Saturday Missive: To Cleave and to Keep Heart

“When we cleave to each other, no tyrant’s shadow can eclipse our sun.”

The week has been another march through the dark forest—branches snapping underfoot, shadows moving where no wind should stir them. The news speaks in its familiar grim tongue: laws bent until they are unrecognizable, the machinery of democracy pried apart bolt by bolt, power stripped from the people and welded into the hands of the few. Fascism no longer knocks; it sits in our living rooms, smiling politely, pretending to be just another guest.

We are told, daily, to grow used to it.

To let the theft become furniture.

To accept that the fire will burn, and our only role is to watch.

But I refuse.

Because even in this hour—especially in this hour—there are still millions who wake each morning and live with a stubborn goodness. People who do not make the news but make the world:

The teacher who still greets her class with joy, the neighbor who checks in on the old man down the street, the young man who steps off the curb so another may pass, the stranger who meets your eyes in the store and nods, as if to say We are here. We still see each other.

I am a humanist, yet I will borrow the old phrase: many among us are godly. Not in the narrow sense of creed or scripture, but in the way they keep a lamp lit for others in the dark, even when the oil runs low.

Every day we are given a sermon without a pulpit:

Meet the charge of the day, no matter the cost.

Meet it with the love you can give, and the love you dare to receive.

Do not think this is small work. It is the only work.

The grifters will keep trying to fill their hollow hearts with the spoils of tragedy. They will clutch at power as if it could save them from the slow erosion of their own souls. But when we cleave to each other—when we lock our arms and insist on being human in the face of inhumanity—no bile they brew can spill upon us.

We fight tooth and nail, yes. We stay vigilant, yes. But we do it with the knowledge that our greatest weapon is the thing they cannot counterfeit: love married to resolve.

Tagore once wrote, faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

Akhmatova knew the dawn might come late, if at all, yet she still walked into the square to meet her people.

So let us keep heart.

Let us remember that even as the wolves gather, the flock is not without shepherds—and that sometimes the shepherd is simply the one who refuses to run.

The day is ours to meet. The charge is ours to keep.

And we are here.

We still see each other.

“The day is ours to meet. The charge is ours to keep.”

So, take this day as a promise and a dare. A promise that the human spirit, bound together in grace, can outlast the empire of fear. A dare to meet the hours ahead as if each one were a field to be sown, not surrendered. Step out your door knowing you carry the oldest banner—love in one hand, resolve in the other—and that when we march together, no tyrant’s shadow can eclipse the sun we make for each other.