Safety is a basic need for all sentient beings. The trouble is that sometimes, in the human world, as much as in any other, one agent’s idea of safety impinges on another’s experience of safety, freedom or even survival. For example, watching birds at my bird feeder in a two-day blizzard. The biggest birds command the food I can uncover and drive off each other and smaller species. In desperation, the smaller birds wait patiently till they can opportunistically swoop in. But then they bully each other for dominance.

The global landscape we confront today includes many unprecedented challenges, such as climate change. Winter holidays are all about stories that teach. Celebrating the Judeo-Christian holidays that dominate this season address a Western, predominantly religious solution to harsh conditions. Do Chanukah, Christmas and celebrating the New Year teach us how to survival this world? Chanukah is about patient faith. Christmas is about generous love. The New Year is about having a fresh start. Those are aspirational values that require internal, spiritual growth but they aren’t necessarily directives to action: Faith that snatches victory from defeat, receiving a God coming to Earth to redeem sinners, the old yielding to the new. None of those are practical solutions to climate change.

In the story of Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s world is shattered by a tornado and she finds herself in a strange world with three strange male companions. They each have an agenda they will realize: home, heart, courage and a brain.

Meanwhile, our real world seems to be undergoing its own tornado of shattering events: not just of climate cycles and the availability of fresh clean water, but intransigent calamities scattered across the globe

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.