Author's Note: I recently joined the Valley of Light community for a 6-month trial membership. This article is crossposted on my blog at Daily Kos.

So it’s really happening. That day we dreaded — the inauguration of a monstrous president of the United States.

It is now our responsibility as people of conscience to rise to the occasion and be the people we want to be, to create the world we want to see.

We might not control the levers of power in Washington, but we control our own attitude and actions. We control much. Never underestimate the power of hearts, minds, daily living and relationships to set the course of the world. The stories we tell, the stories we live — in this is our power.

The powers that be will loudly do their thing, and we will do ours. Let us do it boldly.

I woke up in the middle of the night and felt compelled to write. This poem came to me. It is written in the progressive prophetic spiritual tradition. I intend to read it at a Unitarian Universalist gathering tonight. I share it with you in the hope that it may inspire, as a hopeful counterbalancing vision to the darkness at noon enveloping our nation.

We Rise

“Come up higher,” saith the Lord,
Our Father-Mother in Heaven
Says “speak the words” and we listen;
We rise
We rise
We rise to the beautiful stories we write for ourselves —
A story that’s told through the ages
In many tongues
In many places
A story that’s written on papers
And on hearts
In an ink that shall never fade —
A story that makes us remember
That gives us the power
And the blessing,
The courage to love and create
With a blueprint that shows us the way —
A tale of our past and our present
And a glorious future unfolding
Come, let us read it together,
Let us open the scrolls
Unrolling —
Unraveled as we are,
Let us put ourselves back together
Scattered, shattered together
We rise
We rise

To each of us in our own way: It’s time to rise! When they go low, we go high.

Onward and upward. Forward together.