Thoughts on building a fire

In early December I went to Montauk with my best friends, to celebrate a birthday. When we first got to the cozy house on the bay it was as cold inside as it was out - the kind of cold you appreciate, just getting into winter, the startling briskness refreshing and appropriate. The day after the election - somehow, just one month before - was 70 degrees, the sun tacky in a washed out, boring sky. When I got out of bed, after that roiling dark night of our collective soul, I thought a walk might help. But even in just a t-shirt I was sticky with sweat. There was no relief to be found.

As we waited for the heat to dethaw the house, we bundled up and walked to the water, everything so quiet and still except for the lapping of the gentle waves over the sheets of scalloped seaweed. Montauk holds special meaning for me. You can’t be on that land without thinking about the land. Imagining the Montaukett people, living and walking and falling in love, with babies strapped to them under animal pelts, right where you’re standing with your LL Bean duck boots sinking into the pebbly sand. They weathered winters like these, with only the armor they could make with their hands. They hunkered down, braced against the slicing wind, and got through it one day, one hour, one breath at a time.

But now there we were, in our heated house with a fireplace inside, and a Duraflame we’d bought from the gas station. I told myself I don’t know how to build a fire. I never went camping as a child and when I did start going with friends in my 20s and then my kids after that, my now ex-husband was always there to work that mysterious combination of science and sorcery it seemed to require to get something to burn. I’d spent hours sitting in the dark, in a camping chair, drinking and talking and watching him do it, watching it burn bright and high and then die down, smolder, only to be resurrected by a couple of strategically placed logs, finally settling into something that did put out warmth, something that would take effort to extinguish.

I’ve used the metaphor of building a fire throughout my career as a fundraiser. We can gather the wood and lay it right, but money is the match that will light it, and the tending that will keep it aflame. And it can burn as big and fast as the money will allow. We can add more and more logs and expand the base and make it into a brilliant bonfire, but only with resources. How bright do you want it to burn?

That night in Montauk, after the Duraflame petered out, I put a couple of logs on the fire and then remembered something I guess I had known all along from those dozens of hours of watching someone else do this work - it’s not just about how many logs you have. You have to make sure there is space between them, or it won’t burn. Fire needs oxygen.

I am hearing people say right now - two months after that trip to Montauk, three months after the election, and one month into the unequivocally fascist, Nazi-led, authoritarian, praetorian coup of the United States of America engineered by Curtis Yarvin and led by Trump and Musk and enabled by every single politician in this country with an R next to their name - why isn’t there a plan? Where is the one leader to guide us out of this?

In the absence of satisfying answers, those people - we - are forced to figure it out ourselves. Realizing that if you have one Nazi at your party you have a Nazi party, they’re turning away from Amazon and Tesla; realizing that it just doesn’t feel as good to buy earrings and hand towels and valentines candy from a place that doesn’t think diversity should be invested in, they’ve stopped shopping at Target. Taking what they can, from Anat Shenker-Osario and the Freedom Over Fascism convenings, from Indivisible’s guidance, from the brilliant analysis of Anand Giridharadas and Robert Reich, from Chris Murphy and Mallory McMorrow’s direct to cams, from the thrilling truth-to-power barn burners of Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Gov. Pritzker, from NFL star Chris Kluwe’s civil disobedience, to regular old people saying maybe no one is coming to save us so I’ll have to do what I can, where I’m at, with what I have.

One of my dearest friends and the most brilliant strategist I’ve ever worked with said his greatest fear is that the Democrats will come out with jazz hands, declaring The Plan®.

Even if we intellectually know how disastrous that would be, we yearn for it spiritually. Give me something I can hold to nitpick over, connect with, align under. Give me something to numb this pain. But that would be a temporary salve, if at all. The only plan is the one that is constantly being written, erased, rewritten, argued about, amended, highlighted, torn up, marked all over, and ultimately brought forth not by one perfect leader promising a tidy end to the madness in a televised press conference but by hundreds of millions of imperfect people, throwing the scraps of it like sand into whatever gears there are within arm’s reach. Its a law suit, a veteran birddogging their Senator, an underground railroad built on Signal, a rambling hysterical call to an elected official, a strike, mifepristone ordered to have on hand, a banner dropped, and thousands and thousands of refusals to comply.

The main reason fundraising doesn’t work, I’ve noticed, is when the logs are stacked too tightly. When someone in a leadership position of a nonprofit feels they need to - and could possibly - know before meeting with a prospective funder - *exactly* how much are they worth and *exactly* why will they like our work and *exactly* how much you can guarantee we will be able to extract from them - the craziest thing happens. The oxygen just gets sucked right out, and it won’t light. I know this is true for strategy and growth of any kind, not just fundraising.

