Thoughts

 THANK YOU. To everyone. To everyone who showed up to vote. Today, I realized that this thanks was not previously present enough in me to say it out loud.  Also, thank you. Thanks for changing people around me. You shook me up and you shook up people I love, some of whom I have also struggled with. Somehow, you shook us towards love. Words have come out of people I know that I never, in a million years, dreamed of hearing. It gives me a lump in my throat.  I know ugly words have come up. But this is not the angle I am focusing on because, frankly, what I am focusing on is so much more powerful inside of my body at this moment in time.  You shook us towards love by showing up. While I do care very much the outcome of the elections in terms of humanity on a national and universal scale, I don't "care" as much about who you voted for right now. Maybe I'll be pissed tomorrow about it, but right now, I don't. Why, you say? Who the hell is this person? Why would she say...

 Let me clean off my glasses, 'cause I'm about to write. This morning the sun shone for me. For all of us. There are so many wonderful and awe-inspiring things happening all around us.   I have been thinking about this, little by little, but consistently, since I was a kid teaching swimming lessons and lifeguarding for a community center in a small town. My mom was the organizer of the program. I never knew how much my mom did for the community; she was never on a committee. She was never on a board or part of politics. But in that learn-to-swim program, they always demanded she report the color and race of each participant. She, never once in those 20 years, gave in. Because, guess why? That's none of these particular people's business, my mom would say. These kids were there to swim. Period. The other day, the daughter of a former professor of mine reposted a thread about the "Latino vote" having always been (sorely) misrepresented, misunderstood, and underr...

It's funny how people only seem talk of divisiveness during the last four years. This administration actually brought me far closer to others than I was ever to them before. These times have made crystal clear to me what matters most and how much I appreciate friends, family, and strangers. And colors of skin, and places of origin, and languages, and personal identities, and spiritualities, and food, and preferences, all these things that make us so freaking cool.  This administration, no joke, literally brought me together with my husband, led us to our son (who I have wanted to meet for forever), and eventually, through this pandemic, brought me home (in this case, the place I was born, where my parents and sibling live with his family, too), where I had no idea I wanted to be. Everything that has come from these four full years really has reinforced for me how important my childhood outdoors, supportive and loving family and family friends, holistic studies (philosophies, religi...