloved community. We are waiting to exhale and yearning to breathe free, yet the reality is things are going to be messy for a while. 

 

The biggest task ahead of us may be making sure that no one gets left behind: definitely not the people of color who have been waiting far too patiently for this time, and also not the white people who may be hurting because they've lost a false idol. Few people are irredeemable, and almost everyone deserves a lifeline. It is time for us all to thrive, time for us all to joyfully wake up from history.

 

Next week, I'll share a story about what I was doing the day after the last election. No matter what happens in 2020, it won't be any weirder than what I experienced in 2016. Until then, be well and remember: rest is fuel.   

 

Pandemic postcard #28: Will write for tips

Update: I have taken down my Patreon page as of April 2021. If you'd like to support my work, you can check out more recent posts at Surely Joy's current site, where you'll find a tip jar. Thank you for valuing creativity and the written word.

It's Friday morning, and word has arrived that our First Couple have confirmed cases of coronavirus. Could this year possibly get any weirder? 

It seems like a month ago already, before this latest news and before the raucous debate, but I actually turned down a job this week. After a summer coming up short in my search for work, I was glad to finally have a job offer, especially with the CARES Act federal unemployment assistance long gone and my state unemployment pay ending soon. But something didn't feel right. 

I would have had work for about five weeks this winter, monitoring tests in school classrooms--a job I did a few years ago, too, but that was before COVID. Would the work even happen, with most schools still closed? Then there were the logistical hoops I'd be jumping through to take and keep the job: fingerprinting at a time when it's nearly impossible, weekly COVID tests, heavy-duty PPE requirements. All for a short-term, minimum wage gig with no benefits. 

I finally realized that I'd applied for the job out of fear--of making my rent, of ever working for a wage again. I wound up turning it down out of hope for something better.

Of course, it's a marker of privilege that I can do this. Plenty of people are taking whatever work they can to make ends meet from week to week, despite the threat of a disease that's disproportionately affecting working-class Americans. Many people don't have savings to use in an emergency, never mind during a few lean months. I have savings I can dip into if I need to (and I’ll need to).

Most of all, though, I realized that I want to focus on doing what I do best (and what I'd done my entire adult life until most of my work vanished in March): make a living with words. For seven months, I've been writing these pandemic postcards--essentially a weekly column--to try and make sense of these times, but I have been writing them for free. Not so long ago, before Craigslist and social media decimated local journalism, someone with my background could land a job writing a column or human-interest stories. Those opportunities are rare these days, yet I know I ought to be paid for at least some of my writing. 

That's why--although Surely Joy will remain free (and ad-free)--I've decided to set up a page on Patreon where, for $3 a month, you can let me know my work has value to you. I know this may be a big ask at a time when we are all being asked to contribute to the usual member-supported media outlets plus maintain subscriptions to major journalism organizations that are doing critical work--but if you have $3 a month to spare to support my experiment in crowd-funded punditry, I'll be grateful.

The $3-a-month tier is my "You like me" level. Pledges of this amount can really add up in my small-footprint micro-economy, and I will write at least one patrons-only post each month at Patreon for folks who pledge that amount. (Here's a sample.)

People who pledge $9 a month ("You really like me") will also get access to some behind-the-scenes peeks at my notebooks and work in progress (like this). And because I sense that some of my readers would love to pursue a more joyful, intentional life, I offer the "You want to be like me" tier, which is $27 a month. For that level of support, I will be your personal creativity coach. We'll talk at least once a quarter about how you'd like to live more fearlessly and creatively. I'll encourage and question and inspire you (and you will do the same for me). 

Surely Joy will never be all I do, and that’s OK. I love to interview people and write feature stories; I just finished my first one since March, an article for 3rd Act magazine about how musicians are weathering the pandemic. I like to edit and I have some possibilities in that area. I fervently hope to be working back at the ballpark next year. It’s a seasonal, minimum wage job, too, but I enjoy the fans and the people I work with.

But the writing I do here feels important--to me and, I know, to some of you. We are in historic times, and I am trying my best to make some sense of them while also lifting up my original reason for this blog: the practice of living a simple, beautiful life and of pursuing joy, described by Brother David Steindl-Rast as "the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens." Joy is more essential than ever as we work hard to make real the world we imagine. And today, we might even permit ourselves a bit of schadenfreude while wishing the Trumps a speedy recovery. Or not.    

Thanks for reading this far, and for considering a pledge. It is an honor to write for you. Let's continue to navigate these strange times together.

Mural at Olympic View Elementary School, Seattle

Pandemic postcard #27: The book of Ruth

My mom loved the old saying that "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." As a kid, this didn't make a lot of sense to me; I'd wonder why I would want to catch flies at all. I was more interested in lightning bugs and praying mantises and caterpillars--critters I could catch, watch a while, and release. (Unless I forgot the release part, which I did once in a while. Sorry, bugs.)

