What does it mean to be a creative soul in a challenging and often uncreative universe?
How can we tackle those challenges to embrace our inner creativity in whatever form it takes?
To inspire you on your journey, here are some hopefully helpful snippets and contemplations from my life as a writer, activist, and wannabee musician–the good, the bad, and the ugly, but mostly stuff I’m grateful for!
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Last Friday, on the 3rd anniversary of my brother’s death, I found myself alone in the woods, singing to a fallen tree.
I hadn’t intended to do this, or anything else to mark the day, even though I was keenly aware of it. But in the middle of our daily woods walk, my partner, Shel, turned around to hurry back to a meeting, and I continued on… to the rarely traveled old growth pine forest below the more popular trail that leads to the top of Mt. Holyoke, where three years ago, I’d sat by a large fallen tree and spent a few moments contemplating my brother’s life and death.
My brother, Danny, and I did not have an easy relationship, and he did not have an easy life. At 15 he had a schizophrenic breakdown and never fully recovered. The early years of his illness were rife with outbursts of often violent psychotic episodes at home, punctuated by short stays at locked institutions where they zombified him with thorazine. Later, as treatment for psychosis evolved, he became more functional, but never mastered the stress of holding a job or living on his own, even though he didn’t need 24-hour supervision and could travel alone to visit family. But these drugs took a toll on his physical health and by the time he died (from an imploded port whose repair surgery was delayed due to the COVID crisis) he was struggling with severe kidney disease.
One of the things we shared–from the time we were teenagers–was a love of singing. Danny didn’t have a particularly pleasant voice, or a strong ability to hold pitch, but if he knew that, he never let it bother him. And through the years, when the grandchildren were asked to perform on their musical instruments at family gatherings, Danny always wanted to sing a song.
So in memory of Danny, I sang a song to the same tree where I sat three years ago–Carole King’s You’ve Got a Friend. Danny always liked the James Taylor version, and it’s been one of the songs I’ve been working on in my voice lessons, where I’ve discovered that while my higher range voice is still pretty weak and wispy (though slowly improving) my lower range is strong and getting even stronger.
In the cold and quiet January woods, I belted it out, even though through most of my life, I wouldn’t have considered Danny my friend–just an (often secret) albatross I had to deal with.
I’m forever grateful that a few years before he died, I decided that I needed to go through the process of forgiving him for several abusive incidents that had made me cringe with disgust and an underlying edge of fear every time I was around him. This process was not easy or quick. It involved exposing, through writing and talking to people, many details I preferred not to think about. But, in the last few years of his life I was able to feel more caring and compassion when I saw him.
Here’s a short poem I wrote about the process:
ABLUTION
“To love is to chew; to forgive is to swallow”
—Mark Nepo
Two days before new year, and I have forgiven you,
let the thick glop between us dissolve
like a face in fade-to-black. To forgive
is not to swallow, but to spit, let the saliva glide
on the foam of a cool wave. Forgiveness is faith
in salt, in the movement of water against rocks
as they wear down to a black shine,
so slick you can slip right off—
turning your legs into mermaid tail,
your breathing lungs into gills. I have surrendered,
filled my bones with ocean. This forgiveness is cake.
It is love and I chew. It is cream with chocolate curls,
and it is green and clean, like a crisp, sharp leaf.
(Originally published in Dash, June 2021)
A few days ago, after my rendez-vous with the tree I came across this quote from Jacoby Ballard, from a series of journal prompts I’ve subscribed to from Kripalu Yoga Center on the theme of Choosing Love.
Feeling the emotions of grief, disappointment, betrayal, sadness, and anger are all prerequisites for forgiveness. If these emotions are not fully felt before one turns toward forgiveness, it can erode the process and compromise its authenticity.
How true. It took a LONG time to confront the sadness and denial and face the grief head-on. But I’m glad I got through this before it was too late, thoroughly enough that I could now sing my heart out to a fallen tree.
Then, as in Jewish tradition, I found a rock to place in the spot where the tree had been uprooted and headed home.
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Each year since I’ve started this blog, I’ve included an end-of-year submission stats post, just to shed some light on the nitty-gritty of this murky game. Here’s what happened for me in 2024.
