Thursday 30 December 2021

Threads

The year is closing out, and a stillness has settled in me. It’s been rainy, in a way that a San Francisco native friend says was typical of the winters of her childhood: several days in a row of rain, then a brief sunny spell, then back to more water from the sky. We’ve been in a drought, so it seems especially wet now, and Tahoe’s recent snowfall broke a 50-year-old record, but this is the way it’s supposed to be, actually. 

There’s also been a vertical-wall spike in COVID, both in San Francisco and the United States more broadly, and that has settled something in me, too. Through all of this year, and the last of course, risk assessment has ping-ponged around. Through unknown unknowns, unreliable sources, experts urging caution and still learning themselves, the displacement of personal trust in the face of an insidious virus that knows no moral judgments, and the changing terrain of case numbers, vaccination rates, behavioral change and interventions of mixed success, every movement has been tinged with uncertainty. And it’s been that way for a long time now. 

But, with the rain and the virus surging, some questions are settled. No, we will not be hosting a Christmas party. No, we will not be going out for New Year’s Eve. We’re not going to be going out much at all. We will return to the cozy comforts of last Christmas, festive at home and loving each other through the cold and inclement conditions. The distracting, conflicting priorities have been cut away, and we are decided in the root sense of the term, with noise excised from the program. It’s Christmas on the Island of Corona, for however long it needs to be. 

I find myself reawakening to the things that saw me through last winter’s tumult: My fingers are itching for sewing and stitchwork again, my urge to cook is surging once more, and my gratitude for every investment in our home is at the forefront. The sun is breaking through today, and I can imagine going out to the garden to do some midwinter tidying, the rains having called up many weeds I could thin now before the work is harder later on. 

This autumn, I returned to a task of the beforetimes, and I completed two classes that I had to drop in autumn of 2019. (One I attempted again at the beginning of 2020, and we all know what happened next.) Those classes first fell by the wayside in the wake of my Uncle Mac’s death, a death I willingly witnessed in hopes of helping him pass peacefully as an organ donor. In 2016 and 2017, I spent time at the bedsides of loved ones in the ICU or hospice, first pregnant and then with a newborn babe in arms; one family member survived, the other did not. In 2018, just after my child’s first birthday, my Aunt Suzanne passed, and of her last moments we have stories of her daughter being by her side. In 2020, my father nearly died in front of me twice, and I was able to save him with quick action and relentless advocacy. My husband’s grandmother was lost to COVID shortly before vaccines would have been available to her at the end of 2020. There has been so much bereavement, and much of it began before COVID loomed like the specter of death itself over the entire world. 

I feel like I could write a book about how each of those passings rewrote my family. But a theme that sticks out in particular is how different death feels when one can be present, sit vigil with the others left behind, and begin to heal and rebuild together before the aftermath has even begun. There is no control, but there is presence, and we are social animals that are forever re-glueing our bonds together again in novel ways. And what the last two years have done, in addition to the waves of death and uncertainty, is denied us presence with one another as we endure collective trauma. Togetherness has come in fits and starts, and sometimes with awful consequences. Understanding the dangers of the outside world has become a paradigm-shifting endeavor knit into the course of daily life. 

But, daily life continues. And there are solid reasons to feel hope. On the back of the Winter Solstice, in these mystery days between Christmas and the New Year, I genuinely feel the light coming. This latest wave of the coronavirus, omicron, is washing up on a population that has more immunity before, both because of vaccinations and prior infections. We have more and better treatments to deploy, and this mutation shows some signs of causing less severe illness despite its incredible transmissibility. This two-year cycle of viruses is something we’ve seen before, in prior pandemics, and this evolution toward less-deadly endemic status is part of the playbook in many cases. At some point, this coronavirus will likely take up space among our seasonal illnesses, with particularly nasty strains popping up every so often, but we already have vaccines to mitigate its impact, and we increasingly carry (and pass on to our new infants) the tools to fight back within our own bodies. And it’s not just me saying this, with my decidedly non-expert opinion: Medical experts are saying this, too. This particular uncertainty will not carry on at this intensity forever, and indeed the intensity may be diminishing soon. 

