Schoolyard Bullies and Kindergarten Buddhas
When my kids were little, I used to volunteer in their classrooms. Whatever needed doing, I was happy to support. Truth be told, I loved being there, even if it was chaotic, and it usually was - shout out to our public school teachers who should be paid a lot more. I loved getting a glimpse of what my kids were up to at school, what their friends were like, how their teachers managed a room full of energetic small humans. It was a joy to be part of that.
Once when I was in my daughter’s kindergarten class, I found myself in a tiny chair at a round table with six five-year-olds. My daughter was one of them, she was sitting across from me, beaming. She really liked it when I was there, and the fact that she liked it made me feel like whatever else I might have gotten wrong in my life - whatever mistakes I had made, whatever doubts I’d ever had about whether I was “good enough” - I had gotten something very, very right. The most important something. Next to me was a little girl named Angelina.
We were working on a project that day. The kids had construction paper in front of them, whichever color they’d chosen, along with lined paper on which they’d written the sentence:
My favorite thing about myself is ______.
They were supposed to fill in the blank with whatever word sprang to mind, then they were going to glue the lined paper to the construction paper and decorate the borders. Picture: glitter, cotton balls, lace doilies, Elmer’s glue.
For some of the kids, it was easy. They’d yelled things out right away - My favorite thing about myself is my smile! My muscles! My freckles! I’m funny! Some of the other kids had to think about it a little longer. I knew this was the kind of question that would have made me miserable in kindergarten. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I would have worried that I wasn’t supposed to say nice things about myself, because that was called bragging, wasn’t it? Also, after my dad left, my mom got frustrated with me a lot. And my dad liked to tell me secrets all the time. I’m not sure I would have known how to answer the question. My favorite thing about myself is - I know how to be scared without showing it?
I shared some of that with the table, in case it helped the kids who were struggling. I said this is the kind of question I wouldn’t have known how to answer when I was your age. It would have made my tummy feel funny. I would have wanted to hide. They all looked at me the way kids do when they find it remarkable that you ever could have existed as someone their age, and when you maybe say a thing out loud that they think is supposed to be a secret.
My daughter threw her head back and laughed, the other kids laughed, too. Angelina was one of the kids who wasn’t sure what to say, and I saw her look up at me with a little twinkle in her eye. Just then, the sound of a siren permeated the room, and an ambulance flew by the window. Angelina clasped her dimpled hands together, closed her eyes, bowed her little head down, and whispered some words.
The other kids kept working on their project, but I sat there, and closed my eyes, too. Clasped my hands. Sent out the fervent hope that wherever that ambulance was racing, the people waiting for it were okay. When I opened my eyes, Angelina was looking up at me, smiling. I said a prayer that everyone would be okay, she whispered to me. I nodded. I told her I knew that’s what she was doing, and that it was such a beautiful, kind-hearted thing to do, I’d decided to join her. Her cheeks turned pink. She picked up her crayon and carefully spelled out:
k i n d h e a r t
My favorite thing about myself is my kind heart.
That little girl knew more at five years old than a whole lot of people seem to grasp as fully grown adults in this country right now. A siren blared, an ambulance sped by, and she didn’t stop to wonder what kind of person might be having an emergency, she just prayed for them with her entire pure little heart. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.
When I pray, I am not praying to an entity, I suppose I am praying to the collective energy. There are probably those who would say that is not really prayer, and that’s okay with me, I don’t care what we call it. I pray for the very best in each of us to rise to the surface, or maybe it’s more that I hope - that I gather up the innocence I had as a kid, however much of it I’ve managed to retain, and I hold onto it with everything I have.
I hope with all my heart that my friends will feel safe and loved, that they’ll have enough food to eat, a warm place to sleep, and if they’re lucky - a good book to read and a great dog to love them. I hope/pray that we will be kind to ourselves and kind to each other, and that everyone will find some kind of ease in this world. That every person will feel free to take up space, that no one will have their heart crushed, their spirit crushed, their dreams crushed.
Of course I hope - even as I know - that isn’t the way the world is now, that it is much less that way this week, than it was even two weeks ago. But I hope, nonetheless. I pray that everyone will find their gifts and share them, that we’ll somehow wake up and remember it’s never been about accruing stuff or building towers or dominating other people. I pray or hope or whatever it is I do, that I’ll find some way, every day, to make the world a tiny bit better, to make at least one person feel safer, seen, loved. That I’ll be brave when I need to be brave.