On a Zoom the other day with an anti-nuclear funder and a progressive nonprofit colleague who operates with plenty of space between the logs, we were saying our goodbyes after a hard discussion about the tortuous reality facing not just us, but all humans on earth. We ended by making some light jokes about how bad it is and is sure to get. “Well, see you at the camps!” my colleague said, and all three of us actually laughed. Yes, its funny, funny in the way only something can be as you climb the steps of the gallows, but there’s also something freeing about saying it out loud. Yes, it really might come to that. And yes, if it did, the only solace is the truth that I would be surrounded by people I love and respect, which is something the other side can never say. The more we deny those thoughts, or shame ourselves for thinking them, the faster the fire dies.

There are infinite reasons why I meditate. To slow down my life, to find wisdom in my actions rather than reactivity, to see others more compassionately, to take myself less seriously, to find humor in the chattering of my mind, to weaken my vengeful temper. To know what it feels like to not be too hot or too cold, not starving or stuffed, but just ok. To find freedom in the radical gift of presence. But one of the main reasons is to create space between the logs. When you sit still, in silence, noticing that busy, hard working mind - so skilled at rehashing your miserable, embarrassing failures or rehearsing the exact words you’ll use and the righteous stance you’ll take to prevent against them in the future - you don’t squash what’s possible. You just let it be, with the open fisted curiosity of holding a caterpillar in your palm. What will it do next? And then trusting that whatever it does, you’ll be able to respond in turn.

How do I survive right now, and keep what is precious to me alive? My kids, my community, my fierce and technicolor joy, my writing. The other night I had the worst bout of insomnia I’ve had in years. I was eaten alive as if by a hundred thousand parasites, each one an anxiety of a different species, gnawing through a sacred part of me. I turned to the goddesses, the ones who stroke my forehead and say “honey, we’ve got this - trust us” every time I come begging. But for the first time, I couldn’t conjure them. I said out loud - I don’t even know if you’re there. Is this beyond even you?

The parasites burrowed deeper. What if the divorce is final and Chris and the kids can flee to the UK, but they won’t let you in? K getting fired from HUD. N’s mother getting deported. Z’s child not being able to get their hormone blockers. The 11 year old in Texas. Yosemite falling into disrepair and being used for drilling. Eventually - soon? - they will make the art that gives you comfort illegal. At least we have Chappell, Queer Eye, Alok Vaid-Menon. But for how long?

How long will you be able to write and share your writing publicly? If you knew that in three months or three years Substack would be illegal, or the internet, or any mention of trans people or abortions or freeing Palestine, or that you’d be in jail for criticizing the King, the criminal who used to be the President of your beautiful and fucked up but mostly staggeringly beautiful country that you love and believed in and fought for, with every moment and every breath and every dollar and every day of your entire life, would you write more? Would you worry less about it being good, and just let it be?

I’m proud of all the people I see who are sitting with the discomfort of this brutally uncertain moment, without rushing to shove more logs on top. Who are trusting that that this fight is not going to be won with one giant march planned by a national organization but by thousands of smaller ones, happening every single day, organized by my friend Amy, or the church on Prospect, or the Democracy Action Committee of a local political group. Who are pushing themselves to do things they’ve never done before and sacrifice in new ways - like volunteering to create the ICE rapid response network for their neighborhood, or reading articles every day on Substack instead of opening the unscrupulous New York Times, or changing their spending patterns so they can feel good about the things they buy and own, or breaking up with people who aren’t willing to build a better world with them, or quitting the job that helps fascists get richer, or reaching out to the people in their lives who are directly affected already in this moment and saying “I am a safe place - I don’t have all the answers but if ICE comes or if your doctor denies you your meds please call me and we will figure it out together.”

I’m astonished by our tolerance of the unknown - but what choice do we have? The unknown has always stood before us, vast and dark, a tunnel or a portal, a path or a plank. We can either tolerate it, refuse to tolerate it and live a life of constant suffering, or kill ourselves. Those are our options. The only one that gives us any hope of wise action is the first. But first we have to look at and accept without squeamishness the only truth that has ever been and that will ever be - we don’t know what lies ahead. The guardrails we used to cling to made us think we were safe, that we were following a plan. And now they are gone. There is certainly no plan; there is not one perfect, trusted leader beckoning us forward, and we are under a constant assault from the meanest, lowest, most unloved bullies that this country has ever known. And in the midst of that, we still have to stay warm.

I thought I didn’t know how to build a fire. Turns out, I had just never had to.