Make a Joyful Noise

Or think of the Hallelujah Chorus.

Remember Barbra Streisand singing "Don't Rain on My Parade."And then there is *A Piece of Sky, with Yentel, an Jewish immigrant, on the boat to America, singing “Why settle for just a piece of sky?” and holding that last note longer than is humanly possible

It was with quivering fingers that I opened the computer and typed in “2026 election results”:

And the Hallelujah chorus rang out.

I was happy about it, but still felt I was suffering from jet lag.

And now under my desk, my space heater is singing, a little whine that sounds like music. At first, I thought it was picking up a radio station, like when I was a kid, people claimed they could hear the radio through their tooth fillings.

And last Tuesday, Old Blue hit a Crescendo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I was happy about it, but still felt I was suffering from jet lag.

There is something about critical mass—a speech, a book, a dent in a belief system —all of those need to reach a certain decibel level before they are heard.

It took a company slamming down the Jimmy Kimmel show to get people's attention regarding censorship. Even people who didn't like Kimmel wanted to preserve his First Amendment right to free speech.

 

It took a group of monks, a small group, actually, 13, I think, plus one dog, to start a movement of Kindness. Throngs followed them—that’s when the crescendo happened. Monks walked in the bitter cold, and people stood in the snow or rain to encourage and thank them, to offer flowers and fruit or water. Those nearby followed them; others followed them on Instagram. All felt the love and kindness of those walking only for peace. (Except for those who attacked them for not being Christian—so much for brotherly love.)

The No King’s Marches helped us know that we were not alone in wanting to keep our hard-fought freedoms.  We saw that others wanted that as well—even if the President wanted to dump excrement on us. Indeed, he mimed it on Truth Social.

As one person, we often feel impotent.

If you stepped out of line to protest in an internment camp, you’d be shot; end of protestor. 

But as many, we are formidable.

We found that we can’t grow complacent. We must constantly guard our rights and freedoms, because some will take them away for their own gain.

It’s an old fact.

And Texas, bless you. Years ago, I was in Dallas right after Barack Obama had been elected President. A young clerk in the gift shop and I struck up a conversation, and together we celebrated Obama’s victory.  She was an awakening for me, for I had thought (wrongfully) that Texans were basically conservative; maybe they were, I don’t know, but light shines everywhere. A lesson one learns by traveling.

During this fiasco from the last two T elections, a T supporter told me I had been lied to. Duh. All the while, I was trying to find the truth in the mess we had created.  I guess that insinuated that she knew the truth. It wasn’t so much that she disagreed with me that set me off, but that condescending, “Poor little thing, she believes the lies.”

“I said, Bullshit!” and haven't heard from her since.

And I don’t know where in my brain to put the people who somehow think of T as a Messiah, a pedophile messiah; now that’s a hot one. My daughter, caring for a paraplegic man, was stuck in a MAGA conversation the day after the midterm elections. First, they were lamenting how they could survive the next two years. It sounded like the group wanted to bring about Armageddon. Maybe they want the rapture, which will wipe all of us out except for them. They will be the ones to inherit the earth. The loudest of the group was a man who bragged about having dead deer hanging in his garage, and it isn’t deer season. “I didn’t kill it, he said, “it was given to me.”

I don’t know, maybe it was struck by a car. I don’t understand it, but people who want the opposition dead still get a vote.

This appeared in my email box yesterday:

From sarahbessey@substack.com

“When it comes to biblical understanding, I always remember how Rachel Held Evans wisely wrote about interpreting the Bible, “If you are looking for verses with which to support slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to abolish slavery, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it.

“This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not “what does it say?”, but “what am I looking for?”

“There are people who do want to hate the world, and so they will look for any excuse in the scriptures to justify that. Some genuinely believe it, more’s the pity, but others simply benefit from the consequences of it, so they’ll say it until you believe it anyway. The conviction that God hates everything and it will all burn someday can leave a mark on a person.”

Thank you, Sarah Bessey.

And bless Substack for providing a platform where people can vent their frustrations, where brilliant people probe into how and why we got ourselves into this political mess. It is a soft place to fall. And then there is a man with the audacity to call himself God, who can spit out the truth and humor in equal measure.

I love you guys.

"The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means."

–George Bernanos.

You Can Wish on Other Things Besides White Horses

“That man is brilliant!”

I wrote that sentence in cursive in my notebook at 6: 15 AM last Sunday. Not a normal time for me to write, or to be awake for that matter, but sometimes I am.

