The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
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I am captivated by the range of approaches people are taking in this black moment, also coming to us in the technicolor of green for greed and envy, orange for its standard bearer and red for the blood of deportees and other victims. For every witness and consumer of headlines, there seems to be a variant response. Some people gorge on the news. They digest enormous soup tureens of slime every day, tasting its bitterness, the furry mold growing on the surface, without apparently becoming sick. I admire their willingness to dive head first into the muck out of an insatiable need to know and, fortified by that knowledge, to act. I get it. Other people will not drink an eyedropper of trump tea for fear it will poison them. They are hypersensitive to the contagion of the news, reliving the isolationist experience of the pandemic, sequestering themselves from anything that might be disturbing. I admire their self-awareness. They know just how much they can tolerate. I get it.
There are many intermediate steps along this continuum,. Some people are able to compartmentalize. This is a truly awful word with no attractive synonym, but you know what I mean. Someone who can keep different aspects of life in separate filing cabinets can read about Pete Hegseth before taking a bubble bath without bringing Hegseth’s mother into the tub. There are even multitaskers who can read about Pete Hegseth while taking a bubble bath the way they prepare for a presentation while whipping egg whites on an exercise bike. These people always wanted to run away to the circus and now, wonder of wonders, the circus has come to them.
Most people get by with a cocktail or a few tokes and I get that, too.
I’m trying a different approach. I have no idea if I’ll have any success, but my hope is that I’ll be able to hold both the blessing of my life…my health, my family and friends, my material sufficiency…and the profound horror of the world at the same time. I don’t mean in the manner of the juggler in that same circus, spinning plates on the ends of his fingers, frantically trying to keep everything up in the air. I see it more as a ballet of figure and ground moving back and forth in my field of vision and hearing. I want to hear my grandson playing a trumpet solo in the jazz band concert, knowing that the sound of children being wrenched from out of their parents’ arms is also a wail, only somewhat further in the background. I don’t want to be deaf to the band music or the dirge. Sometimes the dirge will be louder than the laughter of my loved ones and sometimes the laughter will prevail. It’s all happening at the same time and I want to grow in my capacity to receive it, to see the wildfires and the wildflowers and know that they are both reality and that reality itself is the wildest ride of all.
This is not a walk in the park and it is not something one learns. It is something one knows, has always known, but doesn’t necessarily have access to. Speaking for myself, I rarely have access to the experience of interbeing, of organic wholeness in space and time, but just knowing it’s there is a comfort. This is the knowledge of origins and belonging. It’s the awareness that the river bed lies fathoms down under the surface of the water even if you can’t see it or touch it. For millennia, people made use of religious language to express the intuition that what you can see in front of your face is only a thin veneer on an infinitely deep reality in which we are embedded. The noise that we are currently being subjected to tries its damndest to drown out this awareness but it will not succeed. In the end, we are part of all that is and cannot help but vibrate to its frequency. That frequency includes both the joy of being alive and the pain of bearing witness to the suffering of the living. We humans are called to both tickle the baby’s belly and tackle the belly of the beast.
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This is brilliant and, for me personally, a deep sigh of relief. YES this is exactly what I am attempting to do. Thank you for putting my current journey into words. Oh, and did I mention that I am simultaneously dealing with my own cancer journey?
This was a wonderful survival summary. I feel that now we may have a greater awareness of the river bed because our complacency has been destroyed and the need for a belief to become a reality gains ascendence. But the joy in your grandson's music is part of the river bed isn't it? And the pain of life as well.