I think it's hard

to know what to write in these days. The news is bleak and it is easy to feel small and lost and guilty for continuing to live your life. And the worry-worry-worry of what might happen next keeps building. 

You already know this, but it is okay to feel all of those things and still get up to make the dinner, go to work, complain about towels left on the floor, feed the pets, tend the garden, buy the groceries, change the bed sheets. 

You already know this, but it is okay not to have a hot take on what's happening, or to be absolutely up to the minute on the evolution of dictators, or to have single-handedly arranged a donations drive and hired the van and driven it across borders. It is okay to not know how to respond to yet another news story, it is okay to feel overwhelmed. 

You already know this, but it is okay to make plans to meet with friends next week or for holidays next month or only for the next day because that's as far ahead as you can see right now, beyond that seems too black and menacing for plans. 

You can feel compassion and anger and fear about what is happening, whilst at the same time be consumed by the minutiae of your life, the thousands of ways your days play out. The threads that run through your life like a mycorrhizal network, connecting you to the ones you love. This network that you have created, carefully tended and that nourishes your life. 

There is space inside you for all of that. That is what makes this giant experiment called humanity what it is. 

Things I will do while I can still do them:

• cook, eat, repeat
• read, sleep, repeat
• support N and the Kid
• meet up with friends
• make bunting for the wedding
• plan a trip to see more friends
• choose my news sources wisely
• tend the allotment
• decorate the Retreat
• write, work, repeat
• fret, worry, feel guilty, repeat
• donate, donate, donate

"I am washing my face before bed

while a country is on fire. 

It feels dumb to wash my face and 

dumb not to. 

Someone has always clinked a

cocktail glass in one hemisphere as

someone loses a home in another, 

while someone falls in love in the 

same apartment building where

someone grieves. The fact that 

suffering, mundanity and beauty

coincide is unbearable and 

remarkable."

Mari Andrew