IMPACT SHOPPING

I love that the internet has forced companies to be more transparent, and that we as consumers increasingly have opportunities to spend our money on products that support living wages, environmentally sound production, minority empowerment, give-backs, and/or all of the above. 

BALANCING BUDGET & CAUSES

Some of these items are more expensive than the versions made by standard production because it costs more to pay people properly or use higher quality, more conscientious production.

I don't buy all my gifts or purchases from these organizations, but I make a point to buy at least some from them, even if that means fewer gifts under the tree. My daughter cares deeply about the environment, so WWF and 4Ocean are my go-tos for her. Mom cares about empowering those who've been abused, so Sudara for her. I've been wanting to buy my (blind) husband something from 2 Blind Brothers for a while now, and he really needs clothes this year, so it works out well. I adore IRC's highly rated work with refugees, and have sometimes asked people to make my gift an item from their Rescue Store in my name. 

Even if you can only purchase one impact gift, that's one less item supporting slave labor or pollutant manufacturing or systemic oppression. 

SHOP BY CATEGORY & IMPACT

Gifts for All Ages - Fair Trade, Individual Artists, Conservation

One World - Fair trade and recycled games, jewelry, housewares, etc. 

Uncommon Goods - UG includes handmade, upcycled, fair trade, and other unique gifts.

Ten Thousand Villages - Lovely handmade items that have been positively impacting communities around the world for a couple decades 

GlobeIn - Handmade, fair trade gifts and housewares from around the world

World Wildlife Fund - Clothes and gifts to support endangered animal populations and ecosystems

4Ocean - T-shirts, bracelets, reusable straws, and other gift items fund 4Ocean's ocean clean-up efforts. As of this writing (11/26/19), they have removed 7,192,443 pounds of plastic waste.

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Toys - Fair Trade & Give-Backs

Change the World - This is a collection of several Fair Trade shops from around the world.

Oompa - Great collection of fair trade toys for babies and young children

Cuddle + Kind - Handmade, fair trade dolls for infants and young children - each doll purchase provides 10 meals to children in need


Clothes - Fair Trade, Green, Empowerment, & Give-backs

Pact - Clothes and linens for adults & children that meet fair trade, safe chemical processes, water conservation, and community investment standards (They're having a great "Green" Friday sale)

​2 Blind Brothers - Empowerment & give-back gifting: Owned and operated by two blind brothers: clothes and accessories with tactile cues for sighted or vision impaired adults and kids with proceeds going to solutions to retinal diseases and/or guide dogs. Fun fact: you can shop blind and have them select a gift within your parameters, or you can create your own shop blind collection and share it with friends 

Sudara - Fair trade clothing for all ages that supports sex trafficking survivors and sex trafficking prevention

​Design by Humans - Empowerment: Owned and operated by people with disabilities, DbH offers sassy T-shirts with empowering messages for people with disabilities

​Rebirth Garments - Empowerment: Clothing for everyone of every gender, body type, and physical ability

Krochet Kids - Handmade clothes for all ages and crocheted animals empower women to break the cycle of poverty

​VIDA - Women's clothing and accessories made in fair trade facilities with proceeds funding literacy programs - my clothing collection is produced by VIDA.  They have a fantastic Black Friday Sale. 

Food Gifts - Empowerment, Fair Trade

Em's Coffee - Owned and operated by people with disabilities, Em's coffee sells & ships coffee in bulk

Women's Bean Project - U.S. located nonprofit supporting economic mobility to help women break the cycle of poverty for themselves and their families

Fair Trade Chocolate - Want chocolate that doesn't rely on child slavery for harvesting crops? This link leads you to lots of choices. 


Gifts for Special Medical Needs - Empowerment

Pretty Sick Supply - PSS is owned and operated by people with disabilities and provides comfort and gift items for those with chronic illnesses, special medical needs, and disabilities. They have awesome eyepatches, compression sleeves, T-shirts, jewelry, etc. They also have a line of empowering items for depression/suicide attempt survivors. 

Donations in the Name Of - Give-back

International Rescue Committee (IRC) - If you have people on your list who would love to see positive, humanitarian efforts made in their name, the Rescue Store is a way to select a specific gift (blanket, nonelectric lamp, newborn baby kit, year of school for a girl, etc.) for refugees and at-risk groups. IRC is my all-time favorite nonprofit, and consistently earns ratings in the 90th percentile by independent watchdog agencies for how directly they apply their budget to their mission statement.

