(S)electricity

Or Finding ground in a groundless time

Audio version of this post.

And the poem that follows the post (“It’s not like the world needed another bag”)

1. Confession: I would really rather be watching the final episode of The Bachelor right now, but two things are getting in the way of this: 1) It hasn’t yet aired and 2) I am fully aware watching someone sort out their feelings on a white-sand beach in the Dominican Republic is the equivalent of deciding the snack shelf in my pantry will suffice for the nutritionally balanced lunch my body needs.

2. It takes some effort to make a nutritionally balanced lunch, real and metaphor. More effort than it takes to open a box of real and metaphorical corn nuts or snap off some squares of real and

   metaphorical dark chocolate with yummy little bits of real and metaphorical pretzels and sea salt in them. But the better angels living inside my consciousness know better. And so, I take a deep breath and open the fridge, consider the deeper task of my own nourishment.

3. The deeper task of nourishment. This has been on my mind a lot these first months of 2025, and particularly in the past several weeks of the dizzying spin cycle of news. It’s hard to know what to hold onto as the ride keeps going and going and going, and far too easy to lose balance and tumble from the handholds entirely. In tough times, I tend to lean my haunches into creative projects, which tend to provide me with steady, actionable steps and offer a sense of measurable progress and purpose.

4. But these are no ordinary tough times, and the creative projects I’ve latched onto (search #plotholders and #100daysofgooglyeyesonthings on Instagram or Facebook) are introducing a new-to-me sensation that sits somewhere between escape, avoidance, guilt, defeat, paralysis, sadness, ambivalence, and pointlessness. What am I doing this for, I ask myself each time I thread another set of cotton loops on my loom, or affix a plastic pair of eyes on a household object. I should be DOING something, I chastise myself as I make my color selections and snap a photo of a suddenly animated whisk. Isn’t potholder-making and google-eye embellishing the equivalent of corn nuts and dark chocolate. Aren’t they, quite frankly, just snacks?!

   

   

5. But wait! the better angels of my consciousness protest back, returning me to the present tense, potholed as it is with chaos, confusion, division, and destruction. What if these things ARE your nourishment? What if what brings you in contact with your imagination IS the nutritional balance your body needs?

6. What’s true is that what’s unfolding in the harried halls of Washington and elsewhere around the world is a derailment of a catastrophic order, and the speed of the next train coming down the tracks is jaw-droppingly fast, the scale of collateral damage mathematically incomprehensible. Each day, diving into the next brutal chapter of news, I feel like I’m at one of those metal scrapyards, watching the twisted pile of brokenness get bigger and bigger, the cleanup growing further and further out of my reach.

7. When I start threading the loops, though, I feel a return to purpose. My hands are moving, working, engaging, my attention clear, my heart open. When I paw through the junk drawer or scan the refrigerator for my next googly-eye canvas, I notice my patience, my curiosity, my joy. The connective tissue between my present tense and its possibilities start zinging with new electricity.

8. The deeper task of nourishment. This is the thread, I realize, I am always following. It hasn’t changed. It doesn’t. Whatever is unfolding beyond me—chaotic, confusing, unconscionable—is impervious to the directive rooted inside of me: Say yes to whatever makes you come alive.

9. I know, implicitly, that an episode of The Bachelor doesn’t do that. Likewise, following, indefinitely, the rabbit hole and overwhelm of news doesn’t do that either. But so much else does, especially when it’s in my reach, within my physical means, in the field of my own imagination. In these tougher-than-tough times, holding the compass steady is much more challenging. We can lose sight of our agency and our capacity, or become doubtful or suspicious of our own inclinations to ground ourselves. We can start to believe what we are doing isn’t doing anything.

10. But what if it’s the opposite? What if we are doing everything?

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it’s not like the world needed another bag * (February 11, 2020)

And yet there she was, tucked into her favorite chair, making a thing
from scratch. I imagine her, a cup of steaming chamomile to her right,
nubby slippers on, a bright and easy joy on her lips, a radiator
humming companionably behind her. But maybe I have it all wrong.
There were already so many to choose from, thick columns of them
rustling like cornstalks at the foot of every checkout aisle across America.
She had to barricade herself from that fluorescent jungle. She had to yield
to another, quieter call, her hands faintly stirring at her sides. What does it take
to outstrip the army aiming its sights on your surrender, your silence?
Everything you have.

* I borrowed this line from a Facebook post by my friend Aimee Dolich, who crocheted this reusable grocery tote.