Living in the time of monsters

What if peace was on the ballot?

Well, here we are. Another November, another [even more] contentious election, another day making the best of what energy is available at this moment in time. I find it interesting to go back and read stuff I wrote in years past, to see if what I thought then is what I think now. (Sometimes there’s a difference, and a marked one. Sometimes I’m consistent. Sometimes it is somewhere in the middle.) Anyway, I remembered there was a little blurb about the election in my 2017 book, Woodland Manitou. How I felt about presidential elections in 2012 hasn’t shifted all that much now that it’s 2024.

I mean, I’d write this essay pretty differently were I to do it today, and hurricanes, especially when their impact leaves whole towns destroyed (like in Appalachia this October) are nothing to joke about. The sentence that still fits, though, is, “What if “right” isn’t even represented on the ballot.” It’s pretty rare for true solutions to humanity’s problems to be represented on a ballot, no matter how high stakes an election is. I appreciate how the NDN Collective puts in their recent article:

It is not lost on us that this is a historically close election with grave consequences, and it also cannot go without saying that the current political landscape is more riddled with hypocrisy than ever as a genocide persists in Gaza, supported by both parties. 

This is not me telling you how to vote, or if you should, or whatever. It’s November 5th, and it’s mid afternoon. Most folks have already voted if they’re going to¹, or know who they will vote for if it’s still on the to-do list. This is me, along with so many others, lamenting that, as NDN points out later in the article, “Conditions for all life on Mother Earth have not gotten better regardless of who has been in charge. It’s gotten worse.” There’s a lot to grieve these days, even if you do hold space for possibility, hope, and change.

No matter who wins this election, a great many folks will experience a sense of loss. I’d guess a fair number of folks will experience a sense of loss even if the candidate they vote for does, in fact, win.

It’s pouring rain today, so here’s part of a chapter in Collisions of Earth and Sky about a soggy November four years ago.

One late-autumn day toward the end of 2020, water droplets coated everything outside my house. During my walk around the perimeter of our hayfield, their tiny glistening bodies dripped steadily off the trees in the heavy air. Rain was never far off, and the view across the road into the fields beyond seemed out of focus in the foggy mist of a damp November day. Water pooled in the driveway ruts. It wasn’t bitterly cold, but in that sort of late-autumn sogginess, a chill sticks to your bones with determination.

[…]

There were, and still are, puddles of loss everywhere. It’s the one thing we all have in common. It can make everything else seem out of focus. It coats your bones with the heaviness of a steady rain.

Later in the afternoon, I opened the mailbox, hoping to find a few things I’d been waiting for, but all I fished out was a fundraising letter from The Sun. I almost threw it in the wood stove before opening it, but I didn’t. Instead, I read what founder Sy Safransky had to say, and I’m glad I did because he closed his letter with this: “when the weight of the suffering in the world feels like too heavy a burden—this world that’s so impossibly beautiful and unbelievably sad—I remember the advice of Edmond Burke. ‘Never despair,’ he said. ‘But if you do, work on in despair.’”

The world may be both incredibly beautiful and terribly sad, but our work in it continues. In that work is the necessity to pause to be able to work another day. I can only hope that by fully grieving the unbelievably sad and allowing ourselves the stillness necessary to do so, we add another layer of depth to the impossibly beautiful.

We act for LANDBACK, for black reparations, for reproductive justice, for justice for our immigrant relatives, for safety for our LGBTQIA and non-binary relatives, for economic security for all our Peoples, for protections and safety for our houseless relatives, for the rights of all our children– in short, we act for protections of our relatives and all of sacred life that these colonial, white supremacist systems render most vulnerable. We do this because we remember that we are warriors, living in the time of monsters, and we will use every tactic and tool available to us to free all of our Peoples.

Beautiful and terrible things happen every day, and it’s always been that way. Fear and anxiety are normal, and you are allowed to feel what you are feeling—but you don’t have to let fear drive. Feel it and then turn to your support network, get some fresh air, and pay attention to the things in your immediate physical space. Claim who you are. Accept. Remember. Nourish your roots and look all the way up. Keep your eyes on the distant wisps of smoke. There may well be a giant cloud of hope stretching toward the horizon if we have the patience to watch for it.

When options feel limited, sometimes it’s the simplest questions that illuminate the path forward—and it’s not always the path we think of when we consider what’s next. Could you allow for a new possibility, one that perhaps you’ve not yet considered?

What else is possible?²

This is one of the last poems in my forthcoming book, Church of Shadow and Light.

Choose peace. Ceasefire now. Love your neighbor. Walk with someone who doesn’t see the world like you do. Listen to somebody’s story. Share your own. What you want might be closer than you think, even if it looks different than you thought it would.

1. Though my polling place is a very cute historical building next to a corn field, I prefer mail-in/early voting.

2. These paragraphs are from a different chapter in Collisions of Earth and Sky.