how do we hold it all?

Lately, I ask myself: how do I hold it all?

I haul out the hose in my mother’s garden, snap photos of her delighting in the dirt under the magnolias. We’re considering planting tomatoes among the marigolds, this year. When I get back to the city, the farmstand under the MetroNorth station holds baskets of bitter arugula, green garlic, thin-skinned potatoes. They saved the last carton of eggs for me (eight dollars, now), and I walk home with a bunch of kale tucked into the bouquet of daffodils (2.99 a bunch).

Lately, my clients ask me: how do I hold it all?

Together, we flick through the headlines, both political and personal — the worrying away of an independent press, the “well at least I still have a job today!!”, the ICE abductions of students in our cities, the “are you canvassing for Zohran yet?”. They tell me about the cognitive dissonance, about the doomscrolling, about the frantic texts. They tell me about the numbing whiplash they experience going from a fired up courthouse protest to a bland zoom all hands meeting.

Our spaces are a grief circle meets rallying cry. We take time to tend and time to prune, time to water into what is necessary and time to weed out what is not.

I ask them — as I ask myself — where we have the opportunity to think like a gardener, not just like a firefighter. What is systemic, what is immediate, what is relational, what is emergent? Where do we have to haul out the hose, and where can we plant some tomatoes? Where must we show up to the courthouse protest on the way to work, and where can we give each other the last carton of eggs?

How are you holding it all, these days?