The blizzard of executive orders designed to wreck the place had only just begun on Tuesday, January 21, and it was already traumatizing, as clearly intended in addition to wrecking the place. It felt like another Tuesday: September 11, 2001. How could this have happened? How could this have happened HERE?

But the human spirit doesn’t just have power, it is power, and by midday I was feeling charged with a renewed sense of purpose—just like the old war horse, smelling the battle, hearing the trumpets, and saying, “Ha ha!” And then, before long (time is distorted now, isn’t it?), I came across a quote from Erica Xavier-Beauvoir in an article in Capital B about the struggles of people in the Geechee-Gullah corridor, by coincidence (if you believe in coincidence) just days after meeting her at a conference about Zora Neale Hurston:

“When we start to move [to] a space of fear, we are then invoking something that our ancestors don’t want us to invoke. They are in our blood, they are in our eyes. They are in the way that we walk, how we talk, so we owe them our revolution. We owe them our liberation. … We owe them that deep, visceral knowing that we’re just going to continue to do the work. This administration, and the energy around it, we are transmuting that energy at the corridor to fuel us to do a better job for the community.”

And there it is: an assignment! — with emphasis on the part that says “a sign.”

If intensifying our spiritual practices is self-care we may want to double and triple down on when times get traumatizing, transmuting that energy wherever we find it—and that could be locally—is a quiet way of working that will complement and, as Erica says, fuel our outward working and organizing, wherever we’re working. We can all do it in our own time and our own way, using whatever practices work best for us. This is a place where, if you’re reading this, you’re rich in resources—whereas, if the people who are trying to frighten us into submission had any spiritual resources at all, they wouldn’t be trying to frighten us into submission. Please feel free to use any- and everything you find in Getting Over Ourselves—it’s right on this same site, for free.

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