A Dubious Time
Fragments for the New Year: Community, anxiety, and creating space for creativity.
On January 1 I watched the livestream of Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration from buried under a cozy blanket in Brooklyn. Honestly, I loved the carefully chosen defiance to current federal policies and the thoughtful inclusion of a wide swath of New Yorkers. Yes, it was political theater, but it also truly felt like a celebration of all that makes the city the vital and frustrating fabric of what it is while articulating a vision for what it could be.
I know that one, or many, or any government official singlehandedly turn the tide of justice, that we can’t project our hopes onto elected official, but it was a breath of fresh air, a surge of hope to see issues that actually impact people, education, housing, safer streets, protecting the rights of the vulnerable, be addressed. For narcissistic, self-serving swagger to be replaced by a genuine will to serve the people. It was a glimpse of the world I want to live in, even if we have a long way to get there.
On January second I went to a small show of Brooklyn musician friends. It was in the back room of Young Ethel’s, an unassuming bar on 5th avenue in Brooklyn that has been a place that nurtures friendships and creativity since the mid-2000s under various guises. At the end of the show my friends, Stephen Perry, Alice Danger, and Kiri Oliver, collaborated to cover the Mountain Goats’ “This Year,” a song I haven’t thought about in, well, years. I tried to dab away tears, feeling silly and vulnerable, getting weepy over a cheesy, heartfelt cover. But they kept coming.
By the end of the song I was openly crying over the chance to be in the company of friends I’ve known for years, who are still making music and playing shows after everything, in the audience with some of my other closest friends, in a city that can be so frustrating and so expensive, and yet we persist on being there, that moment of feeling held by my community felt special, fragile, and too rare. It was an ordinary and beautiful moment and I was glad I let myself be in it.
I always harbor a naive hope that the start of the year, no matter how arbitrary, will be a reset. A clean slate. A chance to take a breath, reflect, and reset. On January first I thought that this year, maybe, it could be possible.
But early January is a dubious time.
Soon after I woke up to the news from Venezuela. The news from Minneapolis. Reflections on the one-year anniversary of the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles. The five-year anniversary of the storming of the capital by a far-right MAGA mob. I’ve felt heavy, exhausted, my body leaden with anxiety and dread, my brain flooded with overwhelm. A sense of winter bleakness pervades, even back in the desert.
These days, I always feel like there is something looming behind me, something I forgot, something hanging over me. I have a hard time really relaxing or finding a creative sense of flow. Recently I was listening to KCRW as they commemorated the fires. They shared the story of a Saha Kanji, who lost his home in the Palisades fire, and the impact it had on his mental health. He talked about navigating PTSD and described it as “that thing in the background.” I recognize this feeling, even when I know my life is relatively secure, even when the privileges I have buffer me from the worst impact of this current political moment. Listening to this story I had to pause and wonder how PTSD from my own loss still weaves its way through my days, even almost seven years later. Sometimes things feel manageable, and sometimes they feel incredibly tenuous. With the anniversary of the fire I thought again about how many thousands of people are navigating their own version of this loss, and I felt humbled and heart broken all over again.
But there have been small acts of generosity. A friend who has been a trusted caretaker of my house and cats for years, but who I’d never met in person picked me up from the airport after my flight home was diverted from Palm Springs to Ontario. We reflected on the year ahead as we drove back to the desert under rain-heavy skies, talking about taking the time to create space in our lives and not rushing to fill it, but rather to sit with it to see what space that expansion can bring.
I don’t have hard and fast resolutions this year or even goals really. I’m more wanting to nudge my life in the direction I want it to go. Small acts, like jettisoning my smart watch to take a small step away from surveillance and screens. Spending less time scrolling Instagram looking for fulfillment I’ll never find. Spend time outside daily, walking or weeding, or just drinking coffee and looking at the sky. Regular time for writing. Publish this newsletter at least monthly, trusting I’ll have something worthwhile to share.
The other afternoon I had tea with a friend I would like to know better and we talked about the importance and consistency of living our values. Last year I threw myself into the Flamingo Heights Community Center, wanting to build community with a capital C. I’m proud of the work I did with my fellow board members, but also realized that the center took over my free time in a way that was no longer conducive to writing or even building the type of creative, flexible community I feel sustained by. For me, the joy had drained out of it. I realized that for now I needed to step back in order to create the space I need for my art to flow. I fought with myself about this decision, feeling like a failure and feeling like my values about community are all talk, but that I couldn’t walk the walk.
But the truth is, community as the antidote to authoritarianism, as an alternative to the hyper-individualism capitalism, doesn’t have to take a certain form. Community building is not perfectionism. It is not worthless if you don’t create a lasting structure or a longstanding community institution. Community is showing up, taking the time to care, to connect, to move outside your exact comfort zone and away from screens. I’m not sure what form that will take for me this year, but I’m trying to leave space so I can act when I’m called and when I need to. I know that I want spaces that feel expansive, where connection feels like possibility and a way forward.
This past weekend I got together with friends for our annual vision board making brunch. It was a welcome gathering to break my urge to isolate when times feel hard. I joked that all of my vision boards are basically the same year over year, that I haven’t really evolved. But then I compared last year’s to this year’s. And I noticed that this year’s collage has so much more space - less words, less trying to force a future and more just grounding into myself and trusting what will come out of that.
Last week I took an afternoon walk with a friend off a back road several miles from my house. The light filtered through the clouds, illuminating the pink-beige granite boulders and dark lava flows. The ground was strangely spongy due to recent rain and full of desert plants with fresh green growth, chia starting to sprout, smelling minty and earthy underfoot. At one point we walked across a vein of quartz, the ground littered with bright white crystal points. “It’s like we’re rich!” I exclaimed.
Lately I’ve shifted how I keep my journal. I used to write down mostly feelings, political analysis, or stream of consciousness free writes. I still do these things, but now every evening I sit down and write down what happened and what I did, however mundane. These days can feel shapeless and strange and writing them down helps remember and quell the anxiety.
The other day my kitten learned how to climb up the bookcase and knocked off several books of poetry. One of them was Algeria, Capital: Algiers, by Anna Greki, and translated into English for the first time by my friend and classmate Marine Cornuet. Maybe the kitten was acting as oracle, because Greki’s poetry is what I need to read right now. Greki was an Algerian of French descent who was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in 1957 for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle and she wrote the poems in this collection while in prison. Her words remind me about the many struggles that have been and will come. From the first stanza of the first poem, With Rage In My Heart:
I can no longer love but with rage in my heart
It’s my way of having a heart of plenty
It’s my way of defeating pain
It’s my way of setting ashes ablaze
Through sheet heart crushes and rage
The only loyal way that clears for me
A thoughtful route at the edge of wreckage
With its weight in gold, in joy, in distress
These lips of your mouth my double richness …
Poetry. Time in nature. Small acts of community care. Writing and making music. Fewer screens. Finding consistency. That’s what I have so far for the year ahead. I’m giving it space to evolve.
What are you creating space for this year?
xox,
eleanor
Currently reading:Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Greki, translated by Marine Cornuet, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Love your vision board