When the Unthinkable happens. Again.

In November 2016 I was part of a writing residency at Collegeville, MN. At an election watch party that night, I sat with colleagues in numb disbelief as the midnight hour rang in Donald Trump as the next president. I went to bed with a foreboding sense of the swirling chaos and disorder that would soon be upon us. My intuition did not disappoint.

The next morning, I accompanied my grief sick soul to the early prayers at the chapel on St. Johns campus, led by the Benedictine monks. As we sang the Psalms, something about making Yhwh your joy and desire, not putting your trust in tyrants, I began to weep. As I released my anguish and fear, I realized that the monks had been singing the Psalms for hundreds of years—through the rise and fall of governments, famine, death, transition. This practice was a good and sturdy companion for the convulsions of political, personal and social times—standing firm with the same message of steadfastness. I leaned into the unbending soul strength of the monks and their sister Benedictine community that day—and many days to come— after the election. On that day, they got up, went about their prayers and their good work of serving the community together, just as they did on every other day. Nothing changed.

Yesterday, the day after the election, when I realized that “Yes, we are going back”, I was heartsick again—but not surprised this time. It was still a bitter pill to swallow. Again.

This country is not yet ready to shed its white male supremacy paired with the sanction of a false, “pseudo-christianity”. The engine driving another trump term, and pretty much infecting our whole political system, is the long shadow of corporate and wealthy elite—an economic model that continues to eat the earth and her inhabitants alive. Corporatocracy (/ˌkɔːrpərəˈtɒkrəsi/, from corporate and Greek: -κρατία, romanized: -kratía, lit. ‘domination by’; short form corpocracy^[1]) is an economic, political and judicial system controlled by business corporations or corporate interests.(Wikipedia)

The message was loud and clear from many working class people. It’s the economy. Those coming into power will see this as a crass opportunity to exploit the trust, fear and soul hunger of a nation towards their twisted means to a profitable end for themselves. This too is biblical—the ruthless and endless parade of kings, conquerors, colonizing powers and occupiers.

This time, on the morning after, when the unthinkable has happened—again— I am held in the arms of Mother Earth. I go down to the hardwoods of Northeast Ohio, a gem of a sanctuary called The Wilderness Center, where a small sliver of the old stands of hardwoods and prairie grasses have been preserved. It is drizzling rain as I walk the leaf strewn trails, listening to song sparrows, jays, and cardinals. Today, the birds chant the Psalms. This is my bible. Creation, for me, is the one companion who is always with us this side of heaven. I remembered that Mother Earth transcends and “trumps” all our petty materialism and wanton, misguided ideas of wealth. She is our wealth. She is our umbilical cord. She sustains our every need. Earth redeems us when we are hungry, ill, longing for beauty, ceremony, needing peace and a place set apart. This is where my solace and Northstar will reside in the coming weeks and months and years.

I remember how the Celts, a land based people who were colonized and “christianized” by the Roman Empire, wedded their earth songs and symbols with this new, strange religion. They called the bible the Little Book of divine revelation and the creation, the Big Book. We humans are part of Creation’s Divine Body, a very real, multi-dimensional universe. Like a hologram that we inhabit, it is what feeds us, nourishes us, and will keep us — even as tyrants rise and fall, despoil and destroy her and her inhabitants. She keeps on giving.

This country now faces perhaps the longest, and most cruel and corrupt shadow of its obscene and unequally shared wealth and power. I want to fall down on the floor of these trees and give thanks for the sweet familiarity of earth that I find everywhere I go. She is my solace and Psalm on the day after—just as the little book of the psalms came to guide and shore up my soul and many souls on that day after in 2016.

As some gloat or sigh in relief at a MAGA victory. There will be suffering. The country will convulse and seize. There will be unfathomable persecution as the political and economic machine begins to grind up everything in its path.

Now I understand the need of my ancestors to bind themselves together in song and small clutches of communities. We need each other more than ever, as sanctuaries of likeminded souls, to bind together these discordant times into one harmony. When the Unthinkable happens. Again.

We were made for such a time as this.

#soultending #earthmama #soulforce