An Invitation to Pay Attention
Zoketsu Norman Fischer
November 6, 2024
Remarks posted to his personal Facebook page
An invitation to pay close attention to your life your breath your daily tasks and relationships, not to be baited into confusion and despair. You are alive in a world that’s everywhere alive, pay attention to this. And to kindness.
And watch the government and society in which you live just as carefully, listening for the rhythm underneath the jagged melody. Build counter-movements and strengthen counter-movements that already exist. Every day. Day after day.
There have been many cruel and misguided governments. They last as long as they last. People carry on, help one another out. I feel special sympathy for the many groups, trans people, gay people, people of color, disabled people, women, for whom this presidency and government feels like a personal attack. Special help and support for them.
The worst is the expected disregard for the environment and strong support of the fossil fuel industry. But the government doesn’t control everything and many forces are in motion to do the right thing for the earth, we can hope for and agitate for that.
Getting a rise out of its enemies is the great delight of the MAGA movement. But that’s a trivial thing. No use cooperating with it, there are other things to do and it is undignified to allow one’s self to be destabilized by the gloating of the gloaters. Let them gloat if they like.
Pay attention to what matters. Know how to take care of yourself and your friends.
How a person makes a decision is a mystery, but it seems clear that tens of millions of people who voted for Trump were not voting for the Trump the Democrats know. They didn’t vote to further restrict women’s reproductive rights, or usher in a fascist racist homophobic sexist regime. They voted for protection, fairer economics, a narrower focus on them and their problems.
Let’s hope the Trump they decided on is closer to what we get than the Trump the Democrats know. We won’t know until it unfolds.
Would that words knew how, what to feel
To do
Would that the heart on the sleeve
Turn inside out with the terrible news clean fabric
Soldier on, those parts of the body in whose darkness
Sanity resides Kindness as natural as wind
Blows through to some shaft of light
In which the truth scrolls show scraps and clear hints
Of what’s to come
That’s never as imagined
Humans have their many foibles fear elicits
But the body marches forward ever
Forward and round and round
This too passes
And passing refreshes
Every new moment’s a promise That being human matters
On a green and greening earth… And the trees hold steadyYours, Norman
