24 hours

 

Does this pantsuit make my vote look huge?

 

 

Tuesday 8 am

1. so who was it that woke up this morning feeling like a kid on Christmas morning, wondering if the package she’d been hoping for would be under the tree? … yep, that was me……
2. well, the second half of this feeling, which i spoke out loud to a few friends but didn’t post (wanting to stay positive) was that the feeling I had all throughout the day was a strange combination of the anticipation of Christmas morning alongside the premonition of a nightmare….

10:30 am

1. We voted!! No lines here in our little hamlet. Walked right in. 195 or so registered to vote at my polling place (though honeslty at least 20 or so of those don’t even live here anymore, just haven’t changed their polling place). I’m very grateful to all of you who are waiting in such long lines in your hometowns in order to exercise this amazing privilege. Please go vote

Gathered with a few women, who were donning our ‘power pant suits’ for a photo, we felt as if we were making Herstory. Feeling giddy on hope, we felt excitement and possibility. We felt empowered and free. I felt my spirit and my voice rising, lifted from silence and shame.

3:30pm

I am feeling so vibrant today. This must be the way it feels to be free.
Free from hiding.
Free from humiliation.
Free from shame.
Free from closets. …
Free from fear.
Free from labels.
Free from judgments of worthiness and value.
Free to trust again in the goodness of humanity.
Free to shine.
Freed to love.
Freed to hope.
Freed for good.
My sisters, may we continue to live in the land of the free. To all of you who have been brave through this day, this month, this year, this century, these millennia, I lift you up in these wings.

 

Wednesday

2:00 am

1. I wanted to believe in the goodness of man, but i have been fooled once again.

7:00 am

Yesterday, after voting for a woman, whom i trusted held forth a vision of goodness for our country, I was feeling high on hope. On the ‘secret’ facebook page for Hillary supporters, a site free from the shaming and humiliation that has been heaped upon her ( and by proxy those of us who have supported her and so have also ‘gotten the message’), a site of solidarity and support, of hope and ideals for a better world, I shared this feeling of freedom-from -shame with these words.

 

I am feeling so vibrant today.

This must be the way it feels to be free.

Free from hiding.

Free from humiliation.

Free from shame.

Free from closets.

Free from fear.

Free from labels.

Free from judgments of worthiness and value.

Free to trust again in the goodness of humanity.

Free to shine.

Freed to love.

Freed to hope.

Freed for good.

My sisters, may we continue to live in the land of the free. To all of you who have been brave through this day, this month, this year, this century, these millennia, I lift you up in these wings.

 

This morning, these hopes are utterly devastated. This morning, I am faced with the reality that what i had perhaps thought was merely my imagination, some triggered remembrances of the world as an unsafe place where a predator might be hiding behind a friendly face, was devastatingly true. This evening, I became fully aware that i live in a world where half of the people have condoned the violence of hatred and fear.

 

I had a democratic committee member tell me that all of the signs that we saw littering our streets meant nothing really, just a power ploy, but i wondered when so many of us felt isolated because of them, wondering if we were alone in our communities. I heard a commentator on PBS this evening suggest something similar… that their preponderance was indeed a show of aggression. i have thought that even if that is not at all what was meant by even the majority of persons, that their presence at least normalized a candidate’s legitimacy for a community.

 

Donald Trump has sadly normalized and legitimized alot with his win tonight. I fear we have now as a people sunk to our lowest common denominator…. hatred and bullying, shaming and labeling, othering and fear, ‘isms’ and inhumanities of every variety… racisim, religious bigotry, antiintellectualism, xenophobia, homophobia, mysogyny… all are free targets of degradation except for the white heterosexual male, who came out in droves to support him. It was true, they were lurking behind friendly facades.

 

Van Jones called it the great ‘whitelash’. I have been playing around with the idea of ‘whitemale’, too, something like ‘blackmall’, and we are now held at ransom to an abhorrent ideology.

 

And I don’t know how to respond to this. Do i go back into hiding, knowing now what i know? Have we been ‘put in our place’? Will they now feel validated to make public their silent hatred, violence and scorn?

 

I wanted to believe in the goodness of man, but i have been fooled once again.

 

 8:00 am

Despair, a word to be with and dwell in this day. Do not tell me to ignore or suppress my despair. The antidote to despair is not platitudes and abstractions but paying profound attention to it. Listening to my/our despair is desperately needed in order for my/our humanity to endure and to heal. No, it is not time for hope yet. Those seeds are buried in all of this death – Vicki

Highly recommended reading for comfort this day, David Whyte, Despair, from his book Consolations. Here’s an excerpt:

“Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we ca…nnot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, when our world disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away.

Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest; it is a loss of horizon, it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way anymore. We give up hope when certain particular wishes are no longer able to come true and despair is the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope.”