POETRY:
20 Journals/Anthologies accepted 34 poems. I also got 91 poetry rejections.
Of the 34 poems accepted, 7 were taken on the very first go-round; 8 poems were previously rejected 1-3 times; 7 poems were rejected 4-7 times; 4 were rejected 9-12 times; 3 were rejected 15-20 times, and 1 had been previously rejected 31 times! (The other 4 poems were previously published, so I didn’t track that stat.) This surprised me, as usually my poems circulate more before someone picks them up. I’m wondering if I might be getting better at selecting poems I send out and matching them to journals.
Another thing of note is that of the 20 journals that accepted my work, 8 of them had previously published something of mine in the past, so I may have been more of a known quantity. But this is a great point for anyone playing the submission game. Establishing relationships with journals and editors who like your work can be extremely gratifying and also help soften the rejections from some of the more competitive journals on your reach list. And as long as the journals you’re published in put out a good quality product, who cares that they’re not the creme de la creme in the journal world. Your work is still getting read and appreciated!
FICTION AND CREATIVE NON-FICTION:
My fiction stats are a bit more depressing. I offered stories and essays to 23 journals, and only 1 got accepted: an op-ed in my local newspaper.
Some analysis on this:
–Stories and essays are often harder to publish because they take up more room in a publication. (5-10 pages vs. a 1-2 page poem).
–Most of my better stories were already published in my collection, IMMIGRANTS, so I’ve been only circulating a few newer ones. Before the book was published I did manage to publish around half of the stories it contained in various places, but it was slow going.
–I still tend to feel overall more confident in my fiction, and therefore I submitted to a greater number of “reach journals.”
AWARDS:
I’m personally very mixed on the “awards/contest” game for books because it seems like mostly a way of collecting a lot of exorbitant entry fees just to say your book won an award, but my publisher and I did submit to a couple of the more known ones. I was pleased to get a finalist designation (first runner up short-story and all category short-list) for the Eric Hoffer Awards, and a finalist designation in the short story category for the Independent Authors Network.
I also received two Pushcart Prize and two Best-of-the-Net nominations from various journal editors.
And I did not win a few other notable things, like an IPPY Award.
LARGER PROJECTS:
It was a thrill to have my poetry book, Here in Sanctuary–Whirling, which drew heavily on my witnessing trips to the border and the children’s detention center in Homestead, FL, come out in early 2024. With the upcoming administration’s about to take over and put their extreme deportation plans in gear, this book feels even more relevant right now, and I’m continuing to look for ways to publicize it.
I did not spend a lot of time circulating my music memoir or any of my novels. But I did receive three rejections (aka non-responses) from agents, and one non-response from a small press where I sent one of my older kid-lit novels.) So this might be an area ripe for New Year’s resolutions in 2025.
Nevertheless, I easily crossed the 100-rejection threshold (91 poetry rejections, 22 fiction/CNF rejections, and 4 agent/small press rejections) for a grand total of 117!
Onward to 2025!
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As we lit the Chanukah menorah on the first winter at our new house twenty-six years ago, my ten-year-old wanted to know if people could see the lights from the road. I think she was sensitive to ours being the only house in the neighborhood that wasn’t strung with Christmas lights and blinking Santas.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go see.”
We removed the curtain, placed the menorah in the front window, then bundled up and went outside. In the New England snow, our house, on top of a small hill next door to a farm with a Star of Bethlehem on the silo, looked gorgeous with the small menorah light twinkling at the window. I just wanted to stay out there forever under the amazing mass of stars.
We got in the car and drove down the hill, then turned so we could pass the house from below. “There it is!” I pointed. But to see our little menorah would clearly involve knowing that it was there, and a questionably dangerous maneuver of looking up at the house when you should be looking at the twisty road.
My children were not persuaded. “I want it to be like the star on the silo,” my six-year-old insisted as we pulled back into the driveway. “I want to see the menorah from far away.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can see it,” I tried to convince them. And then I had an idea. “Hey, let’s put menorahs on all sides of the house, and then we can walk around and see them, and the neighbors can see them, too!”
