The sword of influence is one to wield with the utmost consideration and care. In this age of influencers—I wonder how many of them feel the weight, the responsibility, or the humility of their position. Not performative humility but actual humility. It’s not enlightenment if it’s tethered to superiority.

The golden calf is a metaphor. Wealth before all else, including the so-cherished Christian values they toss around carelessly—no debate there—pearls before swine. The gutting of every single program intended to support and serve the people in lieu of lining the pockets of the already disgustingly wealthy, including, and especially, this president, who has used his position in the world to siphon riches and favors from every last corner of the globe to the benefit of and for the sake of his own fragile ego, has rendered that commandment meaningless to them.

Mother’s Day is a day to celebrate mothers, but this year I’m preoccupied with erasure. Whatever the origins, whatever it has become, the day is swaddled each year in my present stage of mothering, and as per the usual, I celebrate by contemplating the subliminal messages of popular culture and societal norms that inform expectations, assumptions and perceptions of the role.

In stark contrast to the allure and the promise of the new town square, the ease, the availability, and the convenience has shrunk our worlds drastically, and while our worlds and real life connections to things and people who matter slip through our swiping, tapping, scrolling fingers, tech bros swim in disgusting oceans of wealth, access, and a sort of untouchability and have come to wield a disturbing level of power and influence in spaces where they have absolutely no business meddling.

When young women today post incessantly about toxic masculinity or demand that their male peers stop mansplaining, it’s easy to understand the conflict that ensues. Young women can’t possibly comprehend the centuries of pain and resentment they carry, nor do young men possess the awareness of the centuries of entitlement and abuse they are being asked to reform. It really isn’t fair.

 Is it grace? Or is it the doormat, the punching bag, the eternal peacemaker at the expense of my own mental and physical comfort and safety?

For more generations than I care to count, we’ve been conditioned to settle, to be hugely grateful for so little that it’s practically spliced into our DNA.

It was only once I began to plan that I discovered the wealth of human history etched into the fabric of the place. I can’t navigate these streets without tingling with the awe of the millions of feet, well-healed, sandaled, and bare that have shuffled, slapped, tromped, pattered, and raced over the very same black pavers worn smooth and shiny over the millennia.

Yesterday, I learned that some cultures believe that when a person chooses to do the work to heal trauma and pain, they heal not only themselves, but backward to ancestors and forward to decedents.

A powerful and compassionate concept.

We need to roar. We need to rattle the windows and quake the earth—you cannot have this country; you cannot have our humanity; you cannot have our children’s future. We need to shift our perspective of our power. We need to move mountains, even if they are only the mountains in our heads.

I would rather that women moving into business change the way we do business, instead of business changing the way we do woman.

If we really want to redefine what it means to be a woman in the world who can stand in the full glory of her power, we need to stop comparing women to men and assuming we can tell the exact same stories with a role reversal and a few tweaks.

We grew weary of old, crusty men cast opposite perky young women, and rightfully so, but simply swapping roles doesn’t address the issue. True progress would be to see those same men cast opposite women their own age—reframing the narrative by dissecting a convergence of mature female energy with aging male energy.

The rhythmic movement of our morning walk, the soothing tingle of warm water pouring from our head and cascading down off our shoulders in the shower, the absentminded stroking of the dog’s ears, even the tapping of a keyboard as we rise to meet our livelihood or scholarly demands—

May their strength well up from the deep, like earthquakes, hurricanes, and molten lava—elements that will reshape the world to the benefit of all humanity.

Opting out is the same as endorsing the narrative that the whole system needs to be burned to the ground. Unfortunately, thanks to the people doing the burning, it won’t be a phoenix rising from those ashes, but a voracious monstrosity driven by greed, rage, and an insatiable thirst for power.

I will never be one to say I am grateful for health challenges. The truth is, I’m not; I’d rather spend my energy on other things. But I am thankful for how this particular challenge played out.

As a society, we tend to avoid and shrink from conversations about illness because they are, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, heartbreaking and frightening. It’s that lack of control thing; it puts us all in a vulnerable place full of messy and complex feelings.

Listen. Don’t mansplain. Power doesn’t mean you know more; it just means you were given more.

What if we stopped trying to fix unhappy? What if we didn’t run so desperately from it? After all, Eeyore was probably an empath, and despite his persistent gloom, his friends loved him anyway. His pessimistic self was just who he was, but as part of the clan, they just made room for him instead of insisting he be more like them or marginalizing him for dragging them down.

Woke didn’t kill the Dems; having to play defense killed the Dems. Failing to learn after all this time how brutal, brazen, and downright vile Republicans can be, killed the Dems. The Dems didn’t put trans rights front and center of everything; conservatives did when they decided that banning children from bathrooms was more important than preserving their education or providing adequate healthcare.