Category Archives: Personal

Twenty Years

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Twenty years ago here on the West Coast, the alarm woke me to the news on NPR that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Was it grogginess, naiveté, or refusal to fathom horrific possibility in those first minutes that made me assume at first it was a terrible, freak accident? The second plane struck as I listened. It became clear that we were under attack.

My husband Jonathan was at a conference in Atlanta. We didn’t know when—or how–he’d be able to get home. While our daughters slept, I called my mother-in-law, who hadn’t yet heard the news. When I told her, she said, “This will be the end of democracy as we know it.”

Prescient, my mother-in-law.

It was time to wake the girls for school, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want them to leave behind the blissful oblivion of sleep, of the life they had lived thus far, or explain to them what had happened. I didn’t want them to go to school. I didn’t want any of us to leave the house, ever.

Since it was the beginning of the school year, Ally, 10, had invariably caught a cold—sick, like clockwork, every September. I used that as an excuse to stash her in a quiet corner in my office while I worked a reduced schedule. Emma, 13, painted her toenails red, white, and blue, and went off to school. She soon added to her list of reasons why we should get her a cellphone the ability to call out from a pile of rubble. Ally was more noticeably upset than her sister. She announced she was mad at Grandpa for inventing bombs (my father had been a scientist on the Manhattan Project). When I asked if she was worried about war, she replied philosophically, “Yeah, but I just try to stay out of trouble.”

What I most remember is wanting to hold them close, always, and how incomplete we felt without Jonathan home with us. Somehow he made it back from Atlanta after just two days’ delay. (When he needed to travel to Boston two months later, it was Emma who became distraught.)

We never subjected the girls—or ourselves–to endless replay of the towers smoking, burning, collapsing. We watched very little TV, laying eyes on the horror only once or twice. That was more than enough. Instead I devoured stories in the newspaper, particularly stories of unbelievable acts of kindness and courage.

I remember George W. Bush, caught like a deer in the headlights, reading a story about a goat to school children when he learned of the attacks. I remember members of Congress, joining hands and singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps after the doomed passengers of United Flight 93 crashed their hijacked plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of its intended target. I remember the President saying something decent and good about our Muslim brethren. Then, more alarmingly, he urged us to go shopping, and announced to the world that “You’re either with us or against us.”

A colleague at a conference by renowned trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk later reported that he’d said, in response to Bush’s us-vs-them comment, “I knew then that our goose was cooked.”

Stories of goodness started to give way to a thirst for vengeance, escalating rhetoric and militarism. Only Representative Barbara Lee voted against handing Bush a blank check with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. (She and my mother-in-law are cut from the same cloth.)

We began to bomb Afghanistan. Soon after, our home town became internationally famous because John Walker Lindh—aka the American Taliban—grew up here. Emma was double cast with his sister in their 8th grade theater production. Luckily, John’s sister was able to shine in the spotlight for the first two performances, before the news about her brother broke. At least she was not robbed of that.

Often I post something a bit more hopeful to commemorate what happened twenty years ago, but these days I find hope more elusive. The trauma of 9/11 will be with us for a long time. There are still acts of unbelievable kindness and courage, but bleakness blankets the world. Fear and uncertainty have upended the social fabric, spawning a surveillance state, conspiracy theories, and two disastrous wars. Countless lives are lost and treasure squandered. There’s a clear thread between the terrorists who aimed a hijacked plane at the heart of government and the domestic terrorists who staged an insurrection at the Capitol just this January. 

After the planes struck, it took a while for the towers to collapse. Those planes struck 20 years ago, and we have been in a delayed collapse ever since.

What’s That?!

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A couple of weeks ago, I awoke to a strange noise. It sounded like water, but not quite the same as my neighbors’ pump. Was it one of the sprinklers going haywire? It wasn’t Wednesday, the only day we’re now permitted to water in our town. Would I have to put in yet another call to our HOA’s gardener as we try to get it right between water conservation compliance and landscape life support?