We lit three more menorahs, bundled back into our coats and boots, and crunched all the way around our snowy yard. One of the kids started to sing, and we all joined in: “Chanukah, oh Chanukah, come light the menorah/Let’s have a party, we’ll all dance the hora/every day for eight days, dreidels to spin/crispy little latkes, tasty and thin… When we got to the slope at the back of the house, the children stopped singing and flopped down dramatically, rolling all the way to the bottom of the hill. I felt my heart catch, but only until I heard them laughing.
This was so much fun that we did it again on the second night of Chanukah, and the third, and the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th. Each time we got to the back of the house, the kids would engage in a dramatic fall and roll down the hill. Some nights were bitter cold with wind-chills below zero. Others were slick with ice. It didn’t matter. Going out to see the Chanukah lights became a test of our resolve and our fortitude. A tradition was born.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
There’d be quiet as we waited. Sometimes we’d have to call a second time, or a third, but then we’d hear a rumble in the distance, as out of the dark he’d come bounding back, jumping on all of us over and over again as if giving an exuberant thank you for his special Chanukah present.
Lefty died in 2011, the same year my youngest left for college. My older child had already graduated and was living in New York City, so on the first night of Chanukah that year, the nest was truly empty. After Shel and I lit the Chanukah candles, I insisted on going out despite the fact that it was four degrees and the grounds were covered with a solid glaze of ice. We took ski poles and crept carefully down the ice-coated steps. At the front window, the small light of the menorah exuded warmth, the blanket of stars above us, magnificence, but I felt sad. I missed the kids, even though they were coming in a couple of days to celebrate Chanukah over the weekend. I missed the dog even more.
“We can walk the other way around the house,” Shel said. “It’s less steep.”
I knew the kids would have rebelled at any break in tradition, but I humored him and our old bones. We sang the song. At the end of the last line, I added “Lef–ty!” Like, “Play ball,” at the end of the Star Spangled Banner, the words just belonged there. I even looked across the field, half expecting to see him running toward us, but no Chanukah miracle.
When the kids came that weekend, they insisted on walking in the direction they’d always walked, and stopped, as usual, at the back of the house to dramatically roll down the hill. We sang the song, and of course, they too added, “Lef–ty!” to the last line—as we’ve done every year since then. At least one night every year, we still celebrate Chanukah with the children, their long-term partners, and now, a grandchild. But I still find myself looking across the field, waiting for that moment of rumbling and the speck of distant movement to get larger and clearer, our joyful dog coming back to us.
Originally published in Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Wonders of Christmas, 2018.
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Juliet might have said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but in the writing world titles matter.
Yet, up to now, I’ve been pretty blasé with my titles. Sometimes I can come up with a good title that adds some extra layers or a bit of wit, but when I can’t do that easily I often resort to something that’s succinct and just descriptive enough without giving away the store. And even then, I haven’t spent as much time as I might on a line of prose or poetry to make sure I’ve gotten exactly the words I want.
Maybe this is because I’m not that much of a title-reader. I often jump right to the first line to see if that draws me in.
But I’ve recently learned that if you send a poetry or short-story manuscript, editors will make snap judgments on the titles in your Table of Contents before they read a word of your prose. It’s a marketing world out there, and much as I might hate that, titles can be another form of clickbait. So, as I’m slogging through revisions for 30 Poems in November, I’m giving a bit more attention to titles and changing more of them than I usually do.
Poem #1: Becoming is now Evolution. Poem #5: The Answer is now Chasing Asclepias. Poem #13: Characteristics of Life is now Impossible Hope. Poem #27: In This Letter… is now In This Bottled Letter Bobbing in the Sea… And Poem #17: Family History is now Stick Figures on the Fascist Horizon.
I did have a few poems whose initial titles I liked as is: Van Gogh and Power Outages; Seeking the Moon; Fathers, Plants, Birds; I Am More than Seeds; and What Keeps Me Sane During Insane Times. As well as one I can’t take credit for because it was given in the prompt: Poem Set in the Present Moment Featuring My Mother’s Voice.
Most of the rest of my 30 Poems in November titles are okay, but definitely on the mediocre side of okay. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a few more improvements–and I’ll make that a point for any I’m serious about and might want to put in a manuscript.
As for the rest, I hope there are other people like me out there who ignore the titles and jump right into the words.
