What do I do?

Maybe you don't.

What do we do?

What do we do when it gets this strange, this noisy, this dystopian, this violent, this seemingly unsafe?

What do we do when it’s hard to know who to trust and what to believe in?

What do we do when the struggle comes, and it comes, in steady blows to ourselves, to those we love, to our brothers and sisters who most deserve justice, and who we cannot reach?

What do we do when the flames rise on the Earth and the flames of anger rise in our bodies?

How do we stand in that fire and let it burn all that is false without letting it burning our love down with it?

How do we hold beauty as truth and truth as beauty?

How do we move in what we know, holding it with respect for all that we do not?

How do we step bravely without resources to nurture and care for each and every brave body who steps?

How do we keep our eye on truth, when the loudest voices rise, rather than the most wise and true?

Maybe we don’t DO anything. Maybe instead of DO, we DON’T. Maybe the don’t is simple. Don’t die. Don’t give in to cynicism. Don’t stop loving. Don’t fight hate with hate. Don’t die. Don’t stop creating. Don’t cut yourself off in your protections. Don’t isolate too long. Don’t give up on people. Don’t believe your truth is the only one possible. Don’t call the game before its over. Don’t get stuck in the past. Don’t obsess over the future. Don't doubt. Don’t make life a waking death.

This morning I woke up and our pipes had frozen.

The air was so cold it had a smell. The smell spoke.

It said,

WAKE UP.

It said, LIVE.

Yesterday, I asked my daughters if they wanted to have an adventure. When they were small I got to control everything. We adventured all of the time. Now, nothing can be forced. They come with me or they don’t. I try to make threats about murdering them or breaking all the things they love if they don’t do the things I think they should do with me, but this does not work.

Yesterday, they said yes. We spent 8 hours total in the car driving. Just to make it to Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels by sunset. The tunnels are located in the middle of the Utah Desert, past a gambling town called Wendover. From a distance they could be mistaken for an abandoned construction site, but to behold them in person, which I’ve done twice now, is overwhelming.

I’ve been signing sun on every transaction where I’m asked to sign my name for a few years. I’m not going to explain myself, or make a bad, belabored joke about where my tunnel may be. And I’m not going to stop.

When we got to the tunnels, after so, so much driving, most of the sun was gone. What was left were the colors of a vivid desert sky. The kind of vivid we forget is real, no matter how many times we've stumbled into its vast magic.

And those colors. THOSE COLORS. Those colors, which are more than a camera or naked human eye can perceive, but which are highly visible to the soul, were a defibrillator upon my tired heart.

Do you know what a defibrillator is?

You’ve seen movies and tv dramas about doctors—often exceptionally good-looking doctors, yeah?

You’ve watched the often exceptionally, absolutely unnecessarily, good-looking doctors rub the big machine squares together above the mostly dead person on the table below them and yell,

“CLEAR!”

yeah?

You've hung on the edge of your seat as they then place those defibrillators on the mostly dead person’s body, which usually spasms then gasps and coughs themselves back into life, yeah?

That’s what those desert colors did to me. It was so much electricity straight through my chest, I not only spasmed—I screamed. I screamed and it wasn't on purpose—it was simply not stopped. I screamed and my daughters were not frightened because they knew me.

I screamed and in its sound I touched the wild in me.

I screamed from the place I’m always free.

My scream was not anger. My scream was not fear. My scream was not frustration. My scream was life. My scream was how the cold air smelled. My scream was beauty’s song as I feel it, unshaped, uncontrolled, unquieted. My scream was the bigness a desert and a sky and two daughters as witness can hold.

There was no sound back. No echo. No reassurance.

I needed that.

And then I cried.

If I were making a parody of my own newsletter, it would start with ‘I cried’.

Incidentally, this was one of the best cries I’ve ever had. Nearly hysterical.

I cried almost as if I was overhearing—I let the sound of all that cannot be said come out, unfiltered, with a will of its own, pain and joy mixed up like mushed up Skittles. It felt scary and exhilarating the way real things do, and the way exceptionally good looking doctors on TV shows don’t, but are fun to watch anyway.

xx,
Yan