I love our home. It feels like a home, not just a house.
I hear legos - hundred of legos - and the plastic rippling noise they make when little hands scrape through the bin in search of a particular piece. I love, even, the arguing voices because they are loud and sure, not yet tamped down by fear or an over abundance of caution.
I hear my 14 year old dog let out a small groan when he stretches and tries to stand.
I see the light filter in and highlight dust motes like small, sparkling fairies or billion year old Stardust.
I love our home.
But today I am down. I am down because we are 100 + infiniti days into quarantine, and I haven’t hugged a person outside of my family for months.
I am down because the little moments of spontaneity life affords us are all but missing (they are rare even outside of quarantine because we have 3 kids and most things are structured around them).
I am down because this is the summer when so many voices, so many beautiful, tired voices have been uplifted to protest injustice, and we don’t yet know if anything will change. Like really truly change.
I am down because if the gates were thrown wide open, I don’t even know what I would want to do.
There is a story about a caged lion who paced back and forth, back and forth in its confined quarters all day. One day, after years of pacing, it was freed. Instead of running with abandon into the wild, he paced, back and forth, back and forth the length of his cage. The cage still felt true.
Ta-Nehisi Coates said in a conversation with Krista Tippet said, “There’s no immediate action that I can do to get out of this. What the realization is, is that me and you are here trapped together — that you’re as trapped as I am, that once you are aware, you’re in the cage too. It’s a different kind of cage; it’s a gilded cage, but it’s a cage...It’s natural that the first thing you say is, ‘How can I get out?’” To get out of the cage requires not only turning toward one another instead of shaking the bars, but also a deep kind of imagining. How do we imagine something we have never known?
I like what Terry Thompson said in a conversation with us on the podcast: First we have to learn to be uncomfortable. Then we have to learn to hear and tell the truth. Finally we have to be willing to heal together. Then we can create new spaces of belonging. I know we can get there. The question is, will we?
Let’s throw some paint against the wall. See what happens. Let’s imagine brave spaces and safe spaces where the beautiful, tired voices are not the only one’s singing a new song.