Eventually, I understood the saying as my mother intended it: You can influence more people by being pleasant and kind than by being bitter and sour. My parents lived that idea. Mom and Dad were both easy-going, low-drama people for the most part. They had a strong religious faith, but they also revered reason, and they weren't afraid to change their minds. They were Eisenhower Republicans from the Land of Lincoln until Vietnam and Watergate made them reconsider their loyalty to the GOP. 

 

I've been thinking about Mom and Dad a lot this week as we mourn a famous woman of their generation who shared my mom's first name. Ruth Bader Ginsburg also shared my parents' devotion to the common good and to finding common ground. The late justice was rightly hailed as a liberal lioness, yet she was no firebrand. When, as a young litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union, she brought cases before the then-all-male Supreme Court, Ginsburg didn't frame them in terms of "women's rights" but of equal rights. And although she supported a woman's right to end a pregnancy, she favored legislative reforms to safeguard access to reproductive healthcare. She correctly foretold how the sweeping Roe v. Wade decision would ensure pitched battles over the issue for decades to come.

 

One of the RBG quotes I've seen most often this week is this reminder: "Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." As David Cole, current national legal director for the ACLU, wrote this week in The New York Review of Books, "Her dissents did not aim barbs at the majority, but instead coolly, painstakingly, and effectively dissected the ruling’s errors, and often placed her emphasis on areas of agreement and avenues the majority decision left open." She was able to dissent without being disagreeable, and she famously was close friends with her opposite on the high court, Antonin Scalia. 

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg consistently chose honey over vinegar. When she died a week ago just as Jews prepared to observe the High Holy Days, Jewish theologians noted that the timing made her a Tzadik, a person of great righteousness. I'm not sure what this makes Mitch McConnell, who refused to take up President Barack Obama's nomination of a Supreme Court justice more than seven months before the 2016 election, yet who now seeks to swiftly confirm a third lifetime appointment for a man who lost the popular vote four years ago and seems likely to lose it again on November 3. Calling on another religious concept, I'd like to think that karma will eventually have an answer for the likes of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, but I'm not sure where that leaves us this fall.

 

"The problem for America, as for many other democracies at this point in history, is this is not an even match," Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian this week. "Those who fight for power will bend or break rules to give themselves every advantage. Those who fight for principle are at an inherent disadvantage because bending or breaking rules undermines the very ideals they seek to uphold."

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg became an icon, but it wasn't a role she chose. Like Thurgood Marshall, her life and work were grounded in principle as she fought to make sure everyone's equality was recognized under the law. Is there still time to make this election about that fundamental (if yet-unrealized) American value? And if nakedly unchecked authoritarian power prevails--even as it is being dismissed by a majority of voters, many of whom are already casting ballots--what happens next? 

 

Our news feeds suggest we're about to find out. I miss my thoughtful and moderate parents. Part of me wishes they were still here to see what they would make of this circus--and another part is grateful they didn't live long enough to experience it--but their legacy of valuing love over fear remains strong with me as I seek to chart a course of nuance, reflection, and hope in these darkening autumn days. 

 

I also take heart remembering that my parents were people who were never afraid nor ashamed to change their minds. Just as my folks eventually turned against Nixon, I am sure others like them have finally seen enough to put country over party.

 

Rest in Power, Justice Ginsburg, and thanks for all you did--and the way you did it.       

 

Pandemic postcard #25: The next right thing

It's funny how books and ideas show up at the right time. I've been doing a lot of camping this summer, mainly because it's the one kind of travel that feels low-risk during the pandemic--until this week of hellfire, that is--and also because it is cheap and it gives me lots of distraction-free time to read. For a recent trip out to the Olympic Peninsula, I brought along Plan B, one of Anne Lamott's collections of essays about faith that had been on my bookshelf a long time. I thought I remembered picking it out of a Little Free Library, but a receipt buried in its pages revealed that I actually bought it at National Airport in Washington, DC, on March 19, 2008, when I would've been on my way home from a national bloggers' conference. 

A dozen years doesn't seem so long in the course of a lifetime, but at this point, 2008 feels like many lifetimes ago. By 2008, I had been heavily involved in politics for much of that decade, thus the invitation for the all-expenses-paid weekend of training for progressive bloggers. I gladly took the trip, but I was actually trying to back away from politics at that time, turning my attention toward a three-quarter-time contract job with a favorite client that had hired me to extend the then-still-new tools of blogging and social media to communities doing important small-d democracy work. It felt like I was living a calling. I was as happy as I have ever been in my professional life.