Personally, I have also found some footing in this chaos that is reconnecting me to life before and beyond the immediate concerns of surviving a pandemic. Those classes I mentioned before were dropped in a time of turmoil; in the brief beginnings of 2020, I was getting back on the proverbial horse, and then my child and I both got sick with what was likely COVID, the world shut down and things got very scary. But I finally got that horse over hurdles I was unable to clear two years ago. In that small regard, I am further along than I was before all of this started. My life from before is not gone, though parts of it have been deferred or changed forever. I wouldn’t want to extrapolate too much from this one very personal achievement, but there’s something of a metaphor in it that resonates more broadly to me. Life finds a way, and there are through-lines permeating this instability that can help us navigate to what comes next. (The fact that one of these classes was a history course is a subject for another essay.) 

When the Imperial College report on COVID came out in spring of 2020, projecting that we would endure rolling waves of lockdowns based on hospitalization rates, which would be determined by waning immunity and mutations in the virus, I remember thinking we couldn’t run a society that way. The report anticipated an ongoing cycle of doing this, which seemed impossible just a few weeks into the chaos. Yet, here we are. Those of us who have made it have found a way, physically and spiritually, to endure a cataclysmic impact to life as we knew it. I imagine that we all bear some emotional scars from all that’s transpired, and we are changed. I don’t want to minimize any of that. 

But, somehow, this enforced winter quiet has the feel of a chrysalis to me. I no longer feel that I am cloistered against the unknown. It feels more like incubating strength for the next incarnation, which I sense is coming soon. 

So, for now, I sit, and I try to stitch together a future for myself and those I love, weaving in all I’ve learned about the long arc of history and the lessons of creativity in navigating uncertainty. We’ve been doing this since we lived in caves, you know: Using our hands and our minds to take in the mysteries of the world and fabricate lives for ourselves from the raw materials around us. One more time, I shall cuddle into these constraints, letting some desires hibernate as winter eventually gives way to spring.

For reference: 

Dr. Bob Wachter on hopefully getting to his "happy place" in COVID terms in just over a month's time: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1476314067660722176.html

The early Imperial College report on cycles of transmission and suppression of COVID: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-12-global-impact-covid-19/



Sunday 7 November 2021

Cosmic Love

I just had the most cosmically surreal bedtime with Dash, in which we had conversations I really would not have thought possibel with a four-year-old. I deployed a new book for tonight, Serafina Nance’s “Astronomy” in the Little Leonardo series, and afterward Dash had many insightful questions that took me to the limit of my knowledge about the Big Bang, how rocks were formed, what it would sound like if a gas giant collided with a rocky planet… 

Literally, I would not have believed someone telling me that a kid his age could understand so much. But, sure as anything, he is using that remarkable ability that powers human children—gaining understanding of the entire world around them—to build a model of the universe in his mind right now. He wants to understand the physicality of it, and commented in the end that “Space controls itself.” 

I responded, “Yep, space is something that we can’t control. We are just tiny creatures out there.” 

He asked what Earth sounds like, and I played him some audio. He fell asleep to the hum of our planet spinning through the solar system, which blended in perfectly with the white noise machine as he drifted off.

Tuesday 5 October 2021

My Gifts

What if I gave my best to me?
What if I got free?
What if I stopped holding doors
and started
demanding
more?

What if I inquired
and found
myself
inspired
instead of pre-tired,
perpetually required
to place others before me?

See…
No one’s coming for you, girl.
In all this world
you alone will know your worth.
Since birth
you have had you,
and it shall be the same at the end, too.

So, steadfast friend,
shall we always bend down
together?
Or could we hold each other up
forever,
growing
in the light
of our own radiance?

Tenderly,
I hold you in this dance.
This brevity of chance
where I can honor you,
hold you close,
and whisper, “Here”
as I gift to you the space
and richness
of my soul.



Tuesday 28 September 2021

Scars

I do not want to heal
Only to be broken repeatedly in the same ways,
Over and over again.

Let me become embittered and thorny;
I can never be naive again.
The pit of my stomach turns on pain
I'm still digesting.

Don't rush me.

Maybe I will, improbably, mature once more into tenderness.
Time may soften my strictures, hardened tissues inflexible now after sustained assaults.

