prose – Page 2 – The Kingdom of Enough

Why Write?

Do articles and blogs bombard your email inbox the way they do mine? On top of the important news, intriguing essays, and inspirational nuggets delivered digitally every day, books fill the shelves in my house and are stacked in every place I might sit down to read. Even though I work in a library, I still get a thrill out of browsing in bookstores.

Why then would I add to the volume of words our information age is already exploding with? I just turned 60, so this is not an idle question. Why spend the time I hold dear writing? When I was 35, laboring on a novel, I wanted to be a bestselling author. Even now that I’m happily earning a living as a librarian, I wouldn’t complain if my blog suddenly went viral or if I were named poet laureate of Santa Cruz. But when the garden languishes for want of my tending and my sweetheart wants to go on a bike ride with me, those pipe dreams are not good enough reasons to spend time scribbling in my notebook.

So why bother?

My writing friends have different answers to this fundamental and deeply personal question. “We’re all just piles of sand,” one said when we talked about this recently. “If sand could write, it would.” The human person is meant to work, to be of service. Of course, people who are overworked can rightfully complain that too much work is exhausting and soul-draining, but the opposite of the old aphorism is also true: all play and no work makes us dull too. Artists create, writers write. It’s what we do. But what if your innate drive gets stifled somehow? Another friend called on the artist’s sense of responsibility. “Who are you not to write?” she mused. “To share what only you can give voice to?”

For some of us, writing is personal. One friend writes to process. Through the alchemy of writing, a painful experience can be transformed into something beautiful. “Writing is medicine,” another said. In fact, Carolyn Brigit Flynn, the beloved teacher who originally brought us all together, calls what she teaches “writing to feed the soul.” This is certainly true for me. Writing nourishes me, and I often turn to my journal in lieu of a therapist.

Like Joan Didion, I also write to find out what I think, whether it’s sorting out an environmental issue or exploring my own anxieties and aspirations. I delight in discovery, the surprises that sometimes burble up from secret places when I’m working on a poem. Was that insight waiting in my subconscious all along, or was it just this minute delivered from the Divine? “The writing of poems must be counted as much a contemplative practice,” Jane Hirshfield writes in Ten Windows, “as a communicative one.”

Indeed, while writing is personal for me, it is also, obviously, about communicating. I’m currently looking for an agent for my novel; I submit poems to journals and publish this blog. Something impels me to share. Is it just that old desire for acclaim I had when I longed to write a bestseller? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The friend for whom writing is medicine explained that the real magic happens when she reads her work aloud in a circle of women and is witnessed. As reader and listener as well as writer, I agree.

An old adage claims that there are three ingredients for happiness: something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. In a busy life already full of words, why do I bother putting more on a page? When I was younger, I wanted a product. Now, it’s all about process: reflection, discovery, sharing, healing. The challenge of trying to write well both torments and stimulates me, and when I feel I’ve succeeded, it delivers an intellectual pleasure without compare. Quite simply, I write because it gives me joy.

What is your art, and why do you bother? I look forward to hearing from you!

Our Jacaranda

In April seed pods the size of black plums dangled from the bare branches of the jacaranda we had just planted in the heart of our garden. Would they drop eventually, we wondered? These dark ornaments were … well, ugly to our eyes. We worried too that — even though we’d purposely chosen a sapling with multiple trunks to create the effect of a copse instead of a lone tree – it might split. But what could we do now? Just trust in the nurseryman’s confidence in a tree’s capacity to heal itself and twice a week nurse it with buckets full of water, as precious in this drought as wine.

All spring we watched like new parents as lengthening days untied the knots of green nubs that formed on the jacaranda’s branches and unfurled feathery fronds. The seed pods hung there still, dusty black spades amidst the green froth. Would they ever drop? Should I prune them? But I don’t want to weed, rake, and trim nature right out of the garden. Sometimes when we try to beautify a landscape, we expunge wild processes we don’t understand. If I cut off the seed pods, would I cut off some vital service to the tree? A dozen websites and gardening books ignored my question but cautioned me not to expect blooms this first year. What cause for rejoicing then, like a baby’s first steps, when I noticed tiny buds in June. As if the jacaranda knew the myth of flowers blossoming on a magical fern deep in the Polish forest, a purple cloud bloomed to crown our garden. Yet even this halo could not hide the devil’s paws clutching last year’s dead limbs. Would they ever drop?

