One Year Later

I wrote this reflection, "An Ordinary Friday," for the Nov. 12, 2017, service titled One Year Later at the Unitarian Universalist Church ofUrbana-Champaign. (Audio at the link above)

A year ago, in the days after the election, I was in the throes of grief, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through it. I wore black for a week. I love color, but I couldn’t face it.

In the year since, I have felt the need to turn inward, to find ways to nurture my compassion and my gratitude—to balance out my anger and fear. And to turn outward as well, to engage in ways I can sustain and which sustain me.

Over these months, I have found that the world has come to feel more fragile and more precious. I have come to realize even more deeply how much I love it, this world of ours.

I was reminded of the preciousness and beauty of our world on a Friday about three weeks ago. I was sitting in Westside Park in downtown Champaign, eating an early lunch and choosing the poetry I wanted to read for our UU coffeehouse, when I heard children’s voices behind me.

“It’s the Music Man!” a little boy exclaimed. After a brief pause, he added, “He’s going to make music!” The certainty in his voice moved me, and I turned around to look.

About eight children—they were about four years old—were walking one behind the other, holding onto a rope. They were heading towards the nearby preschool. A little distance from them, on a low stool, sat a middle-aged man, a bag beside him. He reached in, took out what looked like a small horn, and began to play music. Excited sounds came from the children.

I smiled and returned to my lunch and reading. A minute later, I heard more young voices.

“It’s the Music Man!  Hi, Jay!”

About a dozen more kids were on the path to the preschool.

                                                  

“Hi Jay! Hi Jay!” a chorus of voices called out. The man kept playing the music; the children waved and smiled and chattered excitedly.

I was struck by the joy the Music Man and the children brought each other through the repetition of what was clearly a regular event in their lives. I had been reading poems that emphasized our interdependence—and here I was witnessing the joy it brings. Witnessing it brought me joy.

I was struck by how this still goes on, this kind of kindness and interdependence, even while  chaos and cruelty dominate the highest levels of our government. Noticing moments like this is what has allowed me to nurture gratitude and compassion in myself, to avoid being consumed by anger and despair. There are opportunities every day, and I try to remain open to them.

That is how I get through: looking at sunlight on the tall tree outside the Champaign Public Library where I wrote some of this homily, or noticing the engaged looks on my students' faces at Parkland as they listen to each other discuss meditation or feminism, or witnessing the kindness and joy of strangers. These moments of beauty and attention and kindness are as real as the injustices and violations that capture the headlines. Each morning, standing with palms pressed against each other and looking out the living room window, I greet the day and bring to mind the compassion and beauty I witnessed the day before; this practice of paying attention nourishes me and strengthens me and opens me. It reminds me why I love our world and reminds me why I must keep fighting for it.

---

Two works, introduced to me by Rev. Florence Caplow, our new settled minister at UUCUC, have helped lift me during the past year: 

the poem "Now, I Love You. Now, I Witness" by the UU minister Theresa Soto

and the song "I'm Gonna Walk it With You" by Brian Claflin and Ellie Grace.

What has helped you? 

Community has sustained me this year. These candles were lit at the beautiful Solstice service yesterday at our Unitarian Universalist Church; they represent individual goals for the solar year, goals pursued with the knowledge that we have the support of our community. 

An Offering of Flowers

Earlier this week, I walked around our gardens just before sunset. I noticed the exquisite intricacy of petals and leaves, the way the evening light made the colors pop.

I had come out into the backyard feeling horrified by the news from Charlottesville and sickened by the response from the White House. I had already been on edge from the escalation of tension with North Korea the week before.  

Walking around the gardens, my shoulders relaxed, my footsteps slowed. For a moment, the larger world receded, and I felt comforted and strengthened.

We are going to need comfort and strength in the days ahead, so that we can keep speaking up, keep keeping on. I offer you these flowers. May they bring you peace, too. 

Signs of the Times – at the Women’s March in Chicago

Ten days have passed since the Women’s March, and the exuberance I felt then—briefly—has been replaced by worry and dread, alternating with fierce determination and only the faintest glimmer of hope. Still, every time I look at my photos from that day in Chicago, I smile a little and feel held and lifted up by that crowd, a crowd so dense we had to move slowly when we moved at all.

The sun came out in Chicago that Saturday. The evening before, as Marilyn and I arrived in the city, heading north on Lake Shore Drive, the fog was so thick, our usual view of the skyline was completely hidden. The day after the march was grey and colder.  But that Saturday morning of the march, the sun shone on us and warmed us; we shed coats, but the pink hats with cat ears stayed on. All the aerial photos of the marches around the country show a rose-tinted crowd.

Though the organizers cancelled the official march in Chicago because the crowd was too big for the route, some of us marched anyway—slowly, cheerfully, stopping right in the middle of Michigan Avenue when needed.  As we moved across Michigan and down Jackson, walking the one block to Wabash, we chanted now and then: “THIS is what democracy looks like,” we responded to “TELL me what democracy looks like.” Or we repeated, “Black Lives Matter.” The chants moved through the crowd like waves.

Every time a train passed on the L tracks further west of us, we would cheer loudly, holding up and waving our signs. The people on the train would wave back at us, some of them holding up signs, too. Marching behind Marilyn and me was a family: grandparents, parents, and a baby girl, who was nine months old that day her mother told me.  Every time the crowd around her cheered for an L train, the baby smiled and clapped her hands, her palms sometimes slipping past each other; clapping was still new to her.  She never seem startled by our cheers; rather, she seemed to understand the rhythm of the marchers and to respond to it. The baby’s grandmother told me her other daughter was marching in D.C., that her family was represented at marches. This baby will probably hear stories of the marches from her family. But I imagine she will have some memories of her own, too, settling somewhere in her body and her mind.

Last week, I read an article about professors and librarians at Northeastern University (where I got my Master’s in 1990) who collected up signs that were discarded after the Boston Women’s March and will catalog them as important cultural and historical artifacts. Many of us who were at Women’s Marches took photos of the signs, our efforts at recording this historic moment and movement. I’m including some of those photos here. May they remind us and inspire us to keep on keeping on.

We are going to be protesting for a while; we’ll need more signs and more inspiration. If you have slogans or stories you would like to share, please leave them in the comments. I’d love to read them.

That's Marilyn holding her sign (which we got from Emily's List) and the flowers a stranger gave her. 

I love this photo of the crowd--even if the crowd meant we could not find the friends we were to meet from our UU church until later, when they left the crowd and when we could send and receive texts again.

As we walked from the rally site to the Trump Hotel, we saw these little girls marching down a closed-off Michigan Avenue with signs they had made.

Near the river, we were astonished to run into friends who live in Chicago and whom we had planned to try to see later in the day.  How we found each other in a quarter million people--entirely by chance--is beyond me!

These teens were hanging out right in the middle of Wacker Drive and were happy to have their photo taken. 

I just had to add this photo.  We were waiting in the crowd, and I could see a gap over people's heads; I asked someone why there was open space that we weren't spreading into, even though we were packed so tight as we waited to start marching. Was it fenced off?  "Oh, no it's not fenced off. That's the grass. We were asked not to go on the grass." "Oh," I replied, and we both laughed and said, "Midwest nice!"  I then held up my camera to get a photo of the grass.