There’s a hush sound that’s fallen over our country this morning.

I’m a white woman. I’ve known my fair share of oppression as a woman and not just because of the men in my life. There are also the lineage of women that came before me that accepted their position as the “oppressed.” As much as they resisted it, they bought into and paid for it every day of their lives and told me, my position was to do the same.

Fuck that.

I’ve known oppression by other women who’d like me to be less than, and friends who’d like to view me as competition. And as a woman, I am not only a victim to that reality, but subtly and sadly, at times, have been a perpetrator. I live in a country that waves its freedom flag but freedom is the only true endeavor I’ve ever actively sought out in my life. So why am I seeking freedom when I am freer than millions of unfree people on the planet? Because freedom isn’t always obvious to the naked eye.

I know what it’s like to be oppressed and I know a hell of a lot about climbing my way out of a well of oppression when the rains fall hard on my slipping hands trying to make their way out. “You will not become,” the rains say. “You will stay in your well and rot because freedom is not for you, honey, it’s for the men, or the people with money,” the rains say, as my fingers have groped the sediment of the earth, eyes blinded by the soil that’s falling on them with each slip of the finger trying to make my way to the top. “Fuck you!” I have cried out when with three pulls upward, I got knocked down a few feet further away from the sunshine I seek.

The stirring of my country for weeks has left my energetically sensitive body riddled, so I found myself on a flight to fall in the arms, thousands of miles away, of my sister who has fought her own demons of oppression toward freedom.

Donald Trump is our president.

Our father is a fan, but our mothers (we have two) in their subtleties of expression were the one’s who told us of the rains in our wells, and silently put caps on them excluding us from the light, every time we came close to knowing ourselves as full, as women, as free. They never made it out of their own.

I got naked, and looked up as the very literal rain of Vancouver, Washington washed over me as I sat on my sister’s back porch in a hot tub with my morning coffee and ca-cawed at the crow sitting in a tree above me. That’s when I heard it. The hush.

A spider web made itself beautifully visible, holding drops of rain that enlightened its position on her fence post. I wondered how much work that spider put into the making of its web and how it feels about the rain. It relied on its own resources to create itself a life that provided, and the rains, I’m sure, weren’t doing it any favors today.

“My children are crying,” they say. “My daughters will be raised by a culture of devils” they allude. “My immigrant, minority, gay, female, and every other misfit friend is a victim to this energetic massacre” they imply. Social media doesn’t look very hush today, but I hear the voices of thousands screaming loudly in their belief in their newly apparent, silence. They have not been heard and in all of their attempts, all I hear is the hush I’m speaking of.

The spider is not heard as the rains fall on its terrain. Now, I’m not comparing this situation to the simplicity of a spider and her web, but I do believe there is a parallel that we can learn from the water drenched web that the spider has to contend with today.

We are required to pull from the wellspring of our own resources, as the spider has always, as every women, man, and in between, who has sought to find themselves in a world that says they are not allowed to be as they are, or says that their life is less important, or their pussy is for everyone except for them, or their family needs to find a new place to live because they aren’t safe where they are.

I will not weep with my daughters for this news, but it does remind me of the boy, now man, who works for the government in the military that grabbed my pussy in my own house, without my permission while I was a budding adolescent. This hush, reminds me of a lot of things in all of our lives that we’ve been forced to overcome when we felt the least capable. Donald Trump is no exception.

In no way do I want him to be the face of our country, nor do I believe that he’d have even been a choice for any party in their right mind if it weren’t for what really runs our country, money. But here he is, and apparently his morals have been made acceptable in a culture that has fought for centuries to free itself from its own enslavement in whatever forms enslavement and oppression take in the daily lives of every single person in it. No one here is free from the pangs of oppression and if they believe they are, they are not seeing. Equally, no one here is free from the pangs of the nudges inside of them that require an honest sense of freedom to feel fully alive in a world such as ours.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from a mortgage and student loans, with threats of forced vaccinations, the conspiracies of being microchipped by our government in the future, and living in a world that says rape and abuse are okay so long as they are kept under the rug—and so is not paying your taxes as a billionaire so long as its swiftly swept under the same rug. When all I’ve tried to do in the world was be good, sometimes, freedom is the last thing I feel under the umbrella of. As the crow cawed back at me from its tree, I trusted its communication in response to mine was an expression of our conjoined divine freedom. We were friends, in this together.

