Piano Lessons for the First Week of the Great Shattering

I thought I was prepared, thought I’d buttressed myself for the news of what the 47^th President was planning to do on his first day in office, for the sight of Republicans in Congress waddling behind him like ducklings or the billionaire bros shining his shoes for the chance to make a few more tax-free billions, but when the actual moment came at 2 pm on Monday when the New York Times printed the text of his Inaugural address, I sat in my chair and wept.

I wept in the same way I wept when the towers fell, or when, Sophomore year of college, I sat in the front row of history class and the instructor announced that JFK had been assassinated.

A safe edifice of beliefs and values called America has been pulled out from under me and I have a sense of falling unprotected through space and time. Below me there is chaos. As the days go by, the chaos increases with every new executive order threatening immigrants or reversing climate policy or pardoning 1,500 January 6 rioters; or Senate vote to approve a man for Defense Secretary who is a drunken sex abuser with the goal of making the government subordinate to Old Testament law.

I feel unprotected and lost. The word homeless comes to mind.

I don’t recognize my home anymore and, even worse, I feel it is inhabited now by strangers, people who heard the same Inaugural address I heard, who witnessed the shatterer’s pardon of Proud Boys, saw the disdainful look of outrage on his face when the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, had the temerity at the National Prayer Service to urge Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now” — and were gladdened. In the last week, the popularity of the 47^th President has risen, not fallen.

How do I, how do we, process this news coming at us like a rain of bullets from the sky? And equally as important, how do we process the emotional turmoil this chaos evokes?

I’ve had the opportunity this week to talk to a lot of people about how they are doing now that the Great Shattering is taking on a monstrous reality, and my sense is that people are at a loss both about how to deal with the fear and grief and anger as well as how to find a lever of active resistance to the changes.

Has anything in my long career as a psychotherapist prepared me for this moment? Well, I sure don’t remember taking a class in grad school on supporting emotional resilience in an authoritarian regime! But I have sat in my therapy room and witnessed and absorbed intense emotions. I have worked with abusive men and their spouses and witnessed firsthand the terrible internal confusion that rises in the presence of the abuser’s projective system that blames the other and offers salvation if one gives up one’s own reality and follows the lies of the abuser.

And I know we can find a way through this.

I could give you a little primer here on emotional regulation, but instead a memory from my childhood taps on my shoulder and I will, in good psychoanalytic form, follow it for whatever meaning it may offer us.

I am ten years old and standing on the steps of St. Barnabas Convent, an early 1900’s brick structure that resembles a rambling apartment building, albeit one with a cross on its roof. I am knocking on the door and waiting for one of the nuns clad in her long black habit that concealed all but a tiny peek at her naked face to come to the door. The lock is thrown open and I am ushered into a small room occupied by a single piece of furniture: a piano.

Illustration by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

Sister Mary Francis, my piano teacher, who smells a little bit like mint and old moldy shoes, sits beside me on the piano bench, and teaches me how to hold my hands over the keys, how to play the chords, how to cross my fingers over the keys and extend my range from middle C to keys at the farthest ends of the piano. I can hear the sounds filling the room now. High notes like flocks of sparrows perched on transmission wires, middle range notes like squabbling chickadees and low notes like flocks of geese flying south.

Ah! I see the message in this image. This is the skill we must practice now! We must learn to treat each new emotion as a note and allow ourselves to play that note, to hear it and take in its vibrations. But we must also learn that if we consciously shift our attention, we are able to play other notes, notes that bring us into another field of emotional vibration. Grief at the cords well below middle C. Anger with loud, staccato notes on treble and bass. Joy in the quick, high notes. Danger in the single staccato b flat sounded into the silence. Tranquility in the F major key played slowly like rain drops falling.

Emotions are the solar panels, the wind turbines, the engines of our actions. Without a wide range of emotions, we will not have the energy and resilience to act, to resist, to rebuild our home in new ways.

My sense is that people are afraid that if they touch the keys to their grief or anger or fear they will be deafened by their dark tones and rendered unable to hear other notes like the joy In the beauty of the shadows on the snow in the full moon or the gratitude when our grandchild tells us we are the coolest of grandmothers.

This is an opportunity to play whole symphonies! To embrace what we love with open arms, to appreciate the people in our lives who understand us and support us, to come together with strangers and bear witness to the harm and the beauty and the fear. In some ways it is an opportunity to wake up to what we value and love and learn new skills to protect what is threatened.

Imagine that ICE enters your church or your school and removes a child and forces that child into a van, what will you feel, what will you do? Only if you feel the outrage of the arrests, the care for the children, the fear of the power of these armed ICE officials will you be ready to respond.

