Going dormant; waking up

In which life goes on despite disappointment & despair

Since the election, I’ve been suffering, as so many have, from the loss of all my moorings. I went to sleep on Nov. 5 knowing — I thought — the essential mind and temper of my country. I awoke assured that I did not.

And so a long night ensued of questioning and doubting. And during that night what I needed most was silence. No pundits screaming or pleading, absolutely no circular firing squads or postmortems to mansplain/Dem-splain/Prog-splain to me why’s I already perfectly comprehended. It was winter and I was a tree. I shed my leaves and went dormant.

This is what that looked like: I embarked on a news fast—cancelled a bunch of subs, deleted a bunch of apps, hid everything else. I put strict limits on my Meta-related socials, reserving only TikTok from the pyre. (I was curious to see a platform executed in real time. As we all know, it ended up being more of a zombie story—a short death, an ugly resurrection, with no one certain if the deceased is “the same” as before).

TL;dr. I was so successful, in short, in weaning myself from the unreal world of socials and legacy media that, by January, I was starting to forget to take my phone to work—my colleagues marveled; one called it “a sign of health.” And all this lasted from the moment in the wee hours of Nov. 6 I realized the country had chosen deportations over democracy to somewhere around a week into the California fires, when a chance slip of the TV remote clued me in that something catastrophic was unfolding in the West.

So, let’s call it around 80 days, this unofficial period in which I went no contact with the world. I chose rest. (Minus the Starbucks. IYKYK.) I prioritized my mental health. I celebrated my wedding anniversary and birthday, enjoyed a happy holiday with my family for a change.

Of course, even as I made merry among family or wrote up my syllabi, a stone hung around my neck—the heaviness of crystallized anguish for all the things I’d lost. Not just the loved ones I’ve parted from forever because of their embrace of the fuhrer’s festering hatreds. But the loss of friendliness itself. The way the “never met a stranger” girl just kinda… stopped speaking to folks at the grocery store.

LOL. But don’t feel too sorry for me. During that period of grieving—for my country, my lost ideals, my lost faith in humanity and even in God—I was also consumed with rage. Cursing God and Man. Talking loudly to myself in the supermarket. Giving folks that “I wish a heifer would” stare at the slightest provocation.

I even went shopping for guns.

Amid all that, the solstice came bringing a brutal cold snap that whipped through our world. I buried myself deeper under the covers, deeper in my rage... until a few days ago, I beat the sunset home and realized … we’d gained a full two hours of daylight since December. The dark days were turning light. Spring planting days were drawing near…?

So like a mewling kitten protesting the light, I decided to open my eyes to the view. I entered the house and turned on ABC Nightly News with David Muir.

And, yeah, train wreck—I expected no less. Barely a week in, the wails from the betrayed are rising like incense to the heavens—the Magat god-king’s pride must be so inflated. Meanwhile, trade wars loom and the least qualified cabinet in history finds itself facing a bona fide disaster in the mid-air crash at Reagan National. Predictably, we are being told it was the fault of DEI.

But, I’ve got two months of practice in detachment under my belt and a bone-deep, epigenetic understanding of white folks’ bullshit. So I smothered the automatic flicker of outrage and tried to focus on something higher. Or maybe something deeper?

I want to know if I love myself enough not to give in to their hate.

There have been fleeting glimpses of that other way of being for those paying attention to such. Even keeping my news consumption to sips, I’d caught the clips of Bishop Budde at the inauguration, and the choir-singing, vestry-serving, cradle Episcopalian part of me swelled with pride watching her.

Sad to say, what I felt in my heart for the faith she professed … that’s dust. Killed stone dead by the faithful, who are, by the way, still ranting about that sermon and calling for Budde’s deportation and death.

So, the path to love that winds through the church? That’s closed for repairs… permanently for all I know.

Still, when I look out the window at the winter bones of my garden, something in my heart stirs.

For the past two weeks, that something has been flat out singing as I’ve worked on, of all things, a stream protection grant—with a deadline of today. Weaving a narrative of food forests and happy pollinators as a partial reply to the poverty and blight in the center of our tiny, neglected town awakened me to something…

The quote is from The Path of Roses, a book written in 1912 that I’ve owned for nearly 20 years and which I finally feel like I’m starting to understand.

My period of dormancy is passing. Bud break is here.

The “reality show”—the world of outer appearance—belongs to Trump for the next four years. The ill consequences of that choice will fall hard on the people who voted for him, the people who failed to vote, and the people who failed to vote strategically. Those without a plan or any higher purpose will likewise be swept up in the train of tragic consequences.

But there is more, far more, to life than the passing show—and in that other reality, I’m feeling an inner attunement, watching synchronicities flourish and blessings shower down upon people and organizations who do good work.

These feelings are quite detached from church, though they also feel very much of God. And that, for now, is enough.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a view of the pond on my grandparent’s farm. the beauty always soothes me. It’s my cousins’ favorite place to fish.