Renewing the Face of the Earth

Today is Pentecost Sunday, commemorating the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon the confused and mourning followers of Jesus. It might be my favorite feast day, even more than Christmas or Easter. 

The story is in the second chapter of Acts: they were all together in one place, when a sound like violent wind swept through the building. Tongues of fire appeared among them and above them, and suddenly they could understand each other. They were all speaking their own languages, but because they were listening to each other — listening to each other with the power and in the presence of the Holy Spirit — they understood each other. 

The prayer to the Holy Spirit asks it to create us, so that through us the Holy Spirit can renew the face of the earth. We call the Holy Spirit "Paraclete," because that's how Jesus described it at the Last Supper. He said he would ask the Father to send us a παράκλητος, which depending on the translation might be an advocate, or a helper, or a comforter. The word literally means "called to one's side."

Faith, Paul told the Hebrews, is the assurance of what we hope for and the evidence of what we don't see. The Holy Spirit boosts our faith, pulls us along when all we see is devastation. You are better than this, the Holy Spirit says. You are not an accident. You have been created. You can make things better. 

Catholic tradition tells us that the Holy Spirit offers seven gifts: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. If ever we needed those things, it's today—but that is true every day. 

Welcome home

The protestors in the streets around the country are angry about a lot of things, with good reason. But first and foremost, they are homesick. 

If you know me at all, you've probably heard me say that homesickness is the universal human condition. Our lives begin with a violent separation from a place that is warm, dim but lit by a soft pink glow, quiet but filled with a soft and constant rhythm, where most of us get to float without hunger or thirst or anxiety for nine months. The world we're born into is loud and bright and cold. People are poking us and expecting things from the moment we emerge, and we have to ask to be fed. The outside world has its compensations, but we never quite forget that sense of home, of a place where we are always welcome and always cared for.

The worst thing one human being can say to another is "You don't belong here." But it's the first thing any group of people does, once we form. We do it for reasons that feel valid and justified. It conserves scarce resources, it reinforces bonds among the group, it makes it easier to protect ourselves. You might even say it's an evolutionary imperative. It's why we're walking the planet: because our ancestors belonged, or figured out a way to belong by forming new groups or insinuating themselves into existing ones. We're alive because we have either inherited that belonging, or learned how to join groups that protect us, or created those groups for ourselves. 

Police within a society are responsible for protecting that society from people who cause harm. It can be a dangerous job, and the people who do it share a bond that creates its own group, with its own sense of who belongs and who doesn't. That's a necessary and understandable coping mechanism, but it becomes destructive when the police decide they get to say who belongs and who doesn't.

In the United States of America in 2020, a lot of us were prospering before the virus hit. How many of us were focused on protecting our groups, instead of on making sure that other people felt they too had a place to belong? 

Videos are circulating of Atlanta Chief of Police Erika Shields and Dallas Chief of Police Renée Hall walking through crowds of protestors last night—talking to them, treating them like citizens, like people who were where they were supposed to be in their own hometowns. That is the only way we'll get back to any kind of peaceful coexistence: by seeing each other, by talking to each other, by recognizing that these cities and this country and this planet are home to all of us, and each of us belongs just as much as everybody else. 

This morning the man in the White House said tonight would be "MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE." He has spent the last four years telling a lot of this country that they don't belong and they aren't welcome. What does his country look like, then? Is he the President only of those people? Where are the rest of us supposed to go, if we're not welcome in his country? 

Those questions have no acceptable answers. We have to find a way to welcome each other home again. 

 

Love Now, Peace Later

Spotify threw me some Doobie Brothers this morning. It's in my playlists because I was a kid in the 1970s and I still love this song, but I also wonder whether they tweaked the algorithms today.

You, telling me the things
You're gonna do for me
I ain't blind and I don't like
What I think I see

I cannot stand to watch the video from Minneapolis, but I am not allowing myself to look away. If you're here to wring your hands about how sad it is for people to be burning down their own neighborhoods, you can click away right now. Because all that's happening in Minneapolis is that the physical world is manifesting what's been going on institutionally, economically, psychologically, and spiritually for too damn long, and now we're finally seeing it in a way we can no longer ignore.

How much work do we — do I — put in to ignoring the pain and injustice that surround us every day? How many of the people around us — around me — are invisible because they don't look like us or sound like us?

The stories I write almost all turn out to be about the power of invisible women in a world that disregards them. But I don't have any idea what it really means to be invisible, because if I ever wanted to, I — like most middle-aged white women — could transform myself into Karen, the Woman Who Wants to Talk to the Manager. (And I say that with all apologies to at least three—no, four— dear friends named Karen. Sorry!)