IDignity - If you have a loved one in Central Florida trying to get on their feet and in need of help restoring identification documents, IDignity can help. If you or someone you love might want to help others access jobs, voting rights, medications, etc. by restoring their lost/stolen documents, you can donate in that person's name. 

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Image by Gerhard Gellinger from Pixabay ​

​As a creative writing professor, one of the things I often see students struggling with is making the transition from using writing as an escape from the world's trappings to allowing writing to become the bread and butter of their lives. Many people still live under the mistaken impression that creatives must starve for lack of career opportunities, but there are so many avenues to make a great, creative living. The big things that can stop a creative career from happening have more to do with what goes on inside the artist than what's available in the world. This transition from hobby writing to professional writing is both a doorway and an obstacle to a creative career. 

Most school programs don't build in much information about how to navigate this, so I thought I'd share the most recent version of what I tell my students when they come to the place where the pressure is greater than the joy.

There's something wonderful and terrible about going to school for the creative thing you love. More so in making a profession out of it. 

The wonderful is that you can completely immerse yourself in the work that matters most to you, develop your ability to make that work more authentic and of greater quality, and build a community of people who care about pursuing their craft.

The terrible thing is that suddenly this creative play that has always been a way of escaping the drudgery of life is now the drudgery. It is the stuff you must do, not just the stuff you choose to do. In school, it's the stuff you must do for grades. In career, it's the stuff you must do so you can eat and keep the lights on. 

One of the hardest things about going to school for writing or any art is that for the first time you must find the balance between these two. 

Sometimes you're going to turn in work that isn't your best. In a deadline-driven world, that will always be true. But one of the best ways to get your work closer to your best is to find a way to have fun with it, even when it's required. 

Art is rebellious and personal and universal and wondrous and scary all at once. When you're finding yourself under enough pressure that it stops being fun, notice, give that a nod, and look for ways that you may be able to let some of the adventure back in. I recommend artist's dates (see Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way) and rebellion. By rebellion, I don't mean jumping in a tie fighter or heading off to the Hunger Games. I mean look for something else that you can safely put off in order to have a little fun, something that is not your writing. Maybe it's laundry day. Take yourself to a coffee shop and write instead. Live with the pressure of not having clean underwear for a couple days instead of the pressure of not having freedom to write spontaneously, when you want to. 
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Or look for an idea in the world that drives you mad because people seem to think this is how reality works, but it's not - write a bit that rebels against their misconception. This can be satire, fiction, whatever. Just something that gives you that subversive satisfaction that you're doing something you're not supposed to. 
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Of course, that has to be balanced, too, because walking around in dirty clothes for too long has its own bad consequences, but you see what I mean. 
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Look for ways to keep writing an adventure, or you'll grow to hate it. It gets easier to maintain the balance the more practice you have, but we all need to refresh our sense of wonder now and then.

Stories start as a scratching, a tapping, a dripping faucet - something that niggles at us as we go about our day like a shadow that keeps shifting in our periphery. At least, this is how they start for me, and for most of the authors and writing students who've shared their processes with me. Something, whether beautiful or problematic or curious, will not leave us alone. 

So we turn our heads. We look in the direction of the shifting shadow and see a bit of a shape to it, and we write down what we see. 

Sometimes this leads to the next thing and the next thing. Those times are gifts, when the story reveals itself to us in full, continuously, as we sit with it and open ourselves to the words that bring it into the world.

Most times, we have fits and starts. The scratching creature gets skittish and scurries away the moment we've turned our attention toward it. We have a line or two, a page or two, and don't know where the little beast went or how to follow. We look for its tracks in the rooms and landscapes of our minds, and along the way, we see what it saw as it ran. 

Sometimes, we find it that same hour we started searching. Other times, it takes weeks, months, or even years. There are traces of story that started in me over 20 years ago, back when I was in high school, and I'm only now picking up their footprints. In the time since they first tickled at the edge of my conscious to now, I've written many, many other stories. And even in these, I've come to dead ends and missing trails at different moments along the journey.

Some of us call this writer's block. I have come to think of it as not being ready for the story, or for the particular part of the story, that we're writing. 

