One of my wisest friends, Dyana, who’s also a writer I deeply admire, suggested to me once that the US could benefit from a national day of mourning. We could frame it like a memorial day for the afflicted, the survivors, the perpetually marginalized, and the dearly departed. Or we could frame it like a timeout from a scolding mother—in essence, a day to stop and think about what you’ve done. 

There is a lot to mourn. I don’t think I need to tell you. For me, I am mourning that some close friends just lost their pregnancy, and another friend is moving out of the city, and yet another was dropped from the running for a dream job; and an enormous hurricane just hit our neighbors; and trans leaders in our military are being insulted and denied the right to exercise important freedoms; and our president just shamelessly pardoned a man who has acted with such callousness that the pardon is likely to reinforce not only the dehumanization he meted out to others, but his own broken self.

Dyana explains that we need something more than an escape from these realities. We need a better response than self-care. I want to know how to mourn as the active expression of anger and sadness. In this sense, mourning sits opposite from passive despair. Mourning is muscular.

Brian Andreas and Fia Skye work together weaving stories and images that heal the soul, expand the mind, and invite community. They’re good friends of The Porch, and when we talked we began by asking them about the earliest stories they remember:

Brian Andreas:  I grew up in an environment of storytelling, so it wasn’t until I was probably in my twenties where I recognized stories as a discrete thing.  So when you say what’s the first story I remember… it’s like breathing, what’s the first breath I remember taking?  You breathe, you breathe, you breathe and all of a sudden you go, “Wow, I’m actually breathing.”  So, I don’t really have an answer for that, yeah, I can’t remember the first one.

Fia Skye:  I remember the books on my shelf…Winnie the Pooh was a very big thing, you know, The Night before Christmas, but we didn’t have that atmosphere growing up so it wasn’t until I started doing theater that I started to think of stories as breathing livable things.

GH:  So when you look back on your childhood from this perspective, can you observe the outlines of the contours of the story that your family believed about the world?

FS:  My dad worked for Caterpillar and we had a lot of issues with the unions in a lot of family stories, you know.  My dad had this idea of the story of how he was supposed to put his children through college. It’s like you inherit these stories and then you say, I like it, I don’t like it, I’m going to fix this because this is wrong with my generation or my dad said it was wrong and so on. I remember the story we got around the dinner table was of course that my dad was helping save the company [from the unions]. And there were a lot of stories in my family about what a man is, what a woman is.  My dad doesn’t do the laundry, still doesn’t do laundry, only cooks because he has to survive.

There were no global stories except for Russia the Cold War during that time period, but I would say that in the Midwest it was very isolated stories, before computers and before cell phones.

GH:  This is probably a fairly common story, we grew up with the notion that there were good guys and bad guys…and we knew that we were on the good guys’ side.

FS:  Absolutely.

GH:  So, I’m assuming you no longer think that unions are bad and that a woman’s place is in the home, that kind of stuff [laughs].  When did those stories start changing?

FS:  I have been so fortunate to have some incredible teachers. I remember working at Sam Shepard’s play True West, and it was a game changer for me and I just saw how this teacher’s voice in conflict changed everything. I had never seen a woman with such strength and beauty and ferociousness. In theatre when you step in and you have to give voice to somebody else, you have to speak somebody else’s truth with conviction to a room full of strangers, you have to go off your centre.  

You had to look at the whole story then you have to look at all of the different players and all the different pieces and you understand that I’m playing this character.  You begin to understand how people are incredibly human and how they begin to believe stories that other people tell them if they offer something that they want to believe is true. 

We live in fractious times. It’s all too easy to cast difference as evil, and to adopt an attitude of enmity. Certainly there are times when resistance is needed, but more often than not it is the ideologies that mold people that require our attention, rather than the unthinking products of such dogma. The temptation to personal hatred is subtle and corrupting.

I love America, but I sometimes fear it. 

I dream of America, but it sometimes shows up in my nightmares. I know I'm not the only one. 

Living here has brought overwhelming gifts of love, community, service, creativity and hope. 

It has also stimulated feelings of uncertainty, anger, and deep concern. 

In his song DEMOCRACY, Leonard Cohen wrote of the US that "It's there they've got the range, the machinery for change, and it's there they've got the spiritual thirst." We're nearly a year in to a presidency that less than a third of US Americans voted for, but many of the rest of us are still experiencing some kind of exhaustion, mild dread, anxiety, and a sense of powerlessness. 

It could be useful to reflect that the range, the machinery for change, the spiritual thirst are what allows someone like Donald Trump to think he could be elected, but they also nearly got such a common good-oriented figure as Bernie Sanders to the White House too. 

They're what allows ideas and events as varied, brilliant and awful as the invasion of Iraq *and* the national parks system, the Transformers movies and Schindler's List, the writings of aggressive nationalism but also of Maya Angelou and Mark Twain, the alt-right and the civil rights movement, the subprime mortgage crisis and the existence of Habitat for Humanity. 

