08/18/2026
I was reminded this morning that you choose what energy you bring into this world. I’m angry. Angry at the people bulldozing Saint Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park. Angry at the man who mocked me in the comments of some random thread. Angry at things that don’t even matter. I’ve been working on a series of characters flipping the bird, but I realized I don’t want to tap into that energy. I doesn’t do me any good to fuel the fire.
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“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris
