Only Connect

Frank bought some solar lights at the dollar store. He scattered them around the garden giving the grounds an unearthly glow. It’s June and the fireflies are creating their own special effects, along with the moon, the stars, and possibly a planet or two. When you go out in the dark on a late spring night and so much in the universe comes out to welcome you, there is less loneliness, more of a sense of belonging. I’m here and you’re here and rightly so. When neither of us is here any longer, the moon will still wax and wane, the June bugs will continue to crackle like rogue campfire sparks, and maybe you and I will even have some awareness of that, some sense of being part of the whole. We can’t know that from where we’re standing in the dark on the lawn behind the house, but we can try it on for size. Anything we can do in these frightening times to feel less separate, less disaffected is worth a shot.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Only connect, E.M. Forster famously wrote. Connect with the natural world, with your ancestral history, with one another. But just now the screw is loose, the rope that holds things together has become perilously frayed and we are untethered. We have all been dumped out of the plane without a functioning parachute. The anxiety of that condition affects people in many ways, some terrible. People adopt strange cultic practices and anaesthetize themselves with chemicals, but also with various diversionary tactics like buying things they don’t need and cuddling up to television. People, including myself…to be absolutely clear…do what they can and then, for some people, the fear and the disorientation of the freefall take over and they start shooting. What is being referred to as a mental health crisis is an implosion of the entire culture, revealed in living color by particular individuals who are hypersensitive to this degradation. We are all the same, but some of us are more the same than others. If I go out in the dark on that lawn behind my house with three other people, I’m the one the mosquitoes will bite.

I don’t mean to be reductive. I understand that what makes some people violent is a rich loam composed in varying combinations of genetics, faulty wiring, family dysfunction, economic pressures, toxic masculinity, bad karma, and for God’s sake the availability of assault weapons. On the Christian Right some people believe the shooters have been possessed by the devil. You can see how that would be a convenient explanation. A disembodied demonic force, altogether outside reason, has permeated society and must be expunged. Think Joe McCarthy. Think the Inquisition. Think the Salem witch trials. Sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.

I can never express enough gratitude for the fact that my life does not unfold in the center of this vortex. But I know I am part of it. It affects my every breath. We are all part of it and subject to its ripple effects, the sonic overtones of being alive at this time inside this hall of mirrors. Everything is reflected in it and everything is subject to its distortion. No one is immune. There is no vaccine that can protect us from living at a time when, let’s face it, despite inflation, life is cheap. Children are tossed in the gutter like so many plastic take-out containers. Not only are they gunned down in school, but if they survive, many are sent out into the world poorly educated, ill-fed, lacking medical care. This culture has turned its back on its children, as well as its elderly and its poor. That’s the long and the short of it. It operates on the false assumption that if we don’t look at it, the suffering will go away. But the suffering is inside of us. It’s even inside the people who don’t want to be bothered with it. It’s in the tainted food and the toxic air. It’s in the false narratives we swim in and the vulgarity that we are drowning in, the casual racism and sexism we don’t even notice. It’s in our isolation and the lack of compassion we feel for ourselves which can make the possibility of connecting to others a pipedream and connection, my friends, is not just the best medicine. It’s the only medicine.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.