It is November now. With carapaces hard as glass, the pods hang there still, but I notice they have opened – just barely opened like a rotten oyster loathe to let go its pearls. The tree-given desire for life even in such tiny pips as a jacaranda’s seeds is enough to pry open the possessive lover’s door. The pods may never drop, but it seems the seeds have found their way to earth and (we may hope) rebirth.

Use Less, Share More

If you realize you have enough, you are truly rich.

Tao te Ching

Collage of three desert photos: the author sitting on a rock, a Joshua tree, and a chollo cactus.

Of all the places I might go on my spring break as pandemic restrictions began to lift earlier this year, I chose Joshua Tree National Park. I craved the austere beauty of the desert in a way I couldn’t explain, but when I arrived in that wide-open wild landscape of dry sand and iconic rock formations, I realized that the book I was reading, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here, must have sent me to the desert to look for role models of how to use less.

Who would have guessed that a science book would turn out to be the perfect reading for Lent? A spiritual text is a more obvious choice, Abandonment to Divine Providence say, or Prayer in the Cave of the Heart, but The Story of More by Hope Jahren had been waiting on my to-be-read pile for months. I loved her funny, poignant memoir Lab Girl and was curious what a smart botanist with a good sense of humor would have to say about climate change.

Photo of the book The Story of More next to a cactus

For a book loaded with statistics, The Story of More is surprisingly easy to read, partly thanks to Jahren’s casual, engaging style, partly to how relevant and vivid her statistics are. Instead of stating coal and oil use in tons and gallons, for example, she paints a picture: “Since 1969, the nations of the globe have burned enough coal to fill a grave the size of Texas and a volume of oil large enough to fill Lake Pontchartrain three times over.” Or she simply puts things in perspective: “waste of edible food has increased such that it now equals the amount of food needed to adequately feed all of the undernourished people on Earth.” Statistics like these break by heart.

So maybe I should have said that her book is readable instead of easy to read because in fact, reading it was hard, hard in all kinds of ways – painful to acknowledge the species that have gone extinct, frightening to consider devastating heat waves and crop failures, uncomfortable above all, to recognize our greed and waste and that we might need to change. When I say our and we, by the way, I mean those of us who live in the 36 countries of the OECD (including North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan). We’re the ones using the most energy and throwing food away.

Step by step Jahren takes us through population growth, the ways we grow (and waste) food, and how we make and use energy – not to make us feel guilty, but to explain how we got to climate change. She writes clearly, and even if the book is disturbing to read, it’s easy to understand. Ultimately, it’s hopeful because Jahren has ideas, just as her subtitle promises, for where to go from here. She sums them up in a simple motto: use less, share more. That motto is what made this book the perfect read for a season of fasting and almsgiving and maybe subconsciously what sent me to Joshua Tree looking for inspiration.

There, where the Mojave meets the Colorado Desert, plants and animals have evolved to survive in hot sun with little water. In contrast, as a human being I needed to slather on sunscreen, wear a shade hat, and drink at least a gallon of water a day. So how do desert flora and fauna do it? The Joshua tree, according to Blue Planet Biomes, turns its spiky leaves upwards to catch any moisture in the air and stores the water in its fibrous limbs and trunk; it also has an extra root system for storing surplus water. Human beings don’t have eons to evolve our physiology to that degree, but maybe our ingenuity can save us.

Consider the tobacco moth caterpillar that naturalist Bernd Heinrich describes in his essay “Reading Tree Leaves.” In the Mojave this caterpillar grabs tight with its rear legs to the stem that attaches a jimsonweed leaf to the plant’s stalk, reaches its forelegs out to the tip of the leaf, and nibbles away at the edge while using the remainder of the leaf for shade, its own little green umbrella.

Climate change can feel so overwhelming that it’s paralyzing. At the end of her book Jahren suggests that the reader choose just one issue to focus on, one that tugs at your heart or that you worry about when you can’t sleep at three in the morning. Maybe it’s world hunger or ocean pollution, national parks or green energy. Pick an issue that matters enough to you that you’re willing to make a sacrifice for it and start by learning more about it. That’s exactly what I plan to do in future blog posts.

Which environmental issue is calling to you for action? Please reply in the comments!

Ann Thomas is a freeelance writer and illustrator living in Portland, Oregon.

