"The Parade of Our Mutual Life"

I can't sleep. It's 4 a.m. on February 11th.

Tonight I am sad, on so many levels. Lonely, too. When my Mom died, I committed myself to more fully utilizing/realizing my potential; part of that work has meant reconnecting, in fits and starts, with my vibrant spirit and the goodness in my soul. I know my Mom would want nothing less. However, I guess I didn't truly realize the darkness that would categorize some parts of that walk. Tonight, this morning, I feel darkness, and it is echoed by the world outside my window.

News, last night, of a good man taken into custody by immigration police, pending deportation. The officials impounded the car that he and his girlfriend were traveling in, and left her to walk home alone, late at night, in the dark. I do not know him well--he is a friend of a friend of mine--but he is someone who has an unmistakably huge heart and was deeply engaged in the civic life of my community.

News, one-per-day, of murders in my city. Murders, overwhelmingly, of Black and Brown men, women, and children. Good men, women, and children. I can almost hear the rejoinders or exceptions that some might come up with in response to that categorization. Here's how I feel: fuck those rejoinders and exceptions, anyway. We are all good, in our hearts; some people just have traumas upon traumas, hard times piled on poverty. And if you don't rub up against it every day then you better not act like you know it.

I live here, and I don't know it well enough. I do not know it well enough.

I know that it is a struggle that I cannot fathom, and I see and hear things some days that put me in awe of the way people carry the weight they have been dealt in life. Awe-struck. Humbled.

There is so much Grace on the streets of Baltimore; I only get a view into one tiny neighborhood, but that window makes me long to know the rest. The thing I've learned about Grace, though, is that, so often, it seems to be brightest and clearest the nearer it is to desolation. It is almost as though it is in response to hardship--parrying with it.

Two examples:

A mother I know and work with is an undocumented immigrant. She is more engaged on a civic level (with our school and the surrounding community) than anyone else I know. She has Grace streaming off her every day. She hugs and kisses her little boy and little girl every time I see them together. Her light makes me smile every time I'm near her, and her example makes me want to work harder in our neighborhood. She came to this country fleeing domestic abuse and violence. I have seen her cry about these things--but, normally, she's all smiles.

Another family I work with just became homeless. Mom is having some serious health problems (both physical and mental), and said to me the other day, "I'm worried, because I don't know how much longer I'm going to be here." She has two daughters and a son. Today, her daughter stood outside the door to my office, staring at a bunch of pictures on my bulletin board of smiling, happy kids, and traced her finger, silently, over their outlines, again and again. I didn't ask her what she was thinking; truthfully, I almost missed the moment--I was too busy getting ready to to go home for the night; too preoccupied by my own worries. But some spark of Grace made me turn my head around to look. What motivated that gesture? What thoughts was she thinking? Who knows. I bet, though, that creativity and kindness were part of the mix.

Deportations of good people. The murdering of good people. And, on top of that, news of a $130 million budget deficit in Baltimore City Public Schools, which, they claim, necessitates the firing of over 1,000 personnel, including teachers, support staff, and other people in charge of the education of our kids. Of those homeless kids and every other child carrying weights I can't fathom into my building every day.

I attended a City Council hearing about the school budget on Thursday night at a local high school, and was heartened by the combination of warmth and clear-eyed fight evident in the faces of the council members who were present. I sense, though, that the fight will be long, hard, and against the moneyed people working in systems that will never truly "get" just how amoral their decisions really are.

To quote a recent article (on Trump, that worthless man who calls himself our President) by Rebecca Solnit,

Some classes of people are educated, others rebuked. On occasion, the public dialogue produces something tangible. In Lower Manhattan, a grand statue of George Washington, yet another slaveholder, stands guard over Federal Hall, as it has since 1882. But a few blocks away, in a small counterpoint to the master narrative, a recently installed sign remembers Wall Street's eighteenth century slave market. The playing field is level, shout the men on the mountaintop to the poeple below. From the abyss, the people shout back in disagreement. (p.13, January 2017 issue of Harpers)

 "From the abyss." That word choice, alone, makes me want to give Rebecca Solnit a hug: time and again, in essay after essay, she somehow manages to cut past the bullshit.

These are hard times for many, many people. The only people I know who are claiming otherwise these days are, uniformly, white, and, uniformly, prosperous.

The education budget is where it is, the District says, because of fundamental flaws in the structure of the city's budget--"flaws which must be addressed, finally," said a representative from the District's budget office. She sounded, I must note, somewhat defeated. She also sounded nice. She seemed passionate. She even seemed to get the larger social inequity that is the true foundational flaw of the budget: We have a prosperous, white Governor who has never spent enough time admidst those in the abysses of our society--and there are many abysses--to truly understand the real-world public policy implications of his decisions. In my eyes, Larry Hogan represents all the other rich, white men who have come before him and will come after him who think they exercise power effectively for all the people they govern, when in reality they only ever represent the interests of people in their income bracket. No manner of picketing and protest will change Larry Hogan's classist, privileged approach to governance. That fact, however, will stop neither my picketing nor my protest.

What I am hoping for in the midst of all this sadness is twofold (these are, in a sense, my prayers, though I'll admit to not praying much):

1.) That those who are struggling know that they have allies, and that I have the strength to support them in some useful way.

2.) That those who are struggling can see and feel the Grace around them in the moments when they need it most. My God is a loving God, and if she/he/it really does exist, that's where you'll find her. Not on the mountaintop, bellowing about fairness, but down in the valleys, with the people carrying all that weight.

And so I am reminded, as I often am in troubled times, of my favorite piece of poetry. It seems particularly apropos at this moment:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home we may miss
our star. 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of
childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

As as elephants parade holding each
elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the
park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should
consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the
dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to
sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe---
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

It is 6 a.m. now, as I finish this. I feel that I've been partially asleep for months now, numbed, somehow, by loss, by shame regarding who our country elected, and by stress. Yet I am awake now.