Honestly, I feel like I could just write “sleep” after half a dozen bullets and that might accurately convey how I’d prefer to spend the weekend.

Since that’s probably not how I should spend the weekend, here’s what else I’ll probably do:

• Go to the Black Lives Matter protest.
• Have a video chat with friends.
• Shop at the farmers market.
• Make some bread.
• Read and knit in the park.
• Tend the garden.

How about you? How are you thinking you’ll spend the weekend?

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. Loyalty Bookstores, one of D.C.’s indie bookstores owned by a Black woman, posted they’d received hundreds of orders this week requesting anti-racist books. Another local Black-owned bookstore, Mahogany Books, was featured in Time. D.C.’s other POC-owned indies — Sankofa, Solid State Books, and Duende District — also report people have placed a flurry of orders this week with a strong focus on getting more woke.

2. Super dramatic thunderstorms rolled through the area tonight (just after we watered the garden, of course).

3. José Andés’ local philanthropic endeavor, World Central Kitchen, reports they’ve made more than half a million meals since the pandemic began. Many of those meals have been cooked in the empty concession kitchens at Nationals Park.

How about you? What’s beautiful things have been getting you through this week?

This week I started reading I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal, about two teen girls, one white and one black, and how they try to get home after the football game they’re both at erupts in violence. I’d picked it up before the pandemic and it had lingered on my pile. It’s really good and one of those instances where alternating points of view work to enhance the reader’s understanding.

I also started listening to a romance novel, Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Tallia Hibbert, as a total change of pace after finishing up the Inspector Gamache mystery I was listening to.

I think I may do some re-reading as well. I have a lot of books about Black activism and storytelling from when I was in college, and it feels like time to literally dust off and dive back into Anna Deveare Smith, Angela Davis, and others’ works while I wait for newer books to become available.

What books are you finding helpful and educational in response to what’s going on in the world right now?

Buttercups
    ~Wilfred Thorley

There must be fairy miners
Just underneath the mould,
Such wondrous quaint designers
Who live in caves of gold.

They take the shining metals,
And beat them into shreds,
And mould them into petals
To make the flowers’ heads.

Sometimes they melt the flowers
To tiny seeds like pearls,
And store them up in bowers
For little boys and girls.

And still a tiny fan turns
Above a forge of gold,
To keep, with fairy lanterns,
The world from growing old.

I don’t really have anything to contribute right now, except to say that there are still things of beauty in the world — kindness, generosity, hopefulness, and a sense that things can be better than they are — if we can pause and look for them.

I’ve started several drafts trying to talk about the unrest here in D.C. and across the country.

I am trying to wrap my head around the fact that the president has declared martial law in my city and has brought police forces in who do not answer to my duly elected officials.

I am trying to come to terms with the role my white privilege plays in the larger concerns over racist policing and governmental policies, as well as my own cowardice at thwarting the curfew and going to join people whose anger I believe is justified and their cause righteous.

And I am trying to figure out what concrete steps I can take to help find real solutions to complex problems that seem outside of my hands.

But maybe the first one is to get involved with electing leaders again who want to glorify the good of the people, rather than themselves, and who are willing to put energy and resources toward finding consensus and real world solutions.

I’m not going to lie: It was not the best weekend. To be fair, it was far from the country’s best weekend, so to expect mine to stand out is probably both unfair and tone deaf.

Right now, District residents are under a curfew until 6 a.m., in part due to several nights of incidents that arose in the aftermath of police violence against Black Americans and protests against it. (The incidents include several fires, including some in the vicinity of my office.)

I’d like to think that we are all safer because of the curfew, but it’s less because then people won’t be out causing mischief, but more because police seem emboldened in cities across our country to flash white power signs and to use seemingly unwarranted force against citizens peacefully exercising their Constitutionally guaranteed right to assemble and the media exercising theirs to report on news.

D.C.’s police force is usually relatively restrained when dealing with protestors, in part because D.C. so often hosts large rallies. But this weekend’s responses has left me worried about even our seasoned force. They are not without their problems and this situation seems rife with opportunity for bad behavior in clashes with an agitated public.

But at the same time as people have acted out in horrible ways against their fellow humans, I’ve also heard about an outpouring of support — donations of money and physical labor to damaged businesses, funds to raise bail for protestors jailed over the weekend, food, water, and milk (to combat the tear gas) shared, people looking out for each other’s kids, for each other. Once again, in the wake of a great American tragedy, we are looking for the helpers. It’s just too bad that they don’t seem to be the people many of us (white people) had been led to expect.