Grab a Bucket
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Grab a Bucket
and other thoughts about hope when the world is on fire
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The cool stone pressed into my back and the cool water of the creek flowed around me, and, in a way, through me, as it seeped through the fabric of my sunshirt and hiking shorts on its way downstream. My headache faded as my core temperature dropped, the final stage of my self-imposed forest therapy. After the week I’d had, I did what I often do, and I took to the trails. I walked through all my feelings and grief and frustration, and then soaked in sweat and feeling a bit overheated, I circled back to the creek, dropped my pack, and lay down in the cool water.
Lyrics from Joy Oladokun swirled into my head: “Sunday, carry me, carry me down to the water, wash me clean, I’m still struggling…” As I lay there literally in the water, I let my emotions calm as the creek sang over rocks, leaves swirling in tiny eddies, and tiny fish curiously poked their heads at the foreign intrusion of my feet in the deeper pool in front of me.
I messaged a friend earlier last week in frustration: “You know when you end up existing in primarily queer
and neurodivergent spaces, it’s easy to forget how fast those words become weapons and how much you have to fight for things you shouldn’t have to fight for.”After multiple days of having to advocate for one of my kids over something that shouldn’t have been an issue, but he’d been prejudged because of his neurodivergence, I felt a weariness in my very bones. And for me that’s not a metaphor. This kind of interaction is a trauma trigger and those triggers make my body hurt. After getting to adulthood without a diagnosis of my own neurodivergence, there are literal decades of feeling on the outside of everything without understanding why. That’s improved in the past 10 years or so, but now the majority of my circle is queer or neurodivergent, or both.
That’s just sort of happened as well, as another friend said as we were discussing our realizations as adults, having met years ago at a conference where we immediately clicked and then primarily hung out with each other, “neurodivergents are ‘friend-shaped’” in her mind.
I’ve been amused as writers who I follow and have felt connected to have begun talking about autism diagnoses. I can spend much of my time in spaces where people’s identities are celebrated, neurodivergence is celebrated, and people are allowed to just be. Most people in these spaces are intentionally inclusive. I suspect that they, like me, are sensitive to feeling rejected and don’t want anyone else to experience that if they have anything to say about it.
And these spaces give me hope for the world. For the way forward isn’t by listening to anyone in power: by definition, those in power become vested in keeping it, and so even the most benevolent politician who campaigns on the best promises is never going to live up to what they said once vested with the office. Power corrupts they say. We see this time and time again. I gave an example of those in government, but it also happens in corporations, in churches and nonprofits, and at times in movement spaces. We must learn from people in spaces of oppression, learn to hold onto hope, and constantly pursue mutuality. There’s always backlash to progress: we can neither let that reality steal our joy in moments of victory, nor steal our hope when we are living through the backlash.
I had another conversation, one that’s becoming more frequent in our everything-everywhere-all-at-once kind of world.. “How do you stop from despairing,” she wanted to know. And I replied that for me, it’s like hiking: I just take it one day at a time, one step at a time. Little decisions that add up to bigger change.
“I can’t live like that,” she said, “I need that five to ten year plan.”
I thought about it for a couple of days and realized that when I said I take it one day at a time, like hiking a trail, where one step leads to a mile and that mile leads to ten and so on, I didn’t mean that’s the only thing. When I hike, I have a map and a plan. Life is of course messier than that, but each step I take hiking is a plan to reach somewhere or to complete something. So it is with my day to day approach in life, I have plans: plans that are flexible and changeable by nature because whatever goes exactly according to plan? Sometimes that’s part of the adventure, and sometimes it’s something that must be overcome or gotten through.
As I lay in that creek Friday, staring up at the canopy, I was reminded of one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems:
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
As the cool water slipped around me, and the water bugs skated gracefully in a nearby pool, I let go of the things taxing my life at least for that moment. It’s something I’m trying to do more often. Fear for the future is a tax on the present. And while we have to plan for the future, and in the case of climate change, actively work to change the future, that work is done today. Terrible things are happening, yes. More terrible things could be to come. But our work to prevent the escalation of these things is hampered if we become debilitated by despair.
I’ve seen people sharing recently about the common time-travel trope of people being so worried that one little thing they do while traveling in the past will change the present. And yet we don’t see that one little thing we do in the present could radically alter the future.
What do you do when the world is on fire? You grab a bucket. Because if we all just grab a bucket, put out the fire next to us, we can put out the fire all over the globe.
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“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.
But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day.
I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
Buy Inward Apocalypse: Amazon | Independent Booksellers
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I use queer as an overarching term for myself, however, to some it is still a slur and they don’t want to reclaim it. Remember to always use the terms people use for themselves, and not assume because I use queer, it’s okay to use it, especially if you are straight. As I have to continue coming out, if you are new to this space, I am Bi, technically bi-romantic and demisexual, but see, that leads to lengthy explanations, hence why I like “queer.” I also have two neurodivergent children, and while researching adhd and autism because of them, I realized that at some point if these traits are adhd, and these traits are autistic, I needed to just recognize that I have many of them. For more on that, see this prior article.