“Let’s hold each other up,” I wrote in August when our community was divided about how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. “Let’s be kind.”

Since then, we’ve had a tough month. People in our town have voiced opposing sentiments in the national reckoning with racism, the post office has been threatened, massive fires are consuming major parts of our state, armed men have been stopping people because they are sure “Antifa” are setting the fires, the news has been full of talk about possible conflict after the presidential election, and the West is smothering in smoke. As I write, we’re hiding in our homes, hardly daring to breathe.

And there’s still a pandemic.

Do you need good news as much as I do? It’s still out there, still happening. But we may have to work for it rather than waiting for it to come to us.

That’s what Pendleton Center for the Arts has done — they’ve made sure Rock and Roll Camp XV happened even during a pandemic. And according to Roberta Lavadour’s newsletter, the virtual format was “warm and fun and did all the things we hoped it would.” Zoom allowed campers to see artists in their studios and workspaces, and they even got to interview Bill Stephens, who writes the music for “Sesame Street” and who collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda and others on the music for “In the Heights” and “Hamilton.” “Picking up some Grammys along the way!” Lavadour adds.

There was no concert on Main Street this year, but campers made a playlist of their music and were able to express some of their feelings about being a teen in this strange time. And their music will go on, with loaned instruments and online classes resuming soon.

Kudos to those who organized the Black Lives Matter march, too, and to the Pendleton police who made sure demonstrators were safe even as they walked past guns and Confederate flags. They made something good happen, too.

And remember that East/West divide? At least for now, it has dissolved in compassion — think of all the contributions that have been pouring in from east of the Cascades to help those who’ve lost their homes. Even the smoke reminds us that we’re all in this together.

Maybe we really can hold each other up. Maybe we can choose kindness, choose love instead of fear.

Writers Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney were sleeping when a neighbor’s call woke them and a young firefighter pounded on their door; the images of fire in the canyon as they fled — with their cat, Debra’s purse, and the clothes on their backs — are terrifying. As I write, they don’t know the fate of their house and property on the McKenzie River, but they are grateful to be alive.

This morning I found Lopez’s “Love in a Time of Terror,” published in Orion on Aug. 7, 2020. “Most of the trouble that afflicts human beings in their lives can be traced to a failure to love,” he writes. “Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc — ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war — we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans.

“The old ideas — the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be foolish — can have no future with us.

“It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. … It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.”

His words challenge me, but they remind me of the possibility of good news if we are willing to work for it. May we all be willing — for our communities, our country, our planet.