Stories are one of our most ancient containers for truth. When we didn't understand nature, or cruelty, or love, or time, we made myths to contain these truths so we could hold them up to the light and examine them outside ourselves. This helps us navigate the complexities of our own experience. 

But what if a story has a truth to tell that we don't yet know ourselves, as its writer? 

Here are some things we can do when we realize our story has outrun us:

• Take a break. This is a timeworn strategy, but worth remembering. If we step away for awhile, we might gain perspective that will open the dams again and let the story rush back through.
• Research. Even if your story is not history or science driven, even if it is in your home town on the same timeline as your life, you don't know everything about it. If you did, you wouldn't be writing it in the first place - we write to explore a problem, to get resolution. Look at the medicine, the geography, the different expectations of genders and ethnic groups, the urban legends, the "normal" of your story's world and people. 
• Is there a character you don't like? Read blogs and memoirs by people who have similar traits and learn what it's like to be them. These characters you dislike often have something to teach you, but they won't tell you your secrets knowing how much you hate them. Find a way to care about them, even just a little, and see how they suddenly explode into complex, breathing souls. You can still write them as unlikable, but now they will be multifaceted and believable, more capable of illustrating the core of the story.
• Is there a character you love too much? Oh, dear, this is hard. But we have to let them hurt, and we have to let them hurt because of their own flaws. If you work to hard to protect your character's image, no one will believe them anyway, and this perfect character, just like your villain, will stop talking to you. If you can't love someone, warts and all, they know better than to show you their warts. 
• Work on multiple projects at once. If you've taken a story as far as you can without doing the research and work above, it helps to take out other projects and give them more of your energy. In May, Joli Jensen wrote a fantastic article in The Chronicle about how to manage multiple projects according to your schedule and energy levels. Remember, in cases where deadlines aren't involved, it's OK to shift between which projects receive your strongest commitment when your A story goes silent on you. 
• Treat your stories like friends. Stories, like people, sometimes need space. Keep coming back to check on them, but respect the relationship. You can have more than one friend at a time, but it's unlikely you'll be engaged in deeply focused, intimate conversation with more than one or two of them in the same moment. Enjoy the time you spend with each of them, and invite the others over in their turn. Maybe one will teach you something that grows you enough to understand the truth in the others that you weren't ready to receive when it first came to you.
• Examine your demons. Even though most of my characters and their circumstances are not much like me, I often find them facing similar internal challenges to mine. Sometimes when I'm stuck, it's because I need to do some soul searching of my own before I can write a character honestly through their flaw. If you think this might be the case, I recommend doing some guided journaling. Many 12-step programs use the tool of a "fearless" personal inventory that can be adapted to addressing our demons as writers so that we can write our characters honestly as they address theirs.

What about you? Do you have other strategies for making yourself ready for the story that wants to be told? 

Last night, my husband and I went to a Florence + the Machine concert. I'd bought the tickets back in February as an anniversary gift to him. He likes Florence OK (I love her), but I really bought them because of the opening act. He loves Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats. 

When we got to the arena, there were signs posted apologizing that the Night Sweats wouldn't be able to play, and thanking Grace VanderWaal for stepping in to support the tour. 

Before I talk about the young Miss VanderWaal, the reason for this blog post, I have to tip my hat to my husband who shrugged, smiled, and stayed as excited for the show as if one of his favorites were still playing. Kidney failure and losing 100% vision will turn many people bitter, but my husband has never lost his love of life. In fact, I think it's increased.

OK, back to Grace. 

Before last night, I'd heard only one song by her, but I'd heard it a lot. She's featured in the Google "2016 Year in Search" ad below. For over a year, I taught an essay lesson focused on ad analysis, and this was one of the ads most commonly chosen by my students. Grace's "Light the Sky" is the first sound of hope in this ad, and even after reading hundreds of essays and rewatching the ad over and over to inform my grading of these essays, I never got tired of the moment her voice breaks the silent pause that turns the tide of the ad. 

Video source: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIViy7L_lo8

​So even though I don't know her work well, I was happy for the chance to know it better.