Then I noticed the sound wasn’t localized. It was a low drumming everywhere. Could it be…? Of course not! Then again . . .

I rushed outside, exultant. Yes it was! Rain! Splotches darkened the patio, fell on the parched plants. It vanished in a minute, more mirage than reality (except for the photographic evidence).

This rain won’t make any difference whatsoever in our historic mega drought. It won’t even tamp down the dust or matter a jot to the ravaging wildfires consuming California. In a way, it’s a cruel tease.

Yet that distinctive smell, the first sharp inhale that mellows into lingering fecundity!

A whiff of hope.

*

Shrinkrapped subscribers may have noticed a recent mysterious post titled “Test,” with no content or images. Like the aforementioned rain, we might call this a mirage post. No, I am not experimenting with avant-garde blogging that makes Haiku look like a wordy genre. Rather, Shrinkrapped (or possibly my brain) has been broken for more than two weeks (when I first wrote something short and sweet about the elusive rain). The mystery blog was Bluehost’s tech support trying to diagnose the problem. The problem is mostly still there, but working on it! Still needing a whiff of hope, now more than ever, and I bet you are, too! So here you go, in an actual, work-around post when rain and hope—and apparently Shrinkrapped’s brains and blogs—are in short supply!

Boss

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At the risk of revealing myself to be the troglodyte that I am, I’m only vaguely aware of Bruce Springsteen. Sure, I once bought one of his CDs a lifetime ago. I also once dated a man who was childhood friends with Springsteen; they and their friends roamed the boardwalk and bars together in Asbury Park. “We knew he was good, but we didn’t know he was that good,” he told me.

In this lifetime, I’m aware that Springsteen and President Obama started a podcast together. I’ve listened to my CD a handful of times, the podcast never. My careful titration of news via scrolling New York Times headlines informs me that Springsteen had a one-man show on Broadway until the pandemic shut it and everything else down last March, and that it has just reopened.

Which is why Terry Gross’s 2016 interview with Springsteen about his memoir, on which the Broadway show is based, just popped up on my Fresh Air queue again. So I gave it a listen.

The Boss was quite charming. He recounted with wry amusement that his father, taking advantage of Bruce’s helpless dependency following a serious motorcycle accident, brought in a barber to chop off his long hair, a source of constant Vietnam-era contention. At the time this act of butchery enraged him. But the decades bring perspective, which brings memoirs, which, if you’re famous enough, bring Broadway shows.

I also learned from Fresh Air that said show had been made into a 2018 film, Springsteen on Broadway, now streaming on Netflix. So I gave it a watch.

I didn’t much like the man who had so charmed me on Fresh Air. Springsteen’s self-mockery came across as arrogance. Plus he seemed kind of shouty, angry. This was probably due to Netflix’s close-in camera work of a lone performer far away from an audience of thousands. He knew what it took to be loud and brash enough to hold a crowd. Still, Springsteen came across as too well rehearsed to feel authentic. This impression was no doubt further cemented when he talked about being a fraud–hero of the working man who had never spent a day of his life on a factory, nor even worked five days in a row until doing this Broadway show. Still, Springsteen clearly comes by his pain and anger honestly, as story after story tells of his difficult relationship with his hard-drinking, constantly wandering father.

So I’m not that much of a fan, but any real fan would be thrilled to get a two-and-a-half hour concert, the songs augmented by the spoken word. Springsteen has the same inability to carry a tune as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but he shares their gift for poetry.

I gradually warmed to the show, the man. Then midway through, his wife, Patti Scialfa, came on for a couple of duets, and I was electrified. Springsteen softened, transforming from wayward rebel into a mature man who was burnished rather than undone by his pain. Springsteen first met Patti when she was performing in the same bar. He recounted that the first words he heard her sing were, “I know something about love.”

Evidently.

