activism, Choices, community, Determination, disability, Learning, long covid, Mindfulness, Take Action

Chronic Resistance: Notes on Surviving the Horrors

Photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash

Half the US reels from this first week of mayhem. A good portion of the rest of the world too. As always, Democratic party leaders are unwilling to make the radical changes necessary to produce a coherent strategy. Grassroots organizers are paralyzed by attacks on multiple fronts at once, scrambling to serve already vulnerable communities now facing direct threats to their existence. And the failure of mass protests over the past decade to sway policy in a more humane direction has left many without a collective mechanism for voicing outrage.

Just as in the first sickening months of His Monstrosity’s first term in office, the goal is to keep us off-balance. To make us so dizzy with fear and confusion that we end up like Oz’s scarecrow: stuffed full of the shredded hopes of 100 million people, stuck in place and pointing in every direction at once.

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body, Career, Determination, disability, growth, health, Letting Go, Living in the Moment, Purpose, Writing

The Incredible Shrinking Woman

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Photograph of the bow of a wooden boat under a starry night sky

Right now someone is packing for a research trip to Antarctica. Swimming with dolphins. Having their first dance.

Someone is falling in love on a bridge in Venice. Ziplining off a treetop platform. Spelunking in a cave in near total darkness.

Someone’s life disappears into the shadows of another’s big moment.

When the unit of measure plucked from the shelf, someone always falls short.

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body, Brain, community, Determination, disability, health, long covid, Take Action

Joint Force: Notes on Recovery Efforts

Photo by Eryk Fudala on Unsplash. Color photo from inside a stone culvert with a creek running trough it, looking out over a green hillside.

Halfway up the road to the lake, the ground caved in. It was our first summer running the YMCA summer camp in the mountains of Colorado. The new culvert system our regional Y had installed at a cost of $900K had not even had its first birthday.

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Determination, Family, Outdoors, prayer, Relationships, spirit

Salt, Egg

The late morning beach requires windbreaker and hoodie both. Most human neighbors have not ventured out. We do, kicking off our shoes and regretting it almost at once. Dune grass and broken shells slice our reddened feet.

Out at the edge of the water under the low sun, the ground is uneven in a spot. Dark. Probably rubbish, a black tote blown away and left behind. But no, it takes shape as we near it. A bird. A black skimmer, one of the  endangered of this island. White and brown feathers ruffling in the wind. It seems larger now than when its kind fly low, skating along the cresting waves. It is bent in a way it shouldn’t be. Large, like a Halloween pillowcase, like a wedding cake someone dropped. It gains substance in its stillness.

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Brain, Choices, Determination, spirit

Power Failure

bangkit-prayogi-cave

We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating “I’m fine! I’m fine!” and we found ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: “Actually, I’m not fine.”

Glennon Doyle

It pulls in all the bad stuff: guilt, despair, shame, anger, disappointment, confusion, worry, exhaustion, and pain of all varieties. The ShopVac of Suffering. It sucks into its belly the cobwebs from the corners and the black mold from the basement and the decades-old crud buried deep in the carpet.

Engine growling, it whips this mix into misery soup.

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Brain, Children, Determination, Learning, Parenting

How to Grow a World

mossy-tree-bark-texture

Old shortcuts lead to dead ends. Minor annoyances to major road blocks. Drifting off during the boring parts of class, crumpled papers forgotten in the bottom of the backpack, goofing off in the hallway. D grades. Closed doors.

As he fails, his world shrinks.

Only the first quarter of his first year of middle school, and hard lessons are giving my boy’s psyche a good scraping.

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body, Brain, Children, Determination, Family, Growing Up, Learning, Parenting

The Parent He Needs

Two Souls One Heart

On my son’s first birthday, a stomach virus knocked him flat. For the next few days, he couldn’t keep anything down. Even though he begged for the comfort of nursing, I had to ration his time on the breast. We fed him Pedialyte from a dropper. He screamed in protest until thirst overcame his resistance.

After a few days, he rallied. Small portions of pureed food stayed down. Great quantities of breast milk too. He resumed scooting all over the house and tormenting the dog. The doctor had said he’d get over it, and this seemed to hold true.

Except that he kept losing weight.

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activism, Determination, Take Action

Action 4: RESIST

bread-puppet-resistance

Abandon plans for a democratic agenda.  Abandon hope for democracy at all.  The leadership of this country has shed any pretense of discourse about how best to govern.  Our leaders will seize, gut, silence, and reign.  They will topple any established checks on their force, and they will dispense with explaining themselves.  They will have no need to defend the twisted truths they spun as they advanced through a weakened democratic system into the control tower.  Why explain?  Why defend?  They now execute reality.

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