And then there was her band on the stage - three adult musicians rallying the crowd to usher this tiny 15-year-old out to hop around with that ukulele in her glitter eyeshadow and flowered dress, singing in this otherworldly voice that was at once knowing and vulnerable. They made her look older. They contoured her cheeks and put a bow-tied scarf around her twiggish neck, and she looked like she might actually have the life experience - almost - to back up her grown-up singing.

And then she spoke. She was as self-conscious and uncertain as any kid would be in front of tens of thousands of people. She was sweet and grateful and stumbling when she spoke, and didn't know what to say past thank you, and I hope you like it. And I realized she's younger than my daughter. And it kind of broke my heart. 

It's not that I wanted her not to have this beautiful world of possibility. It's that I kept thinking, does she ever get to hang out with other kids and just be a kid? Does she get to have sleepovers and go to the movies and have to figure out how to pool the fifty cents she found in the couch cushions with her friends to order pizza? Does she get to hate school except for that one class? Will she be able to date without the world scrutinizing her as she figures herself out? 

I found myself worried that the music industry would feed her uppers and deny her food to keep her peppy and thin. I found myself praying that someone was looking out for this sweetie, the way I'd want someone to look out for my daughter.   

I examined the band with parental suspicion. Maybe I was projecting (I'm sure I was projecting), but I think they felt protective over her, too. And I watched the crowd - you couldn't find a more loving, considerate crowd than the one at a Florence + the Machine concert, and I felt grateful for this tiny person that she was singing for people who were for her, even those of us who came to see someone else. Everyone wanted her to succeed. When she stumbled through lyrics to one of her new songs, nobody flinched, and we cheered all the harder when she opened it up and made it perfect in the next verse. 

There's a lot of mess in the world. We're all so fragile. But maybe there's hope. If people like Florence Welch and Grace VanderWaal keep drawing crowds, and if each of us in those crowds live out the message of hope that these ladies bring, maybe someday the world will be a safe place for talented children to share their light. God, look over this little girl and her big, beautiful voice. 


More from Grace here: https://www.gracevanderwaal.com/

And more from Florence here: https://florenceandthemachine.net/

Also, Get Well Soon wishes to Nathaniel Rateliff.
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I am planting. I've added golden dewdrops (the flowers are purple - go figure), purslane, Texas sage (not edible), to the back yard. Really, it's just a patio, but it's open to a large green space with a view of trees and the dilapidated golf course that stretches through my neighborhood. In the front, I've decided I'm up for a challenge, and planted gardenias. My husband's grandmother used to grow them, and he misses the smell. He lost his eyesight in 2016, so there's some significance to this. I also added an orchid because my friend Dawn says they're ridiculously easy, and I want something pretty out there if it turns out I'm not ready to level up to the high demands of gardenia bushes.

I am planting. I started teaching screenwriting in December, and so I am writing screenplays now. Short ones. I've written a few scripts before, but now I need to pull them into my wheelhouse rather than treating them as side adventures. Over the past three weeks, I collaborated with a colleague to write an 8-page script that we hope the film department will produce for the festival circuit. I am sending out my most polished novel to agents, and I am writing short things - poems, flash, threads of story for a novel with an ensemble cast. 

The soil is fertile now, but it's been a long winter for us - three years of increasingly fallow living as we journeyed through my husband's illness. He has Type 2 diabetes, and a year after losing his eyesight, he lost his kidney function. Everything extra fell away from our lives, along with some of the essentials.

Our weekend adventures - we used to take meandering road trips. 

Living in our downtown home - we have moved to a suburban townhouse.

My daughter - she moved in with her dad when the stress of living with terminal illness affected her too deeply to stay.

Some losses have measurable value. Others spread their bleeding emptiness through every layer of our being. 

In January, we were blessed by a generous friend who gave Felix a kidney. While this hasn't brought back his eyesight, it's stabilized everything else. Felix is healthy and beginning to enjoy cooking and small adventures again. He and my daughter have laughed together a handful of times this year.

Without the 3-7 weekly medical visits involved in kidney failure, or the 30-mile drive (120 miles for two round trips daily) to and from my daughter's magnet school, I am left with time.

​And a heap of compost.

​Dead things that have collected in my soul over the past three years. 

Sometimes, the smell overwhelms me, and I lay in bed and cry at all the loss. 

​But on good days, I sew handfuls of my decomposed life into the soil, and I write, and I wait for the gardenias to bloom. 

