THIS IS NOT ABOUT POLITICS - IT’S ABOUT ART.

I haven’t written a word or strummed my guitar since the Valentine’s Day massacre when NPS employees nationwide were fired for being probationary. DOGE thought this meant bad at their jobs, but it actually meant in the first year of a permanent job (they could have worked in the NPS for a decade seasonally and still have this status).

But this is not a political post. It is a post about making art and lighting up that part of your brain that imagines, fabricates, replicates, imitates, and celebrates ideas that come from without and within.

It was hard to think what to write about. I sometimes pen poems in the early morning and wake up to ideas buzzing in my head. I often hear a song on my Spotify discover playlist while running and come into work a few minutes late because I spend time trying to figure out the chords before work. But this year, I haven’t felt like doing any of that. I think the rapid changes in our world have caused us to lose our equilibrium. When you're out of balance, you spend your energy trying not to fall. Just existing is hard when the ground is moving. I didn’t realize how much of my feelings of security relate to not only who I am, but what it means to live in this country. But all the safeguards are being pulled. Threats to vaccines, consumer safety, Medicare/Medicaid and veterans funding, education, libraries, NPR, it’s all untethered.

That’s not political—that’s just fact.

But back to the art.

Yesterday I traveled to a protest in Merced. This post is not about the protest, it’s about the posters. We all made posters. To make a poster, you have to decide on materials—paint and markers, or digital prints. You need to decide on a size. You need to narrow down the one thing you feel you want to say as you stand up for your community and county, and you need to create it.

I’m not very good with graphics, but I spent time deciding that the thing I find most horrifying about this administration is that they are sending gangs of armed, government employees to hunt down undocumented mothers and fathers—people working hard in our country, neighbors, co-workers, friends—and disappearing them from our country, community, and most damagingly, from their children. We are doing damage to generations of people. People who Trump has recently admitted are needed by the industries with which they are employed. He only sees the need of the business, not the damage to the people, but the effect I hope is the same: That this atrocity stops. That is a little political to some, but I can’t imagine how.

So the art: I picked my slogan, found an old mat for a piece of art that was quite large. My husband found me a stick and I started coloring and blocking up letters and creating a big, beautiful sign.

And I joined my friends who are very artistic and creative and beautiful women who had all done the same. One matched the rainbows in her poster to rainbows on her shoes and on her shirt. One friend wore a T-shirt with a message that spoke through a shirt and an American flag and a simple "NOPE." Another friend created a flowing artistic sign in her amazing handwriting—simple and lovely in minutes. Her simplicity and care contrasted with my blocky, endless coloring project. And then we showed up at a sea of posters—each person thinking through and creating their expression of how terrible things are in Trump’s America. And we smiled at the humor people used to manage the unbearable and unthinkable. And we supported each other and asked if we could take images. My friend with her DEI Hire shirt was interviewed by the press to explain why this idea was important for her to express.

And we were there with 1,000 other people expressing our discomfort and disdain for a man who somehow found his way into the Oval Office for a second time. A man people I love seem to admire. A man who is destroying all the institutions I value and that allow people to rise up: education, food banks, medical care.

And now I’ve become political.

But the art was great, and I think coloring opened up a channel in my brain that led me to the page this morning. I wrote even before I sipped my coffee. 

The opening is here, and I'm holding onto it. 

Art can be the way we find our footing when the world won't stand still.