The Karen superpower exists for reasons that I could defend on another day, but it's always used to punch down, which is never, ever, ever okay. It's rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of this society's power dynamics, and that misunderstanding is no longer excusable.

The people on the streets of Minneapolis are demanding, What will it take for you to see us? Do we have to set things on fire? Apparently they do. Apparently, that is what it took. God help us all if we don't figure out a way to see each other.

You can donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which is bailing protestors out of jail, here. Support for that organization has been so strong that they suggest you donate to these other local organizations:

• Black Visions Collective
• Reclaim the Block
• Northstar Health Collective (medics)

You can buy a book from Moon Palace Books, which is right in the middle of the conflict zone, here.

The front page of the Minnesota Freedom Fund says, "Love Now, Peace Later." That's a prayer I can get behind.

Love now.

Peace later.

Short Attention Span Theater

I joined Twitter because a PR client wanted me to.

This was spring 2007, Twitter was barely a year old, and I did not see the point of it. It felt self-referential to the point of narcissism. It reaches only the people who have chosen to join, I said, and not that many people had chosen to join, so why spend the time?

Everyone in publishing is on Twitter, they said.

That turned out to be true. It's still true—which is the official reason I don't quit it—but over the past 13 years it's become essential to my work and social life in ways I could not have imagined, and am not always sure are healthy. 

For people who work from home, as I mostly did even before the lockdown, Twitter is an online break room. Since the lockdown, it's become even more important. Although I subscribe to at least half a dozen newspapers and magazines online, Twitter is my primary news feed. It's my main outlet for social interaction. It's my major source of new friends since I moved back to DC. I don't think I've gotten any new clients through Twitter, but I might have. 

The PR client who originally wanted me to join is no longer on Twitter personally at all, although someone runs an account for their brand. Too time-consuming, they said, and too much of a distraction. 

I can't argue with that. It's a massive distraction, and worse than ever now because the pandemic has destroyed my attention span.

That's an almost universal experience, right? We've all lost our attention spans, haven't we? (Please reassure me by saying yes.) A Twitter pal—yes, I get the irony—starts every day online with a box-breath meditation, and sometimes I try to follow his example, but I can't seem to allow myself to stop that long. If I stop long enough to breathe and focus, I am paralyzed by fear, I dissolve in tears, or both.

And I am the luckiest person I know in this situation. I have much less reason to be fearful or sad than the vast majority of other people living through this. And I could be doing more to help those people. 

I need to be back around people because I'm afraid I don't know how to be around people anymore. I need to be away from screens from some sustained period of time, and I need to just listen to somebody else talk for a while without interruption or distraction. These aren't things that come naturally, I suspect. They're learned skills, and I'm forgetting how to do those things.  

The District of Columbia and northern Virginia are reopening tomorrow. I am not even sure what that means, except that next week I'll go back to my office, even if I have to walk.

Anyway, the original point of this post was that the President is probably not the only person who needs to step away from Twitter—but I seem to have made my point about short attention spans and the challenge of holding a sustained thought these days. Show, don't tell, the writing books say . . .

Dreams in the Time of Corona

I had this dream that I relished
The fray
And the screaming filled my head all day
("Nautical Disaster," The Tragically Hip) 

We're all having crazy dreams, right? I don't usually remember mine, but I've started sleeping in four-hour stretches. If I rouse myself when I wake up at the end of those four hours—if I turn on a light, or check my phone, or try to read—I regret it, because I can rarely get back to sleep after that. But if I keep the lights off and my eyes closed, and count backwards or say prayers or recite song lyrics in my head, I usually do fall back asleep, and that's when the dreams come. 

The dreams these days fall into three categories: 

• Dreams in which I am lost, even in familiar settings, where hallways do not lead to expected destinations or roads peter out
• Dreams in which I am unprepared, such as realizing that my high school senior speech is the next day and I haven't even chosen a topic
• Dreams in which I cannot fix whatever's broken, whether it's a car that won't start or a window that shatters or a washing machine that overflows

Nothing here requires much insight. Who could have prepared for this? Even the doomsday preppers seem unequipped. We have no realistic models to project outcomes. We lack the information we need to make good decisions.

This morning I decided to have an English muffin and an orange for breakfast. I am already second-guessing the lack of protein. I should have put peanut butter on the English muffin. Maybe I'll have eggs for lunch. That's the level of planning I feel capable of right now. 

Yesterday I covered a "virtual roundtable" in the House of Representatives—their rules don't allow hearings that don't take place in person—during which a panelist (not witness, because this wasn't a hearing) said that the stock market is a leading indicator of the economy, showing how investors expect the economy to perform about six months from now. 

