Rebecca Solnit inspires us as to what matters in her essay today: This Cold Winter, Love is a Superpower.

One paragraph from: https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/this-cold-winter-love-is-a-superpower/

The poet W.H. Auden wrote in a review of the final book in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, “Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom.” You can see the attempt to consolidate power in the president, as supported by the conservative six on the Supreme Court, and by the surrender of Congress’s powers by the Republican majority, as an attempt to create a one-ring level of power in radical opposition to the checks and balances and ideals of democracy and accountability that have been central to this nation’s official ideology, however imperfectly realized. 

I had to choose between a vigil and a protest today.  I chose the protest at the Manzanita parking lot near where I live.  It was inspiring,  All the cars honking as they passed and waving – not everyone but most, and now I know there is a huge variety of horn honking, different sounds, patterns, and lengths.  Wonderful signs and people.  And there are younger people now which is great, and more ethnicities.  I walked back to the car with a woman from Minneapolis.  She said she knows the cold in which all those people protested and are protesting.  There’s no way to wear enough to warm the feet. It’s not like where I live. Unfortunately I’ll miss next Sunday as our family celebrates the business my husband started here in our home forty years ago.  Forty years!

I’m struggling today with the execution of Alex Pretti, an execution carried out in plain sight and recorded, and yet, again, we are told to deny our own eyes.

I come to David Whyte’s poem “The Well of Grief” for solace, and these words of Albert Camus: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

We can’t look away and we need to trust even more deeply what we see and feel.  I understand the term “bleeding heart”.  My heart bleeds.