10:00 am

Please don’t tell me not to despair. Not today. I believe that despair is a necessary human response to grief and loss. We need to have the space to feel it in order to heal, not to wallow in it but not to numb it either. For many persons in our country, a world that felt safe has been shattered, their worst nightmare come true. That is a trauma like any other …natural disaster or death…when one’s world suddenly breaks. Despair is a normal response to the shock of grief.. They/we will be ok, adjust to the new norm somehow. They/we will rise again, but this is Good Friday for us. Not time yet today for Easter. – Vicki

comfort

11:00 am  words from Karen Maezen Miller

i am reminded of the times I sat with my parents as they died. They were perfectly normal days although they weren’t normal, with nothing to say or do but face …forward. There is only one person in this country who needs to make a plan today and it is not you or me. Your grief is real and your fears are valid and yet, we must not get ahead of ourselves. Please just stay here for a moment longer, and a moment longer, and a moment longer.

Leave your name and the names of any you would like me to say this afternoon when I will chant a service to avert calamity. I will say all the names you give me.

This is the most I can do, and I do it with my whole heart

11:30 am

Hillary Clinton makes her concession /thanksgiving speech.

“Never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.

Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season,

we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.”

I Love this noble woman.

1:30 pm

Ok.She just told us fellow #pantsuitnation -ers to come out of that closet. So here goes.

Watching the waves roll in one by one last night, the shocked commentators on PBS seeking to make sense of the unexpected and inundating tidal wave they were witnessing. What tremors deep in the ocean did they miss or misread on their Geiger counters? They shied away time and again from saying it out loud. What whipped up the turbulent sea?. There were so many ships that they could hop on, like the proverbial bandwagon at sea, and the carefully crafted political and psychologically manipulative boat builders knew how to give rise to each and every dark fear and hatred, each feeling of isolation and humiliation. I am not at all saying that all of the voters grabbed hold or were hooked by these lines, but large segments of specific groups surely did. The mass fear and hatred was carefully preyed upon.

This has all been analyzed to death, of course, by now, this fear of the other – the ‘other’ who is taking our jobs and our culture and our religion, stealing our way of life. Hatred of immigrants, and races, and faiths, and elites, and public servants, and homosexuals. But what they carefully glossed over was this… hatred of the woman. I know it sounds ludicrous to some who are blind to the way that it hurts, but the violent words that are spewed as if She is less than human are no different than other kinds of hate-speech . Hate speech is defined as “speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display that incites violence or prejudicial action against an individual or group, or because it disparages or intimidates” . Even this morning the trolls are out and about –“drain the swamp’, ‘killary’, ‘lock up (or trump) the ‘b***h’ , evil woman, hildabeast, corrupt liar. The words spew from their mouths automatically, without thought, not unlike any group or person who is scapegoated and assaulted with slurs and violence, attacking a woman I hold in high esteem. Others jump on the boat, repeating mindlessly without seeing the carnage left in their wake. At the very least, they accept it as part of the fallout of ‘war’, become numb to the language of violence.

Many will not acknowledge, or are unaware, that it was Hillary’s very femaleness that they reviled. There is little other explanation, PBS NewsHour, for the hyperskewed preponderance of white male voters that just would not fit into your plethora of theories. You saw only Trump’s mistreatment of women outside of busses as evidence of his disrespect of women, somehow forgiven in this race, but missed the underlying disease. Even when speaking of Her being disliked, you failed to appreciate why exactly she has borne these projections, piled upon her, for decades. To your eyes it could not possibly be a woman thing, just that she was not the ‘right’ woman.

Yes, I do take it personally. It intimidates and disparages. It denigrate and violates. It silences and shames. And it makes the wrecked world outside my window feel less safe this morning to me – Vicki

 

2:30 pm

1. –“Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
   Meanwhile the world goes on.
   Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
   are moving across the landscapes,
   over the prairies and the deep trees,…
   the mountains and the rivers.
   Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
   are heading home again.
   Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
   the world offers itself to your imagination,
   calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
   over and over announcing your place
   in the family of things.”Mary Oliver.

3:00 pm – more comfort

1. –“Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
   Meanwhile the world goes on.
   Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
   are moving across the landscapes,
   over the prairies and the deep trees,…
   the mountains and the rivers.
   Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
   are heading home again.
   Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
   the world offers itself to your imagination,
   calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
   over and over announcing your place
   in the family of things.”      Mary Oliver.

4:00pm

1. Dear Ones – May we open to the realness of what arises in us – fear, distress, grief – whatever the intensity of feeling – with full presence and tenderness.

   .May we find refuge in loving companionship.

   May the suffering of our times serve to awaken an engaged, living compassion.

   And may we be guided by the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

   With love and prayer, TaraBrach