November 6, 2024: The Morning After

How I'm feeling

I wrote this yesterday in fits and starts throughout the day.

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What does it feel like to wake up in my country and be beloved within it? To feel something other than hunted?

We were never meant to survive, Mama Audre said.

Earlier, I lay burrowed within the snug warmth of my comforter, apprehensive about the morning. The blessing of drawing breath almost poisoned by acrid aspects of reality. Exhausted upon waking, anticipating what it will take to survive this again.

But I come from light and I am light. I am still here, like a miracle.

My son said, “not until January, Mom. You have time.” I smile in the ways mothers smile at their babies when they commit innocent errors, because the healing is in the effort.

Now the other son is memorizing Matthew 5. These words, swathed in his voice, fall like broken promises, tinkling and gasping:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
    for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
    for they will see God.

I want us to know this blessing, but it only comes with suffering. Perhaps, then, we are already blessed.

God was never to be found in American politics, except to be used—a mule or a symbol—like me. I know. I know. Yet I know God and expect miracles. But where do I look? Jesus was crucified by Rome. He didn’t tear Rome down. The miracle is God, in all power, choosing death rather than domination. Do I want this kind of miracle?

Jesus rose and afterward put power in our hands. Jesus disperses power. It is not hoarded; it is as generous as Jesus trusting us with it. What do we do with it? What even is “we”?

The boys are doing math now, and through the speakers, Nina Simone is damning Mississippi and lamenting, “the King is dead. The King of Love is dead.”

The pain and anger in her song supports me; a scaffolding of resistance and longing.

I know my community. We rise.

We are the latest names written in a genealogy of defiant persistence and provision.

We never saw salvation in government machinations, of course: Not after enslavement. Not after un-prosecuted terror. Not after planned ghettos and neatly executed segregation. Not after lynching after lynching. Not after they sicced dogs and hoses on our children and bombed them to death while they were in church. Not after police immunity. Not after repealing voting rights. Not after they denied that 110-year-old woman reparations for the Tulsa massacre. We are our only salvation here. We are the miracle I am looking for. This both scares and energizes me.

I know that my loved ones, my community, are my sanctuary, a holy place. We will exchange love and food and Venmo one another with money we don’t have and remind each other to breathe and to nap and to hydrate. We will check in and tend to.

We will—without fanfare—resist, rest, imagine, nourish, strategize, fight, guard. We will live.

We have access to streams in the desert. Our source is beyond our environment. God sees.

I know that justice is a tongue the mouth of America refuses to speak.

I know this country’s idols are mammon, violence, and racism.

I know the former and once-again president is an unvarnished and true representative of his country.

I don’t know whether to cry in front of my children as they do their math.

I don’t know which neighbors ransomed me for their prosperity.

I don’t know whether it is better to know.

I will thaw the meat, bake the bread, remember the Pythagorean theorem, play and sway to the music that kept us, keep mothering, spousing, friending, keep praying, keep working, keep breathing.

How are you today? How are you tending to yourself and your loved ones? Do you have language yet for what you are experiencing?
What have you learned from surviving the last time?