In the very long year that was January, Cindy, my acupuncturist, told me a story: another client of hers, when distraught about the election and the then-just-starting barrage of awful things happening, realized her job now was to "go outside and look for God."
Those words took my breath away, then gave it back, and it keeps helping me breathe. Whether you believe or don't believe in God, Gods or Goddesses, the Great Spirit, Allah, Buddha, or any other embodiment of the sacred, we all -- jeez, I hope! -- believe in the common good: decency, justice, peace, kindness, and all else that helps us live in the right.
So we can go outside and look for basic goodness, inner wisdom, doing our best, a guiding light, being a Mensch, or even whatever doesn't suck. For the sake of this essay, please bear with me for using "God," my shorthand for the life force:"the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," as Dylan Thomas writes.
So that's the assignment, I told myself myself when I heard this and I've been reminding myself daily. This was and is the best way I can imagine to get through the next months or years of such vast uncertainty, danger, greed, and chaos with some clarity, tenderness, and curiosity.
A few days after I saw Cindy, I woke up in the dark to a knock on the hotel door from our friend Danny. We had, on the spur of a moment, decided to stay in a Courtyard Marriott to be close to Danny after his wife and our dear friend Kat's surgery at a nearby hospital to remove a tumor from her head. "The surgeon wants to talk. Things aren't going well," he said through the door. We jumped into our clothes to sit with him while the surgeon called to say everything we didn't want to hear. In the few minutes before rushing back to the hospital, I remembered, "Go outside and look for God," so I did. I opened the sliding glass door of our room into the courtyard, the sky dark and foggy, the air damp and cold. I took in a long breath, deciding to continue looking for God whatever this day brought.
I found God in tiny and enormous moments of kindness and also devastation. When the nurse explained what was happening, her voice full of gentle clarity and compassion. When I cried with Danny, shared chips and sour cream dip with Ardys, and mostly, when I sat with a small group of friends around Kat, all of us breathing slowly with her in her last hour.
Subsequent days have been far less heartbreaking but these early months of 2025 are often a time beyond one I could imagine, seemingly or clearly horrible things happening at breakneck speed that threaten so much so many of us believe in and value.
I've stepped out onto my back deck, distraught over the horrendous DOGE insanity largely shutting down U.S.AID, hurting farmers at home and starving waiting people abroad, dependent on food shipments rotting in nearby ships.
I've gone outside in the middle of a cold night, looking for the life in the darkness that reminds me the news is not just the great damage being spewed out rapid-fire from the White House. The news is also the slight breeze on a just-above-freezing night, the coyote investigating our compost pile to find sustenance, the crows marching up and down our deck railing to eat sunflower seeds. The news is in the air and ground, weather and wind, and certainly and obviously what we live with each other.
I've climbed out from my car and asked the real news of the real earth and sky to help when another close friend found she had a brain tumor the size of an orange (I told her I hoped it was a clementine). Prayer is just about always a way to look for God, and she survived a long surgery and is recovering well.
I found God in the words of an Afghan refugee, telling his story of surviving while the Taliban hunted him for three years (for his Facebook post advocating for women's education), then settling with his family in our community. I also found God in the crowd of nearly 300 people listening with soulful attention to Native American students and staff of Haskell Indian Nations University talk about how they are finding the strength and courage to persevere after the Trump administration cut over 25% of staff and faculty positions. In both situations, I felt my heart expanding and hurting as all of us were lifted to whatever ground helps us land together on what we can do next to help.
Just in asking and looking, I find questions to inhabit (if not answers): Where is the utmost tenderness? What can I or we do? And to paraphrase a Ted Lasso episode, what does this situation need? Sometimes it's hot tea and a book. Or an episode of "Call the Midwife" to see nuns and midwives do their best to help people in critical moments. Or in Youtube videos of Melissa Etheridge singing "Thunder Road" with Bruce Springsteen or in sheepdogs doing a very good job one day in Scotland. Or a long talk with an old friend in Vermont when we both chat about how much is freaking us out and where and how we can find ways to listen again to the world in its fullness. And certainly in showing up for events and rallies, making yet another round of phone calls to legislators, talking each other back to earth again, and listening as if our lives depend on it to what's ours to do.
I've mostly found the answer in the beauty of this earth and of each other's presence. In seeing how much, in the most challenging times, we can be there for each other. In stepping outside of ourselves to return home to who we really are. In looking for God even if we don't necessarily find an answer or even a comforting way to be with the anxiety of the moment, we can meet ourselves and each other with love and attention.
Sometime in the dark between last night and this morning, I woke in yet another panic, this time over what is happening to our national parks. I walked to the back door, opened it, and breathed in the smell of rain, felt the still-warm wind on my bare arms, and listened for a moment. I don't know where we're going -- individually or as a country -- but I know what I can look for in the dark.
So very helpful to be reminded how to stay grounded and compassionate toward ourselves and others. You always say it so well. Thank you.