As I travel to give talks on writing or faith, people in my audiences are filled with doom and confusion, with suppressed rage and the desire for revenge. Or at any rate, I am.
Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend, “But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.” This may be my favorite quote of all time. And nothing makes me feel this more than the current state of airplane travel. Yet when I arrive somewhere and have a sad, scared audience, I do the deep dive to share what I’m positive will work to restore hope, no matter what, and it helps me.
What might those things be? Love, compassion, laughter and the No Kings rallies are the big-ticket items for me. They reset me briefly, breaking through the mists of defeat and pessimism.
When I mention these words to an audience, I also inwardly smite my own forehead, because I’d forgotten again.
Let’s begin with love. Oh please, really? Love like Winnie the Pooh? No, no no, love like your best friend who picks you up for a Target run when you call her channeling the Darwin quote. Love like “We Are the World,” and the Berrigan Brothers, Dolly Parton, Wavy Gravy.
I spoke recently at a theater in North Carolina, where all day I kept hearing snippets of news from D.C. that convinced me that the Confederacy was rising. That night I was on stage with the exuberant theologian Kate Bowler, who can be very cranky. One of her books is called, “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I Love to Tell Myself,” and yet everything we talked about — the political scene, scary childhoods, life’s inevitable catastrophes — was ultimately answered by raggedy old love.
Compassion. My husband defines it as the love that arises out of suffering, and one often feels it naturally, certainly more frequently, for a person who votes like you do. But 75 million didn’t in November, and now people like me, who were born tenser than the average bear, are gripped with fear for the young people in our families, for the Constitution, our Earth, the world’s poor and of course ourselves. And my heart shuts down.
I look out at people’s sometimes desperate faces, and hear hopelessness in the questions they ask. I wish I knew something that would work like a magic wand. Sometime around 2018, my pastor happened to share a line of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: He said that during times of evil and violence, not to let them get us to hate them. Then we are truly doomed — hate means we lose ourselves, and our greatest strength, our goodness.
This line got through my wall of indignation. I started noticing how I have seeds of everything scary that certain politicians display, but theirs seem to be on steroids, while mine are comparatively mild, a teenage Cindy Lou Who with PMS. I too am capable of meanness, stupidity and (God knows) judgment. Also, I knew that some of them had been raised in terrifyingly cold circumstances, by alcoholics, abusers and rabid fundamentalists, so I would feel fleeting mists of compassion for them.
Thinking along these lines used to dependably soften my cold stone heart for a long moment, and that is a precursor to hope. I haven’t felt that very often lately.
I look through mist many mornings, due to the marine layer of the Bay Area. I might drive along a strip of brownish meadow, and beyond it the skinny strip of a lagoon, a bit of ridge rising up behind it, and then above it total misty gray like a wet curtain pulled down. I am cut off from the sun.
That is how things feel these days, my thoughts clearly distinguishing the lies and malice, but not being able to see a way through. The fear and pain I feel daily about what is to come in this country, and what is actually already here, makes me feel isolated and separate. On bad days, I can’t even remember the great spiritual truth that we are connected to one another. We are in this together.
And that brings me to the No Kings rallies, another one of which is coming Saturday, everywhere in America. The people who did not vote like me last November are saying it is a hate march of aging radical hippies and anarchists, but in truth it will be friendly and joyous, diverse and filled with everyday people of core believers in the nation, even if it has lost its way.
I would suggest nicely that a million of those 75 million voters will be there with us this time.
They have no more clue than the rest of us of our place in righting the recent wrongs, because of all that mist. But those who show up will see peace at those rallies, solidarity, caring and raucous laughter at the signs and inflatable costumes.
Love, compassion, peaceful gatherings. I spoke in Gettysburg a few weeks ago during a truly terrible day in America. Walking and driving around the battlefield beforehand, feeling the most lasting American tragedy of all, the ownership of human beings, I wondered what on Earth I could say later that might bring people hope. And then we drove up to the statue of Jenny Wade, the only civilian killed at Gettysburg. She was hit by a stray bullet while baking bread for her sister, who had just had a baby. And I realized I could preach that: the arbitrary harshness of loss, the sweetness of small human moments — a baby, a sister, bread.
Mostly what we are left with in dark times is each other. One of us might remind the others to look around for fitful flickers of light, as a radical act. These change us. In my front yard, even with an autumn mist settling in, I see the vigor of still-fully-leafed-out trees, and on one many lemons, like sunny punctuation, and I can breathe freely again.
Anne Lamott, an author of fiction and nonfiction, lives in Marin County. Her latest book is “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.” X: @annelamott
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