 

Yet within a few months, I'd pivoted back into politics. An opportunity had arisen with my state Democratic Party for a job I'd sought a few years earlier. We were on the cusp of electing the first Black president and maybe Idaho's first Democratic member of Congress in many years, too. It felt like the right decision at the right time. Although the job turned out to be heartbreaking on many levels, I don't regret taking it. I did some good work and I was able to share the historic 2009 inaugural with my daughter and some dear friends. Still, I wonder what might have happened had I stayed on the contract gig with my all-time favorite client.

Fast-forward to 2020. Once it became clear that most of my pre-pandemic freelance work was gone, I began looking for a full-time job, focusing on things that could feel like career capstones, or at least really good fits for me. By late July, I was demoralized: I'd come close on a few opportunities, but rejection is hard, and I was ready to give it a rest. Then I saw one more possibility--from my long-ago favorite client, for a lightly advertised job that seemed as if it had been written with me in mind. I applied and immediately got an interview. I was sure it was meant to be.

But after a few weeks passed with no news, I learned that the job had gone to a Black man, a talented young writer. And honestly, that is how it should be. The organization's central focus is on helping communities face up to racism--something which, although I have a heart for the work, I have no lived experience. (Of course, I know that better in 2020 than I ever have before.) I was crushed, but I understand that things usually happen--or don't--for a reason. I was ready to move to New England for this job, for one thing, and maybe that simply wasn't supposed to happen because I love the Northwest and my family is on this side of the country. 

Now it's September, and I've given up trying to find full-time work, at least for the time being. Too many people are looking, and I am older than most of them. But I am too young to retire, so I have to find ways to make ends meet--likely some combination of freelance and seasonal work, which is what I've done much of my working life, anyway. 

This brings me back to Lamott's book. As best I can tell, I read part of it on my cross-country flight, then forgot about it for 12 years. Still, it had survived many moves and lots of serious book-winnowing missions, so I was keeping it for a reason. Plan B finally found its way into my tote bag last month and I read most of it in one afternoon while camped near the Strait of San Juan de Fuca.

 

Early in the book, Lamott explains how, two years after her mother had died, she still hadn't scattered her ashes because she was mad at her mom and keeping her remains stashed in the closet seemed like fitting punishment. She was also deep in grief about the turn our country had taken since September 11, 2001, especially the unfounded decision to make war on Iraq. Then one Sunday, Lamott's pastor preached about how, in a time of war,  

... now was not the time to figure everything out--for instance who was to blame. It was not the time to get a new plan together and try to push it through. It was the time to be still, to center ourselves, to trust what we'd always trusted in ... 

Lamott writes how, taking these words to heart, she was able to quiet herself and her harsh, scary, "thinky thoughts." She took long walks. She sat in prayer and meditation. Then she found a photo of her mom that she hadn't seen for a while, and she just knew: It was time, and "scattering her ashes was the next right thing."

Those four words. "The next right thing." It feels impossible in this moment to know what awaits us with the election and its aftermath, or when COVID-19 will be over, or the trajectory that climate havoc will take. Long-term plans feel impossible; there are too many x-factors. But as individuals, we can know the next right thing, whether it's something small, like working to get out the vote or checking in on a loved one, or embarking on some really big change we've truly thought through a while. Intuition is not impulse.

As I finished this post, I read a new piece in The Atlantic that blames America's poor pandemic response on failures of intuition, comparing our situation to that of ants following one another into a death spiral. I want to make clear that when I talk about the power of intuition, I'm talking about how we can use it on a personal level--not as a guide for public policy, where science and reason must prevail. But in our own lives, I know we can be guided by intuition--on following that invisible thread, those few feet of headlights you need to make your way home, even when you can't see where you're going. (Thank you, William E. Stafford and E.L. Doctorow.) 

In some ways, this has been the hardest week of the pandemic for me. The news of the world is unrelenting, and mostly grim. Smoke-choked air means I can't even enjoy a long daily walk, which has been the one constant in my life since March. Of course, that is a small inconvenience compared to the loss of life and homes up and down the West Coast. My heart goes out to the people working on the fire lines and in the fields. May they be safe. 

Let the rains come soon, and justice, too. Meanwhile, I will try to remember that rest is fuel--and sometimes it is definitely the next right thing.

P.S. To those of you who get Surely Joy via email (thank you!): Please check out the web version of this post--click on the headline--for Loosen Loosen Baby by Aly Halpert, a musical meditation that has been pure soul balm for me since I first heard it at church earlier this year. I like to sing along. I've also included a beautiful video from Leon Bridges that was featured at our congregation's vespers service just a few nights ago.

 

Aly Halpert · Loosen Loosen

Pandemic postcard #23: The suburbs

This week's post comes from my 2017 book Surely Joy, for which it served as the final, then-unpublished essay. I've never posted it online, but--over the past two weeks, listening to the disparate visions of America presented by the two political conventions--I started thinking about my experience growing up in suburbia, which I captured in this essay. I live in the city again, but my recent time in a Seattle suburb showed me how much things have changed since my childhood.