The intensity of their music-making, their chemistry burned through the screen. But it was when Springsteen stood alone and began to talk that I was won over:

“Trust in a relationship is a fragile thing,” he began. “Because trust requires allowing others to see as much of our real selves as we have the courage to reveal . . . it means allowing others to see behind our many masks, the masks we wear, overcoming the fear. Or rather, learning how to love and how to trust in spite of it. That takes a little courage, and a very strong partner.

This seemed like a great toast for our daughter’s wedding next year! Until Springsteen continued:

“‘Cause in this life you make your choices, you take your stand, and you awaken from that youthful spell of immortality where it feels like the road is gonna go on forever. And you walk alongside your chosen partner with the clock ticking. And you recognize that life is finite, that you’ve got just so much time. And so together you name the things that will give your life in that time its meaning, its purpose, its fullness, its very reality. And this is what you build together. This is what your love consists of. This is your life. And these are things you can hold onto when the storms come, as they will.”

Hmm, maybe a little dark for first-time newlyweds? But it was perfect for people who have been together for a long time, and later on I read what I’d jotted down thanks to the miracle of closed-caption TV to my husband, who agreed.

The part of Springsteen’s performance that really slayed me, though, was about a surprise visit from his father. Right before Springsteen’s first child was about to be born, his father drove 500 miles unannounced (“As was his style,” Springsteen remarked). They were sitting together at 7:30 a.m. over beers (“That was also his style”), and suddenly, “My dad, never a talkative man, blurted out, ‘You’ve been very good to us.’ And I nodded that I had. And then he says, ‘And I wasn’t very good to you.’”

This fleeting, sort-of apology was almost imperceptible. But Springsteen’s perceptions are keen:

We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them and we haunt them. Or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chains of our own flawed behaviors. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence. My father, on that day, was petitioning me for a role in an ancestral life after being a ghost for a long, long time. He wanted me to write a new end to our relationship, and he wanted me to be ready for the new beginning that I was about to experience. It was the greatest moment in my life with my dad. And it was all that I needed.

I knew Springsteen was good. But I didn’t know he was that good. He is an ancestor for us all.

One Year Out

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A year ago, my psychotherapy practice safely operating through a screen, I gave away my office furniture and turned in my keys. I felt lucky about my month-to-month lease but wondered if I was making a mistake. Might things get back to normal with summer here? Premature reopening and optimism soon gave way to an escalating spike in cases and deaths, making it clear that Covid disruption was going to be profound and long-lasting.

As always, I asked my clients how they were doing. After long consideration, one replied, “I’m okay,” before adding, “When things are really okay, that’s when I’ll freak out.”

My client’s remark captures the coping through numbness that has typified the last year and a half. We’ve all experienced the Groundhog Day sensation of being trapped in the same day over and over again. Cut off from our normal lives, we’ve also had to cut off our feelings to survive.

For a long time in therapy, Covid crowded out everything else. Sessions felt like highly repetitive check-ins, with reminders to breathe and practice self-compassion. A close therapist friend and I marveled that people were willing to pay us for this. Feeling helpless and shell-shocked ourselves, we lost sight of the value of simply being there.

Gradually, there was room for deeper exploration. My clients still talked a lot about Covid, but they also talked about the 2020 elections, George Floyd’s murder, and, of course, the issues that brought them to therapy in the first place. Despite not meeting in person, it began to feel like therapy again.

Unsurprisingly, each person’s pandemic experience was filtered through psyche and circumstance. For one client who lives in constant terror at the best of times, leaving the house even while triply masked felt like stepping into a fusillade of invisible Covid bullets. Family dynamics were illuminated through heartbreaking rifts over the virus. People—including me–had to confront their often intense feelings of hostility and judgment toward unmasked people they passed on the street. There was plenty of resilience, but also a quiet unraveling.