My eyes rolled so hard I might have injured my optic nerve. If this were ever true—and I'm not at all sure it was—this is nothing but wishful thinking right now. Right now our stock market is nothing more than a virtual game of Pit. It's about the transactions, and I find it increasingly hard to believe it's tied to any underlying intrinsic value. 

Of course, this might be why I'm not rich. 

Pandemic Time

When I pulled the milk jug out of the refrigerator this morning, the date caught my eye: 

SELL BY
MAY 21

What day is it? I had to check my phone. It's May 26, which you may or may not already have known. 

Reader, I put that milk in my coffee anyway. And it's fine, or at least it doesn't taste terrible, and I'm not dead yet. 

But it's one more symptom of the bizarre time dilation of the Great Lockdown. 

March, everyone agreed, lasted forever. We didn't know what was happening, day to day, and everything hung in a strange suspension that made things scheduled a week away feel as if they might as well be the next year. 

But since everything shut down, I don't know where the time has gone. I would be hard-pressed to tell you one specific thing that happened in April, although my daughter's birthday was the 10th and Easter happened somewhere in there. I think April was when my dad got off the Zaandam—and yes, I just checked, he got home on April 3. I know I baked a cake for my mom's birthday (May 1) even though she hasn't been around to celebrate for a long time. Yesterday was Memorial Day, the earliest possible day that Memorial Day can be. And next week is June already.

A friend of mine has been knocking a year off her age for as long as I've known her. She took care of her father as he died of cancer, and she considers that a lost year that shouldn't count against her age. That feels reasonable, especially now. Will we all be allowed to cut three months, six months, a year off our age for the Year of COVID-19? 

Age is not something I think much about. I started out younger than everybody, and it surprises me to find I'm often the oldest in the (virtual) room these days. But if it's just a number, I feel entitled to stay 54 for another six months, at least. 

At the recommendation of the great and gifted Laura Benedict, I started using a Panda Planner to organize my life last year (last year? 2018? I have no idea). It's been transformational, but these days it feels performative instead of constructive. Every day it asks me to list three things I'm grateful for, which vary day to day (today: sunshine, grilled cheese, Spotify podcasts) and three things I'm looking forward to, which gets increasingly baffling. Saying I look forward to the things I do look forward to—cookouts with my family, afternoon hangouts in bars with my friends, NATIONALS BASEBALL—without knowing when any of those things might happen again just makes me sad. Which is contrary to the point of the Panda Planner. 

It's hang time, I tell myself. Just hang time. Which makes me think of the beautiful song about this by Fountains of Wayne and the late Adam Schlesinger, another victim of this stupid virus. So I'll leave you with that today, and try to feel the wealth of having all kinds of time.

Meditations in an Emergency

Well into the third month of the COVID-19 lockdown feels like a good time to revive this blog. I'd change the name, but I'm going to leave it as both accusation and reminder: I don't have all the answers, and the answers I have aren't especially useful. I bought a wall hanging from the brilliant Brian Andreas to reinforce the point: 

I won't buy a frame for it until the lockdown ends, but it's propped up on my nightstand so I can see it every day. 

A strange momentum carried me and many others through the first few weeks of lockdown, and I know this was especially true for my relatives and friends who have kids at home. So many logistical details to deal with, so many things to cancel and rearrange and shore up. Lists to make, priorities to identify. Ten weeks in, I'm floating in a windless ocean with no map and no means of propulsion. I could be out here indefinitely. 

Paradoxically, my work is busier than it's been in years. I'm deeply grateful for that, and I'm sharing as much of that prosperity as I can. Anything I would ordinarily have spent on Metro or Lyft, at baseball games and concerts, on road trips, is going to food banks and women's shelters and clinics and out-of-work performers. It's not enough.

That's what I'm struggling with this morning: it's not enough. Today is a work day for me, because it has to be. I have at least three emails in my inbox that are asking me for things I don't feel capable of today, and I haven't opened them because I'm afraid of what that feels like. Some of it's justified, some of it's not, some of these requests are unreasonable and not things that should be coming my way. The internal monologue runs: 

            Why am I feeling so afraid?  

            Afraid of what?

            Afraid of not being enough.

            Enough for whom?

            Afraid of being judged and found wanting.

            By whom?

            Afraid of being held in contempt.

            Again, by whom?

            By [professional colleague's name redacted].

            Fuck that guy.

Is "fuck that guy" kind? Is it helpful? Is it necessary? No, no, and yes. 

So the day begins.

Are you figuring out how to be enough? What are you doing about it? And how are things with you?