Thick Fog and Longing

Happiness, banana muffins, and why becoming anti-racist isn't a partisan issue

A few nights ago I had a vivid dream about our old farmhouse. In it, I stood on the rough gravel driveway, longing to go inside, yet only able to look in through the windows.

Dreams can be wavy. Reality refracted by the REM cycle, making a thing simultaneously unrecognizable and entirely known. It was him, but it didn’t look like him… I was there, but it looked totally different.

This wasn’t that.

This was animated. Lucid. Full-color.

Peering in through the living room windows, I saw the fingerprints of the home’s new owners. A walnut staircase winding to the second floor, which made perfect sense to me. The kitchen was somehow brighter, front porch better.

I woke up sweating. Sad.

Here’s what I have always known: it’s not the place I miss. I don’t miss the actual house, or even its wide front porch. The yard was always bigger than what we needed. The barn was in a state of disrepair. I don’t miss what it gave to us, those sweet days of scanning the internet for preschooler-friendly craft ideas and eating lunch on portioned plates rimmed with the ABC’s.

They were simpler days, not because of our phase of life, but because opting out of pain and tension was an option available to us. I didn’t borrow trouble. If it didn’t affect me personally, it wasn’t my problem.

My life was less complicated, back then. There wasn’t as much sadness or anger.

I miss that.

~

In the hours after the Derek Chauvin guilty verdict, I tasted possibility. I puttered around the house that evening with lighter steps, doing the things that always and forever have to be done. It felt like a new day dawning.

I mean, I knew better.

But on the heels of the previous week, where the bad fruit of racism was ever in our faces, accountability was a relief. (I say that in full acknowledgment that what I felt was a fraction of what most People of Color felt.)

I started a mental list of all the little things that made me happy. These tiny joys did not arrive with the positive news. They were always there, obscured by the fog of fracture, drowned out by the noise of not hearing each other.

My life, and my writing, unfold around community, faith, and justice. Here’s what that means to me.

• Community: We are in this together, whatever this is, like it or not. We were never meant to go it alone, or even to stick with people who rubber-stamp our existing worldview. We were meant to crash against and slump into each other. We have to find ways to listen better. We have to keep talking.

• Faith: As someone who follows Jesus, I look to him as my roadmap for living as a neighbor. He stood with whomever had the least amount of power. He ate with everyone (even the haughty, sanctimonious religious bros, whom he made very, very uncomfortable.) He lived gritty, of the earth, interested in seeds, carried by wind, a storyteller at heart. He did not dismiss injustice for the sake of a false ideal of “unity.” He persisted. He rested. He was salty and sensitive. “Those who say they live in God should live their lives as Jesus did.” 1 John 1:6

• Justice: We exist against a landscape of racial reckoning. It’s jarring for those of us who have had the luxury of looking the other way. But our comfort is not the point. I don’t consider myself (and never will) an anti-racism writer. That’s not my lane. But our sense of community will bleed out and our faith will flat-line if we refuse to re-educate ourselves and wade in. This is very much our problem.

These things cannot be portioned out like slices of pie. There’s no daylight between them, as Father Boyle might say.

“When we realize we’ve settled for comfort instead of following conviction, we have to be willing to shake things up, even if stepping into our calling leads us into deep pain and discomfort.” - Be the Bridge by Latasha Morrison

Out of sincere love for our little online family, I want to caution us to carefully check our sources as they pertain to racial justice. I’ve been inundated with white people eager to throw a few certain Black commentators and thinkers my way, because they fortify their existing narratives. I get it. It’s a consoling mental short-cut.

But I think we’re ready to struggle together for the common good. I think we’re ready to ask better question and admit where we’ve gotten things wrong and just to not have all the answers. Racial justice is not a partisan issue. It is an essential work. Until we forge our way toward it, we will never know peace.

It is with sincere appreciation and what I hope to be an abundance of compassion that I invite all of us, myself included, to persist and grow and mess up along the way and listen better and risk our reputations and refuse to stagnate.

On this glorious Saturday, I’m leaving you with this incomplete, always-in-progress list of Happy Things. While it’s true that the last decade of my life has come with more sadness and tension, it has also brought more fun, more clarity, more raw connection, more pleasure, more hope.

This is the abundant life, right? We get a little bit of everything.

XO,

Shannan

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Happy Things

:: Draping sheets over the blackberry bushes for what I hope was our last freeze. The next day, in the sunshine, they smelled like clean laundry on the line, like childhood, like baby Silas peeking through the wash back at the farm. (Maybe I do miss some of what it gave me.)

:: Taylor Swift’s transcendent song-writing (I will fight you on this one, Calvin!) “And if I'm dead to you, why are you at the wake?” Why, indeed.

:: The ultimate guilty pleasure of the podcast Every Single Album - Taylor Swift

:: Sho Baraka: The Narrative

:: Tulips - I remembered to get some bulbs in the ground last fall and I’m unashamedly filling vases with their pretty faces. Some of them masquerade as peonies.

:: Washing the curtains - Ruby accidentally squirted purple hand sanitizer on the walls and my white curtains, which was a big siiiiigh for me. It turns out washing the curtains can be therapeutic.

:: Watching my kids try things

:: Watching my kids learn from disappointment

:: Silas's candle-making. (He invented a signature spring scent for me called Grass + Honey and it is everything!)

:: Grape Hi-Chew

:: Fun mail

:: The Innocence Files on Netflix - a documentary about overturning false convictions. (LET ME HAVE MY FUN.)

:: This line from New Girl:

Schmidt (over the phone): Set the scene. What’s the vibe over there?

Winston: Nick’s in jeans.

Schmidt: Nixon jeans? What the h*ll are Nixon jeans? They sound really cool.

:: Choosing my integrity

:: My coworker, Maynard, who tries to turn everything into East African food.

:: Two old bananas and the will to bake them into muffins. These are brighter and fresher than classic banana bread and still stand up the next day, popped in the microwave for 15 seconds. (I omit the raisins and walnuts because my kids still stubbornly resist “chunks.”)

:: Texting my friends

:: The sky (forever and always, a gift to us)

:: A new washer + dryer - I still can’t get over only running one dryer cycle!!!

:: Family Reunion on Netflix - the BEST family sitcom show.

:: Taco Bell - Cory surprised me with a lunch delivery last week. I’m still sad they cancelled the $1 Spicy Tostada, but two crunchy taco supremes and a Coke usually help me get over it.

What’s making you happy beneath the fog?

Here’s to keeping it forever in our sights.

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