Climate change demonstration

Climate change demonstration today. Sad and want to crawl into blankets and hide all day… but holding a sign — vote for climate action on one side, honk for climate action on the other — and hearing probably three hundred people honk their horns in support of the cause was encouraging.

A high school kid came by and thanked us for what we were doing. Then a little later he came back and pulled a couple bottles of water for us out of a brown paper bag: water in 100% recycled containers. I cried a little bit about his caring which I have been wanting and needing to do so much of… I was really amazed and inspired by how many people really cared, but still discouraged because so little gets done.

We’ll make a little dent in the politics of the town, at least, my host said. I thought I might try writing about the issues and raising awareness but will writing make a difference? I don’t know. I am encouraged enough by the response today that I wonder if rallying some more folks to do demonstrations might help: it starts with a small seed in one place and grow. Changing these systems though, despair is so easy to enter into, as easy as it is right now to despair about my life.

Next weekend we will hold signs at this intersection again and then go to a demonstration my host’s daughter organised in Connecticut. I am encouraged and I cried about this kid’s caring for the cause and for us but still it is so hard: changing minds and policy on the climate feels about as hard as mending my own life. Really I do not know which one is harder but I guess in both cases it is important to not give up and to keep moving forward with committed action and committed healing I suppose without attachment to outcome.

I like being around people who share my values especially when we are trying to do something to make the world a better place. I want to be around friends, I don’t want to feel this alienation and isolation I feel even though one of the best things that could have happened happened snd I found somebody with really admirable values to care about me. I know I am cared for and appreciate being seen as a child of God (not necessarily by my host here, he is agnostic: but he would see me as a child of the universe). Someone at one of his talks said he might be one of the only true agnostic he’s ever met; he believes we carry on our legacy in our interactions with others and the impact we make on the world whether we are known for it or not; we change the DNA of the world, and this universe is worth being in awe about, caring about, and so many folks who are theists would still throw it all away. To me he is such confirmation that people can truly care deeply, without thought of personal benefit or reward, to just do the right thing and be a good person, and I appreciate him as a role model of what one version of a good person can look like.

My mood today about my life is much like my mood about the climate: I can’t quite tell my fears and anxieties about the personal and the eco-political apart; I am sad and there is so overwhelmingly much to do and in both cases I am sure I am missing something, that if I could just figure out what it is: what will bring peace to my heart? Is peace in my heart a distant dream and is my heart destined to break and break and break?

A solution to climate change has not been implemented but lots if people tesitify to having found some degree of peace in their hearts and I feel like a failure and a loser who just doesn’t know how to find it or to be okay with anything. I am not a typical person in any way at all; I don’t think simple matter-of-fact advice in how to be happy is going to work in my case, there are too many anxieties floating around and too much that I feel like I am meant to be that perhaps I have never found. I feel like I could search around endlessly and futilely forever for a community that sees me and loves me and helps me feel peace in my heart and what it really means for this way too complex creature that I am to discover what it is for this unique and apparently  woefully high maintenance being to thrive. There is something I’m meant to be that I have not found yet… I want to be heard and appreciated and seen somehow, not necessarily in a public way, but I want somebody to see and know and aporeciate my heart.

When I was younger I had a perhaps naïve faith that if I put myself out there and let myself be seen (and my words right now are the best way I know of putting myself out there) surely there must be a secret admirer out there somewhere who would like a chance of getting to know me a little better. I’m not really so sure anymore. I sort of still believe that if I let go of all preconceived notions and connect or do some wooey thing with my heart I might call in a love to join me on this journey and help me remember what it is to thrive. Do I know how to thrive, already, somewhere deep down? Is there any way to resolve the mess that my heart has become, and if I want to live authentically as myself, what do I need to do to step into that? How can I go from feeling dreadfully off course to excitedly on a track that was meant for me all along? I don’t know. I am sad and I just don’t know. This is a time in my life when faith is necessary more than ever before but maybe it is also harder than ever not to collapse. A song that beats in my soul right now goes: “Somebody (somebody) Ooh, somebody (somebody) Can anybody find me Somebody to love?”