Marked Safe from February 🚩
Sea Legs, Waiting in Line with MAGA at Target, Best Love Song
The In-Between
Hello my friends! I wanted to send out a newsletter during this in-betweenness of winter and spring. We made it! Spring cometh and that swiftly!
This newsletter is a little different as I’m including a longish take on Maga-vibes in a way to inspire courage and action. You’ll also notice the absence of my Very Ameteur Photos, as I just didn’t have the time to get them ready. I do hope you’ll be disappointed LOL.
If you can survive February, you’ll live another year.” —Kevin Killen’s Dad
Getting My Sea Legs
Noone taught me how to “boat.” Noone taught me how to stand on a floating piece of fiberglass that bobbed along on the shifting, rolling, unpredictable watery surface. You just did it: keeping the body still while the legs, ankles and feet constantly adjusted.
These weeks demand a different kind of “sea legs” in order to stay afloat. It feels like the foundations of our democracy are seismically shifting. Each day a fresh outrage. Each day a new energy is required of us. We must exist in this totally proverbial sea change. Even if, as I believe, the tipping point has already arrived and things will eventually be restored to sanity, it still takes a lot to maintain individual sanity.
For me, it's giving chaos an outlet. This is what art is for. I have learned, over the years not to make friends or make peace with clinical depression, but to have peace while living with it. So making, doing and creating is an integral part of my survival. When it’s super rough, I will pick up a brush and attempt to mirror on canvas what’s going on in my head. I obviously have zero talent, but I do love to play with colors.
The above photo is what I painted one cloudy dark February day. I share it with you as one small way I’ve learned to survive. Art and design are my sea legs to the unpredictability of darkness and sunlight.
Word Study
Repair is a good word. It’s more than a patch over frayed fiber, covering the ragged edges and a quick solution to stop the fragmentation. It is regenerative, joining outstretched edges, reaching and grasping to strengthen the whole. Completion. To restore.
Who is the repairer of the breach?
Isaiah 58 tells us: it is the one who rejects false religious, phony faith, petty piousness, and empty public professions. The one who takes up the burdens, in imitation of our Maker, of the least important, most oppressed, most without, least noticed.
Reviler is a good word that describes a breach-maker. Reviler is the one who rails against another, a brawler, verbal abuser, one who is contentious, and a sower of discord and strife.One who treats another with contemptuous language.
The repairer comes behind the reviler. The repairer wins.
Waiting in Line with MAGA at Target
I stood behind an elder couple as they spit and fumed about the longish lines and clearly not enough open registers to move things along. It was impressive–the couple–their necks and heads on the swivel like searchlights at a state penitentiary, commenting on each instance of whatever their Influencers told them to be furious at. One thing about people like that–they exist on high alert to perceive all human action as deeply personal affronts.
And as it happens so often with me, they turn to me, expecting my blonde/gray, blue eyed white skinned self to back them up. I maintain a quiet and open expression (a practice of mine when I feel anger building( as they attempt to loop me in on their consternation and offended feelings. I KNOW this, because I’ve been white my whole life in the south, and am already feeling sorry for them at what I may have to say to their faces.
Meanwhile, a little family–and I mean little for the mother -- was so small in stature, with a baby in a stroller, and two robust little boys, carrying a basket of Target stuff.
The tall man, hands on hips, scans the wide scene of staffless checkout lanes, slowly shaking his gray head. His wife, as if they’ve practiced this at every store they’ve ever been to, asks rhetorically: “Why are all these checkouts empty?” then answers her own question, as if the idea just came into her mind: “No one wants to work anymore.”
The tall man, on cue, casts his wife a glance, then makes a quarter head turn in my direction, saying at both of us: “They don’t want to get out of bed,” he snickers at his witty observation of the lazy irresponsible unemployed They. Wife snorts, then glances at me and now I am involved.
I don’t laugh, I don’t comment, but try to sincerely return a smile–feeling sad and angry–here we go, knowing full well who “They” are. I let the words hang in the air just past the point of rudeness to my elders then said “You know, (power move by standing tall and speaking clearly,” I tend to think everybody’s doing the best they can.”
They agreed and she began talking about the package of rolls–just ONE package–she’s waiting to pay for then take it to their church dinner. Cool. The lines begin going wonky and start to split into. The small woman with the children seemed to be unsure of how to get in line while one of the boys darted behind the aisle of candy and the tall man and wife physically reacted with sharply exhaled breath and reviling grumbles about bad mothers. Again, a quarter-turn to me and I decide to disengage. They could stew in their disgust and contempt so I let the person who had less stuff get in between me and them. I was next to the family. She looked up at me and we smiled at each other. I stepped back and gestured to her in the line.
We chatted–her English was limited but we were able to hold a conversation. I talked with her kiddos. I learned one of them almost died last year from RSV.
As I pushed my car to the exit, the woman and I smiled at each other and waved. It’s really so simple– to act out of love and a desire to make people feel welcomed and comfortable and communicate: You belong here, you are welcome here.”
The older church-going couple pained me greatly because it represents so much of what is being displayed in our parking lots, highways, churches, school board meetings, living rooms, and now apparently, Oval Office: what gets in the way, what makes me wait, who takes what I am entitled to deserves my contempt. And now we are getting even by ripping, breaking, tearing, and creating breaches with a nihilistic fervor that is cruel and unrighteous.
We are a people so tightly wound up with outrage at fake enemies who want to deprive us of gain, take what we have worked so hard to have, those who are invading us, who need assistance, safety, justice. But these people are lazy, we tell ourselves, they are violent, politicians tell us, they will rape your wife and daughters, the small man in the Oval office tells us. We are offended at their enormous need. They don’t dress the right way, they are ungrateful, they don’t understand that they only exist because we allow them to. They owe us their success, and should show it by kissing the ring and submitting to being plundered.
What to do? A couple of recommendations:
Read the book of Esther.
Refuse to let the bluster and noise tame us into complacency
Resist bullies. All of them.
My white friends, let no racist remarks or revilings made in your immediate presence go unaddressed. We have an obligation to practice love with accountability among our circles.
Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.
Do what reflects the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Brush up on some history before it's completely rewritten or erased. Check out On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. Thriftbooks has it for about ten dollars. Click here.
Looking Ahead
A series of essays and short stories “Playwords.”
That safe, virtual space for women who take seriously the call to love our neighbors as ourselves, a place of belonging for women who have felt abandoned by the religious/political status quo, a place for the curious, looking for a meeting of minds and candid conversation with those like and unlike ourselves. I’m working on it!
One of the best love songs. Period.
Untwisted Scripture
Let love be without hypocrisy: Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.
Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. -Romans 12:9 and 21
