When I told my grandson, on the phone, that his Grandpa Ed and I would be leaving for the Southwest and Death Valley, he said, “I wouldn’t want to go to a place that had ‘Death’ in the name.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” I told him, with more assurance than I felt. I had waffled for weeks about taking this road trip. Though the Grand Canyon sounded appealing, Death Valley did not, and I imagined unbearable heat surging through car doors and a barrenness that would be exotic at first, then boring at best, and, at worst, demoralizing. And, much as I knew how irrational it was, the “Death” word scared me a little. “It’ll be fine,” I said again. “Really.”

When I was a therapist and teacher, I taught courses on how to be assertive. I can cite the particulars: Aggressiveness is a show of power. Assertiveness is a show of strength and control. Aggressiveness is hostile. Assertiveness can be relational. Aggression is the flip side of passivity.

I was a person, though, long before I was a therapist, and my knowledge has often failed me in situations where somebody acts mean or gets all up in my face. Ed’s told me I’d make a terrible politician, since my every emotion shows, and surviving a daddy who misused his power in abusive ways has led me to either fight back hard and nasty or withdraw and say nothing.

I didn’t know exactly what I was after when I signed up for the Search for Meaning Festival at Seattle University. Perspective, maybe, and guidance on making sense of the current chaos. Fifteen hundred or so searchers, most of us gray-haired and spectacled, attended the event. We milled around the campus, holding paper cups of coffee, asking directions, eager to hear well-known teachers and prophets and priests.

The morning talks were interesting but academic and informative, not moving nor inspirational. I feared I’d leave feeling empty, dissatisfied. Whatever I was after, I knew I hadn’t found it.

My first afternoon session, titled “Artists in the Time of Monsters” was led by activist, author, musician, documentary filmmaker and theologian Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou. Reverend Sekou is not a tall man. His dreads are the biggest part about him—they hang almost to his knees. But he stands tall in his convictions. He is foul mouthed and funny, full of confidence and vigor. Artists, he says, are people who provide joy and develop community, “honoring those who have not been honored” and “creating space for all.”

Lent is coming up, a forty day period (not counting Sundays) leading to Easter, with an invitation to “go into the desert”, confront our demons, and, hopefully, contact what lies hidden deep within us. I’m accepting the invitation.

Unlike the physical desert Jesus chose, where he was monumentally alone and hungry, subsisting on locusts and honey, my metaphorical desert this Lent will be forty days without the screens to which I’ve become addicted. Badly addicted. My brain automatically craves and seeks the stimulation of Facebook and email—first thing in the morning, all through the day, last thing at night.

My eleven year old grandson, Dylan, does not like me to cuss. He’s a sensitive boy who’s been told that swearing is wrong, and he likes to do things right. I’m a potty mouth from way back, and, tired of hearing myself swear like the proverbial sailor, I’ve done a decent job over the years of eliminating the F word from my vocabulary. But, when stressed or distressed by something loud or intrusive or uncomfortable, I often still yell out the S word.

A couple of weeks ago, when Dylan and his parents and sister were visiting, I was shuffling things around in my kitchen pantry when a bottle of canola oil fell and crashed to the floor.

“Shit!” I hollered.

Dylan’s little boy voice from across the kitchen.“Granola? What did you say?”

I don’t remember exactly why Ed and I met with a marriage counselor thirty years ago. We were probably upsetting each other in the same ways we still can, but hadn’t yet learned to repair. I do remember that the therapist gave us an assignment—a “nurturing exercise”, he called it, with clear directions on how to carry it out.

I recently watched a documentary on prolific author Joan Didion, titled “The Center Will Not Hold”. I first imagined a piece of cheese toast, soft and falling apart in the middle. I wondered then, if the title referenced some physics principal applied to structures without enough support to keep them intact…

October and pumpkins on porches and cottony ghosts wisping from trees and the Facebook post, “What movie terrified you as a child?” I didn’t have to think. No contest: The Tingler.

I was twelve, mesmerized, as I watched Vincent Price warn against the merciless Tingler that would burrow into my spine, infusing it with bone chilling fear. When, in the bathroom of a woman whose fear had driven her mad, the black and white film exploded into technicolor and blood gushed from the bathtub faucet, I shut my eyes and breathed hard. At the end, a lobster-like creature crawled across the screen, and big-eyed Vincent gasped, “Ladies and Gentlemen! The Tingler has escaped into the theater! Run! Run for your lives!”

When I tell people that, for six years in the eighties, I taught psychology at an historically black college near Jackson, Mississippi, they often say, “So you got to feel what it’s like to be a minority?”

As one of the few white teachers at Tougaloo College, I did feel “different”, always aware, if only slightly, of the contrast between my skin and the skin of my students and colleagues. I was mostly accepted, but something of an outsider. “I suppose I did get to feel that,” I’ve answered.

Recently, though, I remembered something that makes me question my response.

I used to wonder, reading a novel about Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia, how oppressed and threatened people managed to carry on in a constant state of fear. When I saw them going through “normal” motions, I’d feel wary, off kilter, as if evil were about to burst through the drapes into rooms where people drank tea and knitted scarves and quarreled over petty things and laughed at silly ones. Did those people have some way of turning off the fear? Or were they just braver than I?

Recently, during our annual “Revelry on the River” reunion, I watched our family avoid talking about our country’s perilous state…