I am the storm

I am not a go-gently-into-the-night kind of person. I am more a rage-rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind of person.

You know me through my writing or because you, well, know me. So you know that I have very little patience for New Age aphorisms and bumpersticker sentiments that I believe substitute feeling good for doing good. For years I have scoffed at “Visualize World Peace” (the corrective bumpsticker reads “Visualize Whirled Peas”), thinking: If you want peace, buddy, you damn well better stop visualizing and start working.

That said, this gray and rainy morning I heard something at Barre3 (where I go to forget the world for 60 joyful, mindless, sweaty minutes), something definitely New Age-y with the whiff of the bumpersticker — that was undeniably powerful. And I had to listen. At the end of the workout, the instructor, my friend and secret guru Summer Spinner (yes, her real name), said: “Breathe space into your heart.”

And, a split second before my judgmental brain had time to dismiss this as yoga-infused pabulum, my body took over and inhabited the thought. I felt that intake of breath, which is life, open up inside me and stretch my heart. Not, of course, the four-chambered, fist-sized circulation pump behind my ribs, but rather my metaphorical heart, the part of me that is located nowhere and everywhere, the part of me that loves and grieves, the part of me that, post-election, hurts like hell.

I breathed into that heart, breathed s p a c e into that heart, expanded it to make room for hope. Yes, hope.

Hope is the beginning. Hope is the foundation for the work in front of us. And so, I end (or rather, I begin) with this: