I'm on the West Coast this week, visiting family and friends and soaking in some sun. A few of you have written to me about last week's essay following the US elections. I could summarize the emails into two categories. 90% centered around the question, "How are you/we surviving this election?" The other 10% are captured in the email: "I'm unsubscribing since clearly your politics don't match mine." Both are fair and since my Substack newsletter "Notebooks" is not mandatory reading, everyone is free to read or discard it as they wish. In this essay, I'm going to focus on the first question.

I had always planned for "Notebooks" to attempt a view of life that grapples with how a religious/spiritual life can still be robust in an increasingly irreligious culture. That holds, and I'll continue along that path. However, the 2024 US presidential election results are on many readers' minds. We must figure out the best way forward for the next four years. Here's my plan. You can beg, borrow, steal, or share from this list. Or simply ignore it all, and develop your own.

1. I'm stepping back from engaging in the daily drama of political pornography. I'll abandon my anemic television-watching subscriptions to national newspapers and other websites. I'll find different ways to stay informed. Candidly, I'm not sure what those will be, but I can't let the poison of the daily drama unfolding dominate my psyche. Years ago, a colleague pointed out that everyone has a devotional practice. He said, "For most people, it's scrolling Social Media, binge-watching mindless television, and gossiping about co-workers." It's a sharp critique, but since we are about to see four years of adolescent drama and manure unfold, I need to step back from it.

2. I need an alternative devotional practice. I intend to embrace two artistic and poetic imagination forms – music and poetic literature. I'll sprinkle in the visual arts as well. Listening to Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, and Over the Rhine will take me into imaginative places that will cultivate my soul. Reading the poetry of Walt Whitman, Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and Langston Hughes is more likely to stir an engagement with the world that is both meaningful and productive. Viewing Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keefe, Diego Rivera, and Banksy's visual arts might just stir a new kind of activism.

3. Everyone needs to ask a question for themselves. That question is, what story do I want to live in? Ancient people had that determined for them as their religion or mythology gave sense and purpose to their lives and the tribe's connection to the cosmos. Today, people are falling into another one and losing that externally determined mythos. The two dominant and interwoven stories for people are political and economic. Polarizing ideology and consumer capitalism are now the dominant narratives. We define ourselves by what team we are on, red or blue, and how much we can acquire or produce. Those narratives don't yield much for the soul. They devour the soul. I yearn for something more profound. I want to live in a story that reminds me I'm part of rhythms that extend back in time and forward in application. I'll continue that exploration as I seek wisdom, faith, and depth that connect me with a story worth living.

4. I'm not walking away from civics. In fact, maybe I’ll dive into the Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau to unearth the influencers who helped influence Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. Yes, like many who had hoped we would turn the page on the ugly divisiveness of the Trump Show, I fantasized about moving to another country. But everywhere I looked, it had its problems. So, I'm staying put. Someone must join the resistance. Inevitably, there will be a blowback. Soon, there will be elections, including 2026 House and Senate seats, and a year likely to favor candidates opposed to the extremism we will see unfolding. I'll be there for those and others. But for now, I'm catching my breath.

Russel Moore, whom I read for his ethical observations, not his articulation of faith, recently reminded his readers of the late Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. During the tumult of the 1960s—war, civil unrest, assassinations— Merton argued that his ability to speak to all of those things was not despite but because of his vocation as a Trappist monk, devoted to silence and solitude.

"Someone has to try to keep his head clear of static and preserve the interior solitude and silence essential for independent thought," Merton wrote. He continues,

A monk loses his reason for existing if he simply submits to all the routines that govern the thinking of everybody else. He loses his reason for existing if he simply substitutes other routines of his own! He is obliged by his vocation to have his mind if not to speak it. He has got to be a free man.

Merton concludes by saying, "What did the radio say this evening? I don't know."

But, anyone who has read Merton knows he knew the plights of a country at war with others and itself. Among the ways I plan to navigate the coming DTSS (Donald Trump $#!% Show) will be to walk carefully in our culture's dramatization of everything. Do I need to know every piece of manure that will demand our attention? For my own emotional and spiritual well-being, the answer is no. But do I need to be cultivating wisdom and creativity for a more sustained response? Yes.

I'll likely be reading more about Thomas Merton as well.