Penlights

One month ago I started an inadvertent journey here at kjottinger.com. I broke from our usual fare, and broke some itinerant streaks of silence.

I was so rattled by the election that morning that I didn’t know how to move forward. Grief for the humanity I was sure would prevail wracked me.

In an effort to not climb back into bed, I went outside, where things always make more sense and where the sun always is, even when you can’t see it. I lay down in the thick blanket of spent and brittle leaves to stare at the gray sky, because what else was there to do? I lay close to the mossiest tree I could, for comfort, warmth, kinship.

I took a picture, to commemorate the naked branches and the barren skies, and when I–of course–flipped my camera around to selfie mode while trying to focus on a bird, there I was, me ‘n Tim ‘n Kamala, laying there busted up in the leaf duff. So I took a picture of us too.

I had no words, really, for what I was feeling, but I had a deep need to somehow run up a flag declaring it to the world nonetheless. I posted to Instagram. Me on the ground. The bleak sky above. But I didn’t know what to write below those pictures.

So I wrote what I knew. Just the facts.

51% of Americans chose fear and hatred today. I’m not one of them.

What else to say?

What came out was what the only other thing I knew to be true, that the only way through, as always, was love, and that apparently, we weren’t loving loud enough.

Time to love louder.

Later in the day, I posted the same thing here on my blog.

The next day I found tiny sparks of solace in small places, and I posted those too.

And the next, a few more bits of tinder.

And the next. And the next.

And by then it was a thing.

I’ve been posting here every day as a practice for myself, a daily reminder to keep this thing pointed in the right direction. To not despair, but to do something. To live in defiance of the hatred and the fear.

I’ve been posting here every day in an effort to be one little penlight in the darkness, in hopes that in my efforts to keep the ship afloat, I might help one other person to do the same. We need each other. One little penlight meeting one more, until we’re a fleet of light.

I’ve been posting here every day because I do believe that we need to love louder, and because that’s a tall order, and I need some encouragement to do it, and I can only imagine you do too.

So I’ll just keep on keepin’ on, for as long as there are words that might help and heal and bring us together as the one family that we are. I don’t know how long this every day thing will last, though it’s been working well so far. I’d guess that at a bare minimum the inevitable travels and travails will eventually upend my streak, some of those travels coming up in the near future. (I don’t plan the travails, but we all know they come anyway.) Eventually I’ll miss a day, the bubble will pop, and I’ll be tempted to let it go, but I hope that I will find my way back to this regular practice, for me, for you, for the whole glorious sea of us.

Here’s to us, louder today than yesterday.