The best stuff is always those moments when we are connecting with another person, face-to-face. When we’re holding the exact right hand, or looking into a set of eyes that make us feel like everything is right in the world, even if the feeling is fleeting. Moments when we read a sentence that feels like the most incredible yes flowing through the bloodstream all at once, or hear a piece of music and know we aren’t alone and never have been. I think of the days when my children were little, the sounds of their laughter as they tore through the house, the feeling of their little bodies tangled up with mine as we piled onto the couch or into my bed to read together. Conversations with my best friend, nights out dancing, sweaty, laughing, the feel of the ocean on a perfect day. My mother’s eyes looking at me from her hospital bed.
I don’t believe there’s an all-knowing male entity in the sky with a ledger, keeping tabs on what we’re doing down here. If you do, I can respect that. I can respect any spiritual practice that gives you peace and ease, that helps you to be a better person, that gives you an ethical and moral framework - because life is wildly interesting, but it isn’t easy. As long as the guy you’re praying to isn’t telling you the family next door with two dads is an affront, and their love is a sin. If your form of prayer comes with a doctrine that says your beliefs are the only valid beliefs and everyone else is going to burn in hell, I guess I’d ask why you’d choose to believe that, when you could choose to believe anything at all.
I’ve studied with a lot of spiritual teachers in many different places in this world. I've heard the Dalai Lama speak in person, twice, once when I was pregnant with my son. He said his mother taught him more about compassion than any teacher, and I made a silent promise right there, with my hands on my belly, to do my very best. I’ve done 12-day silent meditation retreats where you meditate from 4am until 9pm every day, and don’t make eye contact with another person, and think you might leave in a padded van, and I’ve done that multiple times (though it gets better after the first time).
I’ve never met anyone who understood more than little Angelina did in that moment with the ambulance, and I never will.
That’s the entire download - hearing an ambulance and hoping with all your heart that the people on the other end are going to be okay, but I mean truly feeling that. If that’s happening for you, if that kind of empathy is naturally moving through you, you have an advanced degree in being a decent human being.
Sometimes people need things to be hard-won. Cool, if that’s you, go climb Everest, come on back down, shoot me an email and I’ll send you this kindergarten classroom story. Do you want it to feel like a quest? Do a water fast for a week, walk through the nearest forest, do some ‘shrooms if it makes you happy, then I’ll send you this story. Can it only be the meaning of life if you pay a lot of money for it? Go ahead and Venmo me one million dollars, I’ll send you this story, you’re welcome.
But that’s really it - you have compassion, you believe people have the right to exist as much as you do in any way they like as long as they are not hurting anyone else…or you have a serious problem that you need to figure out. You need to figure it out because if you don’t, you will turn your fear and loathing outward, and harm other people. It will be violent emotionally or physically, or both. You will make other people less safe because you have not gotten your shit together, and frankly, you’re running out of time. The world is on fire in case you haven’t noticed, and very bad people have taken over the government of the United States of America. Exactly the way a whole bunch of people told you they would. There was no good reason to let this happen. Sometimes you can’t have exactly what you want, and that is a bummer, but when your options are:
Not exactly what I want, I’m very upset about a whole bunch of things and I want change, and I don’t know if I can get it with this person, but she seems sane, at least, and the people around her seem sane and I think I can use the normal channels of protest to get loud and stay loud until I see the kind of change I want, maybe not as fast as I want, but it looks possible, maybe, and if not, at least I know democracy will still be standing when she leaves
or
Fucking insane handmaids tale women-hating sexual assaulters, LGBTQ-hating, transgender-hating, immigrant-hating, Black, Brown, Indigenous people-hating, Nazi-salute throwing, rocket-loving, climate change-denying, vaccine-hating, bear cub-pranking conspiracy theorists and billionaires everywhere you look
Guess which one you definitely do not choose? And not choosing was choosing, unfortunately.