Donald Trump is not my friend, nor did I vote for him, nor do I believe he gives one ounce of shit for me or my daughters. But here’s what I know for sure: people are a reflection of our light, or our shadow, there is nothing more. He comes in the form of light that appears to be a shadow that we project darkness onto, and we are no different than the world we are afraid of him controlling with his undesirable moral code, if we cannot lift him up by supporting him in the light that we want to see reflected back at us.

The thing that he brings is innovation in the sense that he may require half of a nation to pull from themselves, resources they didn’t even know they have, merely as a means to survive, but also the resources of our souls and psyches that recognize that he is one of us. We are no different than what we resist in him if we do not hold him in the standard of love that we want for all of the people we are afraid his presence will escalate harm upon.

I watched the shadow of the airplane from miles in the sky until the point that it landed safely on the ground yesterday, aware that in my sight of the beauty of the flying shadow, I was on the opposite side of the sun in the plane that flew me here. If we see him as the shadow of a culture, bringing to the surface what has been hidden in the dark, he is bringing us to light so we may unify within ourselves and as a nation. If we continue to see this situation as the shadow, we haven’t gotten up to move to the other side of a plane to look at the light, and by all means, one thing we are free to do, is just that.

Though this time feels divisive to hundreds of thousands of people, we must recognize that he doesn’t, nor does our government or culture, hold the key to our freedom—nor the freedom of our daughters, black, gay, or immigrant friends.

This morning may feel like the rain pushing us back down into our well of darkness, but the same rain that wets our grip on the soil we’re trying to climb up from, is the same rain that has the capacity to wash the soil from our eyes so we can see the sunlight we’re trying to reach at the top.

This is a time of great collective change. A time where we are asked to come forth and not preach to our daughters that we live in a fucked up and oppressed world that they must overcome, but that we lead by example. There is only one thing to do in this world, and it is become our best, highest self.. The resources we have not seen within ourselves are immeasurable and are asking to be made know to us. Donald Trump would not be our president today if this were not true.

Every where I will go today, I will expect to see love. Today, I send all of my love to Donald Trump and his advisors that they may reflect to us the surprise of great love in one of the greatest times for change we will see in our lifetime. It doesn’t start with him. It starts with us. Call me a heretic, but maybe he is a great gift that has only come to remind us of exactly how physically, collectively and divinely resourceful we have always been, despite our eyes diversion to our daily instances of the oppression of our human form.

My invitation to send him love may be a hard pill to swallow for some of us but we cannot get what we are unwilling to give. Division aside, he too, is one of us and without divine support reflected onto him, we will only get, exactly what we expected in the dark corners of our minds a lot of us have looked at him from.

In my expectation to see a future different than my past, today, I choose to see this hush as a place of peace that invites me to consider the possibility that Donald Trump, in all of my disagreements with his morality, may be a gift for me to find myself in love, that we all may come together, because he may make it possible.

I cannot pretend to know how this is going to go down, but I also cannot pretend that I’m sure that he isn’t the greatest president we’ve ever known.

I am willing to trust that his ridiculous marketing skills were used only as a ploy to land him in office and that half the shit that comes out of his mouth was only a tactic to get him where he needs to be so he can be the unexpected gift that unites us all. Trust my friends.

If you must weep, weep, but please, find yourself in the silenced hush, in trust that the only outcome of this election is that we will all be better than we were before it.

 

Relephant Bonus:

 

Author: Stacy Hoch

Images: Video Still

Editor: Travis May