This week: Professional membership group urges me to set goals for new year. Meanwhile I attend my first Zoom funeral, watch a mob invade my Capitol, and learn we are on course for half a million COVID dead by spring. I make tea, paint, and put out more seed for the birds.

Wednesday started with a flash of joy: Rev Warnock, John Lewis’ pastor had been elected to represent Georgia in the Senate, the first African American to do so. John Ossoff seemed headed to join him.

These lifted my heart because I had found much-needed focus in making cards for these campaigns. My mother-in-law was dying far way. COVID meant my husband traveled alone to be with her. In the empty house, I made 70 altogether, each one a hand-made collage with a hand-written note inside saying, your voice matters. You matter. You deserve to heard.

Like so much of my art, these cards were also a call to my own soul: you matter. Keep trying. So, this news brought me joy, even while I braced for the theater of GOP slow-down of the ceremonial acceptance of the Electoral College votes.

You know what came next. The rally with its invitation to combat. The march. The invasion. From lies and disrespect to desecration, violence, death. (Not as much as some planned. Left behind were Molotov cocktails with home-made napalm, pipe bombs with timers, and zip-tie restraints.) All because of a four-year campaign against truth, the news, the courts, the scientists, the doctors, and anyone who doesn’t vote or look like the team that lost the election.

And then they walked away.

I don’t usually litter my blog posts with links but it is important right now to point to facts. White people were allowed to carry on like hooligans or worse, and walk away. (May I never see that smug guy with the naked chest and horned headgear again.) I have been hypnotized by Twitter, not so much “doom-scrolling” as longing for someone, anyone, to help me to articulate what I am seeing and feeling.

“What a staggering, heartbreaking week,” writes Molly McKew. Like her,

“I am haunted by the deeper meaning [and] left angry — so furious it’s almost blinding at times…Furious this is where we are, and that from here anyone — anyone — still minimizes what it is. It’s not over. I wish I could say it was. We will all be tested in how we react in coming weeks. Beyond.”

I talk for hours with my daughter. She’s a PhD candidate in US History. We sort through what we’ve heard, and measure it against what she knows, try to asses what happened and why. We each try to see how our life and our work fit into the larger work that these events call for. We talk about white supremacy and the inheritance of capitalism and privilege.

How can it be that $100 donation retires $100,000 in medical debt? How can the Dow hit a record along with the need at food banks?

From the small place where we each stand, how do we work for what matters?

****

Because of New Year’s, my in-box is filled with advice about planning for business success. It all feels so damn trivial. Wrong. Then I remember, I can think that because good luck and being white brought me safety nets. So much can be traced, if you look at through the lens of history, to opportunities offered to generations before me, and so to me.

Now: what to do? My art is not political. It doesn’t make millions to give away. Can I make difference just by making and teaching art in these times?

Maybe so.

Art is life singing. I believe anyone who makes art, who wants to create, wants to speak from their heart about what they see, what they feel and what they care about, right now. You love your materials, your subject matter. You want to show why they matter. “You were put here for this, to give voice to your astonishment,” writes Annie Dillard. When we paint, when we teach and encourage others to create, we are, I think, creating some of that elusive stuff that makes life a miracle worth living.

We artists are seers. We see what’s possible where others see only the everyday. We call out meaning. We make vision last instead of letting it slip away. “Every one of you has a collection of stuff at home that other people think is trash,” one teacher announced. (“How did she know?” I wondered.) “That’s because you are an artist. Your job is saving the over-looked. Transform it, until you make it possible for them to see why it matters.”

I believe we all have the need to be seen, to matter. I believe that many of us long to make ourselves visible by making art. We transform line and color into the something that expresses us – our emotions, our loves. We say “I saw this. This is how it felt to me.” We swim in the imperfect but we dream in the ideal. “Sure, the paintings fail miserably. But what else can artists do but try?” writes Sarah Swan, “The real art is our collective, undaunted, efforts.”

Remember that. The brevity and the gift. Be generous. Be brave. Be loving. Right now. Art is about the fact of seeing: seeing each other, letting other see us, frail and overwhelmed as we may sometimes feel. We have work to do. We will need each other. “It’s rough right now friends,” Crystal Marie Neubauer writes:

“We are witnessing the last desperate gasps of a dying ideology of whiteness. To look forward to a better future, we can in no way return to the status quo of the past. It simply cannot be the cure to our hurting country to say “let’s get back to normal” when normal was anything but just for us all. 2020, in the best possible sense, opened our eyes to the hidden evils and the lies that have been allowed to operate in this country for so long…[but] you are not the only one holding the fate of the world upon your shoulders.”

We move the weight together, one baby step at a time. Catch your breath. Ask yourself what matters. Keep trying. Make yourself a hot beverage; call a friend. And remember to feed the birds.

My Christmas present - these little ones will see me through.