Hallelujah

As I drove to yoga with the children this morning, John Aeiley played this song on his radio program. I felt it so strongly, with the leaves of the bigtooth maples blazing through the car windows, the children chattering in the backseat, and the world as we know it cracking open in front of us to reveal its pure, gracious core. We are a nation perched, holding its breath, on the brink of tomorrow. It is so beautiful to watch America, and the world, offer up their broken hearts to the possibility of renewal.

I have been thinking a lot about the role of the arts in "times like these," when things have seemed so dire. And I keep coming back to a comment somebody made on Charlie Rose one night, and it was something to the effect that the young people in this nation really reached out in this election, and that what they reached for wasn't experience, or time-testedness. What they reached for was a poet. It is somewhat counter-intuitive, but the more dire things get, the more we need someone who can put the words (or images, or movement) together that will help us face whatever comes. We need a well to drink from that will feed our strength, and that is why the arts are so indispensable. We need a reason to keep walking, keep waking, keep the faith that our children will have a nation of possibility to come home to (even if they may always, on some level, want to escape it--as we have).