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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]