Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent announcement that she was planning to resign rather than be be this American presidential administration’s “battered wife.” hit a nerve. Domestic violence, resistance to patriarchal misogyny and the connection to ecocide have long steered the content of my career.

Today, Antonino La Vela reminded me that it is International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. His reminder jogged my thinking about this topic. I wrote back,

I mourn every past love.

I mourn snow so deep I might fall forever into softness.

I mourn what I never heard my parents say and what I never listened to them tell me.

I mourn each bird that flew into a window and broke its neck.

I mourn my youth, wasted, as usual.

Civilization is built on community. We live in a global community. Any healthy community depends on empathy to survive. Empathy informs justice. Without justice, there cannot be community or civilization. The reckless murders of Venezuelan fishermen to provide images of masculine prowess are sickening.

The recent and on-going dissonance of the richest country on Earth withholding food and health care from its citizens, on the wake of demolishing the East, First Lady’s Wing of the People’s House, holding this country hostage to bloated billionaires, even as they flaunt their wealth in lavish public parties is shocking. Historically effective strategies have not mitigated this scale of cruelty. That might be a failure we need to face and consider what might be missing. How effective is conventional civil disobedience today?

I was going to write a disquisition on anger, intimacy and art. But tonight I am tired, satisfied with the American Election results and considering what this assemblage represents to me.

The painting was my first breakthrough as a young artist, part of a series I proclaimed was about seeing and painting the pure color of light. Not air. But the essence of light that makes color. For a while, I went into an ecstatic frenzy of these paintings.

Winter is coming. It won’t be here until December 21. Mythologically, winter is about death and loss. Many of us feel a deathly iciness in what has already descended on the world. What feels so cold is a trend towards measuring all value against a spreadsheet of dollars and cents, skewed towards the benefit of a privileged group of just a few people. What dies in the spreadsheet is beauty, kindness and joy. That is a cruel world that is built on cruelty. It is a very very sad place to live.

Decades ago, one of my oldest and dearest friends, Jon Phetteplace, committed suicide after his battle with AIDS began to flag. My ex-husband, Payson Stevens, inherited his beautiful photographic portfolio and has been trying to place it.

As we prepare for No Kings Day, it may be that the Universe is taking things in their own hands. Increasingly, despite political divides, it seems we are all in this together. Climate disasters in one place echoe elsewhere. Relational issues that we walked away from here dog our heels there.

Any democratic society, derives from the freedom to publicly voice divergent views and count on having those views respected. Art is where culture publicly voices and makes visible personal concerns that might otherwise remain invisible. The value of making those concerns public is a rule from my trigger point theory, that to solve problems, we must layer all the information. Divergent views are essential to that layering.

When I was 14, I successfully lobbied my parents to be sent away to school. I intuitively knew my survival depended on being someplace else. My mother sold her jewelry to afford my tuition and by my last year in school abroad, I prepared my portfolio to apply to Parsons School of Design and I was on my way. But it has taken me another sixty-three years to feel the world I left behind.

In unreasonable and unmanageable times, perhaps we must imagine another world. I propose imagining a world of empathy. But first we must face the cruel calamities of the real world. Neither empathy nor cruelty are new human experiences. At least one or two religions were founded on dreams of empathy. Religions have also brought us calamities of unimaginable cruelty.