The most inspiring example for me this week of action paired to emotions is the example of Right Rev. Mariann Budde and the words she spoke to Trump from high above him on her marble podium festooned with red and white roses the day after the inauguration. Would she have taken the great risk to speak her truth to him if she was devoid of anger or fear at Trump’s treatment of immigrants and gay, lesbian and transgender children?

”Contempt is a dangerous way to lead a country”, Bishop Budde pronounced in a gentle but firm voice while looking directly into the eyes of the newly inaugurated President.

She played the piano keys of emotions like Beethoven himself. And we listened. She transformed her anger into notes so powerful I cry every time I listen to her speech. She appealed to our basic humanity by naming, “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

Much less clear to me is what actions are available to pair with my emotional readiness. Again, my sense from talking to people this week is that most of us have little clarity about what form our resistance can take. We are searching for it in Democratic leadership but not finding it there.When asked by Semafor reporter Burgess Everett what government official is leading the Democratic charge, Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill, told Burgess “I can’t answer that. Give us a little time, this is brand new.”

The goal of autocrats is to stun the people and move rapaciously into that vacuum, instituting tyrannical systemic changes that will prove difficult to reverse, further stunning the populace and the resistance.

It has only been one week. Perhaps this next week some of those stunned leaders will find their voices and help us plot a form of resistance. Meanwhile, those of us far from Washington sitting at home do not need to throw the blankets over our heads, and, like Sleeping Beauty, sleep for a hundred years until a handsome prince awakens us with a kiss. (Though I confess…a handsome prince, a kiss…?)

Knowledge is power. Read, read, read about what’s happening. Four years ago, when I first started publishing this newsletter during the pandemic, substack was only 2 years old and few people had ever heard of it. It was a new form of publishing that was entirely free, didn’t require the middleman of the agent or the publishing house.

What I could not have envisioned then is how crucial the substack platform would become when the vital role of the free press would, four year later, be crippled by the big money guys, the ones shining Trump’s shoes. If you haven’t signed up for The Contrarian, the fourteen day old substack put out by Jennifer Rubin, former columnist for the Washington Post (she just resigned) and Norm Eisen, political commentator, former United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic and board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, I urge you to do so right now.

Supporting the free and independent press is one act of resistance we can take now.

I have been reading The Contrarian all week and am gob smacked by the fierce energy and resolve of Rubin and Eisen to bring commentary and perspective to this moment. Substack has added video recordings to their site and in the last week they have interviewed scholars like Ruth Ben-Ghait who studies totalitarian states and Heather Cox Richardson and environmentalists like Al Gore. When the Federal judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order against Trump’s Executive Order cancelling birthright citizenship, they were all over that story within minutes! .

Feeling the commitment and passion of Rubin and Eisen to speaking the truth has been a great comfort to me. I believe it will be for you, too, reader. And I believe they will find people who help us plot the directions for our actions. Take a look at this page which summarizes the work they did this week. Their reporting is so prolific I have no idea when they found time to sleep or prepare a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch!

Beyond staying informed, the other thing that is important at this moment, I believe, is connection. I have had a busy week of meetings and at every gathering I have felt a change in the energy field, a new vibration of eagerness for intimacy and kindness foregrounded in the room.

Let me tell you the story of one of those gatherings. On Thursday evening when the temperature was in the low teens I drove into Portland to attend a book reading at a local bookstore. I was one of nine authors invited to read our essays from Littoral Book’s recently published book, Alive to This. Despite the bitter cold, and the treacherous icing of snow on the brick sidewalks, when I arrived the big room was already filled. There were people standing in the aisles, scrunched together on couches. There was a lot of noise, a lot of laughter and delight at seeing old friends.

Maybe I was just projecting, but as I looked around the room, I felt something different from what I have felt at other readings like this. I felt an eagerness for connection, for the warmth of a smile, for eye contact. When I stood to read before the group, I felt their eyes focused on me, and in their eyes, I read a deep hunger for words that mean something, that hold something about our humanity and care for each other.

My piece was a feisty piece about the beauty industry and its attempt to humiliate women into spending millions of dollars on the useless and demeaning effort to remain a girl. When I stood and read that piece in a room last fall, the eyes that met mine were shadowed, their smiles cool, the applause polite. This time, people were riveted, nodding, engaged. Twice they interrupted the reading with applause and cheers, a response I’ve never received and hardly anticipated.

They were cheering for resistance. They were cheering for the joy of community spirit; for the connection they felt in the room to like-minded souls; for language and the old adage that all writing is political.

Come together. Tell stories. Play the piano.

See you next week.