So here we all are, a week and a half into NaNoWriMo. Do you have 16,670 words written? I don't. I think I have about 3,000 words. And I feel successful AF. Here's why, and some things that might help if you're feeling less than successful today:

• Like kids, not all novels grow the same way. They learn to walk, talk, climb, and consider consequences at different times. There's a general expectation for these developments, but even kids who don't fall into the norms charts have something very special to offer. I once worked with a five-year-old whose piano teacher had given up on him at the age of two when he was able to transpose sheet music to a new key in his head and play it instantaneously. She said he was more advanced than she was, and she had nothing left to teach him. Why did I work with him? He didn't know how to interact with other five-year-olds. Let your novel grow at its own pace. If that means you don't have the same word count as you expect, figure out what you do have and rely on that strength to grow your draft. Wait till revisions to worry about the other stuff. 

 

• I knew from the beginning that I'm not a word count writer, so I didn't try to write by word count. My goal for this month has been to find entry points into a story that was too big for me. I've found three entry points already, and these characters' individual stories are growing beautifully. While I don't have 16,000+ words on the page, I do have some of the biggest challenges of the book solved already. On November 1, I did not. What do you have today that you did not have on November 1? How can you build the rest of the month around the way you do write instead of the way you don't?

 

• Jessica Wunder, one of my writer friends, says her goal this month is to keep pushing the story forward. She knows she lets herself nitpick, so she's forcing herself from scene to scene, and this is getting it done. I am the opposite. My novels don't grow from point A to point B. They are more like cell division: one cell becomes two, become four, become eight, and so on. The different bits grow simultaneously, so I grow my work by going back and expanding what exists. How does your work grow? Forward? Backward? By prompt? At the cellular level? If it's not growing, it may be because you're expecting a kind of growth that isn't natural to you or your work. Pause and consider when growth spurts have happened before. What do those look like? How can you create similar conditions for your writing now?

 

• Another writer friend, Leslie Salas, says she always leaves something unfinished at the end of a writing session. If she doesn't complete the scene, her brain will naturally pick at it while she's away from her writing, and it takes less time to warm up to the work the next time she sits down. If she finishes a scene, she makes sure to get a few sentences or questions into the next one before closing up shop for the day.

 

• If you're stuck, there are a few things you can do to take the pressure off and get unstuck. One is to step away from the work. Take a walk, bath, drive, whatever. But do something that gives your brain a break. If you're stuck because you don't know a character or setting or some other part of the book, open a new file, one that will never show up in the novel, and brainstorm. Write out scenes you don't intend to use. Write an interview with your character, or with three characters that aren't important to the book, but who know your character - one who likes them, one who doesn't, and a third of your choice. Ask yourself what scares you about the story. If nothing scares you, that's the problem. You're writing safe. That will bore you and the readers. Find a theme or idea that scares you and let your character wrestle with it. 

 

• Sit down next to another writer and be anti-social. Instead of visiting with each other, write. There's nothing like hearing another writer tapping away at their keyboard to get you motivated to tap away at yours.

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These are just a few things that I've found that work for me in writing in general, not just for Nano. If you have more tips to add to the comments, please do! 

NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and if you're a fiction writer who wants to get a novel out of your system, you may be wringing your hands over it. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, happens every November as a communal push to get a novel on paper. The idea is simple: the average novel has 50,000 words, and November has 30 days. If you write ~ 1,667 words each day of the month, you'll have a first draft by the end of it. (If you want to know more, check out NaNoWriMo.org.)

I don't see myself as a word count writer. When I try that, it feels like I'm missing the relationship with my characters that I so love. I write to go deeper with people, to understand places I've never been, to open myself up to the possibility that I don't know everything. (More a fact than a possibility, but it's so easy for so many of us to forget this.)

And, I write out of order. The Former Lives of Buildings, the novel that I'm currently shopping around to agents, happens on four personal timelines of a character with memory problems, and was the first project where I fully embraced writing different threads of story and weaving them together in some kind of sequence later on. But all of my longer writing projects have jumped around as I've written them, leaving me to fiddle with scenes like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle during the revision process.

So, again, I don't see myself as that kind of writer, one who can just write the first 1,667 words one day and then sit down to write the next 1,667 words on the following day, for 30 consecutive days.

