Zeke lettered two Black Lives Matter signs, but in the end he decided not to join us for the peaceful protest organized by our church. Zoe and I stood with almost 1,000 other people holding signs calling for justice and support for our Black siblings. People honked and waved and held their fists high as they drove by.

I am balancing the enormous looming threat of a police state, the murder of innocent people, the continued willful ignorance of people who insist on saying, “all lives matter” when no one was suggesting that theirs didn’t, with the mundane concerns of each passing moment.

Like the fact that I let Zeke bail on his knitting class this afternoon because he was getting frustrated and couldn’t catch up. I tried to step in an help but I couldn’t figure out how to cast the yarn on either, which is the whole reason he was taking a class instead of me teaching him how to knit.

And the fact that a few hours before he had passed his martial arts test to earn his next belt but only after so much freaking out and crying and refusing to do the test because he was scared he wouldn’t pass. His level of anxiety was way higher than I’ve seen it before, I am guessing because martial arts via zoom is hard to handle sometimes and because he feels the pressure to excel like his big sister the black belt. And perhaps because we’ve been talking about police brutality and innocent people being hurt and killed and he’s trying, like all of us, to process.

Of course knitting and a martial arts test seem trivial compared to what’s happening in the world right now and indeed what’s happening just a few miles east of where we live, where Trump just authorized police to use tear gas and rubber bullets to suddenly disperse a peacefully assembled crowd in broad daylight so he could hold up a bible in front of a church and decry “lawlessness.”

All kinds of ordinary and excruciating suffering is still happening. Outside of Covid-19 and institutional racism and white supremacy there are still people I love (and many I will never know) who are mourning, who are sick, who are lonely, who are depressed, who are struggling. And there are still ordinary joys—smiling babies and new puppies and kids riding bikes and people sharing what they have and holding each other up. And there are the tasks that always need to be done. Even in a revolution and a plague you have to make dinner and wash the dishes. It’s a lot. Holding all these things in your heart and your mind and your gut is a lot. For anyone.