Now, and Then, and Every Catastrophic Now and Then in Between…

[Image: “Tree as River of Time,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I don’t know much about self-identified “poet, teacher, and storyteller” Mark Nepo — not more than I gathered on a quick run through Wikipedia and his Web site a few minutes ago. So I can’t say, y’know, that I can recommend much let alone everything he’s written. But a week ago, whiskey river offered up a one-paragraph sample; in the event, I didn’t see it until two days ago: the day of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The sample, and the prescient coincidence of its whiskey river posting vis-a-vis the headlines and developing story, quite shook me. So I sought out the entire piece from which the whiskey river excerpt came. You can read it here (originally published in the magazine in 2013, re-run at the site in 2016).

For now, though, here is the paragraph cited by the river, and the equally striking one which precedes it:

Each of us must make our peace with suffering and especially unnecessary suffering, which doesn’t mean our resignation to a violent world. For the fully engaged heart is the antibody for the infection of violence. As our heart breaks with compassion, it strengthens itself and all of humanity. Can I prove this? No. Am I certain of it? Yes. We are still here. Immediately, someone says, “Barely.” But we are still here: more alive than dead, more vulnerable than callous, more kind than cruel — though we each carry the lot of it.

That we go numb along the way is to be expected. Even the bravest among us, who give their lives to care for others, go numb with fatigue, when the heart can take in no more, when we need time to digest all we meet. Overloaded and overwhelmed, we start to pull back from the world, so we can internalize what the world keeps giving us. Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to return: to open our hearts once they’ve closed, to open our souls once they’ve shied away, to soften our minds once they’ve been hardened by the storms of our day.

(Mark Nepo [source])

(Aside: as I said, I myself know little about Mark Nepo. But this isn’t his first appearance at RAMH, all of them on Fridays, unsurprisingly. Maybe I should dive a little deeper.)

The day before the shooting, whiskey river added the following, which feels like something of a postscript to Nepo’s piece:

Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates — take back your mind and your body and begin to engage with the fact that you are alive, you are going to die, nobody knows what being alive is and nobody knows what dying is. You’re involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder. There is no mundane dimension, really. If you have the eyes to see it, it’s all transcendental.

(Terence McKenna [source, apparently])

When the news is so appalling that it seems everyone is talking about it — especially online — what else, really, can be said? I don’t feel equipped to inspire people to action, one way or the other. I have no “power” — not even readership, really. It’s fun to fantasize myself in the role of a latter-day knight-errant, roaming the Internet and rallying people — Americans — to a cause…

But there are so many causes to rally them to.

One thing I’ve noticed — from my position on the left of the spectrum — is that we become outraged over causes in seriatim, one at a time. We’re outrage generalists: we freak out about guns, and then there’s a climate disaster on one coast or another, and then there’s a heinous law passed in State A (and copycat laws in States B, C, D, and E), and then… Personally, I think we suffer from then-exhaustion. It never stops. And when it seems momentarily to have backed off, for relief we turn to the media (news and social) for fresh, if less consequential, subjects of outrage: celebrity scandals, foreign wars, music and other artistic works which are, in truth, no worse than not my taste, of course the egos of the super-rich and -famous.

I wish it were possible for us to organize ourselves along more specialized lines, without trying to fix it ALL. It can’t ALL be fixed at once, and it can’t ALL be fixed by parceling out our outrage, pointlessly, in bursts which last only as long as the current news cycle. But if we could just group ourselves, y’know? Cluster, with others of like mind, around the one cause we feel most motivated to act on and competent to contribute to, actively and not passively. Sure, there would be drift, if for no other reason than to prevent burnout on the ramparts. But a little drift out and back would be healthy, renewing our own spirits and reigniting our own passions (as well as those of the new, temporary group)…

Wish-fulfillment, no doubt. But ask the bees and the ants, ask— oh, hell, I don’t know; ask the members of any other damned social species except humans. They’ll tell you. Just look at them. They don’t all work on solving every single problem facing the group. They don’t work in series, either. (Picturing the discussion: “Okay gang, now let’s all run over here and tackle this mess!” “But what about the mess we’re already tackling? It’s still a mess—” “Don’t worry! We’ll get back to it!” Etc. Ridiculous.) They work in parallel. The drones do this. The workers do that. The hunters do one thing, and the nurturers the other.

Could we?