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Welcome to Spring!
Like many of you, I’ve spent this winter trying to manage flurries of chaos and imitate normalcy despite frequent visits from anxiety. I’ve been trying my best to understand what’s happening and how it fits with my lifelong Peace and Love commitment to the world, trying to discover something I’ve missed that would explain how we got here as a country.
For the last year-and-a-half I’ve been adding purple streaks to my graying hair and chosen bright clothing, my effort to hang onto joy. I’ve celebrated anything that needs it and increased nights out at local events and movies. I’ve carried signs and sung in a protest choir, fought the David and Goliath fight against a corporate landfill polluter. I’ve tried to take care of and my increasingly demanding body and my fifty-six year old marriage.
Juniper, my toddler granddaughter who is also trying to figure out the world, has given me hope. So have her parents and my talented daughter Johanna, who has been traveling around the country and sharing her newly-minted songs of love and resilience. I’ve tried hard to greet every human, friend or foe, with a smile or a quip.
I’m getting tired. But I’m still pacing myself for a longer haul.
What has helped most? Writing poetry. Not romantic. Real. Somehow trying to put everything into words has helped me to find context. I’m sharing one with you today, as the Earth turns toward the light.
In the meantime, I’m curious about what centers you. What brings you hope? Where do you feel empowered? Hopeful?
Context
Is this like the Sixties?
They ask, hoping perhaps for
some link to a saner world.
Every cell in my body wants to offer comfort
or to be comforted by some dip into a well of family history
Like so many grandmothers before me
But the mental scoop comes up empty.
No, I answer.
In the 1960s we fought violence in other places
with righteous indignation
one or two of us caught bullets for the cause
but never did we ever see evidence of meanness
generously smeared over the country and
never were we afraid of adults
(who were clueless, yes but not vindictive)
I reach back another hundred years to the 1860’s
and I remember the oft-repeated story of
my sassy German grandmother who saved her husband
from marauding bushwhackers
by hiding him in the cellar and refusing
to leave her place atop the door.
But today a little enhanced research
shows a grisly ambush of 27 German
immigrants, old men and teens in 1864
by bushwhackers who set up camp
right across the road from the family farm
and terrorized immigrant farmers
well after the war was done.
That story was lost or at least not repeated to children.
Cruelty is often hidden,
but it is not a new invention.
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