Blessings on this new moon. I wish it felt good to reconnect here. Instead, it feels like a heinous development to be back. It’s important as all get out for us to link arms again (still?) yet this is not how I would have chosen to find my way back. I drafted a few posts in these last years and yet this didn’t feel like a necessary space anymore. Like many of us, I was living out the minutiae of my life in hopes that we had broken the fever of forty-five. Paying attention, feeling grateful for integrity and public service that were resetting the ethos in the White House and seemed poised to wash in ever stronger waves into Congress as well as we seemed like we might be coming back to our senses and flushing the toxic hate and willful ignorance out of our system… not to be, of course. As the momentum doggedly refused to fully shift and the alarms sounded louder and louder over the last couple of years, we called and wrote and prayed and tweeted (back when that was still a thing), working as hard as we could alongside our day jobs and family obligations and household chores, striving to continue having our American government run by public servants. To continue the rule of law and the centering of humanity, justice, democracy, intelligence, kindness, research, excellence, and right action. Instead, our public policy has metastasized again because our fellow citizens voted to torpedo justice, to jettison empathy, to obliterate science and rationality and reasonableness. While m.a.n.y. of us – and we need to remember this – voted to continue working to construct a more perfect union, too many others chose othering, coursening, cynicism, fear, hatred, ignorance, and intolerance. Do NOT come at me with tales about gas prices and egg prices and immigration. Some of the voters were not blinded by racist, fascist, misogynistic tendencies (which activated and drove most of the movement); even more so those so-called citizens who deny they wanted the othering, voted recklessly and fecklessly. Now we’re all finding out. They chose greedy lying liars who lie, over our calls to wake up and support seasoned and experienced public servants with solid plans to make the world a better place for all of us. We’ll parse our actions available and steps to move forward together over the weeks and months ahead. We’re back. May this New Moon today strengthen the light we must and can shine for each other and ourselves as we resume the work. Keep the faith and keep in touch.