'We have nothing to fear from despair...'

A few thoughts for today

On the morning of Boris Johnson’s general election victory, I went swimming with two friends. The waves were high that day, and we’d been up most of the night, but we got into the water and screamed at the waves: Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccckkkkk. 

It was an act of complete despair; a necessary one. It was December, and freezing cold, and we didn’t care. People stopped on the shore to stare at us, three women bobbing around like corks on the angry sea. My god, the impotent rage; the disbelief. We thought we might just be sunk. 

Time kept moving. We were not unscathed. But that era did pass. Today, we woke to the news of a bleak election result in the US. This time, no-one wanted to swim. Instead, I drove down to Botany Bay, a beach lined with high chalk stacks. I needed to walk. 

Botany Bay is a haunting place to be on a foggy day. The chalk cliff-face cracked and blackened, its bedrock protruding through the sand like bones. Carved by the sea into a labyrinth of pillars and caves, it is a place to lose yourself. Chalk pebbles are prone to holes, and it’s hard not to read it as a parade of screaming faces littering the ground. 

After a while, I reached an inlet that I thought was scattered with rose petals. On closer inspection, they were little squares of pink plastic, thousands of them, all knitted into the seaweed and the sand. It is impossible to walk without walking in a symbolic landscape, and here it was: an insidious tangling of pollution into the fabric of the beach. 

I gazed at it for a while and considered walking away; the task of picking it up was clearly hopeless. But then I thought that I could collect some of it, and that would be better than nothing. So I started, squatting down to walk like a duck along the sand, stuffing pink plastic into the closed palm of my hand. Before long my hand was full, so I poked it all into my pocket and started again. 

I had come to the beach looking for something grander than this; I had come asking what my ministry might be today. If this was a ministry, it was a humbling one: a Sisyphean labour, scrabbling on the ground for litter. I was glad to do it. It kept my hands busy for a while; it let me offer something. 

I couldn’t gather it all, but I cleared as much as I could. It wasn’t nothing. Afterwards, I limped, pockets full, back towards my car. Along the way, a woman was bending down to pick through the sand. I wondered if I should say hello, as she was clearly a kindred spirit, but before I could decide she straightened up and said, ‘Did you find anything good?’

‘Only plastic,’ I said. ‘But I got some of it.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘It falls out of fireworks. Bits of plastic all over the beach, every year.’

‘What about you?’ I asked.

She beamed. ‘I just found the best fossil of my life.’ She held out her hand and showed me a beautiful white heart urchin, preserved in chalk. ‘On this day of all the days.’

Some things happen on timescales we don’t understand. That is not necessarily a comfort, but it is a truth.

There are grand cycles at play that we can’t always read. I feel proud, today, to be among people who are trying to digest difficult news rather than clinging to unreality; to be allied with those who are letting their grief rise. We have nothing to fear from despair. It is just the dying of an illusion. It is not the end. 

Meet the world as it is today. Find the world as it is tomorrow. Somewhere along that pathway, you’ll find something waiting for you.

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Some reading and listening, if you need it:

- Ece Temelkuran’s Together (on my podcast, she explained that we have a lot to learn about populism).

- Lama Rod Owens’ The New Saints (on my podcast, he talked about the true meaning of apocalypse).

- Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic.

- Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Restistance.

- Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh.

- Kaitlin Curtice’s Living Resistance (speaking on my podcast here).

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Take lots of care,

Katherine x