Who knows? Even stones erode.

Jagged edges can become smooth.
Let me take on my metamorphic gleam,
Polished after so much pressure,
Veins showing across my pale, cold being.

The weight I have borne has changed me.
My architecture is petrifying.
My materials are growing more noble,
Resolute and inert in the harsh elements.

My heart has not yet ossified.
In its cage of bone, it flutters on.
In this grand palace of fractures knit together
Joints creak,
Nails dig in,
And knots mark the stories of gnarled growth,
Branching and finding a way.



Tuesday 31 August 2021

Leaving Afghanistan

The news weighed heavily on me yesterday. An end to a war as long as my adult life, messy, heartbreaking and complicated. 

Do these things ever really end? 

I started going to protests and getting involved with activism to prevent this conflict. 20 years ago, I was trying to dig my little heels in against a stupid president and his military escapades. I didn't believe George W. Bush would accomplish anything to make this country safer. 

In community college, I helped run teach-ins about what we were doing. It opened my eyes to the importance of foreign policy, the brutal history of US puppeteering in countries that had often been occupied and brutalized repeatedly, as Afghanistan has. I didn't have all the answers, not even close, but I was certain that lots of guns and bombs were not the solution. 

Moreover, it was clear that the Bush administration didn't have a solution either, nor even a plan, which was absolutely horrifying. 

Shortly after W was reelected, I went off to university in London, hopeful that I could help change the world. I spent the years of his second term having to answer for American stupidity and violence that I had tried to fight at the ballot box, in the streets, and in the written word. 

I was old enough to enter this war when it started, though I wasn't old enough to drink. Over time, I met more and more people who served in Afghanistan, both in the military and the diplomatic corps. I had tea with Pashtun friends and talked with them about their families back home, their children that were growing up half a world away in villages vulnerable to attack. The conflict dragged on and on under Obama, but there was also some sense of grim stability in it, never comfortable and never safe. 

Meanwhile, in the US, we taught our population to fear the Taliban, hooking their medieval violence and hideous misogyny to our homegrown Islamophobia. I don't find it shocking that Trump, that carrot-faced nightmare clown of white supremacy incarnate, had no qualms about negotiating surrender to the Taliban. I do find it shocking that Biden decided to keep going down that path. 

So we withdrew air support and intelligence, two major military advantages our alliance offered to the Afghan fighters, and those that fought by our side despite heavy casualties (much, much heavier than our own) and constant threats lost the last shreds of hope and fled. A government that existed with American protection and financial aid was not strong enough to stand without it. Almost instantly, 20 years worth of uneven progress toward women's freedom and opportunity was buried. 

I wasn't around for the war in Vietnam, and I know the draft made that different for my parents' generation. But this was my Vietnam. This was the war that chewed up a smaller number of my colleagues, but haunted us on the news and challenged us to find any possibility of progress. And now I have seen that country collapse in real time, and it feels like some part of my heart has imploded, too. 

I am not in the mood to discuss American lives. I don't value them more than Afghan lives. I am grateful that we managed to evacuate thousands in our bungled exit, but so many remain, and over 20 years of cooperation an estimated 250,000 people qualified for the types of visas that should have gotten them on planes out of Kabul with their families. Our evacuations in the last two weeks, while huge, have gotten at most half that number out of the country. Much like our entry, our exit from Afghanistan feels unplanned, and the toll of that rests heavily on the same Afghans that arrogant cowboy Americans command to stay and fight. 

The era of Team America World Police seems to be drawing to a close. The Taliban have reclaimed their country. The resistance in the Panjshir Valley is crying out for aid, and mostly finding themselves alone. Women now at the age that I was when I started my awakening to all of this are having their dreams snuffed out, hopes of university and agency stripped from them suddenly after a lifetime of growing up with Americans at their side. 

So many wrong choices have been made here. I feel sick with it all, and so small. The enormity of it all is so hard to hold.

Sunday 22 August 2021

Stage Fright & Stretches

I did a class in an actual dance studio today, for the first time in over a year and a half. Now I feel blissed out and relaxed in an old, familiar way, but getting there was hard. 

