Today in Lake, Day 2 After the Election Edition

I try to slow myself down.

I listen to the beginning of a podcast by meditation teacher Tara Brach. Today’s episode: Becoming Bodhisattvas in a Troubled World. “I often think about trees,” says Tara. She thinks about how the stress of wind causes trees to develop heartwood, the inner fiber that gives them strength and allows them also to be flexible and move with the winds, not break. “Stress also impacts the growth of roots, their deep interconnecting roots with other trees around,” she says, her voice characteristically slow. If we pause, says Tara in her reassuring lilt, “We can find out how the stress of our current times can grow our heartspace, our strength, our flexibility, our connectedness, our capacity to love.” This, she says, is a crucial remembrance.

A crucial remembrance that I am in no state to remember.

But I try. I try hard to think about trees so that I can stop thinking about all the rest. I turn my attention to the tree that I can see from inside my parked car, a yard or so from where the lake churns. My daughter has learned this technique to calm herself and her friends in times of intense anxiety: Name three things you see. Name two things you hear. I see a tree. I see four thick branches reaching toward the sky. I see a fifth branch that seems to have made a “u” before stretching upward. How did it get that way? Maybe this is how history works too—things go sideways before they go up?

Trees take the long view.

This is working. I’m thinking about trees! And just like that, I’m thinking about thinking. I’m no longer thinking about trees.

Then a friend in a group chat pings my phone with the horrible latest headline and I completely forget that I was ever trying to think about trees at all.

The friends from the group chat spontaneously decide to meet in person to share hugs and what-the-fucks and vegetarian breakfast. Some start talking about the election. I’m stable as a twig, poised to break with the breeze, but I don’t want to deny others their responses. Thankfully, someone else says please, let’s not talk politics right now. My friend P. is visibly traumatized. She’s going through it with family trauma on top of national trauma, as I am. I take her hand in mine, give it a squeeze. It’s only a gesture. I wish I had more to give. I wrap my roots around hers.

My friend J. has brought gifts. Mine is a candle on which is written the following words:

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

I want to believe that this kind of peace is possible.

I believe I believe I believe.

Think about trees that withstand the wind.

Like a tree that’s planted by the waters…

In the afternoon, I go to a class my father is teaching at the synagogue. I enter a room filled with 20 people and find him wearing his Harris/Walz camo-patterned baseball hat. My kids gave him this hat for his 84^th birthday in late September, back when we all had been filled with hope. That hat, a too-ironic attempt to signal that we “elites” could get down with hunting, an effort to capture some game-changing share of the undecided vote. How naïve we all were to think that a simple camo pattern signaled our crossing of some divide.

The class my father is teaching has nothing to do with politics. But in this moment, everything has everything to do with politics. My father mentions Voldemort by name in passing, to help make a point about the ways we understand the word “narcissism” in our culture. The woman sitting next to me is triggered by the very name and asks that we not speak of the election.

Ten minutes later, she leaves. And I get it. It is far too early, for many of us, to be the tree.