Dearly beloved,

We need to gather our hearts together. We need to pull those we love close to us. We need to take care of ourselves and each other because we lost yesterday and that loss was really a death. We need to give each other the dignity to grieve, to allow for the profound sadness to have its time but not allow it to have all of our time. We need to move into this moment not with an anger and hatred comparable to that unleashed by this new President (gasp). We need to move with and toward love.

Dearly beloved, I know you are tired and sad and confused. Everyone, from all sides, has been holding tight, and this morning we are all breathless and out of breath. There’s no ready calm to be had right now but I am asking you to try to find your breath, and to help each other to breath again––slowly at first until the rhythm comes back into our lungs and we begin to remember who we are and whom and what we love.

Call your family and friends. Tell them you’re hurt and sad and angry. Ask them for help. Gather together to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and that great and good souls are with us.

I feel the kind of sadness that I know is not going away any time soon. It’s the sadness that comes in response to a lasting loss, to a devastating death. This sadness won’t go away tomorrow or the day after, or for many days really, because so many things we had relied on died last night.

We’ve been watching the forecast for decades now. The storm has been gathering force and gaining strength as it has crisscrossed the land and through the hearts of embittered and angry fellow citizens. Many of us, including myself, indulged the childlike folly that we would dodge this storm like we had so many times before. But we were fooled into the false security that we are always the lucky ones — the ones who always seem to be able to evade fate. Such is the American psyche.

Now fate has had its due. And it is chastening us out of that willful, adolescent innocence. The storm is here and it is well beyond category. It’s too late to retreat into our homes for cover because this storm, this time, has winds that can blow through our walls and windows, and can and will shatter our hearts.

Hate won yesterday. Late into the morning hours on November 8th — the 9th really — 2016, we lost control of America.

But let’s be honest with ourselves. We never truly had control of America. The powerful myth of the American dream was supposed to organize our futures by disciplining our present. And yet that myth has been a fever dream for million upon millions of Americans. It is a dream deferred by greed and racism and misogyny and resentment and frustration and the vicious pursuit of power — a set of pipe dreams exploited by the cunning of capital, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Trying to live the American dream (let alone living up to its ridiculous ideals) turns out to be a nightmare that has visited us over countless nights.

And today we woke up to the frightening reality that this nightmare will be with us in our waking days and nights, and for years and years to come.

I was never a true believer in the idea that the American experiment could or would control hatred. For me, amongst the things that died last night was the frail faith that the disciplines that seek out truth — journalism and the media are paradigmatic here — have not served as stays and bulwarks to sanity but have instead unleashed the storms of chaos. The polls were radically wrong and misguided because, I have to assume, millions of our fellow citizens simply lied to the pollsters. Perhaps the lies were born of mistrust, or of an anxious concern for being found out to be wanting, to be stingy of heart. Americans pride ourselves for our fierce belief in freedom of choice and conscience. Lots and lots of folks spoke their consciences yesterday not to the pollsters but instead at the polls. And they used their free choice to choose hatred and fear.

Many of us will turn toward the divine or a faith in fate or a set of spiritual practices that can help to salve what hurts. But even for those of us with such faith and practices we are at a loss. What do we do? Who can we believe? Where is the hope?

Many are already calling for action, and I will be with them. Nevertheless, dearly beloved — indeed, each and everyone of you are truly worthy of love — let us act with hearts of compassion and with a spirit of generosity that is so desperately absent from the lives of those who voted in this President. Justice is clarion clear in its call to us. Justice demands mercy, where mercy is the loving act of bending our battered and bruised hearts towards suffering. We need that justice — a merciful justice that seeks forgiveness and can render a good measure of care and kindness.

I have hope because I have to have hope. I have hope because I have sons who will inherit this time, and I love them too much to give up hope. For them, and for all those you love, including this terribly flawed and broken nation, let us carry each other through these dark days. Let us be especially giving and generous. Let us be especially attentive to the hurt we are feeling. Let us find compassion––which is to say, to feel deeply and with each other. And some day — not today (that is perhaps too much to ask) — let us hope that we can extend that compassion, generosity, and love to those arrayed in hatred and who are now in power. Hopefully, someday we will be able to pull those hurting souls toward us––not to affirm their hatred––but to help them turn their hearts towards those who suffer, which is to say, towards love.

Go find your dearest ones. Pull them close. Tell them you love them. And then let the loving work begin.