back to life

January is gone. It was cruel. 

It was a clusterfuck. 

Or to put it more politely, in a word I learned this year, it was a polycrisis, overwhelmed by bad news and hemmed in by uncertainty. It's not surprising that I kept trying to start and restart and kept failing. It felt like some part of me already knew... But finding out from last semester's class notes that this was the week (Week 5) when I headed home for the funeral was the slow-motion gut punch on repeat I did not need. 

But I'm here, so once more into the breach, I guess. 

Adam Serwer's piece in The Atlantic, had this absolutely remarkable passage I cannot stop rereading: "The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force." SO much yes!

And Tressie McMillan Cottom says about political exhaustion that sometimes it's not retreat and rest one needs but actually action and connection. That "sometimes we're not exhausted because we're aware of too much, we are exhausted because we're doing too little." The antidote, she says is to get involved, as "people who feel agentic aren't as tired." This is something for me to remember.

Pic: Baker Woods with L. I feel like the trees are nodding their wise heads over me.