I don't know what to do.

When the school bus stopped in front of me this morning, I had a moment. “This is all so weird.” Anyone else have this experience? You’re going about your pandemic business, normalizing everything, and then -- shazam!  You suddenly recognize just how strange things are. “This just can’t be real,” I thought as I took in the small masked people with their turtle shell backpacks, wobbling up the bus steps like the world’s tiniest bandits. 

All the faces I could see but not read — young, old, brown, white — eyes peering over the top of masks. At the same moment, I reach up to brush ashes off my shoulders, nature’s persistent dandruff, what remains of things that once had feathers, eyes, leaves, skin, breath, bark, fur, hopes, joy, pain. These ashes perform their final act, delivering warnings from far away communities and blackened forests — cries for help, reminders. “This could be you. This is you.” Our connections are, after all, not just metaphors.  Ashes travel to remind us, “This could be you.” Small faces in large masks remind us, “This is you.” 

It confounds me, how to straddle this time. Today, it all snuck up on me and I am overwhelmed by what seems to be a persistent knock. “Be better. Do better. Tomorrow, do even better.” My mind cries out for escape, numbing. I want it to be last summer, when I was laughing with my kids, floating down the Snake River amidst living, uncorrupted things. I want to un-know things. 

I don’t know what to do. 

This is the phrase that keeps bubbling up, over and over again. I don’t know. I don’t know when this will end, or how. I don’t know if we can see the pain of someone else without competing for the non-existent medal in the non-existent “Pain Olympics.” I don’t know if the world we created is too far gone, as some think, or still healable, as I hope. I don’t know how to be better than I have been capable of being, and I know that is a must. 

This is the worst time for someone like me — not a “real” writer — to start writing about what I know, right in the middle of realizing I know nothing. I feel overwhelmed because I am small and not-knowing, and this understanding does not fit with the narrative I have lived with my whole life, that I am “strong” and “capable” and “feisty,” and that if there is something to be done, I can do it.  

I don’t know how to stop the fires or the virus or the hurt I am witnessing as I tune into the briefing by my former colleague, the mayor of Louisville. Last time he and I spoke, we were working on ways to promote a  “compassionate cities” policy. But there is no sign of that work in the briefing, the social media comments, the raw pain of the people who knew and loved Breonna Taylor.  Still more pain in the voice of another local colleague, mother-in-law to a police officer, as she worries about her daughter grappling with whether or not her law enforcement husband will come home safely from his work in the unrestful cities our policies have created.

The strangest thing happens as the bus pulls away. From somewhere deep within me, I hear the faintest whisper . . .

Listen. 

With love and gratitude,

Sara and the Becoming Jackson Whole team