I'll be taking a break from posting until after Labor Day. Please be well and enjoy the fleeting days of this weird summer. -- Julie

My parents were two city kids who’d hailed from Chicago, a Cubs fan and a White Sox partisan who somehow got together. Like most white folks of their generation, they moved to the suburbs after Dad came back from the big war. Unlike many, they never became afraid to venture back into the city: for ball games, traveling Broadway shows, and even to see Billie Holiday sing in a little club on the South Side.    

Dad’s company transferred my parents to Pittsburgh when I was four, and while I grew up in a suburban subdivision so lily-white it was actually named Plantation Place, I knew people of color. My favorite memories are of Zola, the woman who ran the inner-city preschool where my fair-skinned mother volunteered once a week, where Mom was known as “the brownie lady” for the pan of treats she brought along every Tuesday morning. One time, Mom and Dad invited Zola and her husband to dinner.  We all ate on the side porch of our home, and the four adults laughed there late into the night. The next day, I learned from a neighborhood friend she would not be allowed to play at our house anymore. 

I loved the woods and meadows and creeks of southwestern Pennsylvania, the same landscapes that inspired Rachel Carson. But I was drawn to the city, and as soon as I got old enough to travel on my own, I’d take the trolley to downtown and a bus to Oakland, where the colleges and museums and rock clubs were. I’d wander for hours on foot, up Forbes and Centre, imagining what it would be like to have an apartment in a neighborhood full of people who didn’t necessarily look or think like me. 

It took decades, but I finally had that experience when I lived in Oakland – the California city, not the Pittsburgh district – just before it became nearly as unaffordable as San Francisco. I hit the apartment jackpot in Oakland, with a quiet place near Lake Merritt where I rarely saw or heard my neighbors. Yet my daily life was rich in diversity, from my commute aboard the packed buses and BART trains to the shops and bodegas along Grand Avenue. 

From there, involved in a long-distance romance, I followed my heart to Washington state. I didn’t want to live with my sweetheart, both because I like my own space and because he lives in the suburbs, so I chose a gritty section of north Seattle where recently arrived refugees live amid university students who can’t afford anything near campus. Sirens wailed and homeless people howled into the night beneath my first apartment. After two years, I found a quieter place to live a few blocks away.

But as soon as I moved to Seattle, I began spending many nights at my sweetheart’s home. Without a car, this involved a short bus ride, then a mile walk … alongside a creek, up winding roads, with blackberries ripe for picking in late summer and tall trees everywhere. Although it was mere miles from my address in the city, it felt like a world apart. 

Circumstances evolved and I ultimately moved in with Tom. By then, I’d noticed something else about his town: Although white people are the majority, this is a place of many languages, colors, and faiths. Families of all kinds are here, some fleeing oppression abroad, others rejecting Seattle’s rocketing rents. Our town is home to shopkeepers and hair stylists and ride-hail drivers from all over the world, living among folks – not all of them Caucasian – who’ve been here for generations.

All across America, the lines between the big city and the suburbs are blurring. Mosques and churches and synagogues and Zen centers are on the same stretch of road. Kids who are learning English sit in every classroom. My neighborhood has a block party every year, and everyone comes: lots of new young couples, many of them mixed-race, their impossibly beautiful little kids chalking up the street. The tattooed-and-pierced community college prof running for city council. The middle-age-guys’ garage band. The sailing ship captain who serves as the MC. His wife, a traveling volunteer nurse, who wrangles the kids’ activities. 

The Asian-American woman leading a drive to save a local patch of undeveloped forest. The Latino guy from a few blocks over who recently moved to town and just happened by. The white lawyer-singer-songwriter and her black bass-playing husband, who’ve had Tom and me over for dinner. 

This sort of scene makes some people anxious, eager to return to a mythical, monocultural America that never really existed. But many, probably most of us, like it this way. Across our differences, we want to strive for that more perfect union because we know life is better when everyone feels welcome and everyone belongs. I miss the thrum of the city sometimes, but if I can live in a suburb – a village, really – where neighbors can eat and laugh and sing together well into the night and look out for each other by day, that is a place where I want to be.

Pandemic postcard #21: Summer reading report

All my life, I have dreamed of having endless time to read, and I've always figured I'd need to wait until retirement for that dream to come true. Then 2020 happened. I have had plenty of time to get lost in a book these past many months. 