And, as a result, I haven't tried NaNoWriMo before. I have used the month to do a mad dash on revisions for novels, and that's worked well. But drafting a novel always seemed like a silly thing for me to try in this manner. 

But the world is crazy right now, and I need to create something while we're in the midst of all this destruction. I don't even care if I have a whole novel at the end of this. I just need to make something. 

So, here's what I'm going to do. The novel I've been researching for the past year has an ensemble cast spread across the globe, and it's felt too big for me to sink my teeth into all this time. But I've written a bit from this character, and a bit from that one, and I guess I have about 20 pages of bits. And that, I think, is how this book needs to get birthed: bit by bit. 

I'm going back to the classroom for this - I know consecutive, consistent word counts don't work for me. But prompts, the mainstay of the creative writing classroom, do. I am gathering articles, character prompts, inspiring photos, and other materials that can work as entry points to get at different characters in the book. Each day in November, I'll write from one of these prompts. I have a good feeling about this. I think it will give me all the threads I need to sit down and start weaving in the months that follow. 

What about you? Have you done NaNoWriMo before? Are you considering doing it for the first time? How have you prepared? How have you kept going in the midst of it? I'd love to hear about your experience.

​It’s been a year since my husband’s kidneys failed. I was prepping the conference room at HD Counseling for a painting workshop. People would start arriving in about ten minutes. My phone rang, and our friend Jen told me that Felix was waiting on an ambulance. They’d been seeing a movie, and he couldn’t breathe.

 It was so close to the start time that people would already be on their way to my workshop. I wouldn’t be able to cancel until everyone had arrived. Jen passed the phone to Felix. He didn’t want me to cancel. Jen promised to give me updates, and I promised I would meet them in hospital immediately after the workshop was done, sooner if he needed me.

For the next three hours, I served coffee and tea and painted with a roomful of lovely humans who were ready to pack up at any moment if Felix took a turn for the worse, and ready to keep me laughing and enjoying the process of creating for as long as he did not.

After cleaning up, I stopped by the house and grabbed the hospital essentials - toiletries for both of us and a week’s worth of strategically interchangeable outfits for me. My husband is newly blind. I don’t leave him alone in hospital. I followed Jen’s final text to his room number. Thanks to the painting session, I’d never been more at peace on my way to an emergency.

Over the twelve months since then, the shape of our lives has continued to change, funneling through dialysis clinics, our daughter’s high school programs and the very real needs that can push a teenager toward a confident adulthood or lifelong insecurity, moving house in order to nail down a more constant budget, the erosion of my stepdad's memories, the odd circumstances of the death of my Aunt Sandy, health issues in our extended family, issues with my own health, seismic changes in family structure.

It’s been a cataclysmic year for us.

I am worn down to my threads. I peck at a chapter here, a painting there. I forget thumb drives when I go on writing retreats, research themes too big for me (but that are somehow easier than sitting in the mottled present tense of what is my real life). I find myself drifting. Longing for beauty.

And this is why we need art. This is why we need story. This weekend, my despair was so great I couldn’t sit alone. My husband was so exhausted from having his blood artificially cleaned and pumped back into him that he had no energy to distract me. So I gobbled up What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty. Someone had mentioned it after they asked what my novel, The Former Lives of Buildings, was about. My protagonist, Like Moriarty's, wakes in the hospital having forgotten important events. I intentionally waited until my own book was finished before reading Moriarty’s (I’m currently shopping TFLoB around to agents). Alice's forgotten years helped me forget my losses for a day.

Last week, I spent some listless time walking around Adjectives Market, a co-op type shop filled with vintage, upcycled, and original ephemera. Sometimes, when I can’t stand being in my own head, I think about which room I’ll paint next in our new place.

I’ve temporarily stopped offering workshops. I haven’t hosted Artist’s Way groups in months. I am still hosting my writing circle because I don’t think I will survive these waves of loss without  the collective writing experience for a few hours a month. But otherwise, I have let go of most of the peopling part of my art life.

But the part where I get to leave my life for a moment by living in the head of someone else - whether it’s my character or another author’s, the part where the overlap of red oil paint just past the edge of the white strokes of a bird’s feather, even the capture of real forget-me-nots in a drop of glass  on Etsy - these quiet offerings of beauty keep me breathing, in, out. They ask nothing of me across a year that has already stolen far too much.  Beauty asks nothing. It just exists alongside all the ugly and lets us notice it, or not.

