Trump's victory is no surprise. He and his accomplices have tapped into a powerful and primal weapon: fear. Fear can disconnect us from each other and ourselves, it can awaken our tribalism, and it likes to have a scapegoat. The usage of fear to manipulate people is as old as humanity itself. This is nothing new.
And nothing that I say here is new either.
But as I sit with my own and others' grief, rage, and terror, I find myself almost miraculously grounded. It's not actually a miracle, of course - I have spent the last 5+ years (and, arguably, a lifetime) practicing stability and resourcing within huge waves of personal and collective emotion. I have sought and absorbed the writings and teachings of people who have dedicated their lives to this work. I have repeatedly submerged myself in the depths of my own and others' psyches, building slow and steady relationship with the underworld.
Any wisdom that I have gathered is still young - five years is nothing compared to the decades and generations of seekers before me that have laid the groundwork. And still, I want to share what feels true and stabilizing right now.
To start: you do not have to believe or take in any of this. As one of my teachers will sometimes say "you can destroy anything I say". Tend first to the parts of you that refuse to hear optimism, that refuse to receive resource. They are deserving of care and attention, too.
Also: I do not share any of this in order to quiet your rage, suppress your fear, or muffle your grief. Rage, fear, and grief are appropriate responses and can be transmuted into powerful action. People are going to die, we are going to suffer, and these realities cannot be bypassed. There is space for all of this.
And. I ask, again and again: what else is here?
So try this on, and notice what arises in you:
Orient to present time and present stages of global experience.
If we zoom out our perspective in time and space, and see the larger picture, it becomes clear that we are living in and amongst collapse. Trump's second term as president marks a speeding up of this collapse, but it is collapsing no matter what. We are living inside a death rattle; we are each cells in a body that is dying. And this metaphorical "body" is the structures with which we have built this current world: the ways in which we have viewed this country, "democracy" as we've known it, capitalism's endless hunger for growth... the list goes on. These structures - this body - has to die. This is the way of nature.
This collapse is LOUD. It is a circus on the world stage. It's all over our media, it's reflected in our bank accounts, and our collective emotional, physical, and mental burnout. It is blatant, obvious, visible to everyone. "Democrats versus Republicans" is the US's gladiatorial arena: meaningless battles with disposable figureheads, playing on humans' inclination towards clinging to false binaries when struggling to survive: good versus bad, neighbor versus stranger... And thus, we are pit against each other, misplacing our fear and anger onto an "other". (There is so much more to say here, but that's for another time.)
Simultaneously, something much more subtle is happening: rebirth. We are already composting the death and decay. We are building, and will continue to build, something new. This is more difficult to attune and orient to because it is so much quieter, and requires seeking and questioning and practicing and building slowly, over time. It is the work of generations - we will not see it come to fruition in our lifetimes.
We are already thinking more collectively again, already building more community with each other, already orienting towards the humanity in each of us. We are reading and writing and feeling in new ways. We are beginning to sense, again, how deeply connected everything is. We are relearning how to cultivate right relationship with Earth. We are meeting our own shadows differently. We are learning to grieve, and we are letting grief soften us, open us, change us.
I am not saying that every individual is doing this - most aren't. I am saying that as a collective, these subtle shifts are building momentum over time. I am saying that the impacts of these shifts will ripple out over centuries, in ways that we may never be able to see or quantify.
Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day. - Mariame Kaba
Yesterday, on the day after the election, I took Rocky on his morning walk. I had woken up to the news and, after some dry-heaving and pillow-screaming, I began to consciously gather resources: friends on the other end of a text, a long hug and dark humor with my partner, practicing an energetic lean with another somatic practitioner. As I let the motion of walking integrate the election results through my body, as I took in the crunch of fallen leaves, the clouds in the sky, the glittering river, the glint of the skyline, I landed on the only thought that felt wholly true in the moment:
The governments were never going to save us, anyway. We will save us.
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