I have a draft of a post about the Ringling Bros. Circus closing, but with the current events of the past week it feels inappropriate to post about nostalgia when an unconstitutional executive order is tearing families apart and has killed more than thirty people. That will have to wait for another day.
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Things have changed. On one hand, people are more united against anything our current president mandates, in due part to his not having signed off on any beneficial executive orders. On the other hand, our republic has turned into a dictatorship within a week. Most news items are train wrecks. My opinions and fears have caused me to doubt some people while allying with others.
Despite all this, we have to keep living. We have our jobs, our hobbies, and our families. While we make donations and spread the news, the dogs need walking, the dishes need cleaning, or our library books need returning. Sometimes living in the face of such disaster feels surreal. Yet we have to keep going through the motions, to find meaning in the little things while not knowing when the end comes. Sometimes watching other dogs, like the Animal Planet Puppy Bowl helps.
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Loving isn't that much different. We say that love is eternal, and in some cases it is with families and with good friends. When love ends, however, say for a fictional work or for someone we once admired, our heart breaks. Hearts don't care if Orson Scott Card once wrote books with diverse casts and now shows racism in his diatribes; they fragment, and repair slowly. Yet, as Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton puts it, despite love taking our feelings and our hearts, "we keep loving anyway, we laugh and we cry, and we break, and we make our mistakes".
Valentine's Day is coming up, and it usually focuses on romantic love. This year, I think I'm going to focus on all kinds of love. We writers are more than romantic beings. We adore the craft, we adore the authors and books that came before us and that are coming out now, and we love the readers. We also love the people that support us, and the fictional characters that come to life. My friends have been there for me during the past two months, and so have my family.
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On Valentine's Day, I'll explore different kinds of love in detail, since at the moment the definition feels murky. The patron saint Valentine died converting people to Christianity; that sort of sentiment doesn't reflect the candy and flowers of today's holiday. I'm going to attempt to appreciate love again, and simply joys from knowing a person or an object is in your life. I'm also going to attempt to love living.
We are living in tough times now, but living is the greatest source of rebellion. The best way to fight an attack on the arts is to make art. The best way to fight injustice is to expose it. The best way to care for innocent strangers is to spread their stories, and to never let them go out of mind. We need to love those strangers and lend our hearts to them, to give them the chance that we gave.
Things have changed. On one hand, people are more united against anything our current president mandates, in due part to his not having signed off on any beneficial executive orders. On the other hand, our republic has turned into a dictatorship within a week. Most news items are train wrecks. My opinions and fears have caused me to doubt some people while allying with others.
Despite all this, we have to keep living. We have our jobs, our hobbies, and our families. While we make donations and spread the news, the dogs need walking, the dishes need cleaning, or our library books need returning. Sometimes living in the face of such disaster feels surreal. Yet we have to keep going through the motions, to find meaning in the little things while not knowing when the end comes. Sometimes watching other dogs, like the Animal Planet Puppy Bowl helps.
Loving isn't that much different. We say that love is eternal, and in some cases it is with families and with good friends. When love ends, however, say for a fictional work or for someone we once admired, our heart breaks. Hearts don't care if Orson Scott Card once wrote books with diverse casts and now shows racism in his diatribes; they fragment, and repair slowly. Yet, as Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton puts it, despite love taking our feelings and our hearts, "we keep loving anyway, we laugh and we cry, and we break, and we make our mistakes".
Valentine's Day is coming up, and it usually focuses on romantic love. This year, I think I'm going to focus on all kinds of love. We writers are more than romantic beings. We adore the craft, we adore the authors and books that came before us and that are coming out now, and we love the readers. We also love the people that support us, and the fictional characters that come to life. My friends have been there for me during the past two months, and so have my family.
On Valentine's Day, I'll explore different kinds of love in detail, since at the moment the definition feels murky. The patron saint Valentine died converting people to Christianity; that sort of sentiment doesn't reflect the candy and flowers of today's holiday. I'm going to attempt to appreciate love again, and simply joys from knowing a person or an object is in your life. I'm also going to attempt to love living.
We are living in tough times now, but living is the greatest source of rebellion. The best way to fight an attack on the arts is to make art. The best way to fight injustice is to expose it. The best way to care for innocent strangers is to spread their stories, and to never let them go out of mind. We need to love those strangers and lend our hearts to them, to give them the chance that we gave.
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