The Morning After the Night Before

It’s hard to know what to say, or even feel, in view of this morning’s election news. For anyone with an ounce of heart and empathy, the first reactions — after numbness — are horror and, possibly, panic. I know I felt all three when I woke to the news.

Yet, as I crafted a response to a friend's text message, I found myself thinking back to the coaching group session I facilitated last night, to the extraordinarily powerful words that were shared and to the fears expressed about not only owning those expressions of power but releasing and communicating them. 

How disturbingly timely last night's session turned out to be. For if there was ever a time to stand in our power, if there was ever a time to free onto the page the stories that have chosen us to tell them, now is that time. So feel what you feel, but don’t let those feelings silence you. If you do, more than an election has been lost. If you do, fear has won. 

I don’t know what this means, but just before I woke up, and before I knew anything  about the election results, I dreamed I was sitting in a cafe or library,  writing out The MoonQuest...from memory, I think. The first part of the big pile in the dream was typewritten; my current and most recent rewriting was handwritten. In the dream, whatever I’m doing with the manuscript feels important, not that that’s clear how…possibly not in the dream, certainly not in my memory of it. 

(The MoonQuest may well be more relevant today than it has ever been through the 30 years since I began writing it. It takes place in “a land of slaughtered bards, a land dulled and divided by fear.”)

Once I heard the results, it struck me that the dream was somehow significant, even if I couldn’t see how. But as I lay in bed, more unwilling than usual to get up and face the day, I began to see the connection. Even though I didn’t consciously know the election results (or even the trends) when I had the dream, I think the dream was telling me that not only is The MoonQuest story more relevant than ever but that all the stories I write are now more relevant than ever. My logical mind cried “bullshit.” My logical mind argued that writing stories that people are neither reading nor heeding has got to be the most delusional of indulgences right now. Yet somewhere in me I know that that cannot be true. Somewhere within me, I know that those stories, particularly my Legend of Q’ntana visionary fantasy stories, are now more important than they have ever been. Because even if people are neither reading nor heeding them, the stories have a broader energetic impact. Either that or everything I have believed, written and taught for more than 30 years is bullshit. 

To be honest, I have barely made it through the past two years, on so many levels, including some of the most basic. I’m not on the street, but I have been homeless. And I haven’t known, from one day to the next some days, how I’ll make it through, emotionally as well as financially. 

But I have made it through. Miracle after miracle has been put in my path to keep me going, right down to my current housing situation, which is far from optimal, but has put a roof over my head, at least for now.

I have to believe that those miracles will continue to show up for me through whatever nightmare this country is constructing for itself. 

Does that mean I’m not scared? Not even remotely. That’s one of the reasons I stayed in bed so long. 

But as I’ve been writing this, I keep thinking about a line from The MoonQuest, one that’s so emblematic of the story: “Feel your fear. Then pass through it to the other side, where your destiny awaits.”

I don’t know how I’ll make it through today or the days ahead. What I do know is that I won’t make it through if I focus on my fear. 

In the first chapter of The Lost Horse of Bryn Doon (the 5th installment-in-progress in my Q’ntana series; The MoonQuest is the first book in the series), one of the main characters is pushed (against his will and desire) to “right it.” Although I know something of the story’s end (a rarity for me), I can’t (yet) see how I’m to get there. 

I see that as a metaphor for where I/we are today. I also see, that for me and very likely for some of you, “writing it” is part of “righting it,” because, beyond the metaphysics of energy transmission, what I write always and inevitably transforms me. And if it transforms me, it also transforms the world. And I see that, for me, part of getting to the story’s end – to this book’s end in the larger Q’ntana saga and to the end of this chapter we’re now living in this country and in the world – is to write it…to keep “writing it” to “right it.”

So perhaps the most important thing I can do today is to return to work on that story, a story that I have been challenged to keep working on because of my peripatetic life these past 22 months. 

Does any of that make logical sense in the context of today and what we may be facing in the days and months ahead? Probably not. But the alternative is a paralytic descent into terror and panic (a too easy alternative), and that will accomplish nothing.

So, for today and through the days and weeks of uncertainty ahead, I will do my best to have the courage to write and speak through my fear and to hold (however shakily) the resonance of the highest possible outcome, for myself and for all. As for the rest, all I can do is continue to trust – in the miracles that have gotten me this far and to the miracles, large and small, that will carry all of us through and past our fears, to where our destinies reside.