Here's a selection of books I've enjoyed so far during the pandemic. All are available via The Optimist, my online independent bookstore at Bookshop.org, and if you enjoy Surely Joy, it'd mean a lot to me if you'd buy a book, any book. Your purchase will help me...and small bricks-and-mortar bookstores, too. As I write this, Bookshop.org says it has raised nearly $6 million for indie bookshops. I'm still working on my first $25. Still, every little bit helps, especially now that the CARES Act unemployment pay is gone.

So without further begging or ado ... 

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. This book captivated me from its first pages, where Odell describes one of her favorite parks in Oakland. (I know it, too.) Odell's mission is to help us pay attention, not to the endless clatter of commerce, but to our heart and soul's delight. This is my favorite book of the year so far. 

The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl is part memoir, part travelogue, part meditation on loss. We can't justify distant travel this summer, but we can travel via books. Hampl ranges widely in this volume, from Iron Curtain-era Eastern Europe to Montaigne's France, but I was most captivated by the trip she took closest to home on the upper stretches of the Mississippi River. Like Odell, Hampl understands the inherent value of day-dreaming and drift.

The Vanishing Half  by Brit Bennett. "I've been reading too much non-fiction this summer," I told my daughter. "I really want to read a novel." So this was a birthday gift from her to me, fitting because this is also a story about family love: in our families of origin, families of choice, and families lost and found. It's also timely with its themes of racial and gender identity.

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea. This had been on my to-read list a long time, and it was the very first book I was able to check out of my local library once it reopened for curbside service last month. Urrea, who spent a few decades researching this satisfying historical novel, has a knack for creating big, well-drawn casts of characters. I look forward to reading the sequel to this, too, as well as The Devil's Highway, Urrea's nonfiction book about U.S.-Mexican border culture. The latter should be a good companion to something else I read earlier this summer, On the Plain of Snakes, a warts-and-all love letter to Mexico by Paul Theroux.

Old in Art School by Nell Irvin Painter. The author is best-known as an acclaimed historian (The History of White People), but she always wanted to paint, so she chased that dream into her 60s while also looking after her elderly parents, who lived 3,000 miles away. An inspiring, illuminating look at one woman disregarding ageism and racism.

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens. One of two fine baseball novels released this year, both written by women. Nemens turns an unassisted triple play with her debut, deftly wrangling multiple plot lines, indelible characters, and strong sense of place. I also enjoyed The Resisters, an anti-authoritarian tale by Gish Jen.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Art & Mystery of Living by Krista Tippett. The On Being Project created a new position this summer, Audience Editor. I wanted it so bad, but I'm sure they've hired someone brilliant to help amplify the project's mix of thoughtful voices and practical wisdom for tumultuous times. I've been an On Being fan forever, listened to this on CD when it came out a while back, and recently revisited it via a copy in a Little Free Library.

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon. I bought this when it came out last year, then it sat on my shelf until May. It was time...and it still is.

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron. Another book that merits re-reading, with short chapters that share Buddhist wisdom on how to sit with uncertainty. 

Atlas Obscura Explorer's Journal. I used this for what turned out to be Volume One of my Pandemic Journal. (I started Volume Three last week.) It's too big to use as a travel journal, but it was perfect for documenting the weird inner journey that is 2020.

Next up on my reading list ...

I've been dipping in and out of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration for the past month. I'll finish it this weekend, and I look forward to author Isabel Wilkerson's brand-new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Next up is my library book of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, another novel I've been meaning to read for a while.

I also just ordered a copy of Jailed for Freedom: A First-Person Account of the Militant Fight for Women's Rights. This little-known book by Doris Stevens is the source material for Suffragist, a new Broadway musical that was to premiere in league with this summer's centennial of the 19th Amendment. The production is delayed now, but just hearing creator Shaina Taub describe her discovery of this book was enough to make me want to read it.

Pandemic postcard #20: Terrible beauty

"The weirdest part was that the sky was so blue at that point. I never saw the mushroom cloud that you see in the video. I saw the lingering smoke from it ... but it was almost golden hour, so the light was just beautiful." -- New York Times reporter Vivian Yee describing the Beirut explosion aftermath 

Decades of strife 

Inept government 

Waves of refugees

An economy in ruins 

A spike in COVID-19

and then this ...

Explosions rock the port

An ancient city convulses

Strangers tend to strangers' wounds

dressing bloody gashes with splashes of liquor

Grim humor rises anew to greet another catastrophe

"In a land conditioned by calamity, people knew what to do ..." (headline from Vivian Yee's first-person account of the chaos in Beirut after the blasts) 

I am at a loss for more words to say about Lebanon, so I will just marvel yet again at the ways how, when the unimaginable happens, people rise to meet it--and also how people somehow notice beauty even amid the most horrific experiences. 

Read and/or listen to Yee's story.

In this year of layered crises and rolling waves of grief,

on the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 

let us do what we can to help alleviate suffering and prevent it, too. 