The Art and Pleasure of Aimless Wandering

I found Lauren Elkin’s book Flaneuse in the travel writing section of Bookshop Santa Cruz, but it is pleasantly hard to categorize: part memoir (a young woman leaves suburbia for the big city and eventually a life abroad), part musing on culture and feminism, part travelog. As any francophone could tell from the title, the focus is on walking. I don’t alas speak French, so I needed Lauren Elkin’s translation of flaneur: one who wanders aimlessly. She concentrates on the woman walker, the flaneuse, whom she defines specifically as “a determined resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”

Elkin herself fits this definition, and so do the women she writes about in her homage to the cities of New York, Paris, London, and Venice, to seeing them on foot, as a woman. (She writes about Tokyo too, but her relationship with that city seems as fraught and unfortunate as her relationship with the man she followed there.) Because my bent is towards literature, I especially enjoyed the chapters about Virginia Woolf in London and George Sand in Paris in which Elkin skillfully blends their relationship to those cities with her own, mixing literary reflections with travelog and memoir.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I didn’t also appreciate her forays into art, history, and politics. Reading about revolution and the history of the protest march in Paris, I found an explanation for the impulse that pulled me into the streets of Santa Cruz on January 21, 2017 even though I wasn’t sure what difference the Women’s March would make. “Marching is an instinctive response to feeling wronged, or desperate, or compelled to make a statement,” Elkin writes. I felt all three of those things after the 2016 election. “It makes us feel stronger to be part of a group,” she continues. “It feels good. Marching is a political act, but it’s a social one as well. We … feel we belong to something bigger than us.” I marched that day with my mother and my sister, friends, neighbors, and strangers, while my best friend joined over 470,000 people in Washington, D.C. and millions marched around the world. It did feel good, but Elkin recognizes the risk too. She describes participating in a march in Paris that splinters when the police block the street. She inadvertently follows a group of anarchists and ends up as part of a mob. “I felt uneasy. It was too easy to be led who knows where, by who knows whom, to do who knows what.” Her accidental experience stands in sharp contrast the mob that overran the Capitol on Wednesday. The insurrectionists might think that Trump led them there to stop the certification of an election he falsely claimed was stolen, but I can’t help thinking how satisfying the sight of that rampage on the house of the American people must have been to anarchists everywhere.

My motto is solvitur ambulando, it can be solved by walking. Like Martha Gelhorn I find flânerie “as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind.” But I’m not a city person. Although I’ve meandered happily in Paris, London, Istanbul, and New York, in truth the city quickly becomes overstimulating for me, oppressive even and exhausting. I have to retreat to a hotel room to recover or better yet to the country where I can walk a quiet lane or a path in the woods. Yet Elkin managed to sweep me up in the romance of flaneuse-ing around a city, and maybe precisely because the pandemic has put it out of reach, I now fantasize about flying to Paris with a pair of comfortable shoes and my notebook. Paris is where Elkin has made her home and the city she writes most about, a city whose streets I too have wandered many times over the last forty years, with friends and sweethearts, with my sisters and by myself, so I’m seduced equally by Elkin’s evocative writing and my own memories.

“There is a sense of the city you can’t plot on a map or a phone,” she says, and I long for that elusive sense, to roam aimlessly, to trust where my feet and chance might take me. What would I observe this time, “keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city,” as I strolled through the Marais or the Luxembourg Gardens? When I got tired and overstimulated, what would I write as I sat in a café people-watching and drinking café crème?

Yet here comes my inner realist to rein in the romantic. It’s January, the weather is miserable, maybe I’ll wait till summer. For now, I’ll sit with a notebook here at home, enjoying the view out my window of the winter garden and armchair traveling with an accomplished writer who knows how to share “the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”

New Year Blessing

On the winter solstice a few friends joined me on my patio, all of us masked and sitting in a circle several feet apart, for an afternoon of writing together. The nights were cold that week of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the mornings crisp, but at one-thirty on the sunny patio it was too warm for us to believe that winter had really arrived.

Sarojani looked up and asked Barbara, the painter, “What color blue is this sky?”

“Cerulean,” she answered.

We took off sweaters, put on broad-brimmed hats, and I read John O’Donohue’s poem “In Praise of Fire” as a blessing for us and also as a prompt for the writing we would do together:

As short as the time

From spark to flame,

So brief may the distance be

Between heart and being.

For thirty minutes in the Santa Cruz sunshine, we labored over notebooks and laptop, seeking that secret inspired place in each of us that might birth a poem, that could reveal the depths of what we really know. On the shortest day of the year the sun dips quickly, and cool shadows were spreading across the garden as we shared what we’d written. My poem began

May each new drop of light

in the lengthening days

fall into the dark well

where anyone might forget

the names we are called to say.

