A Cherishing So Deep

I don’t know if I can explain why 2024 feels like it might have been the best year of my life. I did not succeed at nor achieve anything in conventional terms. I barely traveled. I made a little more money than a Social Security recipient. Nothing glamorous happened to me and I relinquished a long-standing conviction that I’d have access to glamorous moments forever, that a buffett of exciting, climactic adventures lay ahead of me including but not conscribed to events that involved dressing up and receiving praise and possibly being around celebrities. On the world stage there were, to put it mildly, few positive developments, and I believe everyone alive is in an objectively worse position now than they were months ago, even the oligarchs and other architects of genocide who’ve routinized acts so evil that they are beyond the imagination of most humans, spurring the frothing horses of the climate apocalypse into an ever more frenzied gallop.

No accomplishments, but I read many books. I spent a lot of time staring at the neighbors’ flowering and then flowered Catalpa. I fell in love with a language, which has never happened before. I went to church. I got stronger. I gained weight. It’s aging, I often think to myself. Aging is the source of this peace, or rather the quality of relationships aging allows me to have. The mellowed family dynamics. The greater patience and the lower tolerance. The perspective aging affords, which is in part the renewed perspective of how Present Me will one day look painfully foolish and naive to Future Me—so foolish that Future Me may write essays disavowing or insulting her (and I share what follows with that knowledge.) 

In February, I read an excerpt from the Quran, Surah Al-An’am 104:

And I saved it because I wanted it to be right. Is the truth its own consolation, when the truth is so often terrifying, agonizing? I hoped so. It was a promise I clung to while feeling crushed by the refusal of so many to admit the clear and irrefutable fact of the genocide, all those who chose and still choose their cowardice or malice over being decent on the most essential, basic level. I must stress that I received these lines through the lens of that very specific context. I didn’t read them and think oh right, this is about me, God’s favorite, The Perfect One Who Sees. Sure does feel great to be special! It simply was and still is a time when sentiments against massacre are suppressed, criminalized, and brutally punished. So a little reassurance does not go amiss.

Like a lot of religious text, I suspected the words contained wisdom I should attend to even if I could not understand it. But I think I understand it more now than I did then, in the felt sense of understand. These paper boats float out on the lake of the intellect and gradually decompose into the silt below. You need patience to let the words fall apart into meaning, it can’t be rushed. And you need intolerance for disturbance, for whatever would interfere with the process. 

I know it’s not right to call this year the best, like it’s singular or stands alone. It is accumulative, not separate from the years before. But I feel like I love the world more now, or differently, or better. It could be I’ve always loved the world exactly this much, in this way, so I should say instead that I love the world again and I am conscious of loving it, with urgency, with, as Marie Howe writes, a cherishing so deep. I’ve said since my 20s that I could die knowing I was granted a full and lucky life. That’s still true. But I don’t want to die. I feel so acutely now that I want to be here not because of a fear of death but because of a love for life, for the world. Everything is so precious. The animals, the people, the Catalpa tree, the books, the insufficient words. I want to live among people and things, writes Daniel Berrigan. Not in a crazy grasping consuming way certainly. (But describe the right way!)  

There are a few things I wanted to say before the end of 2024 but I’ve been reluctant to write anything because there is so much noise, an incessant churn of content. I’ll try it now anyway, because the internal pressure is there.

First: I hope no one lets their ego keep them from the possibility of God. A lot of the reading I did this year was Christian theology and I was amazed by what I found: ambivalence or disinterest in afterlife and resurrection, profound chains of reasoning about suffering and evil, unslakable curiosity about what matters (love, loss), and tremendous antipathy for church and state. I also read the Bible, not as the literal word of God but as a record of ancient and collaborative human thought. Nothing else made me feel more fortified for what lies ahead, and I believe it’s going to get much darker (in the United States, at least) than most of us can fully fathom.