So now Dr. Phil is riding along with federal officials in Chicago, filming ICE raids, because. I can’t end that sentence with words that make sense because there aren’t any. Who even knows what he’s doing, and who cares? Some fake “priest” just tried to normalize Elon’s nazi salute by throwing one himself, from a pulpit somewhere, and people in the congregation laughed. I mean, I’m going to assume he’s a fake priest, because if he’s a real priest, someone should call the Vatican, but not me, because I’m too busy calling my senators, which you should also totally do. I’ll link that below.
America right now is a cross between Germany circa 1933, and a reality tv show only people who like Nancy Grace would enjoy. Watching the president issue sweeping and horrifying Executive Orders that make so many people unsafe in such a short amount of time is dizzying and heartbreaking - and also everything that was spelled out in Project 2025. We all remember Project 2025, right? That 920-page document a lot of people kept screaming the president wasn’t any part of, because *checks notes* - he said he wasn’t. Ah, right, liar say what?
I think we all assumed birthright citizenship would be the first challenge brought before the Supreme Court, since deporting a person who was born in this country violates the 14th amendment of the Constitution, but then he went and pulled the purse strings away from Congress Monday night, or tried to. I know I am one of those weird nerdy people who took AP Constitutional Law in high school and loved dissecting briefs. I love the Constitution, and sometimes I think my mother was right, maybe I should have been a lawyer. Who knows anything, anymore?
I think there are actually people out there who believe Trump gave them those stimulus checks during the pandemic because his name was on them…when in reality, he just gave Americans their own tax dollars back.
I don’t know if people who voted for him understand that the Constitution grants Congress the power to determine how federal funds are distributed throughout the states and that it is illegal for the president to impound funds the Congress has appropriated, but I tend to think not, based on a lot of very smug comments I’ve seen from his supporters about how great all of this is because he’s really going to clean up the budget. Dang, are you in for a surprise.
I’m on a few pages for parents of college kids, and Monday night they were all flooded with questions from people worrying about their kids’ student loans, Pell grants, title IV grants, and whether those funds would be impacted. All this pain and anxiety because the president and the terrible people he has ushered in around him want to be damned sure no one’s tax dollars are being spent on any DEI measures - god forbid we try to be inclusive in this country. Imagine the nightmare it would be if our civil servants looked like the cross-section of diverse cultures that make our country truly great, instead of a bunch of old and not-so-old, white, crusty, played out, Christo-fascist men obsessed with controlling women’s bodies, and deciding how things work, goddammit.
Men are men and women are women, they bellow, pounding their chests and doing squats. We are about Family Values and Christianity! Abortion is murder, but children can be shot down at school every week, and we shall send our thoughts and prayers. Black mothers and fathers can continue to have The Talk, but we are not a racist country - how dare you teach our children about slavery when you teach American history? Don’t touch our Confederate statues, and don’t fly your rainbow flags. Jeff Bezos can continue to have his tax breaks, but break those strike lines, because we will not give people a livable working wage. Tax breaks are for billionaires, dontcha know.
Grab us a beer and make us a sandwich, because we aren’t done explaining this, and you just don’t seem to get it. We are concerned about the sanctity of women’s sports teams and women’s restrooms, they matter to us. Women and girls need to feel safe in the world, for chrissakes. If it seems strange that we would care so much about women and their safety, and still put an adjudicated rapist in the Oval Office, you’re just thinking too hard. Hand over the remote. Just look at this terrible Bishop with her mercy, and these woke people who pray as an ambulance goes by, not even knowing who is on the other end, because they are so kind-hearted they don’t even care who needs the help.
Let us all be kind-hearted enough not to care who needs the help, shall we? Let us all stay focused. Let us all take care of one another. Let us rest when we need to, find the strength to abstain from arguing with the willfully ignorant, and the resolve to celebrate joy where we find it. Let us remember that there are actual human beings who are affected when a man who would be king attempts to freeze federal funds and test the limits of the Constitution - and let us rise up and make some noise. Woot, woot. Let us not lose our joy, friends, or our humor.
There are people out there who rely on a little bit of help, and there is no shame in that. The system we’ve set up is impossible. Any one of us could be those people at some point, maybe we have been, maybe we are right now. I am very happy for my tax dollars to pay for free school lunches for anyone’s kids. Breakfasts, too. Also dinners. Head Start? That’s the best in our government. SNAP? Yeah, I’m all for making sure people who are really struggling in this country can feed their families. We are not doing enough for people.
