My Feet are on the Ground

Resistance with a side of hummus and other musings about this next chapter of our lives together in these so-called United States

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I heard him before I saw him, heavy, squishing footsteps painted a picture in my head before he passed me. A large man was walking up behind me on the greenway trail. A woman on the other side peered out from her hoodie at him. 

“Good morning!” He said breathlessly to her.

She raised a hand, but was looking at me. 

“Good morning!” He huffed out as he passed my meandering steps. 

I didn’t reply to him just like I hadn’t replied to the other dozen or so people going the other way that morning. I’d finally emerged from my house and was trying desperately to return to my body. I have a magnificent resting bitch face I’m told, and I was literally looking away from people as they passed, and they still intruded with their good mornings. 

He got a couple hundred feet ahead of me and I guess reached his step goal or whatever, because he suddenly turned around like a warplane coming back for another strafing run. 

“Have a great day!” He exhaled heavily as he squished back the other way on his big puffy shoes. 

“Fuck off,” I murmured  under my breath, not wanting an actual confrontation, but needing to relieve some feelings. 

The greenway is in a small Tennessee town perched on the border of two counties, both of which went for Trump by 42 points and 50 points respectively in a state where two-thirds of the populace also voted red. When I walk this greenway for every 20 or so white people I pass, I see 3 to 4 people of color. On Friday after the election, I saw no people of color. I knew for a fact that given where I was, 3 out of every 4 white people I saw had certainly voted for Trump, and against my rights as a queer, autistic person, against my friends’ rights to keep their marriages, against the rights of women in general, against feeding our school children, against welcoming the stranger, against their own thriving because they couldn’t stand the idea of a pluralist, multi-racial democracy, against against against. So the good mornings that morning felt like barbs in my tender heart. 

 “My feet are on the ground. My feet are on the ground.” 

I repeated this over and over trying to get out of my head and back into my body. Eight years ago I stayed up late watching the results, staring as too many states lit up red over and over again until there was no hope left. I stayed up til four am crying, and then woke up at seven mad and determined to start doing things. It all felt like an emergency. I ignored my body and turned into an emotional first responder, trying to do all the things wherever I could. My hypothyroidism flared from the stress and I gained about sixty pounds or so, frequently couchbound to full body myalgia, episodes that would happen after pushing especially to help organize events, participate in protests, help run a conference for our local women’s march community, and once staying up all night identifying and helping bail out participants in a vigil in a town south of me who had been set upon by mounted police officers who allowed their horses to step on at least one person as they rounded them up as they left the park where the vigil had been held. And then my body would crash. I would crawl back up to barely functioning and jump back in again.

When I woke up to the news Wednesday morning, I thought, I can’t live like that again. I don’t want to do this again. 

And as much as I don’t want to live this chapter, I’ve learned a lot. We can’t get through this alone. We can’t get through this if we don’t stay embodied. We must start with ourselves, putting our health first, our communities first, and thinking on local scales. Rebecca Solnit posted the other day that just because we can’t save everything doesn’t mean we can’t save anything. And what we save is worth saving. When I shared her post, I added the thought that if we all save what we can, just whatever is in our reach, we will save more than we think. 

I’ve written and spoken for at least the past eight years now on the power of small things. When I’m hiking, setting out to conquer many miles in one day starts with a single step at the trailhead, and then a commitment to put one foot in front of the other. 

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I passed a squirrel sleeping on a branch not far from the greenway. He’d pulled his tail over his body like a blanket, and he was getting his rest despite the joggers and the bikers and the walkers passing by. 

Prioritizing our rest and health is resistance because we need to be around and healthy for the duration. Prioritizing community is resistance because authoritarian regimes count on us feeling isolated and helpless and as such, despairing. Prioritizing hope as a lifestyle is resistance. And we just need to get used to resistance in any and all forms. 

I just received a notification that the Plan B I ordered is out for delivery with my shelf-stable hummus that I take hiking. Sometimes resistance is served with a side of hummus, who knew? 

“My feet are on the ground.” 

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I reached up and brushed the golden leaves of a maple tree that grew over the path and one came off in my hand. It was soft and pliant as the chlorophyll had faded from its structures. I lifted it to my nose and inhaled the most wonderfully sweet, earthy aroma. I carried it in one hand, tracing the main veins with my thumb. 

“My feet are on the ground, there’s a leaf in my hand.” 

I inhaled slowly through my nose letting the cool damp of the morning air fill my lungs. 

“My feet are on the ground, there’s a leaf in my hand, there’s fresh air in my lungs.” 

I walked into the part of the forest that is still grieving the loss of the acres of trees clear-cut for a housing development. I brushed my hand against the bark of trees as I passed them in greeting, not caring what I looked like to any passerby. I felt their grief and their resilience in one. 

The pink chalk messages warning about judgment and railing against queer people were gone, washed away by the rain that had come the day after election day. My own personal, miniature cleansing of Isengard, the water washing away the filth and the hatred. 

I visited with the two grandmother oaks, left standing between townhouses and the path. They twinkled at me as they let their leaves loose again, and reminded me that as long as you have that buddy with you, you can keep standing. I know that every time I’ve reached out to and talked with someone else, I feel better. Small points of connection that lift my heart and make things bearable again.  

Freedom has always had to be fought for, and always will be because freedom is hard. Living free takes a lot of work. It’s all too easy to acquiesce to the strongman, to give up the fight. The strongman wins when people give up in advance, and that is what we cannot do.

We have to get used to resisting. We have to get used to small steps, and small gains, and small, tight-knit communities that we can count on. And then like ripples in a pond when you scatter a handful of tiny stones across the surface, all our small things can come together. Our tiny streams can coalesce into a mighty river, and then justice can roll down, justice will roll down, even if it's not this generation that sees it on a large scale.  

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One of my favorite hikes is a long loop through the forest. I recommended it to someone and they said, huh, I’d heard there’s nothing to see there. I’m always taken aback by the idea that because there’s no big overlook or no waterfall that there’s somehow nothing to see. There’s mushrooms growing on dead wood with rings of magnificent colors. There’s trees older than your great-grandparents with stories to whisper in your ear. There’s three seasons’ worth of tiny flowers to discover in the understory. But maybe to appreciate the forest, you have to see the trees, like really see them. It doesn’t mean we forgot about the big picture, but it also means, the big picture is made up of a lot of little things, and if we neglect the small, we can’t understand the large anyway.

Photo by author

 Pick up a leaf and admire the complexity of its vein structure, this little thing that we take for granted looks like a whole city map if we look closely enough. This leaf that was part of the hundreds I stepped on as I walked did its part all summer to feed the tree. Trees feast on light via their leaves all summer, storing energy, and then they rest, letting go of their leaves, which are arguably absolutely essential, but if they kept them all year round, they’d die. The trees have a story to whisper to us if we are willing to stop and listen. 

Look at the people you admire from history, the people who struggled actively for a world they didn’t get to enjoy. There has been progress made, and that’s what some are fighting to repeal because they can’t stand to live in a world where all people truly are equal. And while we are a long, long way from that, we must be willing to be as Bishop Ken Untener wrote forty-five years ago, prophets of a future not our own. 

“My feet are on the ground.” 

Reading suggestions in no particular order:

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

• Becoming Rooted and Shalom and the Community of Creation both by Randy Woodley

• The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper

• Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson

• Native by Kaitlin Curtice

• My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

• All About Love and Teaching to Transgress both by bell hooks

• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

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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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