We started the day with the Danish String Quartet, and it feels like that’s the ideal way to close the day out as well. We begin in silence and end the same way – what happens in between is mostly up to us. A scary thought burdened with responsibility, and I know that feels like a lot right now – at least, it does for me. There aren’t words or sentences powerful enough to profoundly change most of our trajectories, not in a single hour or day, often not in a single year or decade, but we nudge, we cajole, we embrace in the hope of making some small difference.
This winter already feels like an eternity of bad news and trying times. My friend Chris asked me a while back how I’m dealing with everything – like the descent of fascism in this once-great country, for frivolous example – and I told him that I was focusing on how artists and people of compassion lived during such treacherous times. In my case it would be to create a safe haven in our home, for friends and family and anyone who still believed in truth and beauty and freedom and love – and to live my life as authentically and defiantly as I’ve always lived my life. Perhaps even more-so in the face of rewinding history to a more heinous time.
We move forward, in the face of oppression and hate – unleashed and unraveled with the awful complicity of misinformed, ignorant, selfish people – and we do so while trying not to get bogged down by all that awfulness. A bit of turning a blind eye, a bit of self-preservation, a bit of fighting back – the things some of us in marginalized communities have always had to do, as we have never experienced a time when we didn’t have to do it. Maybe that’s eye-opening for privileged lucky folks, maybe it’s something they still choose not to see. My place hasn’t changed much; my armor hasn’t rusted. There is power in that, and a little bit of peace too.
