It’s cold outside today, and windy. The sky is the royalist of blues. Last night this same wind blew a storm away until all that was left was the kind of sunset that bursts my heart wide open. There were just enough clouds, half of them streaked with blacks and grays, to bounce back all the color–pinks and tangerines, yellows and white. And the moon watched with me. She was huge. I came out of the library just as it was all happening, just as the wind and sinking sun and sky were in mid-stride, and felt this rush of gratitude and gladness. I smiled and wrapped my coat tighter and said thanks for the chance to be alive. I pictured the vast universe around it all, and me on this tiny rock, orbiting the sun, getting to take such a moment in. I felt small in the best way, and unfathomably lucky.

I’m on a kind of role with my novel this week, yesterday’s pre-sunset session not excluded, and am hungry to give myself the added boost of more progress than I can make during my few afternoon sessions alone. So I’m knitting time together from other places in my days, and have decided to take a short break from blogging as a way of putting time and focus more directly on my book. I have months to go before this project is through, and I don’t want to step away from this space for that long (I love it here, and would miss it here too much), so let’s start with a month of sabbatical and see what kind of progress I can make on the book in that time.

Much love to all of you, and a wish for winds to blow into the distant sky what you most need cleared away right now, to bring the kind of beauty and perspective your heart most needs to take in.

Kristin

I’m still trying to make sense of what happened a few weeks ago when I got word of the second death threat to an AJS worker. Something broke inside of me. It still feels a little bit broken. Every so often this happens, and to this day I’m not clear how the thing gets fixed again. Or whether it ever does. Maybe it’s always broken, and one-two punches of very dark things are just enough to remind me of it. To make its feelings grow conscious.

Its feelings are a lot like those I’ve had around sports competitions, where both sides really, really want to win. The inevitability of one side losing takes the fun out of playing or watching for me–at least a lot of the time–because I hate it that everyone can’t win. What’s the fun of winning if you know there will be people devastated by it?

Hope feels this way to me sometimes, too. Like dancing on the sidelines of a funeral procession. There are people living horrors every day. And I don’t mean only minimal horrors, either. I mean the kind that make your bones turn cold. The kind you don’t ever want to talk about, let alone see.

The reality of this is what knocks me flat on my back sometimes. Is what makes my happiness and hope feel like masks I wear, or any of us wear, to cover over what’s true. I know darkness is only half the story, give or take, but sometimes it feels like a hell of a lot more give.

So. Here’s a shot at a paradigm shift that seems like it holds promise–of helping hope seem totally called for, every single day:

What if instead of expecting that humans should be nice, should know how to share, should not throw sand in one another’s eyes, or bullets at one another’s chests, we expect that humans are just another part of the animal kingdom. They’re a part with far more destructive weaponry than any teeth or tusks could bare, but still: they’re animals. They operate by instinct. They rise and fall as top dogs and peeons. They spawn offspring and run around trying to get theirs without thought of offspringing consequences. They kill when they think it’ll benefit them. They don’t when that seems better. They do whatever it is their instincts push them toward.

The beauty of this view is that it makes me far less scandalized by the reality of our world. We’re animals, for crying out loud! Who holds animals to standards of morality? It’s the absense of morality, isn’t it?, in places where we expect it should be, that causes all our scandal.

The greater beauty of it, though, I think, is that humans don’t actually always act like animals. There are spots of un-instinct-like behavior everywhere. People loving each other deeply, past thought of reproduction or the status it might bring. People forgiving. People caring more for the common good than themselves or their tribes alone. People thinking about long-term consequences. People writing and painting and composing and organizing things that inspire us to live more equitably, more beautifully. More fully at peace and at rest.

Rather than some expected norm, these spots of behavior become sources of gladness and wonder. Reasons to think “Wow! What a world!” with a smile, rather than despair.

Maybe, in a world such as ours, we need to push the dehumanization that’s destroying us far further than it’s ever been pushed, so far that it inspires the kind of wonder and joining-a-renegade-mission mentality that I think it’ll take to save us from ourselves.