How to Never Give Up

or Give In

Last night I had dinner with three friends. Two are women I have loved for many years and we seem to never come together enough but when we do its a seed dropped into our independent and high functioning New York City lives, to remind us exactly who ourselves are in a world that doesn’t always welcome exactly that. When the grind of American personality energy feels like monster teeth, we made time to laugh and eat and drink our way into a home for one another.

The other woman is an old friend of the other two women who I’ve met at parties and openings and know her for her warmth and the many good things I’ve heard and seen about her, her impact on others, I’ve clocked from afar, she is a person who stands for something, who champions feminist solutions to climate justice, who puts it all on the line for us, who I have mad respect for. The night was a salve, where no one was held back from their full power laugh mode, small remindings said aloud to each other look at your excellence! when our moments of doubt and the world of men and assorted assholes render us distant from ourselves.

We discussed those dealings, those renderings of parts of ourselves others use to bolster their own doubts about themselves. We decided they could do better but also that we could all do better.

These moments are fortunate ones, to have relationships in my life such as this, in my writing groups, with old friends and new reminders of why we do what we do, why we keep searching for beauty in the ugliness and not give in to the maul of others worse intentions or worse than worse intentions: the kind of cruelty that no one deserves.

In the studio and at the writing table, I let go for some reason this week in terms of trying to make art for anybody but the deepest little human inside myself. I have things pressing to make for but this week, I made things I don’t need or won’t show and no one will buy. I just made things, which I am guessing, the making of things lives in my dna, all these fanciful not useful things freed a reminder to take good care of each other in these perilous times, as the folk tale hovers over us like a demon.

I hope you keep yourself and your people dear—the friend or sister or brother or cat or dog or a grandmother’s voice or the mourning dove who say, please: don’t give up or give in, who say, I think we have reason to go on and we’ll do what it takes or I think we can, each of us, do better, don’t you? and you to be there in the room, real or metaphorical, to say to them the same.

two unfinisheds

Some from my 100 day project, the week ending in today, Day 64.