Well, friends, we made it through that impossible year. As I reflect on 2020, I’m giving myself permission not to look for meaning in it beyond the recognition that it’s really hard being human. I’m thinking instead of the things that got us through. I’m thinking about the long walks in masks, the humans (fictional and real), the cooking projects and poems and video chats reminding us that, yes, we are incredibly fragile, but we are not alone.
I’m going to be exploring our connections with one another here in my new online space. As a queer person who came of age in conservative faith communities, I’ve experienced the sorrows that come with unbelonging. But I’ve also experienced the healing power of communities that throw open their doors to every kind of human and allow themselves to be transformed through those connections.
I hope you’ll join me in reimagining what it means to belong to one another in cities and neighborhoods, faith communities and families. I’ll send out a newsletter sporadically, but the real conversations will happen on my substack, which you can read more about here. I’d love for you to subscribe to stay connected.
In the meantime, I wish you many small kindnesses as we begin this new year together.
Small Kindnesses
By Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”