Facing it by Looking Away

or Turning Away from One Thing to Clearly See Another...an offering.

An assortment of men, some with integrity, some two-faced, some deities, some mortals. Chronos and his Child, painted by Romanelli, and my hand holding moonstone in the light.

A few days ago I wrote, “Here we are, straddling the first and second halves of January 2025, and I feel confused. Which way do I look next? I don’t understand time.” Then I saw the headline that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire, and I broke my promise to myself to stay off the news. Ever since the aid got blocked and the DNC wouldn’t let anyone speak to Gaza’s plight, my pointless calls to my pointless representatives have felt… pointless. You’ll not be surprised to learn that after fifty-five years and several more days of careful consideration, I am no closer today to comprehending time, history, human brutality, or my role in all of it than I was in the year 2000. No better in 2016, 2020, or this morning.

Today, right now, my stomach feels a little bit off and my heart is beating a tad too fast. One cup of Earl Grey, even the strong extra bergamot batch from Upton, shouldn’t do that. Of all the Long Covid symptoms I deal with, tachycardia isn’t one of them, so like so many of us increasingly do, I consider my nervous system. It’s been pretty regulated this week; I’m getting out in the fresh cold air nearly every day for a good long walk by the river, taking at least 30 minutes to stretch into yoga asanas that feel spacious and calming. I’ve taken time to gaze at some moonstone in sunlight and contemplate nature’s majesty. What’s my problem? I’m in my best old Cape May sweatshirt, I ate my peanut butter toast and berries, my house is warmed by the Jotul stove my diligent husband must chop and haul to feed all day because it can’t take more than two logs at once, and I only have a few packages to mail out by 4:30 in terms of “work stress” today. So, what’s with the shaky feeling in my gut? I didn’t have this yesterday. But then, a New York Times headline pinged on my desktop this morning with Trump has arrived at the White House and it suggested I “follow updates live.” Ummm, No. No fucking thank you. Count me with Michelle today: I’m busy. I saw this movie eight years ago and I fully hated it, and nothing on this earth could make me watch that dumpster fire again. I’ve never been less interested in a sequel. I know we are maybe overusing the words trauma and triggered, but… yeah, both. When you’ve been abused by men who’ve gone scot free, it’s a special sort of hell to see such a person at the highest seat of power, twice.

Frenchtown friends, daughter and husband, human family members at the January 2017 March on Washington.

Eight years ago after the initial outrage I marched on Washington with 500,000 pink-eared compatriots, including my then nearly 16-year-old daughter, my proud feminist husband, and a dozen neighbors beating drums and friends clamoring in solidarity. Yesterday, I had to check Google to see if protest marches even happened this year…and they did, over 350 of them! Good for those guys. But I had no idea. I was home, alone, quietly typing in my office, no sound but the tinnitus (thanks, Covid!) and John’s cooking soundtrack downstairs, just typing and retyping. I’ve written more pages in the last few days about this dilemma, this feeling, and this moment than I care to admit. It’s too much and all over the place and would likely make you as loopy as I feel if you had the stamina to stay with it, but I’ve opted not to test you that way. It becomes a bit of a chaos rant, and I haven’t shared here in so long that I decided to be nice to you. I started over. But I realize “the news” may be why my heart is beating like this. I’m trying to turn my despair into art and my face toward the light and it’s hard to know for sure how to do that anymore. Every time I start down any path, I go too far, I get too agitated, and I turn all the way back. Writing here is a little bit of putting myself back out there, and honestly I’ve done rather well by tucking myself all the way in. So which way do I turn?

I started the first draft of whatever this is on the 15th, contemplating two-faced Janus, the Roman god we named January after, and how he’s a perfect metaphor for everything… and also the worst. I mean, I’m so tired of old white deities holding the keys and the staffs, the shepherd’s crook. But Janus, the god of endings and beginnings, is literally a gate-keeper, the guy at the doorway of the year, one of his faces is old and looking back, the other young and looking forward. He’s the god of pathways and transitions, so that tracks. Father Time and Baby New Year all in one tidy package. I guess we get to decide if he’s aspirational in some Zen way (like, hold the duality and stay calm, be balanced and enlightened, ready for everything, or even… wise?) or if he’s just an average man born with a congenital anomaly who’s always dizzy from flipping back and forth.