Help us know that borders are illusions

and that nationalism is absurd.

Pandemic postcard #17: Expecto benignitas

Every summer but one since 2003, I have spent the second full week of July at a Unitarian Universalist family camp in Seabeck, WA, gathered with about 250 other people who long ago became dear to me. A norovirus swept through the camp the first year my family was there, sickening many of us. I got a mild case, but I had no question I'd be back the next year and the year after that and the year after that ...

Alas, the past two summers at camp have been a bit bumpy. In 2018, I arrived two weeks to the day after my sweetheart Tom died. It was a hard week, but camp was where I needed to be, especially since it was where Tom and I had fallen in love five years before--and where I had so many good people looking after me and my stepchildren and Tom's first wife, who were also there.

Last year was tough for other reasons. Our 2019 speaker had to leave part way through the week as a family member was near death. I remember with pain how, a day earlier, a young adult friend passionately and publicly called out the speaker (who had cluelessly appropriated a phrase and intonation used mostly by Black people) on his middle-age privileged white guy-ness. Later that day, I told my friend that when someone needs to be corrected, it might be kinder to do so in private rather than in the heat of the moment. One of my favorite quotes comes to mind: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

It was a wearying week in several other ways, and by the end of last year's camp, I had decided it was time to take a year off--a decision cemented by the idea that the July 2020 theme was going to be how our faith's failures to address systemic racism were failing us. My July 2019 mindset was "I've done this work. This isn't why I come to camp." Instead, I signed up for the more lighthearted August arts camp, eager for a sort of reset button.

Now we're all living through much more of a reset than we ever imagined. The 2020 arts camp was canceled altogether, the July camp is online, and I have belatedly signed up. Systemic racism is no longer the topic; as the pandemic took hold and it was still uncertain whether we could gather in person, camp leadership wisely decided to defer that topic to 2022 when we can give it the attention it merits. (Next year's speaker had already been booked.) But in light of this summer's Black Lives Matter uprising, and because this camp is filled with folks fervently seeking justice, it seems likely we'll be wrestling with racism and privilege, and that's as it should be. I just hope we can be kind, especially as we gather over Zoom in these fragile times.

I've been thinking a lot for a few years now about the problems with cancel culture. Publicly shaming people, usually online but sometimes in person, has become rampant--and the malicious person occupying the White House threw gasoline on the flames of cancel culture when he used the phrase in his speech at Mt. Rushmore last weekend, seeking to deepen the already gaping divisions among Americans.

People do and say stupid and spiteful things, often intentionally, sometimes out of ignorance, and we are losing our ability to contextualize and modulate our responses. This "hot take" culture prompted several dozen writers and public intellectuals to sign a letter to Harper's magazine this week--but the letter was dismissed by many because its signatories include J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, who has recently made several cruel statements about people who identify as women but weren't born with that gender assignment. Transgender activists and allies have tried to tell Rowling why her comments are harmful, yet she's dug in deeper.

Whether she is transphobic, mean, or simply blinkered, Rowling's motivations are increasingly suspect. At worst, she risks coming off like a version of her detestable character Dolores Umbridge--yet so do the inquisitorial people who wish to unilaterally cancel Rowling and negate her body of work. The Harry Potter books have helped millions of kids (and adults) feel more at home with themselves and with the notion of difference. As long as I've attended July camp, Harry Potter readings have been a fixture after lunch. It'll be interesting to see whether that continues this year. It may be time to retire the tradition, but if so, let's do it in love, not cancellation.

We need an activism that is sustainable and rooted in kindness. We need an activism that is able to sit with discomfort, engage in dialogue, and help people retain the possibility of changing their minds (and publicly admitting they have changed). I want that for J.K. Rowling when she realizes the unnecessary harm she is doing. I want it for myself when I admit I have only just begun to address my white privilege. I want it for everybody who is right now so passionate and sure in their beliefs on any number of topics, but who may come to know years from now that their thoughts, words, and deeds lacked nuance--or were even flat-out wrong. 

___

If you enjoy Surely Joy, please consider supporting my work via Patreon. Pledges start at just $3 a month. Thanks for reading! 

Pandemic postcard #16: Happy Interdependence Day

" ... when it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, democratic society, we are still a developing nation." -- Vincent Harding to Krista Tippett, On Being, 2011 (rebroadcast this week)

I used to love the Fourth of July--then 2003 happened. That Independence Day was the first one after our country went to war in Iraq on false pretenses. I was in Casper, Wyoming, visiting family and attending a holiday celebration at the local events center. From the fireworks to the jingoistic music to the diesel-belching monster trucks, it all rubbed me the wrong way. Being in Dick Cheney's hometown didn't help.