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Yesterday, at around 8:30 am, my partner, Shel, and I left Las Vegas, Nevada en route to Death Valley, a 2.5 hour drive. We arrived 8 hours later.
No, we did not have traffic or car trouble. And, in all fairness, we did have a couple of stops planned that we guessed would add two more hours to the trip. But the other four hours? Chalk it up to seizing the opportunities that the moments presented.
The first interruption came when we still in Vegas, on our way to load up on groceries at Trader Joe’s. This was one of our two planned stops–since we were told that Death Valley was a food desert as well as a physical one. Shel suddenly told me that instead of eating some of the food we’d brought from home (or that we were about to buy from Trader Joe’s) he’d really love to have breakfast in a down-home Mexican restaurant that catered to the local community. So when we passed this diner, we had to stop!
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
One large dish of guacamole, accompanied by one burrito, five plantains, and countless chips later (approximately an hour after schedule) we climbed back in our car and pushed on.
We were reasonably quick at Trader Joe’s, stocking up on our general staples (cereal, yogurt, hummus, bread, peanut butter, cheese)–and dithering only a bit in figuring out which produce would keep best and locating the hard-to-find chocolate almond biscotti, and may have made up some of the time we spent on breakfast. I was feeling pretty hopeful when we got in the car and saw it was only 90 minutes to Shoshone, CA, our next planned stop. If all went well, we’d arrive sometime between noon and 12:30, perfect for lunch at the Crow Bar Saloon, which had been recommended by a friend as the only good food in the area. We also hoped to take a quick dip in one of the local hot-springs before driving the last hour into the park, arriving well before darkness made it hard to see where we were going.
We had driven about two miles and were finally out of Vegas and on the open road when Shel saw the sign for Red Rock Canyon National Park. “Let’s stop,” he said.
I reminded him that we’d been there on our last trip 11 years ago when we’d driven from Las Vegas to the National Parks in Utah and hadn’t found it that impressive.
“But it’s gorgeous right now!” he insisted.
I couldn’t argue. The scenery was absolutely stunning. We agreed on a short stop. Thirty minutes just to walk around and soak it in.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
An hour and a half later we were on the road, though not at all disappointed that we’d tarried as long as we had, for the privilege of getting up close and personal with the rocks. Now we were scheduled to arrive at Shoshone at 2, which reset to 2:15 after a gas and bathroom stop. We took a brief sweep of the eclectic one-room local museum, and ate a hearty late lunch at the Crow Bar, but alas, there would be no time for hot springs. It was 3:30, the sun was already sinking pretty low in the sky, and we had an hour more to go.
The light was quickly fading by the time we arrived at our lodgings in Death Valley. As we got out of the car, we snapped pictures of the last smidgeons of sunset.
Photo: D. Dina Friedman
And by the time we were done checking in, we had to find our parking area, our building, and unload all the suitcases in the dark. But, whatever! We had no problem with the driving and we had an amazing day!
As I thought about this story–a very typical one for us, as our children will be first to grumpily attest–I recognized how important leaning into the unexpected has also been for me in my writing process. In first draft free-writing, my mind often makes sharp U-turns or veers off the road entirely. And while I may not even understand why I’m making the association, it’s often those odd connections that lead me into the juicier more important places. And even in revision, I’ve sometimes found that breaking open a piece that isn’t working and going off in an entirely different direction can help me ultimately find my way back home.
I do feel a bit sad that we didn’t go to the hot springs. But we’ll go on our way back to Las Vegas. Or we won’t–but at least, that’s the plan!
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After writing 30 poems during the past six Novembers, my December project is always to clean them up before sending them all–the good, the unfinished, and the hopeless–to the people who have so generously donated to this fundraiser to support the Center for New Americans.
Center for New Americans: cnam.org
I wrote about this process last year in a post called Poem Wrestling, but each year, I come to the table with a bit more learning, and also more compassion for myself as I work on shedding the egotistic aura of perfectionism and the numerous ways it sabotages my life. So what, if someone reads a not well rendered poem of mine and thinks badly of me or my writing abilities. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.
If I’m taking the time to revise these poems, it shouldn’t be out of preserving some image of myself whose truth is already questionable. Instead, revising should involve getting down dirty with each poem and asking myself, as Northampton Poet Laureate Franny Choi said so succinctly and enigmatically in a recent workshop I attended, what does the poem want?