I thought I was signed up for one thing, and the plan changed. I wasn't sure if the train was running, or on what schedule. I struggled to get my headphones to cooperate on the walk over when a little music would have gone a long way toward calming my spirits. None of this would have phased me before. 

I took some deep breaths and kept going. I trust this teacher, and trusted that I could show up, rusty as a bucket of old nails, to try something new... Even though I really wanted the comfort of familiarity. 

There has been so much discomfort. Getting started again has had me feeling nervous and weird in ways I didn't expect. I said to James the other day, "These are things I want to do, and I'm surprised at how scared and uncertain I feel. It sucks." 

"I've been getting some re-entry jitters, too," he said. And that's exactly it. It feels like stage fright, which I actually had very little of when I was onstage a lot, but I now seem to have about going to the studio to stretch. Oh, how the world has changed! 

I got to the train station. My train was later than I hoped it would be. I got on anyway. While I was riding over, I felt a wave of panic about my potential tardiness that frankly was also a rather new experience. (Apologizing for being behind was unfortunately so much a part of my old status quo that it was effortlessly baked in.) 

I got off at my stop. I exited. Things started to feel familiar as I entered the building. I got settled into my class. It was new and a puzzle, but also a story related to one that saw me through injury and pregnancy in a previous existence. It was a meditation through the unfamiliar back toward my old home. Getting back in my body, marley underfoot, breathing and expanding again. 

It felt so good! I stayed. My teacher and I caught up afterward, comparing notes for the first time in a long while about our endurance through a year that felt apocalyptic. We both stayed--in our city, returning to this studio, reviving practices in-person that connect us to ourselves and each other. 

I'm banking this experience. I needed to feel the cresting of pent-up nerves give way to the warm shore of something good on the other side, and I got it. What a treat after so much cabin fever and staying stuck! 

Here's to putting the pieces back together again, even if our hands are shakier than we expect them to be.

Wednesday 30 June 2021

A Word About Rainbows

My family lives in a rainbow city. A big rainbow flag flies at the top of Market Street, a grandbaby of the one created in this very city by Gilbert Baker in 1978, waving us home up over the mountain. Through COVID, rainbows proliferated in windows, gestures of solidarity from child to child. 

The hilltop vistas display microclimates in all their vigor, and prismatic displays of sunlight clashing through precipitation might be waiting to delight around any corner. Truly, San Francisco wears these colors well.


When my cousin’s two adorable children learned my son’s name, they whispered, “Rainbow Dash!!” excitedly. Their mom filled me in on the exuberant flying unicorn character in the My Little Pony revival that knitted this new generation of childhood to my own. We got him the hoodie immediately.


I am basically Rainbow Brite myself, a resolute geriatric raver who needs color to thrive. So, no surprise, my kid’s wardrobe was similarly littered with vibrant hues and entire spectrums from his earliest days, with Mommy matching.


These parfaits of color have gained meaning after meaning. Only after my baby was born did I learn the term “Rainbow Baby,” and realize that he was one, conceived only a couple of months after a miscarriage. Truly, through some pretty dark years, he has made the world brighter around him, and I am so grateful for how he shines. 


My little boy’s birthday happens during Pride, and San Francisco is alive with celebration when we celebrate him, too. For all of his years so far, rainbows have had a place of prominence at the party, and often friends have come kaleidoscopically from other festivities to cheer on my tiny kid. 


As a subtle coda to all of this, Pride matters in this house. I am blessed to hold a very privileged place on the queer spectrum, so I don’t talk about it much—but if you know, you know. I’m straight-passing, in a hetero relationship, and sufficiently cis so as to quietly blow up femininity from the inside. (Hey, if life assigns me Disney Princess, I might as well use my powers for good as much as I can.) I’m not trying to take over Pride, but I am certainly here for it, always.


So, it’s important to me that my kid keeps getting the message that there are a lot of ways to be, to love, and to live, because that is his world. This is about his family, too. He already knows kids with families that look different from ours; that is his normal. He knows that love is love, that we have to stand up for what is right, and that being bright and colorful is a joyful way for a boy to be. 


