i am from el paso, i was born there. when i saw the news of this latest mass shooting, i felt gut punched. i ignore a lot of the news. i know it’s all a total crisis, i dedicate my life to focusing on and testing for solutions that will work across the wide range of crises.

but then i see that a black man saved children in the process. i thought of my father, young and black in el paso taking me to the store. he would have done that too. and all the other black men, military or not, who do the right thing, the brave thing, all the time, over and over, and still have to carry the weight of racist dehumanization.

my heart is tired of grief, intimate and stranger.

i turn to the goddesses, and my tarot deck, and children, to ask how we keep moving, or when we will stop, interdependent questions that lead back in different ways to an answer of broader love.

honestly, i am not satisfied.

i start reading about the people who died in el paso, and then the people who died in the other mass shootings this weekend. this month. this year. i let the grief come, let the tears wet the altar, let the pain move into anger, rage, protection, connection.

i feel hopeless and frustrated around this issue, because it’s tied to the chasm, the massive gaping chasm at the heart of the US…on one side is racism, imperialism, greed, patriarchy, small minds, hateful moves. on the other is, largely, a vague sense of moral outrage, with a tiny band of revolutionaries on the left screaming, “it’s all connected!!”

that is still, always, the thought that lifts my chin from hopelessness – it is all connected. the horrific behavior is all connected, down in the roots and up in the white towers and under the masks. we can’t work one issue at a time. but if we keep pulling at these roots, saying what the fuck when it’s appropriate; saying not in my house, not on my watch, not on my dime, not in my name; keep pulling the toxic roots up and out, tossing what we cannot hold to our ancestors, pulling it out from the very very lowest point, bringing it all into the light – i know, by which i mean i can feel, that we are going to pull the foundation out from under this empire of awful.

and i will keep working to make sure we know how to love each other in the chaos. loving you, new strangerancestor or beloved friend or aligned reader, right now, in this chaos, is good practice.