Weird Contentment in Colorado

Colorado, 2014, driving from Boulder to Durango with Dawn.

feeling content these days, and it’s a little disorienting.

nothing is missing. (can it be?)

the earth is vast, the universe unfathomable, and everything alive right now will one day die.

while we’re here, most people are pursuing their best guess at happiness, even if that comes out fucked up and harmful sometimes.

i’m so grateful for this life — for brilliant friends, sweet creatures, solid comrades, revolutionary* forebears, artists and teachers of wisdom, ancestors i’m just starting to get to know.

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i’ve had this Voyaging High before (traveling, spacious, privileged, insulated) and i know it’ll change when we get home to the Bay. the suffering will roil up stark and terrible again: displacement, prisons, transphobia, oil, deportation, depression, exploitation, rape culture, cruelty on large and small scales. it’s not that it’s not here, too. it’s here in colorado, clearly. but as a sympathetic outsider, i get to be patient. i get to trust that the left will reconstitute itself, and might not even be known as the left anymore, but as something greater.

these are funny political prayers, huh?

thanks for listening.

Photos: leonine kitties in Boulder; vistas on the drive south; Dawn with a special lovely kind of doubling-over smile that Dawn makes.

* i don’t use this word like a sexified marketing ploy, but for the simple reason that the magnitude of change required to give everyone on earth access to healthy food, water, shelter, medicine, and education is so great, that in my mind it would be disingenuous to call it anything short of revolutionary.