#057: Golden Hour
De-ICEing | Feeling big and small | Emily Dickinson
Hi friends,
How does it feel to be alive today, right this moment?
To me it feels pretty rough. It feels like we need to dig deeper than ever before to get at the rotten roots of our world’s unrest. It’s evil. All that bigotry and racism that we thought we could heal with a few words, with a few concessions. We’ve failed, and now those St George flags still adorn a house I pass every day. Two of them, hung with care across the outside of their upstairs windows. Omens. I reckon they’ve been up for three of four months. Maybe this week, as I push the pram along, I’ll cast out a few spells or prayers against them.
Will you cast some spells with me? For healing and togetherness and to find a way out of this black decaying mess. It’s so ugly. I turn on the tv and there is no beauty to be found. Just small men conjuring up divides where there were none.
Last night I went to a karaoke bar with five other women. We sang our hearts out and drank tequila (bad idea). Sang songs from the musicals and our childhood. Felt good (apart from the tequila). Felt like something we should be doing more often.
The altar above was made by Minneapolis-based artist Grover Hogan the day after Renee Good was murdered by ICE agents. They say:
i make work that can be used as future artifacts for when future generations in my family want to see what we were doing and how we were processing- because we have so little go off of before my great grandmothers. i think the material is important though, i was hoping the materials would reflect the desperation of creating something to bring comfort in times of fear and uncertainty. i also do want future generations to know how much our culture was based in simulacra, appropriation, breadth over depth, and fear (especially in response to ongoing colonization efforts from columbus to ICE). and i am definitely not absolved of being a part of that culture myself.
Here’s what went right this week …
→ London’s murder rate hit a historic low. 97 murders were recorded in 2025, which is the lowest figure since 2014, and the lowest homicide rate on record once population is taken into account. [BBC]
→ Aid is not a crime. 24 rescue volunteers have been acquitted of human trafficking charges by a Greek court. The Presiding judge told the court that all swimmers were acquitted of charges because their aim was ‘not to commit criminal acts but to provide humanitarian aid.’ The volunteer activists were arrested in 2018 after they tried to help migrants and refugees reach the island of Lesbos from Türkiye. [Al Jazeera]
→ [Good news genuinely seemed a bit thin on the ground this week. Share your own good news stories in the comments please!]
… And some things that didn't.
→ False idols. This year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, María Corina Machado, has presented President Trump with her medal ‘as a personal symbol of gratitude on behalf of the people of Venezuela’. Kirsti Bergstø, the leader of Norway’s socialist left party, seemed flabbergasted by the news, saying: ‘This is, above all, absurd. The peace prize cannot be given away.’ She also pointed out that Trump’s threats towards Greenland demonstrate why it is ‘madness’ to award him the prize. [The Guardian]
→ After Renée Good, ICE continues to kill: ‘Last night ICE agents shot two more people in Portland. On New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles. In Chicago’s Brighton Park neighbourhood, a Customs and Border Patrol officer shot and wounded a woman named Marimar Martinez, who survived. The agent who shot her bragged to his colleagues over text, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”’ [Thot Pudding]
→ It’s not looking good. According to the EU’s earth observation service Copernicus, the world may be on track to breach the 1.5 degree Paris climate agreement threshold up to a decade early. Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London said: ‘Whichever way you look at it, dangerous climate breakdown has arrived, but with little sign that the world is prepared, or even paying serious attention.’ [Financial Times]
Words I’m carrying with me for the coming days …
→ ‘I do love the world, I feel alive in it. And I want to find real, liveable life in my small part of it. Perhaps my village isn’t separate from the galaxy I gaze at, or the cultures I’ve travelled through, or people and ideas that span millennia, or what’s contained in a single human heart. Perhaps it’s a place where, at best, all these scales — vast and distant, intimate and immediate, the civic spaces in between — come into conversation.’ Elizabeth Wainwright reflects (beautifully) on the concept of the ‘global village’ in her Field Notes.
→ ‘… sometimes we need a dark sky to remind us that we are small. That time is deep. That wonder does not need us to manufacture it.’ Nadia Bolz-Weber on Phosphorescence and the journey through darkness.
→ A poem by Emily Dickinson, from Sheet 5, via Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound
You cannot put a Fire out—
A Thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a Fan—
Upon the slowest Night—
You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—
Because the Winds would find it out—
And tell your Cedar Floor—
What went right for you this week?
Let me know in the comments.
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I had to think hard about what went well. Times do feel lean. But I found two.
A) I’ve joined upscrolled https://upscrolled.com/en/about/ a different kind of social media.
B) the daylight is very visibly longer as we head towards the end of January 🕯️
What went well this week-
I attended kirtan and sang with people from around the world about opening our hearts, and peace, looking out onto mountains, a lake and beautiful nature that was being tended with intentionality.
Money was collected for local children and families needing help to have food.
I came home to read news of coordinated prison riots, hostages, and police killings due to ongoing escalation of gang violence.
It struck me how we can build bubbles of connection and care, not to deny what’s happening elsewhere, but in effort to keep our hearts open enough to stay human within it.