In the war diaries he later published, Whitman wrote: 

These Hospitals, so different from all others - these American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, well they open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, showing our humanity, tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, bursting the petty bonds of art. To these, to him, what are your dramas and poems?

Whitman was not forsaking his art. Rather he was recognizing that there are times when art is not enough, a time when we have to get our hands dirty, when artists need to take a stand with our bodies. This is the tension that tugs at many artists who feel the need to go inward and artfully explore while all the time there are pressing needs around; we see family, friends, and strangers suffering. These propel us out of our sanctuaries into the flesh and blood of the world we try so hard to understand. For me this often feels like a messy affair of inadequacy as I fumble to give comfort and care. While the services I offer to the grieving, the sufferer, the person waylaid by a storm or injustice does not reflect the thoughtful, polished art I so much aspire to create, perhaps this physical manifestation of my concern, the “profound conviction of necessity,” the word made flesh, is art in itself. As Whitman reveals, we can enter a process of transfiguration in which our bodies become the poetry. 

To say history rhymes means it doesn’t repeat itself, but there are resonant themes that return, which, I suppose, can be a thought filled with either hope or despair. Seamus Heaney wrote a poem in honor of Nelson Mandela called “The Cure at Troy” that closes with these lines:

It means once in a lifetime

That justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

I would like to think you can hear that rhyme at dinnertime—in the food prepared, the dishes digested, and the stories shared. Everything in the garden that gives its life for that moment, that meal, gives a rich and generous gift. At the table, we find nourishment and new life.

“This is an important play, a theatrical masterpiece, as significant as Death of a Salesman or Oh What a Lovely War,” our tutor told us as he handed out a list of the play’s themes: right wing politics and corruption, the ozone layer; the experience of the gay man— closeted and out, the personal and societal impact of the AIDS epidemic; faith and sexuality. This was theater at its most contemporary and my secret shame was I just didn't get it!

Other students declared Angels in America was their favorite play of all time, while I silently fretted over why I couldn't see it's genius. Maybe it’s because I was a latent homophobe? After all the sex scenes made me blush. Or maybe it was because the character I identified with most was Joe Pitt, a closeted gay man struggling with his faith as his worldview changes, but after the mortifying "safe sex, no sex" comment I wasn't going to admit that to my fellow students and be singled out as "that religious girl" again.

My granddad was a scholar—and a damn good one. Born and raised in rural Oklahoma, he left his simple upbringings, and all the struggle and trauma they

contained, to pursue the world of biblical scholarship. More than once, I’ve heard my grandmother refer to him as a “giant of a man.” And it seems he was, especially for his world. For 45 years, he taught and researched at various universities and lectured to audiences worldwide. He preached to his students the importance of a relentless pursuit of truth, and he himself lost much for that pursuit. He authored multiple works on the New Testament, archaeology, and the Apostle Paul, and his sweat mixed with the dirt of numerous archaeological digs in the Middle East. He raised three outstanding, service-minded sons, and he loved his wife with a dedication and fire all could admire.

Almost everything that made my grandparents giants together is an article of the past now. 

I was haunted for years by the thought that it might happen: a startling deathbed revelation that a core belief on which I had built my life was faulty. I would see in an instant how hundreds or thousands of micro and macro decisions had issued from a false premise. Scientists encounter this phenomenon frequently in research,  and have to go back philosophically and methodologically to the fork in the road and choose a different direction. But I would have no opportunity to do that, and would die immersed in regret amplified by realizing my unlived lives too late.

And then it happened. I recognized that I had told myself an untrue story for years. I had indeed acted upon it in ways I regretted. The saving grace was that this happened not on my deathbed, but in my mid-forties.

The greatest misunderstanding that people have about the USA until they live here is that it’s a country. I’ve been here for ten years, and the most surprising shift in my perception has been that the place might be better seen as really fifty nations, each with their own culture and laws, connected with their neighbors only as tightly as they want to be. This fact carries tension, of course, if you value coherence; but the liberating consequence is that if the first step to healing a place is knowing it, it may be much easier to know a state than the nation. The handful of key cities and rural communities that make up a state are conceivably knowable by a handful of people who care enough to steward the earth, nurture the people, and imagine “the next stage of good.” That phrase, coined by Bob Woodward to refer to the role of US American Presidents, is spacious and inviting. It’s a way to live. Looking out my window, seeing trees, but imagining the neighborhood and the city behind them, and the region behind those is a beginning of knowing. That knowing is vital to rootedness, and rootedness is the beginning of hospitality, and hospitality will save the world...

In my homeland of northern Ireland, lament for the past is real, but we are moving beyond the cruelty and toward owning our story, in all its painful and joyful variety. We know what it was like to live in a society governed by fear and hatred. We’re not going back.

Which brings me to the present moment, as it pertains to the fifty state experiment that may or may not actually be a nation. I’d like to offer some gentle thoughts on the state of the union, emerging from my experience of growing up in a place where we thought we could dominate each other, and are only recently discovering that our needs are shared. I’m going to sketch seven principles and practices for thriving in the current moment. Let’s begin with the one closest to each of us.