What keeps your heart going?

Dear reader, what are you doing to keep your heart strong? Because I’m still figuring out what it means to be morbidly alive with chronic apocalypse fatigue. It’s constantly disorienting surviving under capitalism Monday through Friday, paycheck to paycheck, while white nationalist fascism is in full swing and climate disasters rupture the world. It feels like I’m making a sandwich in the kitchen of a burning house. And every day, I’m figuring out which parts of the house to avoid, and finding momentary peace in areas yet to be destroyed. 

So while we are together in this house on fire, let’s step away from the smoke. Let’s find space that’s quiet and clear. I want to share a few transcendent things that keep my heart beating. 

Since 2008, I’ve been a fan of Laura Stevenson’s music. She takes that singer-songwriter style and douses it with punk and grungy '90s alt-rock, creating a sound that’s like Dolly Parton-meets-Archers of Loaf-meets-Neutral Milk Hotel. In her earnest, poetic songwriting, she explores the clumsy ups and downs of romance, along with heavier topics such as depression and grief. But the other important thing to know about Stevenson is that the music and lyrical subject matter are elevated by her diamond voice, which soars and shines. My feet never touch the ground when she is singing. 

This year, Stevenson released her seventh studio album, “Late Great.” At this point, it’s impossible for Stevenson to release a bad album. There are only varying levels of greatness in her catalog. “Late Great” is no exception. On the album’s somber tracks, you can hear Townes Van Zandt in the minor chords. On the full-band tracks, the luscious compositions build up into something grandly bittersweet, like they were arranged by Roy Orbison. In fact, the doomed romanticism of Orbison’s songwriting is in Stevenson’s musical DNA.

Lyrically, “Late Great” is her most devastating record, as many of the songs deal with divorce and heartbreak. “Your I.D. and mine/ As they're set side by side/ On the desk of the notary/ A click of a pen and the stroke of a hand/ And there's no longer you and me,” sings Stevenson on the track, “Middle Love.” With exasperated disbelief, Stevenson sings in the chorus: “And I can't fathom/ How I'll get to the car.” 

Throughout the album, I imagine the narrator in each song standing in front of a door where love is on the other side. The push and pull of fear and desire compel one hand to reach cautiously for the doorknob, and it takes all the strength in the world to open the door. “And I'll push it ’til it runs me through/ I will sing it 'til my lips are blue/ ‘I want to’/ ‘I want to,’” croons Stevenson on the closing track, “#1 (2).” 

Perhaps it’s counterintuitive to listen to sad, heartwrenching music in the summer. But the world insists on shattering my heart, so I take shelter in the blues. With that said, there’s one more beautiful thing I must share with you before everything burns down. 

I keep thinking about what it means to sustain an open heart in a heartless world. I’m thinking about the ongoing genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. While holding all of this, I am constantly returning to June Jordan’s poems of love and rage, especially “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” The opening lines read: “I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED/ GENOCIDE TO STOP,” and the whole poem repeats these declarations, acting as a spell rebuking genocide and to summon liberation.

Elsewhere in the poem, other incantations read: “I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED/ NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY/ NOBODY COLD.” I recite these demands as Palestinians die from Israel’s forced starvation. I recite these with the desire to break the spell of occupation. I’m trying to maintain my soul and humanity in a hell-soaked world, so I read love poems as spells against genocide. And that’s what I admire about Jordan’s work. She understood that love is political. Her poems announce to the world, “Yes, my heart’s broken, but I love you fiercely, and I will not let our enemies erase us.” 

Dear reader, hold onto what keeps your heart strong. Hope is not something I think about lately, but when I share a song or poem, it’s my admission that tomorrow is still worth living for. If I stop to tell you about a novel that felt like seeing a sunrise for the first time and how it gave me the will to keep living, it’s my admission that beautiful things are still worth fighting for. If this country is an empire on fire, then the people and places I love are reminders that we can build something better out of the ashes.