Happy Halloween. It’s been an odd season for me; usually by this point I’m half pumpkin by volume and the other half bat. By contrast I’ve felt a bit “Charlie Brown in his Christmas Special” this year. “Can anyone explain to me what Halloween is really all about?” (And then Linus steps onto the thrust stage to recite, what? Ezekiel in the valley of the bones? The bit with Saul and the witches?)

It doesn’t help, I guess, that here in the United States every two Octobers we must observe the Interval of Horrors, in which we all determine by action and inaction whether the next two years will be either (1) a period of increasingly desperate hard work toward repair and perhaps even much-needed progress against the myriad looming dangers of our age; or (2) an accelerating fall into oligarchy and despotism that will leave you, me, and really everyone—not even the billionaires and oligarchs get a pass on this, though unlike you and me they are surrounded by people who are paid to convince them otherwise—even more naked before the storm than we have been made already. Our text messages are full of fundraising appeals that offer a potential rope out of the Fear Pit for an algorithmically calculated price, and the salvation of our country seems like it should be in our individual hands, isn’t that what democracy’s all about after all, but also it’s in the hands of every other person legally able to vote. Whee.

When I was younger and had no caretaking responsibilities I dealt with these feelings by going all-in on campaign work, on phone calls and door-knocking shifts. That kind of shift is harder to make now. My soul’s default and most comfortable gears are “100%” and “0%”, so finding a new strategy beyond donations has been, let’s call it a process of discovery. But I did hear something recently that helped.

At a political meeting a couple weeks back, one of the organizers said, “between now and election day, commit to doing one thing.” Not do all the things, which you can’t do anyway. Just one. Not “one weird trick”. One thing. One set is infinitely more than zero sets. More is great, one is doable. Why not do it now? The hardest moment is just before the weight starts to move.

I sent a bunch of postcards recently and felt good about it. Perhaps you’re like me, and this will help.

It’s also good to remember that elections are only part of it. The daily work of organizing and building capacity and resilience and possibility and neighborly connection is the topsoil from which every change grows. Like any soil, it’s complex, multiple, weird, full of wriggly bits and tiny threads—traded pick-ups from after-school, playdates and cups of coffee, conversations—no single one of which feels like all that much, but which all web together into the sustenance of life. That’s what we must build, to have anything at all; that’s what we must protect, so it has the time to grow and work miracles.

Do one thing. And vote.

It hasn’t all been politics that’s been after me, though. Also there’s care work, and other work, and the feeling of overwhelm and collapse that comes with finishing a big project, and the accumulated weight of unanswered mail, and mourning. Early this month, I felt a kind of real dread I’m not used to in the season. Maybe it’s because I’m older now and the things we laugh about this time of year have assumed, as the man says, a “fitful kind of reality.” Maybe it’s because I’ve been saying more goodbyes recently, and contemplating endings, and as the leaves turn and the night comes on every year, every season, every day seems its own long goodbye.

But there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

On the road back from Viable Paradise the trees were flame-red and the air crisp as a new razor and there was cider in the fridge, and my kid has a costume for the holiday and I have foam gravestones on my lawn and a poseable skeleton to set up. I’m deep into my re-read of A Night in the Lonesome October and my running pace is creeping back up there, and it’s dark in the evening and even a bit dark in the morning. It feels harder now to grin bloody-toothed into the night. It has a gathering sense of reality; this is what all those books have been steadying me for. But I’m finding my fierceness and my wicked edge, my glint and grit and oh yes: teeth.