I’ll ‘fess up straight away. Since the news of Japan’s nuclear crisis, I’ve been trying to avoid the news. I mean to say, I’m not reading every story or watching the news or streaming video. I’m seeing headlines in newspaper boxes, reading emails from friend’s family members in Japan and some newspaper stories. These main points: what happened is devastating and the situation is not resolving itself, I totally get.
A situation like this makes a Western Massachusetts resident realize (again, by the way, not for the first time) that a state line is just that, a line and Vermont Yankee is really ohsoclose.
A situation like this can stir up helplessness and fear, anger and frustration, despair. I should be hopping mad, because it’s unfathomable that as this crisis deepens, every nuclear power plant on the globe isn’t simply shut down but shut down forever, as in clamped down as securely as possible, the end.
What I feel, though, is incredibly sad.
So many lives lost, so many lives completely, utterly changed in horrific and hard ways, so much uncertainty and so much fear, no one can hold that much loss without feeling knocked at the knees.
And I’m in Florida, with my two littlest kiddies, happy beach frolickers, gleeful splashing in the pool cuteness and my mama. The sky on Florida’s gulf coast this week is that bluer-than-blue hue and the sun shines and then falls at sunset like a “ball dropping into the pool” to quote my daughter. The ocean is near enough to be constant music. Its sound is soothing, its expanse somehow reassuring. We’re playing plenty of Yahtzee and solitaire, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter (talk about hardship) and re-reading many times over Cynthia Rylant’s Henry and Mudge in Puddle Trouble and Bob Graham’s Has Anyone Here Seen William? (I brought some other books for the three year-old, but she requests these from our first day again and again; fortunately, they totally hold up). We’re eating tons of fruit.
There’s something so slow and basic and absorbing in a stay present way about doing pretty much nothing but hang with kids and sleep eight hours a night.
**
That the two realities are so at odds is part of why I’m not reading much. Mostly, though, I can’t hold more sadness than I already feel. I don’t want to move past sadness, either. I feel like it might serve me more to hold the bruised, tender feeling than to risk bitterness or sarcasm (maybe Rush can go there; I surely don’t want to). Believe me, I can still be mad; I can still be firm in my conviction that every plant close the hell down while I’m sad.
There’s a lot of work to do, people to help, and many leaders to contact. Let alone the bigger piece of figuring out a future that actually changes nations like ours to become less dependent upon you know, everything we’re dependent upon: fossil fuels, nuclear energy, cheap things from China, plastic and convenience. Emphasis here is a lot of work.
Far away from crisis or even chilly, muddy Massachusetts, I’m letting myself drink in every smile.
If you’d like to help with relief efforts, here are three suggestions from a friend who lives in Japan of organizations that are really able to do some good right now: The Japan Society, which can target aid specifically where needed, or Doctors Without Borders or the International Rescue Commission. I know helping even a tiny bit should help me feel better, at the very least.
**
Until the end of April I am participating in the National Network of Abortion Funds’ second annual Bowlathon for Abortion Access. If you’d like to help support this critical cause, you can sponsor my Standing in the Shadows’ team (that’s you, folks, my readers). I’d love it if people bowled or otherwise got together, passed around a bowling ball bag or a hat and raised monies that way—and sent me photos of your gathering. This is, to me, about women’s equality and agency over our bodies/lives, and not slipping back to darker days for women.
