Hard as Stone, Soft as Tears

Today is a day of sorrow for me. This moment in time the day after election day feels

Hard as Stone, Soft as Tears,

the light dimmed by a cloud of uncertainty, loss, and grief for women, people of color, trans/queer/other, immigrants,  our children and the earth.

Though we need to take tender care of ourselves and perhaps even find a sanctuary of peace today, we also need to not give up or give in. We need continue to live with loving kindness, doing what little (or big) things that we feel called to do in the name of love. I don’t know what the future will bring. Neither do you. But I hope each of us who are mourning today will do what we can to shine a light of love in the world however we can.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes–you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, a alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

Through the coming days, weeks, months, and years I believe we also need to remember joy and choose joy each day in one small way. This morning I took myself and my camera out to French Regional Park for a walk in the fog. The weather felt so appropriate for my feelings after hearing the election news. Still I found moments of joy seeing the world through eyes of love on this sad morning. My spirit lives on unconquered.

Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Life goes on. We will persevere. We will walk on and take care of ourselves as we also care for this earth and those who are threatened. Why not make joy your “initial act of insurrection?”

It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté,” the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.” It’s a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist.
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

May you walk in beauty.

Note: Photos in today’s post from my morning walk in the fog at French Regional Park.