Ebb and flow
Beauty ...and broken glass
I’ve been riding a bit of a beauty high. Two weeks after the nourishing time in Morro Bay I retreated to Santa Cruz with a half-dozen others artists for some dedicated songwriting time. The weather was glorious (and a bit disorienting given the actual season!). Great sunsets, sunrises, morning walks on the beach and sharing songs after dinner is the medicine, I tell you! Before that, I spent the bulk of a weekend at The Winged Migration Expo on Mare Island in Vallejo, which was a great, educational and encouraging event for the many people and organizations working on all aspects of bird and bird-related conservation. I got to table about Flight Lessons — and Flight Patterns, an art exhibit I’ve had the privilege to curate in conjunction with the next FL performance at Rhythmix — alongside the good people at Buteo Books, and also did did a short presentation and played songs from the show with Kwame on the presenter’s stage.
All these events, alongside proactive, questing people, have buoyed my hope and insulated me a bit from the injustices raging in other parts of the country. By the time I was back home this past Sunday night, belatedly watching and marveling over the Bad Bunny halftime show and reading the commentary and the huge number of people who had tuned in, I felt like anything was possible.
“Do you think the tide is turning?” a friend said yesterday.
“I think it has turned,” I said. Though clearly dark forces are still working hard. But I believe most people living in the U.S. really don’t want this — this president, ICE, authoritarianism, all of it.
This morning I woke up to a broken front window. Someone had thrown, improbably, a heavy mug at it, in front of which was the blinking peace sign I’ve been switching on each night regardless of the holiday light season having passed. The thought that someone might see the peace sign as a target had crossed my mind a couple of months ago, but I had pushed it aside. Just last night as I was plugging it in, I had felt a rush of satisfaction at seeing the colored sign light up, pleased that we’d just left it there. This morning, looking at the sign and sofa covered in glass, I felt a cold shiver of fear.
But that fear has slowly abated as my community has rallied: friends came over; neighbors weighed in; the two police who came to take a report were calm and kind; and the glass repair people fit us into their booked day. Right now, no one would be the wiser that this occurred.
And yeah, this is all very small beer in comparison what so many people and communities are going through elsewhere, and more specifically in Minnesota, which continues to go through it.
The next No Kings event is March 28, but there’s a whole other list of ongoing actions coming up soon, including a bunch in the Bay Area.
“Nothing is more precious than peace. Nothing brings more happiness. Peace is the most basic starting point for the advancement of humankind.” — Daisaku Ikeda