Fall and the RBG Moon
Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. Amy’s Cheese Enchiladas. Orion. The dark. The night. Amber. Dr. Gustave. Cataract surgery. Cataracts. Maxwell Falls, upper and lower. Shadow Mountain. Its solidity. Welcome, Fall. The Harvest. The turning of the Aspen’s high up on Black Mountain.
Oh. As the evangelicals love to proclaim, we are being tested right now. Can this nation, or any nation, live divided? Trumpian fingernails, worn near the quick, scrape across the blackboard of TV and written news. One insult after another. Bad ones. The action is in our reaction.
With the pandemic already heavy on our souls, the death and replacement of RBG feels like too much to bear. As if the heavens have opened and instead of compassion and grace, their god sent psychopathy and misery. Is their orange deity this powerful? Is he this tone deaf to his electoral defeat, his trashing of religious values, his arrogant misogyny? Yes, I guess he is.
The Chinese find courage and sadness in the fall. I do, too. This fall. Right now. Today. This moment. Sadness and just behind it anger. Courage, too, though. I will not retreat into despair or lose my love of this nation. I will not lose my core belief that we are all in this together as creatures of mother earth, of this vasty and mysterious universe.
Trump is, I guess, this nation’s id, forcing us to confront our shadow, our long and shameful treatment of those different from our white Anglo selves. If we can stand the chaos, then there are great days ahead, because this shadow has the energy to carry us into a new era. Not quick, not today, but in the weeks and months to come.
This means that no matter the results of this action or that we hold tight to our dreams, to our children, to the future. We continue to act, to push ahead. Not for any particular result, but because it is who we are and how we stay with the pulse of change.