Even in the dark

may we remember …

“You write a lot of prayers,” Barbara pointed out when I finished and then, noticing John O’Donohue’s book on the table, asked, “What’s the difference between a prayer and a blessing?”

Well, that’s easy, I thought, but as I tried to formulate an answer, I was flummoxed. Are they the same? Is a blessing a form of prayer? Kim suggested that a prayer is offered, a blessing is bestowed. After they left, I pulled my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary off the shelf and looked up the verb to bless. Maybe part of the reason I was confused when I tried to answer Barbara’s question is that blessing carries multiple meanings:

Hallow or consecrate by religious rite or word
Hallow with the sign of the cross
Invoke divine care for (bless your heart)
Praise, glorify (bless his holy name)
Approve, speak well of.

To pray has fewer definitions in my dictionary:

Make a request in a humble manner
Address God or a god with adoration, confession, supplication or thanksgiving.

As I’d thought, there is overlap between these two actions. To invoke divine care or to praise God is both to bless and to pray, but that first definition of bless, to hallow or consecrate by religious rite or word, seemed to stand alone.

In my Catholic tradition the power to consecrate rests in the hands of the ordained priest. I learned this at age eight when I made my First Holy Communion. Only the priest can perform the sacramental rite that turns ordinary bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. Yet he clearly isn’t a magician. He calls on the power of God to make the bread and wine holy. Only through divine action does transubstantiation take place. I think my first instinct was correct, blessing is a form of prayer, and so was Kim’s, a prayer is offered, a blessing bestowed.

The day I put on my white lace dress and veil to make my First Communion, my grandmother gave me a rosary as a gift. After Mass my mother took me to our pastor to ask for his blessing on it. He made a Sign of the Cross over the beads while saying some words I couldn’t quite hear, maybe something like this prayer I found online: may those who devoutly use this rosary to pray be blessed, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. “Amen,” my mother finished, and I quickly copied her. Although I wouldn’t have used Merriam-Webster’s words to describe what happened, it was clearly something special, yet now that I think about it, not so different from one of the very first prayers I learned, grace before dinner: Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts …

Objects and buildings, animals and people may all receive a blessing, and John O’Donohue believes that as human beings we each have the power to give a blessing too. “I never doubted that I could bless,” Kim shared during our gathering on the winter solstice, but despite learning to say grace from an early age, as a Catholic it took me a long time to realize, and I thank the role models who showed me that I too could perform this priestly act. Over the years I have joined in a blessing way for a pregnant mother, led ritual cleansings of new homes, laid hands on sick friends, blessed travelers, knit prayers into shawls, and anointed women with water from Brigit’s sacred well in Ireland.

“It would be lovely if we could rediscover our power to bless one another,” John O’Donohue says in his book To Bless the Space Between Us. “Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing.”

At the end of an apocalyptic year, still in the midst of a global pandemic, at the beginning of what will likely be a hard winter, I believe with John O’Donohue that an intimate kindness prevails, and I call on this kindness to bless you and keep you. When you find yourself in darkness, may it shine upon you.

Beholding Your Sanctuary

My Grandma Sammie knew many psalms by heart and could quote them chapter and verse. Maybe she’s the one who inspired me one day almost twenty years ago to learn Psalm 63 (the first nine verses anyway). I studied it carefully to imprint the words on my memory. When I came to the line, so I have seen you in your sanctuary, beholding your power and glory, I pictured my place of worship, Holy Cross Church, with its high ceiling and sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows.

Then, to my surprise, my imagination leapt out of the building and into Yosemite Valley with the distinct curve of Half Dome and the craggy heights of El Capitan soaring above me. Yet maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Isn’t nature as much the home of the Divine as my dear parish church? John Muir called the Sierra Nevada the range of light, and I visited those mountains every summer. Why wouldn’t my mind latch onto Yosemite as the sanctuary of the Holy One? Psalm 63 itself begins with sensual longing: my body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water. It set me up to conflate God with the earth.

I returned to the mental exercise of memorizing the psalm. My soul shall be filled as with a banquet … Now came another image to mind, the morning of December 21, 1999, the last winter solstice of the millennium.