As we ride out this pandemic, and expressions of love and community are so altered by yet another epidemic, may we hold our bright visions close and expand them. Baker’s spectrum contemplated expression, vivacity and sensuality as a broad embrace of all that is beautiful. I hope our arc continues to be bent toward justice with many hands working in concert, our variegation perfect and dazzling.

[Images of Gilbert Baker and the colors of the Pride flag from Wikipedia.]





Tuesday 18 May 2021

The Way of Pain

I'm going to attempt to say something sensible about Palestine and Israel here, and the odds are high that I'll mess it up. But here goes...

I visited Israel in 2016, to attend the wedding of two dear friends. James and I were their guests, witnesses, and photographers when they married at San Francisco's City Hall, and we were honored to be invited to Tel Aviv to celebrate with their friends and families. These same friends have also openly struggled with Israel's gnarly history, which indeed mandatory military service conscripted them into. They are the first to decry how fucked up all of this is. (Their unease is shared with nearly every Israeli of my generation that I've met.)

Upon arrival in Israel, the first place James and I stayed was in Sheikh Jarrah, which is the area of Jerusalem where the recent looming threat of eviction during Ramadan of Palestinian families to make way for Jewish settlers was one of the flash points for the current violence. On our way in to the ancient city from the airport, rocket fire streaked through the night sky. 

When we were planning our trip, I wanted to stay in East Jerusalem. We were welcomed at the American Colony Hotel, which was beautiful, and which in name and history still frames part of my understanding of Israel's complexities: An Ottoman pasha's home, sold on to some Messianic Christians from Chicago in the 19th century, situated in the first Muslim-majority neighborhood outside of the walls of Jerusalem's Old City, and run as an oasis of neutrality for diplomats and dignitaries in a city divided. 

As the march to war has been building over the past month, the place names are familiar to me, and my acquaintance with the city puts a visceral sense of place to the flashpoints. James and I walked through this quiet neighborhood to Damascus Gate, where barricades were recently put up to prevent Muslims from gathering after prayers at al-Aqsa mosque. When Israeli officers fired rubber bullets at worshippers there, and videos played of fires and bloodshed at the mosque, it stands in horrifying contrast to the day I stood there in the sunshine, watching mischievous children get scolded by their elders while parents prayed inside. 

I have never been anywhere that felt as simultaneously beautiful and apocalyptic as Jerusalem. Its Old City quarters house Muslims, Jews, Christians and Armenians in relative peace, a longstanding cohabitation indeed. I walked through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and saw over a millennium of Christian devotion rendered in Byzantine mosaic and ancient graffiti, embodied by a diversity of sectarians I don't think I will ever see again anywhere else. 

But history is omnipresent, deep and bloody. I walked the path of Christ's torment en route to crucifixion, and then on to the Western Wall, crossing the skybridge over Jewish worshippers crying at the foundation of a Temple destroyed to a Muslim holy site built on its remains. Upon leaving the Temple Mount, we walked through Palestinian children firing imaginary guns at the deadly real armed Israeli soldiers, who frankly weren't much more than children themselves. I had little faith that the uneasy, imbalanced ceasefire would hold. 

Let me be clear: I think that Jews deserve to feel safe, and I think the world has generally proven itself wholly untrustworthy with that. I also think that Israel has reproduced the displacement and discrimination that inspired its foundation in the first place. As an American, I see an awful familiarity between the inception of the United States and Israel's origin story; indeed, the US has explicitly helped develop the narrative of Israeli exceptionalism in a way that mirrors its own arrogance and desire to mask genocide and imperialism. I have huge problems with how both the United States and Israel came to be and continue to be, and I continue to be appalled at how the US remains complicit in the misery, displacement and oppression of Palestinians by Israel. 

I also spent days refreshing my understanding of Israeli politics so I could try and briefly convey the complexity of the challenge there, and the task is genuinely beyond me. Suffice it to say, Netanyahu has been a contentious force for a decades, and during that time he has used settlers as a way to further invade Palestinian territories while also using the ensuing conflict to shore up his shaky coalitions with rightwing factions. His machinations clearly endanger Israelis, and plenty of them know it, but the incredible plurality of parties and competing agendas make it hard to actually oust him, even though he's failed to secure majorities and has been a focus of corruption investigations nearly from the start. (Americans that idolize the notion of coalition governments should do some deep reading on Israel to get a feel for how fatally stuck they can leave a country.) 