In the midst of exhaustion and angst, something else emerged over the last year and a half: greater self-knowledge, clearer boundaries and priorities, a sense of wanting to retain some of what Covid necessitated. So many of my clients have expressed gratitude for life becoming simpler, for not having to engage with activities or people they don’t particularly like, for discovering what’s truly important to them.

With vaccines bringing relief and freedom, we are beginning to feel what we have needed to keep at bay: grief, loss, and anger, but also hope and gratitude. There’s a profound savoring of the little things we used to take for granted.

Yet reopening is also triggering the jitters. How are we to interpret a masked or maskless face? Will letting down our guard lead to a disastrous spike? Must we don social artifice, return to functions and relationships we haven’t missed, invest in elaborate ventilation and contact tracing plans for our offices? What happens now?

Perhaps my client’s prediction is coming true as our numbness begins to thaw: Now that things are better, it’s safe enough to freak out.

No April Showers, But Still . . .

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Although April showers bring May flowers, there’s been nary a drop here in Northern California. Still, hope springs eternal. So does Spring. Particularly when accompanied by a robust vaccination rollout.

One minute after we booked our first shots, we also booked our first trip in ages–a long weekend of hiking around Auburn, California. Hoping not to become April Fools, my husband and I set out April 1, almost two months after our second jab.

Auburn’s a picturesque Gold Rush town, and the American River runs through it.

Snow melt, such as it is, makes the river flow, the wildflowers are resplendent from the bit of rain we got in March, and fire season, while in our consciousness, was not yet in the air. Our self-contained Airbnb with kitchen facilities and good wi-fi awaited after a day on the trails:

Since I had cleverly sprained my ankle a week before our trip, I came equipped with a good brace and my laptop in case I had to spend our weekend at our studio while Jonathan hiked. I am happy to report that the brace worked, and I didn’t crack the laptop even once.

It was a gorgeous trip, one we savored even more given the limitations of the previous year:

  • Hidden Falls Regional Park
  • Lots of Redbuds!
  • Jonathan, Quarry Trail
  • American River
  • Nature and Nature Harnessed, Lake Clementine Dam

There was even a rainbow at the end of our last hike, a good omen before heading home:

First Day of Spring

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Yes, I know that officially yesterday was the first day of spring, but in my book, the cusp doesn’t count. The real deal is March 21st, embedded in my brain and on my calendars since childhood. That childhood was spent in New England, where usually a blanket of snow lay unperturbed by the date on the page. I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1977, where daffodils burst forth and the Japanese plums are festooned with a cloud of pink blossoms just in time for Valentine’s Day. But the calendar defies lived experience. March 21 is the first day of spring, and that’s that.

March 21, 2020, is also the wedding date of a couple unknown to me to whom I am eternally grateful. Without their long-planned nuptials, my daughter and her boyfriend would have moved from San Francisco to Brooklyn on the first of March. But they delayed their departure to witness a cousin’s joy.

That short time span, of course, was when our world turned upside down. I think of my daughter and her boyfriend trying to find an apartment and navigating the subways, newly arrived in the pandemic’s epicenter. Instead, they scrambled to see if they could rescind the notice they’d given on their nearly packed apartment. (Yes, they could!) They started working remotely for the same tech companies whose New York branches had beckoned. They kept abreast of the cousin’s rapidly shrinking wedding plans and slept unperturbed by constant sirens.

My husband and I drew huge sighs of relief. They were safe, at least for now. Not the fate, sadly, of so many. We felt the shock and sorrow of the deepening horror along with our luck.

We also felt lucky that it was spring when shelter-in-place began. The green hills, blossoms, and soft breezes would see us through until things got better—around July, I figured in those early days. Surely by then universal masking, testing, contact tracing, and cooperation would have contained the virus.

Instead, things got worse, catastrophically so for tens of millions in this country alone. Groundhog Day, the 13th month of March, our long, dark winter, the apocalypse—whatever we called this strange time warp of everything different while also the same, it seemed like it would last forever.

