I Will Stay IF You Will Stay

for Torrey House's Column A Thing With Feathers

I will stay if you will stay.

A shooting star fell outside my bedroom window the other night. It was dark and cold with no moon, a white diamond, falling fast toward the newly fallen snow. I was going to make a wish, and then realized with a stomach clenching jolt there wasn’t anything left to wish for. The worst thing had already happened, and now there was nothing to do except watch every single thing I cared about be annihilated, one executive order at a time. That very day, in fact, the incoming administration announced they would put troops in the streets. The likely future attorney general crowed about putting left-leaning women in gulags, and Amazon began selling t-shirts that said Your Body, My Choice.

Hope is holding tight to a vision of care and compassion we might make real in the world with our hearts and our hands.

Wishing, I thought, was over for a while. There was only time now for doing, or making, tenaciously and determinedly, the sort of doing that might shelter the most vulnerable among us, the sort of making that could protect a family. Hope, then, must lie somewhere between wishing and making. Hope is holding tight to a vision of care and compassion we might make real in the world with our hearts and our hands.

Nearly a lifetime ago, a young Joy Harjo wrote a poem called “She Had Some Horses,” and a young me read it and decided I was correct in my suspicions that women make the world. Today I call on each of us to do just that. To use our hearts and our hands to make micro-countries of love inside this larger country of cruelty. Micro-countries of protection, for all belief systems and genders, for humans and children, for dogs and horses, cats and chickens, wolves and grizzly bears, for the making of art of all kinds. Micro-countries where we grow our own clean food, install solar panels and water catchment systems, where we dance with Mavis to “I’ll Take You There” after dinner and sing “Closer To Fine” around a campfire in the dark. The single-family unit with its electric gates and motion-sensored klieg lights has never served anything but capitalism which fears matriarchal communities of shared resources and mutual opportunity and involvement most of all. Many humans, of course, have been living in these mutually supportive communities for time immemorial.

Yesterday, on my drive to Denver, I passed a group of men on the slushy side of the highway waving hate flags including a Your Body, My Choice flag even though Colorado did just enshrine reproductive rights into their state constitution by a 62-38 percent margin. I need to be honest and tell you that for the following fifteen minutes, part of me wanted to turn the wheel hard right into the canyon wall. I say this not to be alarmist, but to recognize that wanting to leave is a reasonable response to ignorance and violence and terror that has no forecasted end.

But I will make a deal with you. I will stay if you will stay. Together we can tend the Earth and our animals and each other, which ought to have been our primary job all along. This nation is dying of denial, so we will live into and out of our sadness and regret. There will be joy too, and laughter, because that is another thing that people can make together. We can surround ourselves with the words of the ones we trust most, and we can write some new words together. We can take turns keeping watch while the others are sleeping. No more looking up or out for a savior. We were born both to provide and accept this version of radical care.

PAM HOUSTON is the author of Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom, co-author of Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place, and author of many other books. She teaches at Institute of American Indian Arts and University of California-Davis and lives near Creede, Colorado.