As one of my Israeli friends put it at our celebration of Biden's victory, imagine what the US would be like if Trump had been in power for twenty years instead of a single (unpresidential) term. The Netanyahu years have led away from the peace process and toward war, and there will be no improvement to the situation so long as he remains in power. 

So, here we are watching more death and destruction in the Holy Land. (Some sick factions of American Christianity even cheerlead this, as it's part and parcel of their End Times fetishes.) The people of Gaza are kettled on a tiny strip of land, trapped, deprived of free movement, subject to airstrikes, houses reduced to rubble amid a pandemic, bodies of children stacking up. Families in Tel Aviv are also racing for shelter, as the Iron Dome's impressive but not impervious defenses fend off rocket fire, debris raining into the Mediterranean Sea. 

As we left Jerusalem to head to Tel Aviv, James and I literally drove through a fire. It started small, close to the side of the road. We had been talking to our Palestinian taxi driver about Ramallah, which we had seen from the road, and I remarked that there was a grass fire. We ended up stopped on the highway next to a large tree, because drivers in front of us had paused to gawk and take photos of the blaze. I knew that if we didn't move, the flames would be on that tree and in danger of setting our car on fire, but we couldn't go anywhere until the stopped vehicles cleared. Indeed, the fire lit up the tree next to us incredibly quickly, which scared folks in front of us badly enough to get moving. The fire was so close by the time we could move that we could feel the heat through the windows. 

That sense of seeing just where the fire is heading, with nobody moving, feels like an apt metaphor for the last month of keeping up with this news. I'll never forget what it felt like to stand in the heat gazing up at the Dome of the Rock, nor the heat of that fire about to overtake our taxi. 

If anyone needs me, I'll just be over here pressuring my elected officials to stop propping up warfare and hoping Netanyahu's corruption trials lead to a forced retirement sooner rather than later. More layers of trauma, bloodshed and death bring us no closer to peace. 




Wednesday 17 February 2021

Rush to Judgment

When I was a kid, I was exposed to Rush Limbaugh in a filthy car and a desperately dirty apartment I tried to muck out more than once to save my father. 

I heard Limbaugh's hate-filled tirades demean women, celebrate the deaths of LGBTQ activists, and rile the anger and entitlement of heavily armed men. 

If you don't know what it's like to be trapped in that smoke-filled cesspool, wondering what's happening to someone you love, seeing them be radicalized long before that word had entered your vocabulary as a child, then sit down. 

I won't show Limbaugh compassion any more than you'd mourn the death of the dealer who got your loved one hooked on heroin. 

As a grown woman--one of Limbaugh's preferred demographics to target--I look around and find that the vast majority of my friends are not straight white Americans. My nearest and dearest are immigrants, international, first generation, melanated and queer, and they all have come under attack from Limbaugh and the rot he helped fester. 

If you're capable of compassion in the face of evil that targets people you love, good on you, I guess. But don't try to shame or silence people that are feeling relief in the face of the only victory we're going to get as far as this pernicious poison is concerned. 

We live in a society that refuses to hold men like Limbaugh, his buddy Trump, and all their ilk accountable. Refuses to reject them. Instead, these creeps are given medals and presidencies, pardons and praise. They breed Brock Turners, Dylan Roofs and Eliot Rodgers, who in turn are mollycoddled after massacres as the press works to illuminate their pain despite the bodies lying all around. 

This doesn't stop because we turn the other cheek; that may be a power move for men in a world that doesn't expect them to display self-control when faced with attacks, but it's the bullshit status quo for those of us that are already expected to be quiet and kind as we are curb-stomped into submission. 

Know justice, know peace. No unity without accountability. While I somehow still hope that true diversity reaching the highest and most powerful levels of our society will relieve this grim pressure to be pliant in the face of abuse, in the meantime we might have to simply exhale more fully in the absence of a monster.

