This morning, I went for a walk with my husband. It’s snowing in Colorado—we’re approaching what looks like six inches of accumulation, and it continues to come down steadily.

 

We walked under snowy trees and talked.

I brought my travel tea set and one of my favorite teas (I’ve covered it here before—it’s Zomba White Tea Pearls from Friday Tea), and we stopped and let snow fall on our eyelashes and poured hot tea in the quiet whisper of snowfall.

Snowflakes landed on gloves and hats—perfect, crystalline forms.

I saved this image from the carousel posted by Loyalty Books on Instagram so that I could refer to it when I needed it, and spent some time outside, in the snow, in the perfect snowflakes, with tea and grief and a wounded sense of hope.

I have a lot of boxes where I can usually fit my feelings. Those boxes don’t seem big enough right now.

 

Here are the easy ones: I had hoped for better. I had believed we would get better. I thought that this time, the choice was so obvious, so clear, that even with all the forces arrayed against us, it would work out. It had to work out.

 

Trump has made a lot of promises, many of them incredibly scary. I mostly dealt with the fear up until now by convincing myself that we wouldn’t have to deal with any of that. But now that all seems much closer to reality. We are entering territory that is more frightening than the place we are leaving. I am not sure I can process how scary that territory is at this time, and I’m not going to try now.

 

There is a tendency in moments like this to try to point fingers: to blame anyone and everyone, including yourself. I am trying to sit with my feelings when I do this. We all want to believe that there are easy answers—that this wouldn’t have happened if only we had taken another phone banking shift. If we had canvassed harder. If we had donated more. 

 

We are in the bargaining phase of grief: the belief that somehow, if we got a do-over, we would get it right.

 

But this has always been the sideways promise of America for anyone marginalized: the sinking feeling that it will never truly be your home coupled with the hope that this time, if you try hard enough, you can make it happen: you can make tens of millions of people forget that they hate you and believe you do not belong.

 

I do not know that there is much more we could have done about a man who could barely complete a paragraph or walk a straight line, who promised to be a dictator on the first day and punish his enemies, who hoped out loud that someone would start shooting members of the press, who made plans that dozens of economists all agreed would cause economic chaos on a scale not seen since the Great Depression, winning tens of millions of votes because people didn’t care about any of that—they just believed that this country would be greater if we wiped more of us off the map.

 

Much of the future is enshrouded in fog. Here are two things that are clear, though: first, the future will not be any better or easier if we turn on ourselves and each other.

 

Second: hope is a necessary practice, and part of that practice is feeding your hope. One of the things I’m thinking about is how I can get people through this.

 

So here is part of my practice of hope for today. Many of you may know May Peterson—she is the author of the Sacred Dark Trilogy, which is mysterious and beautiful and loving. She is also a trans woman and one of the kindest, most loving people I have met. She’s having a rough time right now, and I can only imagine how much fear she must have about what might be coming.

 

If you’re able and willing, it would mean a lot to me if you could toss a few dollars on the Gofundme to help her stay housed.

 

I can’t change the world. I can’t change the country. But maybe I can help change the next few months for May. That is what hope looks like right now: small changes making life better for those in need.

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