Baking Away Worries: Reflections after the election

On a lethargic morning suffering from an election induced migraine, I found it easier to concentrate on the old Betty Cocker recipe for chocolate chip cookies than to contemplate the former president’s re-election to a second term. His promises for the “first day” of his administration are chilling and include initiating mass deportations of migrants, pardoning January 6 insurrectionists who violently sought to overthrow the Constitution, and cutting climate regulations despite evidence of ever more severe weather conditions.

All day, ping-ponging worries bounced through my brain while I creamed the butter and stirred in the chopped pecans, all the while trying to breathe deeply and to re-direct my focus.

• Worries that eliminating Head Start will enlarge an already existing education gap between those children ready for school, those who can count and know their colors and those who have never held a picture book.
• Worries that the end of prescription price caps will only serve big pharma’s bottom line and cause those on tight budgets to have to choose between paying the rent, putting food on the table, and buying lifesaving drugs.
• Worries that a greatly curtailed National Weather Service will return us to the “old days” when checking the sky and feeling the wind on our face were our only weather alerts rather than using science to identify the path of approaching storms.
• Worries that banning books, like giant book bonfires of earlier generations, will chill the creative spirit of writers and artists and curtail the mission of public libraries as the “people’s university.”

Then, late this afternoon, I listened to Vice-President Kamala Harris offer a gracious concession speech that acknowledged the exact range of my emotions. She advised, “Do not despair. This is not a time to throw up our hands, this is a time to roll up our sleeves”.

I began to shift my energy from worry by focusing on her words and a prayer shared by Rev. Robin Tanner, “Beloved One, hold the pain and the fear, hold the dream and the fury, hold us as we hold one another. Call us into being with a love that does not let go.”

And more words of encouragement from this evening’s Election Vespers:
Mary Housh Gordon – “I think humans in western cultures often need to feel there is an upward arc to history and some promised arrival in order for there to be meaning. But the place we are going is just around the sun on a miracle of a planet – and we are still alive in a world that is so beautiful and so brutal all at once and always has been. And it is all drenched in meaning no matter where it is headed and it matters that we love each other well and drink up the beauty and resist the brutality.”