Isn’t it weird that the party of family values is against this stuff, but all in for billionaires? Isn’t there something about a camel and the eye of a needle, or did I make that up? You want to talk about bloat and cleaning up the budget? Tax the billionaires, then we can house the houseless, feed the hungry, and raise the minimum wage. Get back to me after that. Seriously, I don’t want to hear a word about the budget before then…(but someone should tell them if they don’t tax Social Security benefits, there won’t be any for future generations. Just in case any of them care.)
In the meantime, let’s keep doing what we just did. When something outrageous, unconstitutional and scary goes down, let’s not wait and see what happens, okay? Let’s get on those phones, let’s send those emails, let’s post where it makes sense to post. Let’s make sure our representatives know we are watching, and know what we expect. If you don’t know how to contact your representatives, you can find that information right here. It’s easy, and it matters. You can let them know how you feel about DEI, how you feel about your friends feeling unsafe, how you feel about your own rights and those of your daughters, your sisters, your friends. I am not happy seven Democrat senators voted to confirm Kristi Noem, are you? Let them know, that’s a good use of your time.
That is very different from engaging with people who want to waste your time on the internet. Save your energy for the things that make a difference. Don’t immerse yourself in their constant cruelty show and smug delight in your outrage, stay above that fray. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I know this was the most alarming power grab I’ve seen in my lifetime, and this was week one. I know we can’t afford to go to sleep or give up.
Pick a few news sources you trust, pick a time of day that works for you (my recommendation is not before coffee in the morning and not before bed at night), and read for twenty minutes so you know what’s happening. You don’t have to hear his voice that way - it helps. If there’s a phone call you can make or an email you can write, do it. If there’s a cause that matters to you on that level where you feel enraged in your very soul, that’s probably the one - see if you can find a local organization doing good work, and volunteer, or maybe it’s a national organization, they need volunteers, too. There are often local branches. It will make you feel better to do something, and it will make a difference.
Aside from that, friends, when you hear a siren, pray to whatever you pray to that everyone will be okay.
Well, the month that was eight months long is finally coming to an end and we made it. We’re still here, right? We still have each other, we still have a sense of humor? This is how we’re going to do it, one week at a time, and when that’s too much we’ll break it into smaller bits. If you’d like to meet me in real time to tall about wanting people to be okay with your whole heart whether you know them or not, I’ll be here 1/31/25 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version which goes out Saturdays. I’m going to Croatia in June and may just move there (kidding, probably), but maybe you want to meet me. And I hope you will meet me in the comments section. I love you. We’re doing it. It’s hard, but we’re doing it.
Dearest Ally,
my favorite things about you are your kind heart and your ability to detect kindness in others. That Angelina story is priceless (like children’s drawings, which are the best drawings in the known universe).
We are currently living through the cruelest of shit shows. As a descendent of German Nazis, I know whereof I speak. But as the mother of a revolutionary, raised to question the status quo, I beg you to keep an open mind when it comes to third party voters. My wife, a civil rights attorney currently struggling to keep her trans clients safe, will not soon forgive my daughter for ‘throwing her vote away’ (not choosing was choosing/ same as voting for the monster itself).
But my Laura has spent much of her almost thirty years on this earth advocating for the wrongly imprisoned and marginalized who didn’t have a voice in the Biden/Harris administration, either. She could not, in good conscience, vote for a ticket funding genocide and making a sharp right turn to recruit voters (we, too, are tough on crime and immigration, and we carry guns to prove it). I have to believe that our children deserve radical (rather the in.. cre…men.. tal) change and that they will built something better out of the ashes. I have to believe that our children are smarter than we are.
The wisdom of Angelina is the best medicine I can imagine right now. I needed something pure and simple and perfect to get my mind right.
I’ve been watching the benefit concert for FireAid tonight and I am loving the stories of people rescuing other people’s pets and all the love for the fire fighters and first responders. It’s good to fill up on the beauty of the world before your cup gets empty. I will keep Angelina in my pocket for moments when I flirt with losing faith.
You’re the best, Ally. Shine on, you crazy diamond 💎