I realized there are principled Christians moving through the world like I have tried to as a vegan: keeping their heads down and quietly pursuing their paths while being tirelessly slandered—not oppressed but readily disdained and made into cartoons—by the angry and ignorant, as well as degraded by association with deeply terrible Christians, of whom, like terrible vegans, there are many. (The loudest being usually, on every side, the most fraudulent.) I feel stupid for not coming to such an obvious fact sooner but again, revelation can’t be rushed. As I’ve said before, I loved Jesus very much when I was a little girl. It is almost too sweet to feel I’m allowed to love him again. 

Second: I tried a variety of forms of political engagement this year, even ones about which I was (correctly, in my opinion) completely faithless. I went to offices in Congress, I attended mass protests, I participated in demonstrations, I tried new groups and new actions. I don’t regret it because I met people who cared and I saw that the way they cared was different from mine, our capacities and sensibilities both disparate but we all showed up, we tried to treat each other kindly and we wanted to make change. It cements something, I think, to see American representatives raise foreign flags in their ostensible workplace, to watch celebrities like Rosario Dawson pull sad faces in front of protestors before entering the Washington Hilton. You can know this but directly observing it delivers another layer of comprehension. Does it feel bad? Yes, very bad. It feels like burying my face in wet garbage and holding it there. Whether or not it worked, it was done for the benefit of my soul.

What seemed wisest, ultimately, was to not work against my strengths or my proclivities, and to trust my instincts when any given space didn’t feel right to me. To organize my sense of obligation, I now have some goals and rules that help me not flounder around in the sea of need, that make effort habitual and therefore easier. I have an amount of money I’ll donate online each week and when I’m asked for money in person, I give it. I try to write to a prisoner, in some form or another¹ , at least 3 times a week. Because my schedule is so flexible (I am basically unemployed), I try to take up the slack with court watch and abortion access projects² as necessary. I’m just sharing this in case it helps someone else feel less overwhelmed by all there is to do. You can pick a few things and set some boundaries and commitments around them and change as necessary.

Third: Americans live in a dying empire controlled by irredeemably evil people. The country’s poison has seeped into almost all of us because we inhale the fumes with every breath, and one of those toxins is the impulse to look at a stranger and see an enemy. The rhetoric that followed the election disheartened me much more than the (I’m sorry, it must be said) entirely foreseeable result. Everyone who voted for Trump is not a sadistic piece of shit anymore than is everyone who voted for Harris. And it is not up for argument that Kamala Harris is a morally bankrupt cipher of a person who had a slew of frighteningly vile champions including actual antichrist Dick Cheney. Her whole campaign was an amoral, right-striving grift and it demeans and endangers us to pretend otherwise.

I’m not saying everyone should hug a TERF and french kiss a guy who bought Hawk Tuah crypto. I’m only saying the lack of critical awareness appalls me. My feelings about this country are clear but there are still genuinely good people all over America. The support for the CEO assassin, if nothing else, proves that people know they live in a shitty system that’s robbing and killing them and they respond to the prospect of someone trying to interrupt that.³  

So that’s it. I got some rants out of my system, thank you for that. Thank you for taking an interest in what I have to say. Even though I know it will be violent and scary and sad, it will not only be that, and I am excited to be in 2025 with you. There is nowhere else, in fact, that I would rather be.

1  I found out about PLSN through PrisonCulture. I have a penpal through Letters for Liberation. I found another one through WriteAPrisoner, but you could use LostVault or Wire of Hope or Facebook or Reddit groups where people will post profiles. There are a lot of places (here, here, here, here, here) to find political prisoners but it’s a good idea to check that their contact information is up to date before you send something. I used to get intimidated by different mailroom restrictions and general guidelines but using your common sense to write a single page of black ink on white paper is pretty low risk in terms of violating the rules, and a lot of inmate profiles will tell you if they can receive emails but can only send paper mail, for instance.

2  My beloved NYAAF has a case manager training coming up soon. If you’re in the DC area you can help through DCAF or DAPSN. There are dozens of other local funds and practical support networks for the rest of the states.

3  You must miss me with that Rosario Dawson-style sad faced “when did we become so bloodthirsty, how can people celebrate murder” etc.