Wednesday 20 January 2021

Forward to Finer

We made it. Now, I want to take a moment to talk about the wonder of President Joe Biden, and what it means to have him in office now. 

First, I will state plainly that he was not my first choice. I actively boycott boys at the ballot box. I'm all the way here for the abolition of the white heteronormative patriarchy. At first glance, Biden's election does not achieve that. 

However, we have just endured a miscarriage of constitutional duty under that orange oaf, who exited the capitol ignominiously this morning after breaking our long tradition of peaceful transfer of power. Over 400,000 of us are dead because of catastrophic mismanagement of a pandemic, the spread of a plague with no functioning federal government to mitigate the harm. White supremacists were offered pride of place in the last administration, even as cries for racial justice rose from we the people. 

And, so, I find myself grateful for any change. But, as I contemplate the matter, I find myself grateful in particular for Biden as a person. 

We now have a president who has experienced deep loss and grief, and regularly embodies empathy when presented with someone else's pain and struggle. He has stumbled, and he has learned. Biden has moved voices to the fore that we all desperately need to have there; Black women have long spoken truth to power, and we have long needed a federal government that looks like America itself. Biden has prioritized that, and is willing to move out of the way for representation that matters so much. 

Can you appreciate his bravery? In the wake of racist insurrection, he has ensured that Kamala Harris stands ready to lead if any ill should befall him. It's an amazing chess move, flagrantly defying those last-gaspers of white male privilege, and it's beyond symbolic because Harris is there to give this administration teeth, too. Though his whiteness and maleness may placate the less imaginative among us, he has assembled a team that erodes the blandness of such power. 

Biden is an institutionalist, ascending to office to assess and improve our vandalized democratic pillars. He has a long memory of how our democracy can function, as well as a detailed view of the imperfections in it. 

And, let's be clear: He is not perfect. His administration will not be. There is no perfection to be found anywhere in human endeavor, only the endless labor toward a more perfect union, toward greater justice, and toward expanded opportunity for us all. That work is never done, and will not be done in four years' time, nor eight, nor any number to follow. 

But Biden believes in that work. He has dedicated his life to it. He has been bruised and battered by life itself, and he has resolved to elevate others. That is so profoundly antithetical to the perniciousness of the last four years that it is indeed difficult to set aside cynicism and retain a kind of clear-eyed hope about healing, but that is what we are called to do. 

I am so grateful that my son will have an entirely different version of masculinity before his eyes as he ages into being able to see what's really going on, following four years of raising him amid the fight against fascism. I am so deeply relieved that my child will see that power should be inclusive and riveted with empathy. When Obama bestowed upon Biden his final Presidential Medal of Freedom, I cried, too, for the man who fought rapists and sought to free our families of cancer in the wake of his own grief. That ceremony stood in stark contrast against the looming specter of toxic masculinity that Trump embodied, and I prefer that my son remember Biden's version of old man in charge before we move on to a more colorful, female future. 

Today, I watched women in positions of prominence usher in a new era. I felt a stability return that has been noticeably lacking; how much energy have we all expended in that long uncertainty? I do not long for some pre-2016 status quo, but I am happy to feel a glimmer of hope again. I am overjoyed to have a president who is comfortable in the presence of--indeed, confident because of--the presence of brilliant women with backbones of steel. 

Today, we return to the Paris Accord. We rejoin the world in so many ways that matter, and we come humbled to the table to engage in the most important work of humanity, to stem the rising tides of climate change and address the woes of environmental injustice. We can start dealing with the life-or-death matters of our shared future with our allies once more. 

Today, we have a president that can speak whole and complete sentences that tell the plain truth of the pain of our nation's founding. Those words alone are not a solution, but we must have them to begin. We have a mandate to manifest an entirely different destiny that is honest about our history of genocide and theft, and seeks to rectify the wrongs of our ancestors inasmuch as we can from our positions of privilege within the troubled now. 

Today, we begin again, carrying the baggage of the past but less than we endured yesterday. And we have someone who has put his hand up time and again to be of service in that endeavor. 

Biden offers himself as a bridge over tumultuous waters, and I am grateful that today feels significantly less adrift than so many days that have come before. We have to build back better, not back to normal but forward to finer.