Kimberly O'Connor

On Friday I had the treat of talking on the phone with a dear friend I hadn’t talked to in awhile. This person is someone I used to see almost every day, and then as life does, life changed, and now I get to talk to her every now and then. Back when I saw her every day, she introduced me to the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett.

If you don’t know this one, stop everything and check it out, and the next time you’re walking or cleaning or driving or doing anything where it might be nice have something ground and inspiring to listen to, listen to it.

My friend asked me how I was handling the fire hose of news these days and I told her I was handling it by not reading it. Sometime the week before last, I realized I had to get out of panic and despair. Not only because I have, like, a job, one that involves showing up for about 90 other people weekly, daily, and hourly, but also because I was giving away my experience of life to powers outside my control. My friend mentioned that Krista Tippett of On Being had recently sent a newsletter about the importance of controlling our media consumption right now. Later, she forwarded me the email. In it, Krista Tippet shares,

“I can’t count the number of people I’ve encountered across the last weeks who have reported that they are deleting apps, limiting their consumption of news, boycotting or disrupting the barrage of information overwhelm. I’m beginning to see this as a spiritual discipline for being alive in this time…

I find myself pondering my long-ago conversation with Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen…She told me the ancient story, as her Hasidic grandfather had told it to her, behind the Jewish ethical imperative to “repair the world.” In the beginning of creation, the light of the universe was shattered into a million million pieces, which lodged as shards inside everything and everyone. Our calling, as human beings, is to look for the light from where we stand, to call it out, to gather it up — and in so doing, to help repair the world….

We’re muting our news feeds because the stories they tell are not just informing us but shaping us, taking hold of our minds and hearts and nervous systems and limiting or galvanizing forces of hope and despair, groundedness and action…. The pragmatism and wisdom of her grandfather’s sacred story, Rachel told me, is in how it calls each of us to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch.“

I love this idea of choosing our experience and guarding our power so that we can use to to shape the part of the world in our spheres of influence.

Here’s the episode of On Being that features Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen.

I read the email my friend sent this morning after I wrote, for the first time in awhile, a new poem. I decided to share it here today:

On March 1, 2025, I Walk to the Top of the Hill with My Dog and My 8-Year-Old Neighbor 

She says the reason the moon looks bigger  
here is because we’re higher. Yesterday 

one president yelled at another president; 
today thousands gathered in Joshua Tree, 
 
Yosimite, Rocky Mountain, Shenandoah, 
Zion. My mother texts from thousands of miles 
 
that my hometown, so recently flooded, is burning. 
These things are true and related, links 
 
in an infinite chain. We’re living in a snowglobe 
for sale in a gift shop in a busy park town, 
 
hands descending again and again to shake us. 
Oh, but the snow globe’s sold—it’s the same 
 
hand shaking us that’s always shook us, 
attached to an arm tattooed with dollar signs 
 
and swastikas. She says the moon will move 
soon from the part of the sky that’s dark blue 
 
to the black, where we can see a few stars. 
She asks if I think the red and blue lights  
 
we see from our hilltop are coming here. 
She’s afraid of fire and war. We all are. 
 
When we walk back down, the moon is there 
where we started. I’m trying very hard 
 
to be grateful for all I have. Look, 
the people in the snowglobe are holding signs, 
 
but they’re too small to read. They begin 
to use the signs to hit the glass from inside. 

When it shatters, what’s next? 
Their whole universe collapsed, 
 
the water draining through the shards, 
everyone blinking, clearing their eyes, 
 
gasping in for the first time 
this new and shocking animating air.