And there is little that gives me more joy than when a poem bursts open into exciting new directions I had never anticipated, or when I can see in a pile of mud, a glint of a hidden sparkling stone that needs to be excavated and polished.
But enabling poems to find those pathways to self-realization can be difficult, especially when there are 30 of them that were quickly drafted.
Here’s what has helped me:
First, I read through all 30 and sort them into three categories which I label: Close (has integrity but could use tweaking), Medium (there’s something here, but still needs substantial work) and Mess (which means either huh? or yuck! depending on how self-deprecating I’m feeling that day).
Then, for each work-shift, I try to work on one poem from each category, reading through a few until I find one that appeals at the moment. For those in the Close pile, I read the poem out loud and listen for jarring word rhythms to eliminate and sounds that resonate. Then I pick through, taking out words that feel prosaic and flat, or images that feel worn and tired. I especially look at where I can replace a common verb with a stronger more evocative one, and if there are places I can substitute a word with a different number of syllables or slightly different sound to keep the internal “music” more consistent.
For a poem in the Medium category, I will eventually do all of the above, but first I’ll ask myself which parts are the sparkling rocks and which parts are mud trying to disguise itself as a sparkling rock. I’ll often chop off sections, and then add to the sections remaining to see if that brings me closer to what the poem wants.
The poems in the Mess category are the hardest to work with. These are the ones I’d likely toss if I hadn’t made the pledge to send all 30 poems to my funders. And often, I will file them in my Inactive archive after the whole process is complete. But sometimes a poem in this category just needs to emerge. For these poems, I first try to ask myself what the poem is really about, or remember what I was trying to say when I wrote it. Then, I look at what’s on the page and see which parts help reflect that message. I cut out all the parts that don’t seem relevant, (perhaps saving some of the images I might like for future poems) and start with what’s left. More times than I’d expect, I manage to rescue these poems once I’ve cut out the prose-laden, irrelevant and didactic places, and then continued revising according to the steps above.
Of course, my piles are fluid and sometimes a poem I first peg as Close gets demoted to Medium or even Mess. But this is counterbalanced by the Mess poems that eventually end up in the Close poems.
Does anything ever get finished? I’ll probably keep revising stuff until I die, but eventually poems fall into an additional category of Good Enough, and I offer them for publication.
And regardless, at the end of December, I send all 30 poems to my audience of funders, shoving aside any residual embarrassment. My revision process is effective enough that most of the poems by then are in the Close or Good Enough categories, with a few stragglers still in Medium and Mess. Most people don’t read all the poems, anyway, and I’m totally fine with that, giving them blanket permission to peruse or ignore. Life is short. We all have a lot to do.
And out of the 150 poems I started during these 30-poem Novembers between 2019 and 2023, 32 have been published. So, I guess someone somewhere also thought they were Good Enough.
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As a child on Thanksgiving, one of the things I most looked forward to–after the turkey, the stuffing, and the apple pie–was “The Argument.”
It was kind of like a sport. On one side would be my grandfather and Aunt Rita. On the other side would be just about everyone else: my parents, our close family friends: Bill & Jo, and–to the extent we could participate–my brothers and me.
Though the details of the news cycle changed over the late 60s and early 70s, the overlying arguments were always the same. Should we be in Vietnam? And did nuclear proliferation make any sense at all?
If I already have enough bombs to destroy the world a million times, I remember my mother arguing. There’s no reason I need enough bombs to destroy the world two million times–no matter what Russia does.
At this point my grandpa or Aunt Rita would launch in about the evils of Communism: Russia, Red China, world take-overs.
No one was ever declared the winner or loser in these yearly arguments. It was just something we did before getting out the poker chips–where there would be winners and losers, but only for chips so it didn’t matter. And I don’t remember any real antipathy expressed against those who held a different opinion. No cutting remarks about “owning the liberals,” or accusations of racism, ignorance, or “wokeness.”
My grandfather was one of the kindest, most generous people I knew. So was Aunt Rita, a devout Catholic and an active member of the Republican Party for decades. She sent us all so many cards with checks in them, my father joked that she was running a foundation. And on a Thanksgiving Day several years later when my brother ratted me out for sleeping with my college boyfriend after I confronted him about stealing the cash in my jewelry box and everyone else reacted with stony shocked silence, it was Aunt Rita who took me aside, pressed a twenty-dollar bill in my hand, and told me that whatever people did in loving relationships was just fine.