 

I fell asleep the night before to the tune of Austin Kleon’s words ringing in my ears, or wherever written words ring. Behind eyeballs? 

Kleon wrote the book, Steal Like an Artist, and says he hopes people steal from him. And it’s hard not to, for almost all of his sentences make good Quotes. Thanks for the permission, Kleon.

But I’m not reading Steal Like an Artist right now. I am reading Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.

I’m writing cursive—how can a person form all those a-e-i-o-and u’s by printing each letter? It takes too much time.  (Did they stop teaching cursive in schools to force kids to a keyboard? Oh, oh, I’m getting cynical.) And I’ve read that writing cursive can make a person more creative. However, I compose on the keyboard most of the time; I like to encourage cursive and remind myself to use it once in a while. 

 

“Plenty of great art,” wrote Kleon, “is made by jerks, creeps, assholes, vampires, perverts, and worse. And all of them left a trail of victims in their wake." He calls these people “Art Monsters.”

“It’s painful to grapple with Art Monsters, with the idea that people who are reprehensible in their personal lives can produce good work.”—Aston Kleon.

“Art is supposed to make our lives better. If art is adding misery to the world—better to walk away and do something else.”—Kleon. (See why I love this man?)

“Great artists help people look at their lives with fresh eyes. And a sense of possibility.”

“If people read your work and as a result choose life, you are doing a good job.”—Sarah Manguso.

“Art is the highest form of hope.” —Gerhard Richer.

“Hope is not knowing how things will turn out—it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty.”

“To change your mind is to do some real thinking, and thinking requires an environment in which you can try out all sorts of ideas and not be judged for having them.

When you reach for your phone immediately upon awakening in the mornings, you are inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You are also saying Goodbye to a fertile moment in your life as a creative person.”

See how I can't help quoting? 

 

I consider myself a creative person, for I spend hours in my office making stuff up. 

Another quote. this time from Kurt Vonnegut, “Practicing your art no matter how well or badly it is, is a way to make your soul grow.” 

That's what’s what we are here for, isn’t it?

 

It’s the remorse or bitterness of yesterday, or the bitterness or dread of the future, that breaks us down. Today we can handle.

Imagine it’s Groundhog Day. (The movie.) It’s now, now, now, and now.

And remember if your art is ruining anyone’s life, including your own, it’s not worth making.”—Austen Kleon.

 

 

“One white foot, keep them to the end.”

You can wish on other things besides white horses.

I cleaned the garage yesterday and found this picture in a little folder. 

I almost swept it up, but when I retrieved it and opened the folder, I found this picture. It gave me a heart thump. It is a picture of my little Mustang Sierra on the day I bought her in Burns Oregon.

She was only five and one-half months old. She wasn’t culled for auction, as they auctioned the foals at six months. I asked if I could buy her. The BLM man was happy to sell her to me. He said she would have better feed with me, and she was almost six months old anyway.

She was a mustang rounded up from the wild, and her mother had to make that roundup run pregnant, so Sierra was born in the pasture on the BLM property. Notice she has one white foot. An old horse saying says: “One white foot, keep them to the end.”

 Sierra as a grown-up lady of two.

I didn’t keep her to the end, but I had the honor of her presence for six years. 

It makes me sad that I didn't keep her to the end, but thinking back, I think it was for the best. My daughter had two horses, and I had two horses. In 2009, times were tough, and we decided to sell our property and move to Hawaii. Scott Beckstead, who then worked for the Humane Society, found a lady with 60 acres who would take them, so we gave our horses away. (Now Beckstead serves as the Equine Director of the Wild Horse Sanctuary and frequently goes to Washington as an advocate and Lawyer for the Wild Horses, and all things wild, really. Obviously, he is one of my heroes.)

I couldn’t keep Sierra as an alone horse; she wanted to be with the gang. She might have preferred horses over me, but we were good friends. She was a character, so curious, sweet and loving, and had strong Mustang feet, kept perfectly filed by running on the emery board of our gravel drive. I would turn her and Velvet, my Quarter horse, loose, and they would frolic and cavort, roll in the Oregon red dirt, and then settle down to graze on the grass that grew around the house. 

We lived in the forest, so no cars went by. Our long gravel road to the house kept them isolated. I rode Sierra briefly. I was the first person on her, the only person except for one foray in an arena by another woman, and she never bucked with me. I conditioned her with a saddle and a bag of grain on her back. She chewed on the truck, though. For years after, people would ask me what happened to the truck; the hood looked like a monster had clawed it.

I was lucky to have had her for six years.