Then the vaccines came. It felt like deliverance, even though we were cautioned that not much could change.

Here’s what changed immediately, though. Despite some lousy side effects those two jabs can cause, the most pronounced and immediate are the rush of joy and hope. Whereas last spring marked our entrance to Hell, this spring feels like we may truly soon emerge if we don’t abandon our senses.

To celebrate (fully masked and vaccinated), my friend Mary and I met at Filoli, a gorgeous estate south of San Francisco known for its gardens.

We’ve visited many times over the years, but savored this time especially. Not just for nature’s splendor, but for the extraordinary appreciation of all the ordinary things like seeing a friend in person and not over Zoom, making plans, envisioning a good future. (Still, nature was pretty splendid):

    As for the couple who saved my daughter and her boyfriend from moving to a Covid hotspot? Today marks their first anniversary (the ceremony occurred as scheduled, though with a tiny group of masked intimates, our two not among them). Happy anniversary—and congratulations on the birth of your baby earlier this month!

    Spring is indeed here again—a time of hope and renewal.

    Our National Holiday

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    Groundhog

    Finally, the day you’ve been living over and over again for almost a year is officially here! I’m referring, of course, to Groundhog Day, hitherto an obscure and underrated holiday whose elevation I’ve proposed as an apt celebration of the American character.

    But I didn’t quite intend this level of elevation, this much capturing of our experience! Seriously, I could do without Groundhog Day as a national meme baked into our collective unconscious because of COVID Times. Like Bill Murray in the famous film, the alarm goes off and we are eternally trapped in the same day. Also with the same people, same four walls, same conversations, same Zoom screens, same Netflix stupor, same quiet unraveling. And that’s if we’re lucky!

    The tedium is broken up by panic attacks about paying the bills, homeschooling the kids, elderly parents dying alone, sniffles spelling death–you name it. Not to mention anxiety about armed anti-maskers storming state capitols and militant anti-reality mobs staging an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol under the direction of Donald Trump. So much for subscribing to the “What’s the downside to humoring him?” theory.

    This got me thinking about whether groundhogs are harmless hibernators who sometimes bite people who haul them out of their slumber, or if there’s a darker side to these reluctant rodent celebrities. As one gardening website asks, “Can that cute groundhog really cause damage?”

    Yes, as it turns out. Much like insurrectionists and their leaders, “If not properly controlled, groundhogs can cause serious structural damage when burrowing. Their tunnels break apart building foundations . . . ” An easy Google ramble further reveals the answers to some of the most vexing questions, including my favorite: “Are groundhogs good for anything?” This is artfully evaded with a sort of “All God’s Creatures” vibe, plus a passing note that they’re vegetarians.

    More pragmatically, we learn how to get rid of a groundhog:

    –Sprinkle blood meal, ground black pepper, dried blood, or talcum powder around the perimeter of your garden.

    –Puree and strain hot peppers and garlic, mix them with water and enough liquid soap to make it stick, and spray it liberally around the garden.

    Would that these methods worked with insurrectionists and conspiracy theorists!

    Anyway, today’s news is that the groundhog foretells 6 more weeks of winter. Had it been cloudy, it would have been slightly shorter. Since the daffodils are currently blooming where I live, and since the calendar notes that Spring will be here no matter what in about six weeks, I smell a hoax. Or some kind of rodent.

    At any rate, we did wake to a slightly new day on January 20. President Biden has a plan to bring us out of our long, dark winter. No groundhog can tell how long it will take to emerge from Covid Times based on the presence or absence of its shadow. Assuming vaccination rates continue to improve, here’s a better predictor of how many more deaths will occur depending on how we (and Congress) all act in the meantime.

    As Bill Murray learned in Groundhog Day, he had choices within his trap, choices that led to remaining stuck or breaking free. So do we.

    Hallelujah

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    On the same day our country marked the milestone of more than 400,000 people dead from COVID, we were finally able to collectively acknowledge and grieve our loss. President-Elect Biden reminded us, “To heal we must remember. . . . It is important we do that as a nation. That’s why we are here today.”