That day I went out before dawn for a walk along the ocean cliffs in Santa Cruz. What was purported to be the brightest full moon in a hundred years was setting in the west, swathed in swirling mist. For forty-five minutes it was my beacon and companion, and I was in awe. Finally, just as I reached my turning point, it dipped below the horizon. Show’s over, I thought sadly and turned around to start for home. What I saw then nearly took my breath away: a gorgeous sunrise had stolen up behind my back and was now in full bloom across the bay. I had only to turn around to see fresh beauty on the horizon. Here was the generosity of the Beloved on full display, sun and moon playing with the earth in a wild dance that seemed a secret shared between them and at the same time a wanton display for all us creatures to see.

Before King David composed the psalms, we were given nature as a scripture. Praying Psalm 63 is a way for me to celebrate the written Bible and the book of creation at the same time. Both help me find my way into the cave of my heart. At a time when I no longer take clean air or our democracy for granted, this is not a small thing. It might seem like escapism, and yes, it is a respite — like a walk along the ocean is — but the intention is to return to face COVID, the fight against racism, and wildfires with a hope and compassion I don’t have on my own.

Where do you perceive the Divine? What invites you into the cave of your heart? These are deeply personal questions, but if you feel like sharing what gives you hope in troubled times, please reply in the comments.

God Bless America

This morning I’m remembering the candlelight vigil in Mission Plaza Park on the night of 9/11 and the interfaith service that followed in Holy Cross Church. After the final hymn concluded, in the moment of silence after the organ notes faded but before the rustling of departure began, a single spontaneous voice began to sing “God Bless America.” A few others joined in, Sister Barbara promptly took it up on the organ, and then we were all singing. It has become a cliché since then, a requisite but routine badge of patriotism, as satisfying and thoughtfree as the seventh inning stretch and singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” but that night it was pure and heartfelt.

I want to reclaim that prayer for the land that I love, now threatened in so many more ways from within and without than it was even on that awful day.

Stand beside her, O Beloved, and guide her through the night – through this COVID-19 pandemic, our fight to end racism, wildfires burning from the mountains to the oceans white with foam. Shed your light from above to show us our common ground. God bless America.

Sitting in Paradise

“Sit in your cell as in paradise,” St. Romuald tells monks in his brief rule. My desk may be the closest thing I have to a monastic cell.

I loved it from the beginning, the ample size and solid feel of it, the sensuous curved corner that saves it from being stodgy or businesslike. In a concession to technology a discreet hole in the top allows power cords to pass through, but it is otherwise entirely organic. Waves and whorls in the grain of the cherry wood surface hint at a tree’s life story. Water stains tell of use, twenty years of a writer working (and eating and drinking) on this silky surface.

My ex-husband, an amateur woodworker, built it for me when I got tired of writing at the kitchen table. If I couldn’t have a room of my own in the apartment we shared, I wanted at least a desk of my own, and he designed it to my specifications: 66 inches wide and 32 inches deep with two drawers and built-in shelves. Since he was a self-taught furniture maker, he had to think through each step as he went, and the way he figured out to make the desk stand up was to build it into a corner, screwed to the walls to form two of its sides and give it stability.

Not long after the desk was finished, I put away the loosely autobiographical novel I’d written about navigating infertility as an expat in the Netherlands and started an adventure love story that I hoped might actually be publishable. When we divorced, I got to keep the desk and luckily the apartment of which it had become part and parcel. When my new sweetheart and I bought a house together eight years ago, I didn’t see how I could bring the desk with me, but he carefully detached it, marveling at the ingenuity of its construction, and brought it to the corner where I’m writing today at a window looking out on the garden.

In a marriage of the quotidian with the sublime, my laptop and to-do list sit surrounded by candles and icons, feathers and stones, succulents in a handmade ceramic vase. A turkey feather lies atop the letters my grandfather wrote home from World War II, the addresses he scrawled in pencil unfaded after seventy years though the once-white envelopes are ivory now. Behind them are two black-and-white photos of my parents when they were small, and on opposite ends of the desk are photos of me with my sisters and my sweetheart. A painted wooden owl reminds me of my writing teacher and the other beloved women who gathered for a ritual to celebrate my fiftieth birthday.

My desk, I see, has become a sort of altar. Like Joan Didion,”I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means,” and this piece of furniture is a home for that thinking and meaning making. I sit here as in paradise.

What is your favorite spot for thinking? If you’re a writer, where do you like to write? Please reply in the comments!

Give Back Your Heart to Yourself

From trellises and branches the gray-haired woman hangs bells shaped like birds throughout the garden – not because she wanted to cross an item off her to-do list, but because the breeze on this foggy June afternoon called her outdoors, because the boysenberry vine craved an ornament, and the bower flower wanted company.

It took her a long time to learn that you don’t need a spreadsheet of garden chores or a master calendar of when to fertilize and mulch, that it’s better to study leaf color, light, and rain. Yet she has a compassionate fondness for the younger self that planted those roses by the book and nourished that baby bougainvillea after a rough transplanting. Who knew roots could be so delicate, so fragile?

The woman’s hands know the soil in her garden now, the clay where the oxalis thrives and the soft earth under the old bougainvillea fed by its own fuschia-colored bracts fallen year after year. She has dug deep, so she knows the roots and burrows too. She abandoned her spreadsheet long ago, for the calendar is in her head now, in the angle of sunlight and the arrival of shadow.

Title from “Love After Love” by Derek Walcott

Let America Be America Again

The book How to be an antiracist on a desk next to a notebook

“America is broken,” a Canadian visitor observed four years ago on a trip to California, and I bristled. Wasn’t that an overreaction? In spite of everything – homelessness, school shootings, racism, and all our other problems – the comment seemed harsh to me. We had come through the great recession, we had a black president, I felt hopeful.

Then 46% of my fellow voting citizens chose a man we all knew to be an egomaniacal, lying, cheating, racist bully to be our president. More homeless people appeared on the streets of my town. A gunman with a semi-automatic rifle shot and killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and injured 17 more. Botham Jean was shot and killed in his own home by a white police officer, and then Atatiana Jefferson was too. The pandemic hit, and African-American and Latinx citizens are getting sick and dying at rates higher than their proportion of the population. Our national government failed to respond to the coronavirus like leaders of a first-world country with access to science, but even if they had, our brothers and sisters of color would still have been disproportionately affected. The pandemic merely exposed a racial divide that existed long before coronavirus arrived on our shores.

And then on Memorial Day a white police officer knelt on the neck of a black man named George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until he was dead. I’m finally ready to concede what I couldn’t four years ago.

America is broken.

This week I turned to poetry, as I often do when I’m trying to counter the specters of panic and despair that lurk at my side since the 2016 election, and I found my way to a poem by Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again.” The poem walks a lyrical line between “the dream the dreamers dreamed” and “the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies” that were a reality in our country in 1935 when it was written and still are, the title itself a retort from the past to “make America great again.” It is a powerful poem, but it is more about economic oppression than racism, and there’s a danger in conflating the two, in not acknowledging the ongoing injustice rooted in our history of slavery, segregation, and oppression of black people. As a privileged white woman I appreciate Hughes’ inclusiveness: “I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shores,” he wrote. But the fact is, I am not affected by the misery my Irish ancestors suffered under the English the way that African Americans today are affected by their brutal history in this country. To pretend that the past is over and done with is worse than naïve. It’s dangerous. Ask any black man who goes out of his way to seem non-threatening when he’s among white people.

Langston Hughes reminded me that there are two separate evils to confront: one is the corruption in American government that has dismantled whatever checks we had on capitalism and allowed wealth and power to accumulate in the hands of a few, and the other is racism. To fight the first evil, we must work for campaign finance reform to restore some semblance of representative government. Then we can tackle climate change, equitable opportunities for education, affordable housing, jobs with a living wage and health care for all.

But at the very same time that we’re recovering from a pandemic and trying to save our planet and bring about economic justice, we also have to fight the scourge of racism. Enough is enough. Why did Americans take to the streets this week? One by one we must root out and remove the reasons for their righteous rage. As President Obama said, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

So what can I, one white American woman, do right now?

First, I can examine my conscience for my own racism, a legacy of the culture I grew up in. But how do I recognize what is hidden from myself? This work will no doubt take the rest of my life, but to begin I will take a hidden bias test and read How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. (It has to be an ebook, though, if I want to read it now. This title and several others on racism are backordered at Bookshop Santa Cruz and on Amazon, thank God.) Second, I will welcome opportunities for conversation about racism wherever I find them. Third, I will donate to Black Lives Matter. Fourth, I will create a guide for students at Foothill College (where I am a librarian) on antiracism and civil disobedience.

This is just a start, and I welcome your suggestions. America didn’t break in 2016. Genocide of the indigenous people and slavery broke it before it even began. What can we do to repair it?