It is an unremarkable day here in the Northeast. Grey sky. Dull snow. Holiday lights dimmed or packed away in tissue paper older than my grandmother’s tea set. Leftover soup and the soggy end of the last corner of the final dessert crumble sags in its glass dish. We are back to work, back to routine, back to school and the hopeful ones are, for at least this first month, back to the gym. The cat leaves a trail of pooh now across the basement floor. “She is old enough to become distracted,” I think to myself. She begins in the litter box like a proper girl but forgets then what she is about, wandering about the basement looking for clues as to what is next, leaving droplings along the way, harbingers of a larger fecal mess to come. This will only get worse, my vet assures me, and I think, “and to this I was born, finding pooh.”
I don’t know what you are seeking these days. Where you are in the cycle of your astrological signs or numerological numbers. What the holidays have left for you to remember or to fix. What may be your visions for the year. One thing is clear for me in 2025. I must amp up my zombie apocalypse survival skills, as I have none. I have a friend, I’ll call her Brett, as Brett is the strongest woman I have known, who has all the skills: fire-building, wood-chopping, ice-chopping, food-growing, first aid kits in her truck; next to the chainsaw, hammer assortment, back-up fuel, back-up water, back-up blankets and tents. She has it all and knows it all. When the zombies come, I find her, or I don’t survive. That is the truth. Meantime, it is January. Meantime, the sun continues to rise. Meantime, goodness exists. Valor lives.
Among all the pain of 2024, which I do believe most of us can agree was rampant, a story of courage emerged. Gisele Pelicot, raped over years by her husband and the strangers he invited into their home, chose to allow her name and her face and her story to become public. She did so with clear purpose – so that other women may know that the shame is not on them – it is on the perpetrators of violence to carry shame and to be called to account. Her action inspired women in cities across France to march in the hopes of new legislation, and in the Avignon courthouse where her trial was held over weeks, women lined up for hours to thank and applaud her.
She understood that it was not her mess. It was never her mess. It was the soiling of her husband and those men who chose to cause harm to a woman who had been drugged. And yet, once she understood the harm done to her, the smear of rape in her home, she followed the trail, made it public, and stood with valor.
I do not know where your hopes lie these days. I do know that surviving the strains of our time require skills, that is true, and evidence of our ability to think beyond ourselves and stand up for each other. We don’t need superheros or superpowers. We do need to attend to each other, to clean up the mess in our homes, and to seek, honor and share evidence of goodness and bravery.
It is never far.
Love, Maria
