I showed up to the Board of Elections a couple days after early voting began. I do love the vibration of Election Day, but I don’t love the unpredictability of family life, and so I snuck over during a little open window (So quick! So easy!).
Walking in the building brings tears to my eyes almost every time. In the past,, my tears felt connected to a deep-seated hopefulness, a searing gratitude for being part of something larger than myself. I’m still grateful, but the tears don’t feel like hope these days. They feel like something rawer, more tender. Perhaps grief and audacity.
I cast my ballot, affixed my sticker, and went back to work. Will it matter? I wondered. But it already did.
–
I heard a story recently that I want to share with you. Most attribute it to Native American traditions, specifically the White Mountain Apache Tribe, but there is some debate. The American mythologist, Michael Meade, shares a version of it in his book, Why the World Doesn’t End.
The story is about a wizened old woman who lives in a cave deeply hidden in the side of a mountain. People have relentlessly searched for the exact location of the cave, but it remains so tucked away that for years no one has seen it with their own eyes. The woman has lived there on her own for decades, accompanied only by a lineage of black dogs who keep her company.
The woman doesn’t mind her solitude, and seems wholly unaffected by the passage of time. She operates at a different pace, unhurried by the usual intensity of human life. She spends hour after hour of her days intricately weaving. For decades now, she has been working on crafting the most beautiful blanket that will have ever been seen. An incredible contrast to the dim cave, the colors of the blanket are vibrant and spectacular. The patterns are elaborate and gorgeous. She’s recently been adding porcupine quills to make a fringe on the blanket, creating beauty even from something made for defense.
Her fingers are raw and her neck aches, but she rarely stops her weaving. The only times she sets down her tools are when she goes to the very back of the dark cave to stir the large black pot that hangs above the fire. Inside the pot is a simmering stew that contains the seeds, roots, and herbs that are the building blocks of the earth. The woman knows that she must stir the stew every so often, lest the ingredients burn up in the ancient fire. She’s not sure how she learned that this was her duty, but it’s as clear to her as her hands are in front of her.
Thus, the woman’s days alternate between weaving her beautiful tapestry and stirring the primordial stew. She weaves things together and she stirs them up. Her intuition tells her when she needs to set down her weaving and go back to her stirring.
With as old as she is, it takes her some time to move to the back of the cave. She uses a cane she’s fashioned out of old root to walk slowly there. She grabs the large ladle that leans against the cave’s wall and begins churning the mixture.
Once finished, she heads back to her weaving. But when she arrives at the blanket, she sees that the black dog that had been sleeping next to her has awoken. He has managed to pull on the unfinished thread and pull at it so hard that all of her beautiful weaving has come undone. In front of him lay the remnants of the blanket, now just a large tangled pile. The woman looks in near disbelief at the chaotic mess beneath her.
She makes her way to her aching knees and picks up disjointed pieces of the beauty she had spent a lifetime creating. The dog sits nearby, but she doesn’t look his way. Instead, she keeps her gaze focused on the threads in front of her, the lost radiance of her design. She is still.
She sits that way for quite a while, though time has barely any meaning to her now. But eventually, slowly, she gathers her tools and picks up a loose piece of the thread. She begins to weave.
As she does, she begins to have visions for a new design, one even more gorgeous than what had come before. Her energy swells and her hands begin work more quickly. It will soon be beautiful again.
–
Some have called the days in which we are living a dark night of the soul. That seems right to me. It’s been a time in which the structures through which we’ve understood the world and ourselves have begun to unravel.
For a while, we tried to hold those threads together, as we are inclined to do. But I think many of us have seen by now that this may not be possible. We must tend to the fire, We must return and take it in. We must begin to reweave something beautiful – in good time.
I have no predictions about what will happen this week. I’m not holding hope or doubt. I’m not holding belief or fear.
I am holding something bigger than any of that, I think – or at least I am trying to. I’m holding the sense that we are a seed in the elemental stew. We are a thread in the tapestry. We are part of a timescale we can hardly conceive of, and an ebb and flow that we can scarcely imagine.
I know that there will be goodness this week because I trust that we will all find it. At the polls. At the dinner table. In all of the places where we will do our most sacred work. We will continue to make the slow march back to the beauty we cannot help but create.
