Hello, friends. If your heart is aching, If your heart is heavy, if your heart is hard, if your heart is tired, if your heart is fearful, if your heart is furious, if your heart is numb (especially if your heart is numb), this is for you.
Yesterday, the day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, I took my sad heart for a drive up to Georgetown to be in community with my students. When I arrived, they were turning trash into art. (What a fucking metaphor, right?) Wire, fabric, discarded Altoids tins, egg cartons, magnetic poetry, plastic forks—you name it. The prompt was simple: to make something that expresses how you’re feeling right now.
What struck me as I watched them string up their art was how their disappointment and rage and fear hung right next to their gentleness. How human it all was. I am having a hard time staying soft. I’ve been on edge, wondering if I really know my neighbors at all. I’ve been thinking in us vs. them, misplacing blame, forgetting that other people are hurting too and this is why we’re here. I needed to watch my students carefully putting the pieces together with their hands. I needed to witness their mercy. I wrote down their hot-glued phrases of magnetic poetry.
Then, on the drive home, I started to sing.
It was a day that I did not feel like singing, but the song came anyway, soaring out of me as I passed trucks and rivers on the dark highway, insisting I feel the whole moment. It brought me to tears—the good kind that remind you that you are alive. I was singing their words.
Later that night, I took the song to my talented bandmates, Will Hewes and Zack Anchors. We recorded it on Will’s phone, imperfect and unpracticed, each of us just inhabiting the now, together.
There will be days to come when we need to fight like hell for what we love. Right now, I just need to remember my own humanity.
Lyrics:
My hand is open
Could we forgive through every bend in time?
Stand up
See the space between
Balance
Ignite
Go forward
hold light.
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