Then this just in: Cecile Richards, former Planned Parenthood president, dies at 67. Everything feels extra poignant right now, am I right? Freedom for women dying way too young and Project 2025 just getting started. You know you’re 50 or older and have been lucky so far when 67 sounds so young. Age of course is the first way time gets surreal. Once you reach, I don’t know, maybe forty, you really start to feel it (how old were you the first time you thought about how old your parents seemed when they were your age now and you were whatever other age and your mind got blown) and time is doubly weird in January every year (anyone else remember writing checks? It was always practically March before you got the date right), but time feels triply bizarre now. It’s bizarre that triply is a real word. What’s trippy is that it’s 2025, for Pete’s sake. We’re a quarter done with this century, and I’m still laughing about Y2k and considering the possibilities of a new era with my fresh, 30-year-old face. Only I’m 55 now, and I’ve spent the last five years (which feel like two years when I look at what I’ve done and twelve when I think of what I’ve felt) trying to face my future without despair over losing so much time to this illness… or caring about all the sun damage this face has collected while worshiping the light. I’m toggling between making progress and befuddlement, how about you?

And now that the intensity of the pandemic is easing up in some ways for the average healthy person (and the 38 million of us with Long Covid in the U.S. can be damned), we’re starting another four years of darkness here in America, “leadership” that will proudly mock and abuse everything we believe in. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Don’t get me wrong, I think the new old guy in charge is fifteen fathoms worse than the most recent old old guy in charge (this just in: Biden Pardons 5 Members of His Family in Final Minutes in Office), but my heart and brain still ache that we didn’t have the collective power to elect the younger, sharper, more representative and humane team…the one that while absolutely imperfect, would at least try to keep some momentum for the middle class, for healthcare, education, equity measures, and the weary earth. Some integrity. Jimmy Carter was a beautiful Father Time this year, dying right at the end of December at a perfect 100 years, his long flame of humility and public service quietly flickering out. That his Baby New Year is Trump Part Two is beyond nauseating… our fresh new light-bearer is the 78-year-old felon, rapist, fraud, & narcissist, protecting wealth and white male privilege in his top hat and diaper. Inaugurated on MLK Day, no less. I could puke. As noted earlier, I’m not going to watch that show.

So where should we turn our gaze exactly? I’ll be damned if I’m going to put my life on hold for 1460 days until we swear in our next flawed human leader, but what I mean by my life is going to have to change. And it’s been changing. After 40-plus adult years of engagement, optimism, and a can-do spirit that bordered on obnoxious… after being turned all the way on and plugged all the way in for decades, I feel very… different. This has been true for nearly four years since Covid knocked me for six, but this is an even deeper level of different. I’m so quiet now. I’m listening to the geese & watching the snow. Measuring my next move. Jotting in a journal, sipping my childhood favorite tea with honey and milk. After living in constant connection as an extrovert, a teacher and artist, and a bit of a social media maven, I am almost entirely off line. I had gotten pretty distant already, but I checked out entirely after the election, a trauma response after all that intensity and hope and energy loss. I started unsubscribing and deleting newsletters and unfollowing pages like it was my job, even the “good” ones. Nope, nope, nope, I said, as I cleared my inboxes and turned off my phone. I’ve been listening to novels, taking walks, doing puzzles, making soup. Crocheting. Lingering in bed in the morning until I’m really ready. John and I are like Ma and Pa Ingalls over here, holding each other for a long time in front of the wood stove, having a laugh over a bowl of popcorn in bed. We have about the same annual income they had, too, but no matter. I do see the headlines, but I don’t open the articles. It’s like there are a few competing loud action movies on in the house, but they are two rooms away and the doors are all closed, and I can only faintly hear what might be arguments or press releases, crying, sirens… and though I have waves of an old urge to “stay informed,” I find I can’t really go in there if I want to keep my center. And forget social media. These days I toss in about one post a month on my work pages and maybe share my neighbor’s missing dog info on Facebook. I mean, can you do it? Can you scroll from make-up tutorials to bleeding Gazans and dead children to stand-up comedy to weeping mothers holding hostage posters without feeling entirely insane, powerless and numb, or triggered and raging? Then the floods and hurricanes, then the wildfires ripping lives apart, as we brace ourselves for more environmental deregulation. Then someone you love is screaming into the void about how she wants to unfriend you if you don’t re-post this exact rage post to your platform right now. You monster. Another friend is love bombing one neighbor and shit stirring on the town page. Talk about swiveling head syndrome. As the kids say, miss me with that shit.