Make art. We all need to breathe.

Photo by Gabriela Pinto. Used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

​In forty-five minutes, the United States will inaugurate Donald Trump as our next president. I am not hoping for disruption during the ceremony. I am not wearing black as a signal of mourning. I am not planning to march with the women tomorrow, though my heart goes with them.
 
I am also not watching the inauguration – the timing of my sitting down to write this is deliberate, to the minute. I will be finishing it as the ceremony begins.
 
I have been on the right side of the fence. I have been on the left. I have dear friendships with people on both sides.
 
I am watching them yell at each other across the fence.
 
I am watching them yell about the other side to those on their own side of the fence.
 
I am watching both sides believe that the other side is full of false media, ulterior motive, and manipulative posturing. I am watching both sides assume the media they trust is correct about the other side. I am watching both sides get upset when people on the other side rely on their own trusted media.
 
Both sides believe the other is nefarious in its desires. Both sides get angry when the other side does not recognize the complexity of their opinion.
 
Both sides are treating each other exactly the same way.
 
The language is different. The means of calling the other side out is different. But the treatment is the same.
 
Of course I have my opinions. Of course I am not neutral. On some issues, I think the right is correct. On other issues, I think the left is correct. On most issues, I think it will take a complicated blend of both approaches to find the true solution.
 
This is my protest.
 
I protest the division. I protest the name-calling, the posturing, the unproductive way that we are pushing each other further and further away. In doing this, we are pushing each other deeper into the opinions we disagree with. In doing this, we are making productive compromise less likely. In doing this, we are ensuring that no one on the other side will ever listen to our side.
 
This is my protest.
 
I commit to building bridges. I commit to listening to people who disagree with me. I commit to treating them with dignity, even if they do not afford me the same dignity. I commit to being a conduit to productive conversation.
 
I am not neutral. I have very strong opinions, and seeing people who don’t seem to “get it” makes me as angry and frustrated as anyone. And this is why I need to build bridges. Because their opinions are just as complicated, just as based in their own life experience and knowledge and careful reflection as mine. Their opinions are based on the information they have access to, just like mine are based on the information I can access. If I shout, why would they listen? If I call names, why would they trust my good intentions? If I treat them without dignity, why would they treat me or my ideas with dignity?
 
I will do my best not to allow my own behavior to hurt the progress toward what I believe is good and true and right for our country.
 
As long as no one is listening to each other, we allow the political machine to progress unchecked. We may think we’re resisting injustice, but the other side believes they are resisting injustice, too. All of us want justice. That’s our common ground. Our biased press allows each side to forget this common ground. Our definitions are different, but perhaps not as different as the press wants us to believe. Our means of achieving it is different, but combining the best of both sides will work much better than dismissing anything good from across the fence just because it’s part of a complex idea that involves some things we don’t like.
 
Neurologically, the right is concerned with protecting the self; the left is concerned with protecting others. The truth is, we must have both protections. Giving everything out until there’s nothing remaining leaves us unable to protect anyone. Hoarding all protections for ourselves keeps us from advancing by endangering those who might have important contributions. We must have a balance of the best of both sides.
 
This administration threatens just about everything I believe is essential to maintaining what is good about the United States. I will protest it. I will protest it by recognizing that the people who voted this into being care deeply about our country. I will protest by refusing to deepen the divide. I will do my best to recognize and speak balanced, impartial truth in order to protest the way the press on both sides has usurped our ability to speak with each other by prioritizing ratings over balanced, impartial truth. I will recognize that no one, including myself, is completely impartial, and I will make room for others to broaden my ideas and understanding.
 
Shouting my deepest beliefs from the rooftops will not convert a single soul. No one likes an evangelist unless they already agree with the sermon.
 
I will honor my own convictions by doing the hard work of building bridges. I can say what I believe while leaving space for what others believe. Perhaps I will grow through this – is that so scary? And perhaps my opinions will evolve into something even more complex – I am open to this. It doesn’t threaten my understanding of truth when facts come together outside the party line. I will seek the good, the true, and the beautiful in each person I encounter. And even if they refuse to show it to me, I will doggedly believe that it is there, anyway.
 
I protest this divide. I invite you to join me.