I realized something today. Well, actually I’ve been quietly ignoring it for a while now. Sometimes when I write, I hold a glimmer of hope that loved ones will read my words and awaken to the harm and suffering that their staunch support of this administration is causing.

Maybe you know someone like that too.

People who are cheering on the chain saw, who believe they are on the side of the constitution not the other guys. They probably see those with different views as sheep, evil bastards, who are standing in the way of progress, too dumb to see, or too indoctrinated to look past their noses. (And yeah, I left it intentionally ambiguous. It could be said by anyone on any side.)

How did that happen? How did the left’s talking points become the right’s? How did the world get turned inside out? Yes. Rhetorical.

How did might become right, the patchwork become white, and ostracism and expulsion become the new open arms of this country.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. We all came from the womb of that yearning. Now that gets you a one-way ticket out of the country and a no reentry tattoo across your forehead, at best.

At worst, it gets you a one-way flight to the bowels of El Salvador hell. No one comes home from there. There is no return. There is a reason this administration is fighting tooth and nail to bury Abrego there.

But, it seems, those under the spell of the great conman do not see it or God forbid, choose to not see it. Maybe they see something I don’t, but if they do, such callous ends do not justify the means, ever.

To continue to write with them in mind is a fool’s errand, and I have been a fool. Seeing that, my fool-heartedness can be as it is. Yes, my heart aches for all those caught in the cult of cruelty, for all of us who love them, and for the country and its citizens who are learning first-hand how cruel that can be.

The mind wants to find a cause, to figure out what causes people to be supportive of cruelty and not realize that it is inhuman, savage. It looks for reasons in the reasonless, wondering how people can think that they are on the side of right, that the other guys, the ones protesting peacefully, the ones pointing out the harm, the ones drawing attention to the corruption, the ones trying to protect everyone’s rights are the bad buys.

There is no cause. If there is anything I have learned in my years in this grand show, it is that. People are a composite of their experiences. We cannot see what we cannot yet see. Whether this experience, the experience of gross neglect, of battering our neighbors, will be the one to change that, I do not know. It may require many more, or just the next one.

What a cosmic curse life is. And a miraculous blessing. It takes those we love into dark places just like it did us earlier in life, if not this one, the ones that came before. Those dark places are our teachers, and this one is dark like nothing I have experienced before. This is not just one person’s dark night. It is a collective dark night and we will come out of it eventually. That is a given, even though it may feel like it is not. It may not happen in my lifetime, or my grandson’s, but it will.

Life bends towards love. Not just this one I call mine, but all life bends towards the resurrection of disconnect, the sacred recognition of absolute connection. It is the natural state to which all life returns.

Yes, I’d love to see it occur a bit faster. I’d love to see more smiles and happiness, less suffering and pain. That’s how I’m made but not the way I was always made, at least not sufficiently clear to stand up for it with my last breath.

That commitment required all the experiences of loss and suffering that I endured, the abuse and the reckoning, the discoveries of lifetimes.

Remembering that, I relax a bit, trusting that life’s design is working perfectly. I have already moved beyond the understanding I held mere months ago. Whether others caught in the story have or not, whether the design is playing on their hearts, or they are digging in deeper, is not mine to worry about. That need to nurture and caretake is letting go, releasing itself like the farm released me three days before the movers came.

I attend to what’s here right now, and right now it is writing these words, allowing the energy of heartbreak to flow through unhindered, releasing the need to carry the world on my shoulders, loving my beloveds as they are, loving them like I used to wish others had loved me when I was struggling to find my way.

It’s such a fascinating world. Birds sit on the feeders. Squirrels are running across the fence tops giving Sophia fluffy tails to chase. The sky is a beautiful clear blue and the dogwoods are nearly ready to pop. In this moment, life is good. It’s important to remember that.

Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY

Top Image: Autounit777 at deviantart.com

Bottom Image: Amaya Gayle’s front yard