10 August 2020
Woof. Still here. Kids are going back to “school” tomorrow so we will be resuming some modicum of routine here during the week days. I’m happy about it. Or rather, my astrology is happy about it. Co-Star keeps telling me I need some routine to stay sane! It’s like I’m cope trippin’ a little bit!
Speaking of coping, I’m so happy for my friends’ Simone and Rob and their epic new single Cope Trip. I feel obligated, motivated and inspired to make things in this moment when I see my friends making things. It’s accountability, yo. And I AM making things. I am painting a lot... which is why I am here a little less... and I am getting more grounded into the big project that we are working to begin actualizing before year-end.
I am thinking a lot of thinks about my social responsibilities right now. I hope you are too. I mean, bare minimum, y’all GOTS to vote this November, and for all of your future local voting opportunities as well. I have school-aged kids so I’m thinking a lot about public education and kids with so much less than my own. I’m thinking about the choices I can make to make that bridge shorter between us. I am thinking about my language, and how it’s expanding with all of the learning I am doing around racial and environmental justice. New language, new ways to articulate things that I have felt for so long, are changing me. I can see it happening. I am growing more empowered to change the more I understand about my self, my role, and my privilege. It’s progress.
I’m fighting against the daily, hourly impulse to curl up in a ball and sleep til this is all over. When I fight that urge, however, I’m accepting into my body that the fight is never over. The pandemic is only giving us space and time right now to face our problems. We got so many fish to fry. We need climate justice. We need poverty to be obliterated. We need to stop separating families. We need prison reform. We need to burn our current administration to the ground.
It’s overwhelming, right? You can only eat an elephant one bite at a time (but don’t really eat an elephant! you know what I mean)... I bring this phrase back to myself when my projects and my responsibilities make me want to jet. Or just go to sleep. Or eat a gallon of ice cream. I know there’s always one thing I can do each day that takes a bite out of the elephant. Right now, just one thing is so much. If we all commit to one thing once a day that gets the world closer to the one we want to live in, the elephant will just be bones before we know it... and the world will look a whole lot more like the one we all deserve.
Eat the elephant.