I’m in my seventies. Been around the block a few times. I had a private practice as a therapist for what seems like forever, and I’ve been to therapy myself, tons of times, and I’m wiser and happier, and I’ve done about all the change and healing I can do. Right?

Nope.

A few weeks ago, my voice teacher, a young man who comes to my house and is teaching me solfeggio (an exercise for learning to sight read vocal music), asked, “Is there a song you’d like to learn? Something we could work on?”

“Hmmm.” Five zillion songs whipped through my head. “Do you know ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face’?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I’ll find it.”

“Okay,” I told him. But I was puzzled. I didn’t much remember the song and had no idea why I’d named it as one I’d like to learn…

“Snowpocalypse”, or “Snowmaggedon”, which blasted us with over two feet of the white stuff and some serious wind, is about over. I was mostly snowbound for a week. Except I didn’t feel bound at all. The time seemed free, unfettered, and, as a friend said, “low pressure”. I noticed things more—both “out there” and in my less-distracted than usual head. In the afternoons, I binge-watched “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix, and the number Thirteen stayed with me, prompting me to come up with thirteen things I noticed or had confirmed:

1. Binge-watching twenty-six episodes of “13 Reasons Why” induces way less guilt during a snowstorm.

2. The three-foot-long icicles outside my kitchen window were so sharp and shiny, they scared me.

3. There is a special kind of happy that comes with printing out all three hundred and fifty pages of my almost finished novel, reading it, and finding out I don’t hate it.

A few mornings ago, I was eating my avocado toast, with two of Ed’s perfectly fried eggs on top, thoughts darting through my mind like gnats—the pozole I’ll make this afternoon, the onions I need to buy, which novel to use for my book review, can I put off washing clothes for one more day, dare I watch the upcoming “presidential” address, did I hurt that woman’s feelings when I had to run out on our conversation—when I remembered another young woman at an AA meeting over thirty years ago.

“This morning,” she said, “I was five minutes into my breakfast, and I realized I hadn’t even tasted my food, and I said to myself, ‘Pay attention! You’re eating eggs, okay? You’re eating eggs!’” People nodded, laughed, said “Been there, done that!” I nodded hard as anybody.

I’d been trying to pay attention to immediate circumstances instead of head-tripping through my own chaotic universe, ever since I read The Three Pillars of Zen in the late sixties. I’d had minimum success.

I hear the word “Hope” more than usual these days. It sounds ethereal, wispy, like Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers”, yet we are directed to keep it, to spread it to others, to make sure it stays alive. “Hope” is batted about like a badminton birdie, hard to contain, control, or see. I use the word myself, often quoting the author, artist, or prophet whose vision gives me hope and the belief that our country and our world will one day actually be alright.

But the take on hope that most appeals to me now is from Brian McClaren’s “We Make the Road by Walking”. Some of us in our church are reading this book, and we discuss parts of it with friends who gather weekly at our house during Advent.

I don’t grieve easily. When I come across reports of mass shootings or inhumane treatment of immigrants, women, children, other-gendered or sexually oriented persons, African Americans, Muslims, or Jews, I acknowledge the horror and then automatically push it out of my consciousness. I was a therapist long enough to know that this protection in my psyche is a dragon guarding the door, keeping me from being overwhelmed or falling apart. I also know the results of not grieving enough—angsty anxiety, low level depression, or an uncomfortable combination of both.

“Vestal virgins must be accompanied by knights or clergy, or come at their own risk,” the Halloween party invitation said. Ed and I lived in Jackson, Mississippi then, and had been a couple for about a year. We decided to go to the party as vestal virgin and clergy, only gender-reversed.

My mother dressed Ed in one of her silk nightgowns, bedroom slippers with floppy bows on top, and a curly, dark blonde wig. I rubbed foundation and blush on his face (he was beardless then). He looked adorably awful. I wore his long, black clerical robe with a stole around my neck and an horrifically ugly mask we found at a costume shop. We posed in the hall mirror at his apartment and cracked up at our reflections.

I saw on Facebook that the date was September 11th, and recognized, with the surprise of one for whom time moves with distressing haste, that seventeen years have passed since terrorists attacked and destroyed New York’s World Trade Center. And when I remembered that 2001 day, I saw, in my head, the same things I’ve seen every year since.

I’d flown, then ferried, then bused to Hollyhock, that mecca of a retreat center on Cortes Island in British Columbia, for a writing conference with the indomitable Natalie Goldberg. I settled into my cabin with the one other woman who arrived a day early, both of us anticipating two more women.

I don’t remember exactly how, the next morning, we and eight or so other early attendees ended up sitting in a circle in a room next to the dining hall. Natalie Goldberg, barefoot and in blue flannel pajamas, sat with us, all of us anxious and confused. An attack? What? The twin towers?

We met up with our old friends Linda and Jack the other day, a couple we hadn’t seen for six years. They moved to the area to be close to their children and grandchildren, since Jack was diagnosed with Alzeimers. I was a little anxious—we’d drifted apart mostly due to distance and priorities, but also a growing sense that our world views were different. They’re more theologically conservative than we are, and, I imagined, more politically conservative too.

What to do if we differed on the big things—how to change our immoral treatment of immigrants, what to do about police brutality against blacks, how to get people to vote for somebody sane? Ed says I’d make a terrible politician because my every emotion shows on my face…

My fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, is determined to have a Broadway musical career. She acts, dances, and sings in the Pacific Coastal Youth Theater, and I’ve seen her, on family road trips, spend hours in the back seat poring over scripts, learning her part and the parts of the other main characters. So far, on our vacations together, she and I have watched the movie versions of Hairspray, The Producers, West Side Story, Rent, Newsies, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Annie, and Shrek. Sophie’s passion is a force to behold, and I love beholding it.

But the thing that amazes me most about Sophie is that she’s thought and she’s figured and she has a plan…

The small, fortiesh man in a t-shirt and stocking cap stands at the mic in front of the state capitol in Olympia and says, grinning, “When the Asians come out protesting, you know there’s some shit going down.” The man is a high school biology teacher and his grin is a grimace now as he breaks down and tells us how scared his students are, how scared he is too. “It’s bad,” he cries. “So bad.” He collects himself and continues, choking, no guns at school, don’t force teachers to be armed, please, no.

I’m sitting on the capitol steps with a couple hundred or so people, lots of old white hippie throwbacks like Ed and I, a few young, black organizers, a sizable number of female and male clergy in white collars and black cassocks and colorful stoles, clapping as the speakers take their turns. It’s the fourth Moral Monday in the Poor People’s Campaign, and I’m trying to wrap my head around this movement while my heart swells and hurts as the people, “the least of these,” Jesus would say, tell their stories.

Over and over throughout the past weeks, I’ve been moved…