all I have is a voice

It's been a rough couple of weeks. It feels like it really shouldn't be, because I've done so little, but I've done something almost every day. Half a day sorting the synagogue library, going to services, going to a memorial where I wasn't even a secondary mourner. Starting significant house cleaning. 3 medical things, one physically painful, one triggering, one really long and worrying. I had been feeling pretty good this winter, and I resent suspecting that it's probably just not doing anything. And, of course, there's what an old friend of mine calls the polycrisis. War and plague and environmental disaster and political collapse.

I had intended to go to the No Kings rally this afternoon. Then I fell apart Thursday afternoon, after the admirable Rikibeth came over and cleaned my kitchen before I started getting ready for Passover. And didn't really have the ability to do anything yesterday, not even make a sign for the rally, much less get organized for Passover, as planned.

Today...it's not like I'm out of spoons. I have some. I could go to the rally. It feels important. It just feels like a choice between doing that and having much of me left to make a nice seder, where we read straight out of the printed book or where I find good appropriate add-ons from HIAS, and poems about modern-day frogs and tyrants and the importance of working for freedom in every generation. It would be nice, but I'm afraid it would be kind of empty.

I have part of the Auden poem taped up by my desk, to inspire me to make calls.
"All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man in the street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky."

I have so little I can give. It's not like I can be out there blowing whistles, or driving around delivering food to people afraid to leave their homes, or singing outside ICE offices on Wednesdays. But I could do this if I pushed. We'll see how it goes.