Of course, many of us now view the Bush-Cheney era with a mild pang of nostalgia. Things were bad then, but we had no idea how much worse they could get. Tomorrow may be the most divided Independence Day in our 244-year history. Maybe the rancor was worse during the Civil War or Vietnam, but we didn't have 24/7 media saturation to amplify and magnify our differences--and of course, we didn't have a global pandemic.

Ironically, this is also a Fourth of July of more promise than we've had in a long time. A growing majority of us have finally decided to recognize and reckon with the reality that our country was literally built on the backs of once-enslaved people who are not yet totally free, by immigrants, and by indigenous people. The pandemic continues to be a huge challenge, but it is also making us creative and resilient, and the new surge of cases reminds us that science is in charge.

Eighty-five years ago, poet Langston Hughes was riding a train from New York to Ohio when he wrote "Let America Be America Again," his poem noting that for many, our nation's promise has yet to be realized. Eighty-five years later, every word continues to ring true--despite the civil rights victories of the 1960s, despite having had a Black family in the White House, despite the general civility with which most of us live our lives. We still have work to do, and the Fourth of July gives us a chance to commit anew to the cause.

Our break from Britain was a long time ago. Maybe it's time to rename this holiday Interdependence Day as a reminder that we need each other--that, in the words of the Rev. Theresa Soto, "All of us need all of us to make it."

Pandemic postcard #14: Yours forever more

My love, you would have turned 64 today. In a perfect world, you and I would be celebrating in a cottage on the Isle of Wight, "if it's not too dear," maybe after finally making that trip to Ireland that we talked about. Of course, I miss you every day, as do countless others.

Beautiful Human

A year ago, a bunch of us gathered at the ballpark to toast your memory and your birthday--the first one since you'd left us--as the Mariners beat the Royals, 8-2. Alas, there is no home game today. There isn't baseball at all, and no one is flying overseas. (I'll explain in a minute.) So I'm hopeful your family and friends will remember you by tuning into SPACE 101 (still going strong!) for a while and listening to the Mariners classic game on the radio tonight. That's what I'll be doing.

These things sound comfortable and familiar, but our world is not the one you left on June 30, 2018. For the past few months, we've all been facing down a viral threat. Some people don't even exhibit any symptoms, but others get gravely ill. Seattle was an early hot spot for this highly contagious disease. Nearly half a million people have died. Many millions have recovered.

For several months, much of the world was in some form of "lockdown," with people isolating much as we did after your stem cell transplant in 2016. No movies. No restaurants. No concerts. No sports. Millions of people lost their jobs as entire industries closed down. Many people who can do so have been working from home. Schools all went online, and some will remain that way this fall. "Stay home, stay safe" was the mantra all spring. Lately, though, many people have become frustrated or bored or angry at being told what to do, so we are slowly going back to business as usual, even though there is no cure and no vaccine for this new coronavirus. We take heart that most people who get it won't die. Life must go on. 

Still, the risks are real, especially for people in crowded factories and prisons and nursing homes, and for people who are already battling other illnesses and the people who care for them. Remember how we got married two years ago this morning on your 62nd birthday, and how we welcomed your siblings and your mom and your children into a very crowded hospital room afterward? That would be impossible today. In fact, it's possible that--had you been hospitalized in 2020 instead of 2018--you would have died alone. That is a thought I cannot bear, so although I continue to mourn losing you too soon, I am grateful you did not spend your final months in a time like we have now.

On top of this unfolding health crisis, a Minneapolis cop murdered a man named George Floyd on Memorial Day. It was just the latest incident of racist police brutality, but for some reason, this particular killing--caught on video--lit a fuse, igniting Black Lives Matter marches and vigils across the country and around the world. More than ever before, white Americans are starting to reckon with 400 years of systemic, structural racism. A small portion of Capitol Hill here in Seattle has become a staging ground for people who seek to dismantle this system. The man that most of us grudgingly call president believes they are terrorists and has threatened military action (while our mayor and governor defend the activists' constitutional rights). Meanwhile, although the skies and roads cleared for a while as people stayed home, climate havoc is another existential threat we refuse to take seriously.

Wow. That all sounds pretty grim. But I want you to know there are many reasons for hope in the myriad inspiring ways that people are facing all that besets us right now. Folks are looking after one another. People are seeing one another as fully human for the first time. People are exercising their creativity, their compassion, and their conscience in lovely, fruitful fashion. Musicians are playing concerts from home. Chefs are feeding the homeless. Teachers (and parents) are helping children learn. Healthcare workers are saints and angels and wizards and miracle workers, but you knew that.