    In the brief space between sundown and dusk, the simple and somber pre-inauguration memorial was electrifying. Lori Marie Key, a Detroit nurse, sang “Amazing Grace”—the same as she did on her shifts tending COVID patients to lift spirits amid all the heartbreak. Gospel singer Yolanda Adams then sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Along the entire length of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, 400 light pillars—each representing 1,000 lives lost—began to glow as darkness descended. The camera slowly zoomed out to reveal the illuminated waterway, Abraham Lincoln frozen in marble and time, the Potomac beyond.

    “In Hebrew, the word hallelujah means to rejoice in praising God,” I soon learned from Kyson Parks’s The Origin and History of the Song “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen. Parks continues:

    It is a bitter lament about love and loss . . . “Hallelujah,” the song teaches us, is a refrain worthy of times of celebration, of mourning, of regret, of catharsis, and reconciliation. Cohen’s song tells a story of broken love, true love remembered and mourned, guilt, penance, and of finding peace in the vicissitudes of brokenness.

    How fitting for what we have been through. In our nation’s capital, the last line of the song—“It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” soared over the Reflecting Pool as the lights came up.

    For some of us, Leonard Cohen’s song marked the beginning as well as the end of Trump’s  presidency. On the first Saturday Night Live after the 2016 election, Kate McKinnon–who had played Hillary Clinton throughout SNL’s 2016 campaign skits–performed it for SNL’s Cold Open.

    When McKinnon finished, she turned to the audience as Hillary and said, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”

    Tomorrow Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in as our new President and Vice President.

    Hallelujah.

    This, Too, Happened

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    Far, far down the very long list of Donald Trump’s transgressions, which range from petty insults to treason, is something trivial that nonetheless bugs me no end: His ability to suck all the oxygen out of everything, grab the narrative, and destroy anything good.

    After Biden’s clear victory in the days after the election, my brief period of joy and relief quickly was subsumed as Trump’s and his enablers’ lies about election fraud sparked widespread denial and defiance among his supporters.

    “I thought at least we’d get a bit of a mental health break,” my husband said, “but things just get worse and worse.”

    Reality played out on a split screen: election officials counting ballots while white mobs screamed at them; many, though not all, GOP state legislators accepting the results while most Republicans in the U.S. Congress acquiesced to the President’s lies; the courts—including the Trump-packed Supreme Court–holding firm against ridiculous claims; Georgia Republicans Brad Raffensberger, Gabriel Sterling, and even the detestable Brian Kemp–all of whom voted for Trump—becoming unlikely Resistance heroes. Biden’s 7 million plus margin in the popular vote coexisted with the depressing possibility that once again the Electoral College would have rendered those votes irrelevant if a slice of votes in a few swing states had gone the other way. But in the end, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, then Georgia all flipped from red to blue.

    Georgia!! Thanks to demographic changes and more than a decade of on-the-ground organizing, mostly by Black women, this deep red state turned a lovely pale shade of blue. Georgia in Biden’s column was thrilling though not decisive. But a tantalizing opportunity emerged: the fate of the U.S Senate rested entirely on the outcome of Georgia’s January 5th run-off elections. Could it happen again?

    I didn’t think so. I thought it was unlikely that the Democrats could win one race, let alone the two that would be necessary to pry the Senate Majority Leader’s gavel out of Mitch McConnell’s hands.

    Stacey Abrams, founder of the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight, likes to say, ““I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic—I’m determined.” I tried to channel her attitude. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, sending postcards through Reclaim Our Vote and phone banking once or twice a week. My husband and I sent a little money to Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, more money to grassroots organizations on the ground .We were among millions who did the same. Whether or not it would do the trick, at least it would be good for my mental health.

