Since my last update … wow have things changed.
I know many of you have been privately asking us, so I want you to know that Jamie I have been brainstorming how to weather this time, from our precarious perch as a married pair of working artists. We’ll let people know about it in the months to come, but the “sneak peek” version is that we’ll be centralizing our efforts around our Misfit Stars online community. Stay tuned. And if you’re curious to know more, private-message me.
In the meantime, here are some thoughts I wrote down last night about my own current experience in this time we’re all living through. My hope is that it might help you feel like whatever you’re feeling, you are not alone:
Every day these days comes with new emotions, new strange realizations about our new, strange, collective reality. Every hour, sometimes.
This morning, it was something like denial. “This can’t possibly be as bad as I’ve been thinking, right? Maybe I’m being dramatic.” …. and then the facts of the situation hit me again in the gut like sack of rocks. And I know. I know. The governor of California just asked 12% of the country’s population to not leave their homes. Our state is likely next. Those things wouldn’t be happening unless this is exactly as mind bending as it seems.
This afternoon, it was incongruity. Jamie and I walked along the waterfront in Tacoma, gorgeous blue sky overhead, sunshine warming our backs. “How can there be so much beauty and light and warmth here, while at the very same time there’s this microscopic force barreling toward us, about to hurt so many lives? It doesn’t match.”
Tonight, it’s utter sadness. For all but two hours overnight the night of November 8, 2016, I cried and cried and cried for our future selves, not knowing what the precise reason would eventually be for those tears. Now I know. Today I know from what depth I cried then. And that for which I‘ve been bracing myself until now.
Without getting into all the details, this moment didn’t have to be this way for us. This virus would have come to the human population no matter what. But the abject failure of the person we put in office to lead us, who — literally because of his own bottomless pit of greed and vanity — dismantled systems that would have made us prepared for this, denied the advice of the scientists and the experts telling him how to get out ahead of this, and allowed our situation to become so dire — that’s the reason we are where we are in this moment today, facing what we’re all about to face, what we’re already facing.
It didn’t have to be this way. If you doubt me, take a look at South Korea. It didn’t have to be this way. But here we are. And I feel so. so. sad.
So … I understand that none of that is rosy. But those are my thoughts this evening. There are many other things in this strange time that are giving me cause for joy, and stirring my love for people, and igniting small senses of hope and possibility:
Like the voices of people singing to each other from their balconies in Italy,
the smiles of my neighbors when we see each other on the sidewalk and get to chat (at a safe distance) for a while,
the helping that so many people seem eager to do for one another in this time …
… we are a stunning, beautiful, brilliant constellation of souls, us humans. We will make it through this. There will be an after-time.
I just want to say, though, for the now-time:
I am here to cry with you,
laugh with you,
rage with you,
work with you,
fight with you,
hope and dream with you,
in all the fullness of every part of my being.
Be well, friends.
