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This morning, between glances at the GPS and the starlings studding the streetlamps while driving into Boston from our suburban hotel, a blunted paraphrase of poetry popped into my head:

“oh can you linger for just a little while longer to hear the [birds] singing, not for your sake and not for mine but for the pure joy of being alive on this bright morning”

This is not how the poem actually goes, but it’s an approximation of “Invitation” by Mary Oliver, a poem I read for the first time at some point in the summer of last year. Then, the birds were everywhere, basking in warm sun and drinking in the aroma of heat and fir needles in the tree behind our old apartment. It’s mid-winter now and as I was leaving the parking lot of Emory’s office building this morning, in the edges of my vision I caught what I swear must have been a blue jay. I hadn’t seen one in months.

Last week, I bought bird seed and finally set up our two feeders. One hangs on the knob of a branch cut from the tree in front of our house and the other is directly opposite on the back window. Our year-round neighbors, the dark-eyed juncos, gather at the window feeder and aren’t bothered by my shadow in the kitchen. They gobble up seed after seed, always one at a time—they are defensive of their perch, rearing up and flapping their wings vigorously at any waiting birds who try to sneak a bite. They take their fill, then move on letting one of their conspecifics waiting on the sill take their place.

Before I left for the public library this morning, Emory got news that one of his co-workers would have to leave before work started. Their partner had been in a bad accident. I don’t pray often, but I spent much of the drive asking a higher power to watch out for them, to make the path to recovery possible and smooth. These days, we’re seeing pain, illness, death, and suffering so much that it feels like sharing the weight with something bigger than myself is the only way to hold it all.

We spent the eight hour drive to Boston listening to The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, a 1994 novel about a state where memories of things disappear and a police force tracks down and removes anyone capable of remembering what was lost. The central characters are a chosen family of sorts: the narrator, her dead nanny’s elderly husband, and her editor whom they conspire to hide from the Memory Police. So much has disappeared over the last thirty days since Inauguration Day in the US—people, words, jobs, websites, money. The mass firings, deportations, censorship of government websites, denial of funding, confusion over new policies, all of it has left us in a swirl of perpetual loss. Knowing this was coming does not soften the blow. We had to pause the book several times to reconcile the dystopia of the novel with the one we are living through today.

I find myself wondering how much longer the anger and mourning will take to clear my system, how many times I will vacillate between them before I can dream of anything else. The rapid succession of events doesn’t leave room for much meaning making, but I try anyway in conversations with Emory, my therapist, and our friends; in my journal and my own mind; in books and poems and articles from other times and this one. I still don’t feel like I’ve found anything that satisfactorily illuminates the meaning of grieving preventable loss or acts of cruelty for cruelty’s sake. All I can say is it doesn’t make sense. The world is broken and anger and mourning are natural responses to witnessing its brokenness.

I am determined to love every bit of this world’s aliveness, even when it seems it might be dying. Grief comes with me everywhere, it demands my attention. Of course it does. Love requires commitment, commitment requires steadfastness through change, and steadfastness through change requires grief. It doesn’t make sense that things are breaking all around us. Not when the way to keep them whole is so often right in front of our noses. What does make sense is to stay ridiculously hopeful, as Mary Oliver puts it, “not for your sake / and not for mine / and not for the sake of winning / but for sheer delight and gratitude”. What is enjoyed thoroughly in life can’t be taken away in death. Gratitude for some things cannot be diminished by loathing others. We can choose to love this world for the sake of love, to be hopeful for the sake of hope, to grieve for the sake of grief. It is worthwhile, a serious thing, just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.