Up Outta My Sleep

 If I'm being honest

It has been a while since I was up outta my sleep and at the keyboard so early in the morning.

Most especially on a Sunday morning before going back to work as a Palliative Care Chaplain. 

Rest is necessary in my day vocation.

I need to replenish my body, my soul, and my spirit from all the I carry, all that I pour out, all that I hold - listening to the fears, hopes, wonders, and mourning of close to 150 different souls every week.

So

This weekend, I rested in.

My body felt every bit of all that I do.

But, again, if I'm being honest, my body has felt it every since my husband woke me up the morning after darkness descended upon the nation - again - and held my shaking, scared, and scarred self. How could they do this - again?

Then, I was reminded that as a seventh generation on these shores, what more would I expect from those who literally stole, killed, and destroyed so the few can profit from the many?

That was two years ago.

And I, we, the people have not had rest since then.

Every day has been a new kind of horror, so much so that I don't even turn on the news. To be frank and honest, I haven't watched the news since the day before the destruction.

Why should I?

When they piled on the age of a virile, descent man who just wanted to get the nation on a good footing, trying to recover from the disaster and death of the previous dude who craved attention, adoration, and adulations. But honestly, who as an adjudicated r@pist, just wanted to stay out of jail. But decency wasn't enough for the ones who stayed home, the ones who voted for an ideal, and the ones who just h@te for no reason.

They couldn't bring themselves to consider a woman, a twice-kissed-by-God's-sun woman from the sunny state with the funny laugh and parents whose origin story does not reach back as far as mine. She was the color of creamy café au lait so as to not assault their eyes with too much melanin. Her husband was the color of milk, but oh that belief he carried. Maybe that was it. Regardless, their twisted understanding of the ancient library from the forgeries written in a leader's name, they believed their minority made them the boldest, smartest, ruler over all, and their women gladly, traditionally, followed along because who wants to be on the other side of those like the C7 who consider them just usable property anyway. Perhaps they thought if they couldn't beat the power, at least joining it would not consume them?

I haven't watched television news, but I am not ill-informed or unaware.

I watched with horror as yet another body was strange fruit and the melanin-lacking clenched their pearls as if they hoisted themselves up on trees or telephone wires.

I listened with a mother's heart and an activist's fire as a mother pleaded with others to have a modicum of decency and critical thinking - how did her son drown with no air? how was his body without organs? how was he the only one who didn't return from the holiday weekend trip? why were his friends not friends all lawyered up and clam-shell-quiet? who murdered her son?

I know about the mysteriously pregnant girls in the detention centers - but they were supposed to be separated from the boys...right...but the pearl clenching happened again because but but but...illegals?

And the brilliant who unalived self by bus instead of being the walking symbol of this country's hate with monitor strapped to his ankle and all he wanted to do was go to class.

Or the brave ones who walked out of class instead of letting their fellow high school scholars be taunted by yet another r@cial slur.

Or the shoes that I've loved, owned, and proudly collected for two decades now deciding that abstract images of lynching was a great advertising campaign.

me, in the pandemic summer, speaking at a voting rally in a midwestern city, trying to get folks to wake up, put on a mask, and go exercise their rights

But, I am only one of the 7%,our 92% collectively tried to save this nation from herself. We cajoled, warned, protested, marched, taught-in, wrote, we did so much of it...and yet...the nation chose destruction.

We talked about the geriatric demented barely able to walk straight white dudes, or the wheeled-around-corpse-like, or the pretenders.

We saw it and spoke it and folks didn't listen.

So we all sat down.

And picked up pens, needlepoint, pottery, gardening, sewing, canning, anything else but being sacrificial lambs for an unrepentant nation.

But here we are, again, in the position of saving, cajoling, reminding, cheering, and advocating that before destruction truly comes upon us - as if this ill-advised war wasn't enough, as if poisonous food wasn't enough, as if returned diseases wasn't enough, as if gas wasn't enough, we again turned to the airways - not television media - to get people to register, to get up off the sofa, to put down the influencer fake life, and get out and go vote in the midterm. Here we are again, so many of us, leading from a place of survival, hope, and possibility.

And the truth is we are tired.

We have been awakened - yet again - up outta our sleep.

For folks that are scared of the wind and the waves, and let us remind ya'll, we are not the Brown skinned Palestinian Jew who can calm the storm, we are just vessels who care.

But we are here again, trying.

Like that weeping prophet, trying to wake his people up, trying to warn them, trying to turn the mirror around so they can see themselves and know that this time, manna was not dropping down from heaven. This time, they were all, collectively, going to have to get up and do something and realize that human together was always the plan.

So before I put down my pen again - I really do have four major writing projects and board certifications to prepare for, so your girl is really quite busy - let me gently remind you that saving yourself does not happen apart from saving the people around you.

Like rescuing each other from flood waters or fires, we have to care for the one next door and down the street.

That is the point.

That was always the point.

So, I hope and I pray that we don't have to call for the wailing women and their daughters, that I don't have to pull out my white and get to mourning - yet again - that maybe the reflection of the past two years is enough to make folks want to do something different.

But 

Maybe it is also a bit of reaping what they've sown.

The cattle ranchers are feeling it.

The farmers are feeling it.

Cereal should not be $6.49 a box for "contained bioengineered ingredients."

We are supposed to be enjoying our early-sixties. Being empty nesters, looking forward to grandchildren and visits to places like Canada where the lake is still Ontario, or to driving along Vermont's pristine roads to look at mountains delighting us with her colors. 

We are supposed to be forgiving student loans like we have forgiven billionaires their taxes.

We are supposed to be trusting women with their own bodies not setting them up for the blue-pill posse who crave young flesh.

We are supposed to be caring for the sick and not angry that they aren't dying fast enough.

We are supposed to be building more schools and homes, not AI Data centers fed with the water we need to drink.

We are supposed to be making housing affordable and the streets clean.

We are supposed to be enjoying concerns in the center honoring the nation's arts.

We are supposed to be at the pool reflecting hope.

We are supposed to walk freely in the community.

We are supposed to be doing life.

Life abundantly.

For this beautiful earth really does know how to care for herself and her inhabitants.

And she will survive this scourge.

The question is - will we be here to see it?

We can be.

Collectively.

If only.

Well, today is a new day dawning in this week after autumn welcomed crisper mornings and cooler days. And as the world turns, right, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia, humans still trying to be human together.

I hope.

©2026. In Vermont. Eating mango slices that cost a mortgage payment sipping a chilled lavender latte looking out at the day dawning holding onto hope.