So, of course, I’m thinking about all of this as we head into this year’s Thanksgiving. I’ve already had moments of drama and trauma with some extended family that have left me feeling far less generous and forgiving than Aunt Rita–or any of us–were during those long-ago arguments. And I’m personally not in a place to take the Pollyanna route and conclude with some cliché about how we need to love everyone, regardless of their ideology. No matter how well-meaning and caring some people might be in their personal lives, I can’t get past their enabling a leader who has built his whole campaign on hatred of others.
Yet, this doesn’t excuse those of us on “the blue team” from dismissing their concerns, or deriding them as human beings, no matter how “wrong” we might think they are. So this gets at the conundrum: how do we keep ourselves, those we love, and those groups of people whom we may not know but still care about, safe from the augmented rhetoric that has been fomented to target them.
I don’t know the answer, but I do know that as a fiction writer I’ve had to infiltrate the minds of some characters who are about as different from me as possible. And I’ve had to make them fully developed, with fears, aspirations, prejudices, dreams, secret fantasies. A standard concept in character development is that the reader only sees the part of the iceberg above the water, but in order to make the character and their motivations authentic, the writer has to know and fully understand everything underneath.
So, maybe part of the problem, regardless of which “side” one might be on, is that people aren’t seeing anything more than the tip of the iceberg.
What would it be like to treat the uncle who drives you crazy as an exercise in character development. There are many great lists of questions you can ask yourself about your character in order to understand him better, and hopefully gain some compassion so that if you were to write him in a scene, whether people liked him or not, there’d be something about him that would make your readers care.
And a braver step, if you happen to be sharing a Thanksgiving table, what would it be like to ask your uncle to do the same exercise for someone from a targeted group–a trans teenager, or a woman from Central America whose husband has just been killed by gangs and is now fleeing for her life.
As Arlo says, if just 50 people a day….maybe it’s a movement…
Happy Thanksgiving!
A Thanksgiving staple–my cranberry upside down cake. Photo by Shel Horowitz
It’s Friday evening and I haven’t written a blog post all week. I can give a typical round of “a very busy ‘to-do’ list,” or “dog-ate-my-homework” excuses, but the real reason is that I haven’t been motivated. Usually, once an idea starts tickling me, it’s no problem to sit down and write, but that didn’t happen this week.
And despite my lack of creative zing, I had to write a poem every day, or, at least, a few lines dressed up as a poem for 30 Poems in November. That was about all I could corral my writer mind into doing.
In fact, earlier today when I suddenly made a rare decision that it was time to tackle the mound of homeless papers that hadn’t found their way to my file cabinet–a task that would involve emptying the file cabinet of papers that no longer needed to be there–I completely forgot that I was about to blow my streak of blogging 34 weeks in a row.
So now I’m writing against a deadline, plodding along even though my heart isn’t in it. Sometimes, when The Muse is AWOL, plodding is where it’s at. Every novel or long CNF work I’ve written would have never been completed if I hadn’t sucked in my breath and resolved to plod my way through, even on days I had no motivation.
I know my lack of motivation right now comes from being shell-shocked by the election results and the shock-and-awe tactics of bad and worse news coming down the pipeline quicker than I can respond to it. Likely I’m not the only one who’s overwhelmed by the onslaught of news stories, emails, and newsletter posts urging me to take some sort of action: calls to listen to, more articles to read, phone calls to make–all of which feel crucial and important.
But there are far more actions than I could possibly do.
So I plod along, careful to prioritize the things I’ve already committed to, like working with my immigration justice group to help build a wider coalition in our community, and writing calls-to-action for Rogan’s List, a very useful way of keeping on top of the news and plugging in where you can.
But even these things feel like very small steps to address the morass–like trying to fend off a big wave with a small flick of my hand.
How not to drown?
The only way I know is to make sure I take time for the self-care I need and keep on plodding. One action, one poem, one blog post at a time.
And to remember the story of The Hare and The Tortoise. How the tortoise won.
Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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