Six Months

Below is a very brief recounting of January-June 2025 as I experienced them. Those months were heavy for me in ways different from severe personal loss, empathy for the losses of others, and regular awareness of and efforts to change unfairness and cruelty in our collective structures and actions. This year I’ve felt a deeper, sharper dissonance between, on the one hand, beauty in my everyday life, and, on the other hand, collective structures around me that are bending towards capricious authoritarianism and deliberately unfair and callous treatment of scapegoated and already vulnerable people. This sharp dissonance in what is likely to be the last third of my life casts me into heavy foreboding and hopelessness. But then the foreboding and hopelessness themselves are constantly undermined by the beauty, love, strength, and hope showing up again and again in my life, and then this undermining in turn deepens the dissonance. I think life is always this way. This year I’m  more conscious of it and feeling it in my body more.

January 2025

     I remained numb from the 2024 election results. In retrospect I was in denial about what could happen. I flew to Bonaire to scuba dive. In an underwater world in hot, sunny Bonaire, purpose, effort, and care for self and others seemed simple. However, dive after dive I still felt very much a novice and decided that I can’t afford these dive trips and purpose lay elsewhere. During the last of my dives, I had acute pain in my upper right molar area from either a tooth squeeze or a sinus squeeze and then I picked up a sinus infection which, exacerbated by NYC’s dip into really cold weather and the beginning of the Trump administration, sapped my energy. 

February 2025

     A sullen heaviness settled into my brow and head over this month of snow, ice, and salt-dust air, while the Trump Administration swung from one erratic, cruel, destructive, and potentially lawless action to another. Marietta, I hoped you were right. You were not.
​     I oscillated between a life of engagement with beloved family, friends, colleagues, and community; and an inverted life huddled away from the cold and salty outdoors while exposed to bursts of searing news. Every morning I was grateful for the peace and warmth of my apartment. Many nights my fears grew more numerous and more grotesque.  

This year I turn 65. From one moment to the next, I’m getting old, not just older. I’m trying to live the world I want. Less plastic, less plastic, less plastic. Use less, separate, compost without plastic! And so much else. And how shall I fight, how shall I fight without fighting?

    On a cold evening, not good for my sinuses not at all, I dove back into a deep reminder of Public Conversations Project’s long and illuminating 1990s dialogue work with pro-life and pro-choice leaders in Massachusetts. I met young representatives from Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) and Builders. That evening I remembered forward. Digging into the granularity of dialogue again I recommitted to curiosity and listening but also resolved to speak more. I recommitted to honesty in my speaking, unharming to myself and others, or satya and  ahimsa, recently re-encountered  in the yoga teaching of Rolf Gates.

March 2025

    Hope and grief, again, with No Other Land.
    I moved into this specific home six months ago. Community — essential to my life and especially dear in this time of personal vulnerability and battered structures — is still a work in progress. Pies and conversation — warmth and delight — on pi day in a wintry month that was still salty when dry. New friends mixed with old thoughts, old friendship.

How do I do more in my local community? How can I know more people? Who do I want to invite? How do I want to invite? How do I want to contribute?

    Meanwhile, "freedom, ideally, is being able to choose your responsibilities. Not not having any responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.” (Toni Morrison) I rolled those words around in my head, exploring intimacy with myself and the world.

I don’t know.

Living — knowing-not-knowing, again and again — is all I can do. Ardently living.

     Land Day. The heart of living, for everyone.

April 2025

     The salty winter is gone! Desperate joy at the puffy buds, the daffodils. Winter is hard, even brutal, but has no malice. 
     Hands Off in the rain, with tens of thousands. By happenchance and in separate encounters, I met new neighbors.
     
This is also the world. 
This is also the world comes back, or I look for it. I saw, I felt, not just once, not just twice, this is also the world.

     And I found a good dentist not far from me!
     Hope in the middle of loss, loss, loss. Normalization, or we have to live this, with a heightened awareness of all that is “good” and all that is “bad.” Kindness and beauty reverberate through me; anger, pain, and fear reverberate through me.
     I learn heart and stillness from people who know the body, know mind, indeed know soul as they seek to better serve trauma-affected and neurodiverse youth, especially young men of color. This is also the United States, this is also the world.
     Chatting with family; eating with friends; being enchanted by adolescent night herons who are hunched and glum among preening and turning adolescent egrets. This is also my life, this is also the world.

May 2025

     Wild swings from the pleasures of late spring to disbelief and dogged reading of the news. I read the news for 10, 20, 30 minutes, no more than that in one sitting, often no more than that in a day.
     Color-splatch moments of recognition and intimacy with dear ones and strangers. Such moments gentle my soul.
     My reactivity, as well as the hedging of myself to avoid that reactivity, ages me.

 What can I do? What will change in my lifetime? 

And yet I know we are not doomed. What exactly that means I’m not sure. We are not doomed is a real thing, a sorta-kinda cloud of history, evidence, conservations, cycles, but if I look too closely everything shifts and meanings change their shape. Nothing disappears; I just can’t martial all of it. I can’t throw a cover over it and hold it all, subdue it, and then order it. Of course I can do that — hold it, order it — for limited purposes and periods, of course I can, but not for the lengths and breadths of not-doom.

June 2025

    The first New York cherries, the first local blueberries! 
    The light and air and food of early summer, along with:

• continued erratically violent implementation of erratically cruel immigration-related directives; 
• continued threats to dissent; 
• continued lies;
• continued erratic foreign policy; 
• continued yes-sing of the Republican Party and Supreme Court majority; 
• continued erratic nothing on Palestine-Israel, Ukraine-Russia. 

     Let people die, fill your coffers, strut around. NO KINGS.
    Beautiful summer days, visiting children.
    Repeated encounters with young people provide an antidote to simple endings. Young voices in politics. Young people will turn this. 

     Zohran Mamdani. I hope he holds on to honesty, principle, partnership, and engagement. These are what he brings as much or more than his policy ideas. Will he be allowed?
   I ended June with a covid-19 infection, not so novel any more but still an unfolding mutation and an alarming resonance. 2020-2025.

It hurts to try to comprehend — to feel in my body — my experience of all the good in my life and the layers of threat, struggle, and pain around me. It’s easier to feel just the good. Or just the pain.

We’re halfway through 2025, a quarter through this first century of this second millennium in our Gregorian calendar. I’m aging, with history in my body.