I had so much more written, but I want to keep this manageable. I had a whole thing about Tom Kean Sr. and Tom Kean Jr., Dad was the Republican Governor who gave me a teaching scholarship in the late 80’s & supported the arts and civil rights, & divested from South Africa over apartheid… and his son, my current Congressman whose email updates decry the lost of Israeli lives (as should we all) but make absolutely no mention of the Palestinians dying 45 to one in the last 15 months. On a lighter note, I also had a section about the fact that my Christmas tree is still not put away and Why and What That Means (there were six specific sentimental ornaments discussed), and then there was a heartwarming “looking backward/looking forward” reflection on the tiny handmade Christmas stocking & gingerbread traditions in my family (short version: we had stopped doing things for a while, and we’re doing them again, and it’s been good). There was an idea about looking up from our phones, zooming out when our specific reality is terrifying, and also zooming in to any real and tangible thing when our brains get hijacked by all the big feelings and impossibilities. There was at least a page about my illness and my healing lately, blah blah blah. Feels good to cut all that out.

The only thing I cannot cut out is this photo. Two more faces, the opposite of old Janus, these faces are little, Palestinian, and female. These two are turning toward each other instead of in opposite directions. Like, cooperating. Connecting. This photo was in the New York Times coverage of the cease fire, and it was taken by Eyad Baba of the AFP. Baba has given us so many gut-wrenching images of Palestinian families and children, but this photo is a standout. It’s a pure ray of light. I hope it’s fair use to share it here, like an offering. It depicts an offering. Two children, maybe four and three years old, are sitting on gravestones (many people in the central Gaza strip have taken shelter in cemeteries) in bright sunlight. The little one on the left is reaching out her polka-dotted sleeve toward her friend, a spoonful of food offered, a bowl of more food between them. The little one on the right is leaning in, mouth agape, curly headed and chubby cheeked. The spoon is all but in her mouth, she’s one second from tasting the food. Even though one of these kids is in profile and the other’s mouth is wide open, you can see they are both smiling. They each seem the picture of health and innocence, and because we have some sense of the utter horror they’ve been through, the likelihood that their families and homes have been destroyed, that the trauma already sits in their mitochondria, their happiness in this one moment pierces us to the core. The clear possibility that they may grow up, may survive this and just… exist, and maybe even be well someday, seems almost too much to bear. I’ve spent at least 20 minutes on each of three separate days this week studying this photo since I first saw it. It makes me weep every time, and I can’t get enough of it. As we like to say now, it’s everything. It’s just what I need. Such a simple, human moment. One is hungry, one is feeding her friend, the sun is shining. The little fist with the spoon isn’t just offering food to her friend, she’s offering enormous nourishment to all of us. The chance to hope again on their behalf, and for our wounded world. A tenuous but safe-right-now space, even if only for the moment of the captured image, and a reminder that it is in our nature to care for each other at least as much as it is in our nature to conquer and kill. A place to turn our gaze so we remember what we believe in and that it too can thrive. Six hundred trucks of humanitarian aid are pouring in every day, if what I read remains true. Too little, too late, but also thank god. Some relief. These little girls, bless them, aren’t thinking big adult thoughts yet about their situation in the world’s roulette. They’re having a snack. How mundane and miraculous.

When I saw this picture, I thought of you, my community of neighbors, artists, & friends, most of us so privileged we can only imagine a fraction of the threats these babies have survived. Most of us with the luxury of “turning away from the news” for our mental health. But I don’t believe that survivor’s guilt over having that option is particularly useful. What this photo gives us is useful. If we can sit in the sun with a friend, we should do it, and turn our faces to each other’s light. If we have enough food, and if we are at peace and enjoying any kind of abundance, if we have anything to offer at all, we should be grateful, and we should share it. I haven’t had much to give out lately, but here in January of 2025, while we’re all making our way and for whatever it’s worth, I wanted to offer you this.