    Phone banking is not glamorous. Mostly it’s a tedious exercise in marking “Not Home,” occasional hostility, depressing levels of disinterest. Every now and then, though, a conversation makes it all worthwhile. Calling Georgia for the run-offs had very little of the former, lots of the latter. Caller after caller picked up the phone, especially in the early weeks before every organization under the sun was calling multiple times a day.

    Almost everyone was fired up and ready to go. People expressed appreciation for our efforts all the time. They eagerly agreed to get their friends and family to vote. “Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” one man told me right before Election Day. “We’ll be there with our whole block.”

    They were, and then some—voters who mailed in their absentee ballots, put them in a drop box, or stood in long lines for early voting; newly minted 18-year-olds casting their first ballot ever; a robust Election Day showing. Turnout was high among Republicans, too, but it was higher among Democrats—with impressive gains not only among Black and suburban voters, but also among young people, Latinx, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders.

    By the time I went to bed Tuesday night on the West Coast, Warnock had been declared the winner, and it was clear that Ossoff, too, was well on his way to victory. The first Black and Jewish senators from Georgia, running on an unapologetically liberal platform.

    All our hard work paid off. Particularly impressive were the tireless and creative efforts of on-the-ground organizers and volunteers who have rolled up their sleeves forever for Georgia and the country. Stacey Abrams, Nse Ufot, LaTosha Brown, and Cliff Albright, of nationally known Fair Fight, New Georgia Project, and Black Voters Matter, are the stars of this movement, this moment. But so are those lesser known who got it done. Abrams noted, “We beat voter suppression.” As Rembert Browne, host of the wonderful “Gaining Ground” podcast summed up, “People stepping up from every corner of Georgia is what turned Georgia blue.”

    On Wednesday morning, even though it was cold, I put on my flimsy peach-colored T-shirt to mark the occasion. I had not felt so jubilant, so emotional, since Obama’s 2008 victory. What a glorious day!

    Or at least it was before it all turned to shit, joy and hope once again snatched away. Shockingly but not surprisingly, the Mob Boss incited his mob to violently storm the Capitol to stop Congress from formalizing the Electoral College votes. Of course this insurrection is the most important story

    But it is not the only one. Remember what happened in Georgia, not just once but twice. This, too, is real. We have the power to help it grow and endure.

    Dark Into Light

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    I have always loved this time of year, when fall turns into winter. The light lessens and nature’s surface goes dormant, yet life and promise teem below and out of sight. It seems that nothing’s happening, but all the while there’s productive churn from the necessary stillness.

    At least that’s what I tell my procrastinating self, especially when I’m tortured with writing. It’s what I convey to clients who feel hopelessly stuck and spend so much energy chastising themselves. Dormancy is vital to growth. Out of darkness comes the light.

    The meaning and metaphor of solstice are even more profound this year. The pandemic has been unfathomably brutal for so many, and will likely get worse before it gets better. The mind-boggling cruelty and corruption of Trump and his enablers has pummeled us into exhaustion. And that’s on top of the usual suspects—the failure to reckon with our original sin of slavery, dire and growing inequality, a warming planet. The demons of our nature too often appear to have the upper hand over the better angels.

    Yet even in these broken times there are fragments of hope. The New York Times has been running answers to “What Was Good About 2020?”: A pared-down wedding. Perspective. Realizing we are all connected. Absolutely nothing. Saving money on gas, dry cleaning, and haircuts. And my favorite: seeing into one’s colleagues’ apartments during Zoom meetings.

    Many people I know have noted how the forced disruption has also eliminated much of the frenzy and artifice life demanded before. Acts of kindness and compassion abound. One of my friends speculated that perhaps the murder of George Floyd sparked a sustained uprising unlike other murders of Black men and boys before him because more White people, experiencing their own hitherto unknown hardship and loss, could at last empathize. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch spinning darkness into light, but there’s something to it.

    And now there is a vaccine, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in January 20. There are dark times ahead, but Spring is coming.