Shine here. Shine now.

Jeff Rennicke, The Conserve Kid’s English teacher back when COVID closed down the school and the world, is in Alaska, as he is wont to be. He wrote this on Wednesday:

“It is fitting, I suppose: a thick fog blanketing the Alaskan mountainsides where I have come seeking solace after such a difficult and divisive election night. The future is clouded, so why shouldn’t the horizons be as well?

There is legitimate worry today about the future, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, the vulnerable, women’s rights, our environment, our future. Many, including myself, are unsure of what steps to take next, where to put our energy, how to move forward against such obscured and foggy horizons. The answer, for today anyway, just might be that you don’t.

I recall once hiking up the steep and rocky face of a peak deep in Alaska’s Brooks Range when we were suddenly enveloped in a thick, fast-moving fogbank. Like an avalanche of clouds, the fogbank spilled off the peak and swallowed us, cutting off the horizons as surely as a shroud. Moments before, we could see for miles. In the fog, even the rocks at our feet were fuzzy and indistinct. To climb any further would have been to risk a blind encounter with an unknown ledge, so we did the only reasonable thing we could do, we just stopped, sat on our backpacks and waited.

Today seems like a day to stop, find a place to just sit and think things through. Times like this usually do one of two things to us: they make us stronger by reminding us of the important things, the people and places that we love, the importance of staying strong for ourselves and others, or they spiral us into despair.

It is too early yet to know for sure which will happen this time, either to us personally or to us as a nation. Only time will answer that question.

I do know this though: eventually that day in the Brooks Range, we heard the clatter of caribou giving us hope that there would be a safer way down from this ridge when the fog cleared. Soon, we heard the rolling rock sounds of ravens calling above us letting us know that the fog was thinning overhead, slowly, and that if we just gave it enough time things would become clear again, and we could get up, take the first tentative step towards whatever the future held, and then another, and another, in faith that the fog would soon be lifting.
~ Jeff Rennicke, The Little Dipper, The Horizons of Hope

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Jeff’s reminder to stop and rest calmed me and allowed me to get in a full breath and slow the treadmill. His reminder that we indeed have the option of allowing this time, slowly, slowly, to strengthen us, gave me hope and resolve. If ever there was a time to love louder, this is it.

It might not be time to plunge forward into massive undertakings yet. We don’t have to have a world-changing plan. We don’t have to figure out the next step yet. The fog is thick.

But the fog gives us the opportunity to take a breath, to slow the nervous system, to regroup. To see the mountain and the fog in relationship, to reset the view, to rest the eyes. In time, the course will be clearer. For now, we do what we can do, right here, right now. We love louder.

“And who knows? Maybe what you’ve written will help others, will be a small part of the solution. You don’t even have to know how or in what way, but if you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

You might think St. Anne is talking about writing. I don’t think she is.

Shine here. Shine now.

Time to love louder.