I've spent the last five years caregiving (again). This time for my dear mother, who insisted on celebrating her 98th birthday and then departed for heaven the next month. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to write about the incredible challenges of getting adequate care for her. Writing my other blog, Dwindling Light, about my husband's long decline from dementia was enough. I couldn't do it again.
Between caregiving and the plague years and then settling my mother's estate, I didn't do much else until recently. But I did write. A lot. Three book manuscripts, four short stores, a myriad of poems that need editing. And now I feel ready to share my work with the world again. But what to share?
What would provide some succor, some strength, maybe some levity, to others in this very difficult passage we are all rowing through together? The waves are high. The rocks are higher. Our boats seem small and flimsy. And the dark tide runs fast into a future that, frankly, doesn't look that appealing. No dawn-drenched quiet bay ahead. At least not for awhile.
But there is this: we have each other. We have a loving God. At least, I think so. My focus during this Lenten/Ramadan/Passover season is to let that God love me. To simply open my aperature wide enough to let the warm comforting light in. Just for now, to stop yelling at God. To stop asking why?, why? and why? both personally and in terms of our collapsing climate, the horrible internicine wars of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, or the continued flood tide of racism, autocracy and neo-fascism.
In the midst of these, there are shifts in focus that can help me (and, I think, anyone) find something like peace. Not for more than a few moments at a time, and not in the distractions of electronic media and fan-dom. But perhaps in an early walk on a still chilly spring morning, rosy-fingered dawn and all; perhaps in a few minutes of play with the neighbor's lopping half-grown puppy; perhaps in taking deep breaths while listening to lesser goldfinches cheep and whistle, and the creeks bounding down to the nearby river.
These are not ways to combat sorrow. The ache in my chest remains--for the children of Gaza, the hostages' families, for subSaharan Africa, for families sweltering in camps at the border, for tigers and penguins and stranded whales. But these gracious time-outs revive my soul.
It's such an old word, soul. Saxon in origin, related to zeal. Unrelated to the gendered Greek forms, anima and animus. How much do we think about soul in our daily lives? The very liveliness of life? We forget that there is more to our experience than its physical impact, more to grief than the heaviness. There's a soulfulness to being here. The soul that's at the same time observing thought and action and also communing with other souls, and the Great Soul Creator.
Maybe that's why we are so stricken with these sorrows all around us. Our souls are not protected from them anymore; the internet brings them to us in all our waking hours. It's been a long time since we've legitimately been able to plead ignorance of evil. And our souls are watching, sighing and hurting when we pretend we don't know, claim it's always been this bad.
It's always been something, sometimes very global and very terrible, like smallpox or the plague, like World War Two. But now the terror has sunk into our bones, our animal memory. I think that's why there is such a craze for science fiction and dark fantasy, especially in the young. They are hunting for a way to normalize, at least regularize, the likelihood that the world will be in very bad shape by the time they are responsible adults who will have to somehow fix it or cope with it or hide from it. It's escapism, yes, but also maybe training.
The problem is when anticipating darkness actually creates that darkness. That's my concern about people's response to global climate collapse. That the appeal of dark authoritariabisn will pull us into the maw of the thing we fear. that the desire to go unconscious may shape a future of passive horror, like Nazi Germany but a hundred times worse.
So the hope has to lie in encouraging the human capacity to remain awake, to rest and re-soul ourselves in a loving God, to talk together about how we feel at this dreadful moment and what will get us through the dark passage, into the light.
