Re: “politics”: the ongoing torquing of mind and sensibility has left me splayed out, flabbergasted. How to compute? For example: I used to follow “left-wing progressive” alt-news websites — until they seemed to unite with the MSM in the shameless promotion of Hillary for President. Thus, at some point within the past year or so, I found myself, to my dismay, switching to some commentators on Fox News! and even to Alex Jones infowars! What? These alt-right websites, formerly anathema to me, were and are “pro-Trump.” I’m not pro-Trump either, though I sure prefer the uncertainty of whatever he will bring to what Hillary would have done to keep the status quo cemented into place.

Meanwhile, the beat goes on. Now we have the massive Women’s March on the day after Trump’s inauguration, springing up in hundreds of cities and towns not only here, but across the world, inspiring an estimated four million people to get up off their couches. Even Jackson Wyoming, my old stomping grounds, drew hundreds of people off their skiis.

My response to this is ambivalence. On the one hand I laud those who get off their couches to join with others in common cause for respecting the sovereignty of women, their bodies, and Mother Earth. On the other hand, I am concerned that “identity politics” (gender, including the supposed blending of genders, being one of them) are being used to divide us further, as usual. And worse; for example, today’s infowars headline: Harpies Shriek Following Trump Nomination 

Such low-form misogyny! I thought that aspect of the anti-feminist animus had spent itself decades ago.

Of course I’m  still a “feminist.” And yet, given that feminism seems to be now identified with “We came, we saw, he died” Hillary, I’m very concerned that the current conflation of feminism with Hillary is still determined to take Trump down.  Not that I love Trump, but I am excited that his enormous, seemingly “god-like” presence on the world stage appears to be shaking up absolutely everything and everyone. Because we need that shakeup, as we blindly feel our way forward into a very uncertain future.

Meanwhile, let me close this post with a bit of nostalgia. Here’s the photo that appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in 1969 with a teeshirt to which a fist had been silkscreened.

The graphic designer and wearer of that fist was the young man and Harvard student Ray Frieden who, along with his wife Nancy, were and are my oldest friends in Massachusetts from our years in Cambridge (1965-1972), where of course, Nancy and I transformed into ardent feminists.

Here’s Ray now, with one of his grandchildren.

But is there something even more basic than feminism? Even more worthy of devotion? Yes. I want to burrow underneath feminism, underneath any and all our “isms,” those superficial mind-created forms that function also as barriers pretending to divide this from that. Yes. Let us descend into the heaving, swelling, nourishing life force that drives my body, your body, every animal, insect, bird, plant, tree, the soil, the water, the Earth, the Sun and Moon, the wheeling galaxies both seen and unseen! Yes. Underneath the divisions, underneath the divisiveness that so powers today’s politics, let us feel our way forward, aware of every heartbeat, every breath, sensing ourselves as each a vast, brilliant, pinpoint presence of the one living loving Being that powers the universe.