The Day After the Election

The sky cries with me.

"Its OK Mom," Olive says this morning, when I tell her Trump won. "Hillary Clinton can always try again."

How do I tell my six-year-old daughter that my sorrow is not just about Hillary's loss, or a political election between too broken parties, but about the rise of mysogony, racism, xenophobia, narcissism to a leather swivel chair in the oval office, complete with a gold pen for limiting the rights of just about everyone without a surname of Trump. The male ones that is.

We will be kinder, stronger, more brave, I tell my children, as we eat breakfast without the background chatter of NPR, like usual, a decision Nick and I made the night before when we looked at each other and knew: The kids will be scared too.

We listen to music on the dark drive to school, avoiding the potholes and rocks from a recent slide on Lowell Point road which snakes around Resurrection Bay on its way to town, all four of us silent, even Elias, who seems to understand we aren't in the mood for questions.

Nick and I choose not to go to a coffee shop for work, not ready to overhear political discussions at Rez Art, we return to our quiet cabin, with the fire we neglected to light in our early morning stumble, where I rebuff my blankets' lure, the calling of a pillow over my head to muffle sobs, and agree to take the dogs for a short walk on the beach before we sit down with our computers to work.

We weave through the alders in our backyard, cut through the woods of Miller's and Silver Derby campgrounds towards the smell of salt air. 

As Tonsina and Lola run across Spruce Creek towards the incoming tide Nick says, "I'd kind like to be a dog."

Yes please.

Turn me into a mountain goat, an orca whale, a sea star, a muscle.

One of the thousands of jellyfish, at the end of their life cycle, that have been floating to shore for weeks, dying in mass, the way salmon do, a collective last gasp, before bodies that glisten in the sun become earth again.

To be the kelp at my feet, to not worry, to not anticipate, to not question.

The eiders, crows, and gulls flee from our pups who run after them, purely engaged in the chase, the feeling of paws on stones, black sand, the salted water of the Pacific.

Two seals emerge about twenty feet out from the sand bar where Nick and I stand, four sets of eyes looking back at ours, as we look out towards theirs, curious, breathing, as the day after unfolds.

When the news of our new president came to our cabin in the woods, the sobs just fell out of me, like a waterfall, an unexpected deluge of sorrow, of fear, for the next four years.

To be kinder, stronger, more brave, I first need to let myself grieve.

So we return home, and I wrap myself in blankets, and I turn off my phone, and return to "Blue Iris", a book of poems and essays by Mary Oliver.

I read and reread her words:

"Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them the daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen... Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion." --Mary Oliver from Upstream

Living here, at the end of the road, where pavement turns to gravel, which leads to a foot trail, beneath the Kenai mountains, along Resurrection Bay, its easy to turn my attention to to the green world of moss and ferns.

To lose myself in the broken shards of seashells and the way an eagle soars.

To show my children tidal pools, climbable spruce, squirrel nests with their mysterious tunnels underfoot.

How to connect all the country's children to our living home?

How to replace fear and hate with an understanding we are all connected by the verdant thread of breath, by trees, by the water that rolls down my windowpanes, my cheeks, as my dogs lay, unquestioning, by my feet?

There is work to do-- so much real, hard, life affirming work to do.

Comments

[Kelly O]

Last night and today there have been tears and grieving in Indy too. But, now I'm getting to the point where I know I will not change and will continue teaching my kid as I was raised, regardless of what others chose to do.

[Christy]

With you Kelly, feeling even stronger in my ideals and willing to do more to make this world a more compassionate place.

[greta]

I mourn deeply the loss of so much enlightenment, the extent of which we will realize in time: backtracking in our steps toward establishing equal rights under the law for so many oppressed people, spreading compassion, protection and respect for this delicate and wild planet, hope for our daughters to move far beyond misogyny and objectification, respect and space in our hearts for religious diversity. Stunned and grieving, yet somehow did foresee that the rise of the presient elect's popularity and power was headed toward this outcome. In this short time before the transition of administrations, we peer into a dark era that haunts our children's future, and I mourn the iminent attack on all the progress we've made to brighten their world. Echoing in my mind are (1) the intricate creation and destruction of Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas to symbolize the transitory nature of life and material life; and (2) Ecclesiastes 3: ...A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance... Such is life, and we forge on.

[Christy]

Greta, you comments always touch me deep in the core. thank you for your wisdom and courage and power. Love to you my friend!