Oh, and our trio of twenty-somethings? They, and their entire generation, are rocking the house. They're taking charge, they're calling BS, and they're not taking no for an answer. (And by the way, May graduated last week in four years flat despite losing you halfway through college and despite having her senior year disrupted by the pandemic.) You know me; as a journalist and a contemplative, I tend to favor objectivity and nuance, but I've come off the sidelines a bit, because the right side is clear. We are either on the side of dismantling racism and doing what we can to save democracy and the planet, or we're not. As Stephen Colbert famously said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

I miss you, Tom. I miss your sense of humor, your solid presence, and the fact that you lived fully until the day you died. Our time together was too short, but it equipped me in many ways to deal with what we're facing now. You'd be proud of how I traveled to Mexico earlier this year, pre-pandemic, and earned my certification to teach English as a foreign language. (I am "intrepid," you'd say, and you'd be right.) I'm looking for new work now, some way to be useful. Please know that although I am alone, I am not lonely, and on most days, I believe the best is yet to come.

Yours forever more,

Julie 

____

If you enjoy Surely Joy, please consider supporting my work via Patreon. Pledges start at just $3 a month. Thanks for reading! 

Pandemic postcard #11: Sitting with sadness

You'll have to excuse me: I've had a hard time coming up with anything meaningful to say this week, the week we passed 100,000 deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19, a week we saw naked police brutality that claimed the life of yet another black man, a week we saw his city wracked by grief and more violence that is escalating as I write this, a week when we saw yet again that the emperor has not a stitch of decency.

I'm sad, and I'm just going to sit with that sadness. 

So in lieu of a new message, allow me to send you back to this post of mine from April 2018 that is resonating with me again, and recommend two things I discovered online this week. (Apologies to those who avoid social media, but it's been a cornucopia of useful things. That said, I look forward to this week's tech sabbath!)

On Facebook, writer Luis Alberto Urrea is making posts in a series he calls Operation Uplift. He gives us a cue ("Chapter 68. Kindness. An unexpected blessing. A touch of grace. A gift. A moment’s peace. A touch of Zen. A safe feeling. A quiet shelter. The color of joy. Hope now") and one of his own photos, and people post their own words and pictures on the theme. The name is apt: I always feel a little better after I look at the latest chapter (and better still if I contribute).

On Instagram, Los Angeles creative director Lisa Hennessy is posting a lockdown journal of doodles, many with poignant written reflections about the absurdity and humanity of what we are all going through. I found this by accident and I am glad I did. I also followed her bio link to her values-based branding agency with the impossibly apropos name of fernweh, German for a longing for distant places and for exploration. That makes me feel sad, too, except it is somehow a happy sad, knowing that however distant the world may seem right now, it is still out there waiting for us.

See you next week. Prayers for Minneapolis and for us all. And try to remember--even in the worst weeks of this hardest time--that joy is "the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens," that we can be grateful in every moment, if not for every thing. (Brother David Steindl-Rast)

Pandemic postcard #10: Holiday in Pandemia

My church had its annual Coming of Age service last Sunday. It's one of my favorites, the culmination of a year when our ninth-graders spend a year thinking about life's big questions. Of course, the service was online, and it was still wonderful. "Joyful but realistic," one woman described it in our virtual coffee-hour gathering afterward.

From Easter and Passover and Ramadan to Mother's Day and graduation season, we've checked off nearly all the spring boxes. I love the congratulations-and-stay-strong signs honoring graduates all over my city, and it's been fun to listen to online commencement speeches by everyone from President Obama to Awkwafina to ... Donald Trump? And now it's Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial start of summer. On Monday, when we pause to recall those who have died fighting for our country, let's remember the most recent casualties: the doctors, the nurses, the cashiers, the meat packers, the beloved grandparents.

It doesn't feel like summer. The steam heat in my apartment came on again yesterday amid a Seattle cold snap. The ballparks are empty, from the biggest stadiums to the forlorn sandlots, now given over to dogs and their people playing fetch. Concerts and sleep-away camps have been canceled. And yet ...

Italy? Mexico? Seattle!

I am not sure where or even if I might travel this summer. Except for a few recent forays to state parks open for day use, I haven't gone beyond a two-mile radius of my home. Still, it's been dawning on me anew that I live in a place that people from all over the world visit on vacation. Now that we can venture out a bit, I want to spend some time in my bigger backyard, the Emerald City. I want to wander through a nearly deserted Pike Place Market, see the murals that have popped up at Pioneer Square, and maybe hear a busker play in Georgetown. I want to spend some of my unemployment pay at local restaurants and shops in Ballard and Columbia City. And if I'm feeling really brave, maybe I can meet a friend for a socially distanced picnic or a cup of coffee, or even go to a movie once the neighborhood cinemas reopen. I would totally do that.

In many ways, the new normal is feeling pretty old. Since the pandemic is going to be with us for a while, we might as well try to have fun, safely and responsibly and with thanks to the people who are willing to serve us. We ought to be realistic ... but joyful. This is our life right now, all of it.