Hope for Hope

+ Sunlight Ends (first draft)

Chit-Chat Check-In #101 • Transcript

How’s everybody doing? Not so good, probably. A lot of you are probably feeling about the same way I am, and had to take a little time to process those feelings, too. Still processing.

My thoughts on our current moment: I think we all saw a world that was new. And I think we were all excited about that coming true. And I think a lot of our fellow citizens saw that world as well, but were much more afraid of it.

I don’t feel like I should get to hate people I don’t know. So I’ll just say that I think they’re very fearful. And I don’t think we should be fearful. We saw that new world, and I don’t think we should let it go. It’s going to be clearer, and clearer. And maybe we just need to get better at explaining why it’s not to be feared.

Personally, I’m making a choice to not be fearful. It’s not easy. But I have good examples in my life of people who saw something far on the horizon, and worked for it, fearlessly, for long long periods of time. Mavis Staples in particular, has been a real role model.

Sorry if this evaluation of our current moment isn’t what you want to hear right now. But I hope that hope isn’t ever an unwelcome message.

I love you all.

OxO—Jeffy

My father’s advice after 2016. Needlepoint by Beatriz Castillo. Thanks, Bea!

P.S. I appreciated these words from Barbara Kingsolver:

Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable.

But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. If you feel crushed by unkindness today, it’s a time for grieving, reaching out to loved ones, noticing one bright color somewhere in the day. Remembering what there is to love. Starting with the immediate, the place and people we can tend ourselves, and make safe. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Because there are so many of us to do it.

And we are all still here today, exactly as we were yesterday. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse.

This Week in Wilco, Etc.

2023 / November 5: Jeff is at the Athenaeum Theater in Chicago with Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal to discuss his recently released book, World Within a Song. Jeff also plays “Pecan Pie,” “Jesus, Etc.,” “If I Ever Was a Child” and “You Are Not Alone,” as part of the event.

1997 / November 8: Wilco wraps up the Being There tour with a set at Liberty Lunch in Austin, TX. Blue Mountain opens.

2015 / November 9: Tweedy’s cover of Jose Feliciano’s song, “Let’s Find Each Other Tonight” is used on the television show Fargo (Season 2, Episode 5 The Gift of the Magi).

Sunlight Ends (first draft)

Things don’t make sense a lot of the time. Here’s to dancing in the light wherever we can find it. Til it ends. Which it won’t.