Heartache Over Ice
“Strange to say, it is death itself, making a final decision,
that rescues us once and for all from nonexistence...
What has once been can henceforth never not have
been...All is lost, so all is saved.”
Sometimes it's all too much, isn't it? The bickering and the dithering, the 'to mask or not to mask' as senators leave town while America goes hungry. Never mind that, if we had taken the pandemic seriously, we'd be through the worst of it by now, and maybe the Earth would be, too... if only.
Every night at 10 pm I join a circle of friends who go outside to pray for those in the community who are ill, mostly with Covid-19. I step out onto the deck and into the star-filled night. I am greeted by the silhouette of the pine. The scents of salt and green tinged with sage and the night-blooming flowers that unfurl in the suddenly late-summer garden. It's so incomprehensibly beautiful that the prayers that pour out of me are mostly songs I make up as I go, because what else is there at such a moment, except to sing to Earth's beauty and send it to those that are ill? There is no one to beseech. No deity to save us from what we have wrought, only the painstaking embroidery of our efforts to change our minds as quickly as possible, which means as slowly as needed, for as long as it takes, or, well, for as long as we have. And now my mind is empty of thoughts - but not the good kind of empty. Rather, it's the emptiness of lost momentum as wonder meets the jagged edge of despair because it feels like all our lives are flickering and about to go out, even as we adore what's left.
What I mean is that there's a gap in my heart between the glow of the Milky Way, the way it reflects on the water and illuminates the garden - imagine, enough starlight to see by! - and the headlines that, day by day, clang our doom. I can feel the floodgates waiting to release the gush of keening pent up in my chest as I read that the Greenland ice sheet has collapsed beyond the point of no return. How, exactly, does one respond to such a thing, even as it spins in the torrent that has already swept it away to make room for the next calamity, and the one after that?
Between news of police shootings, white supremacists and Trump's latest birther bullshit, I skim the headlines (bad idea?) and see that desperate beachgoers in the UK have left their garbage to cover the sand they've crowded onto, including, according to one woman who helped clean it up, their "small suitcases, disposable barbecues and broken parasols." Suitcases? Parasols? Our beaches here are filled with garbage, too, of course.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I rashly thought that we humans were waking up to the beauty that is this Earth. Many of us felt it. Were we mistaken - as in, taken to the wrong place. Sometimes, at moments like this, poetry is the only thing that actually helps. I think of Robert Bringhurst's gorgeous Sutra of the Heart. In it, he says,
The heart is a white mountain
left of center in the world.
The heart is dust. The heart is trees.
The heart is snowbound broken
rock in the locked ribs of a man
in the sun on the shore of the sea who is dreaming
sun on the snow, dreaming snow on the broken
rock, dreaming wind, dreaming winter.
Is it only in death that what we love becomes real? Or is there a way of conjuring wholeness that can bypass the headlines, and the fact-by-fact realization of what's at stake, in order to build the will to transform?
My mind has been on dreaming these days, because I've been writing about Liberia, and how the dreams and the elephants came after the civil war, with a mandate that everyone recognized: come together to mourn what was lost in order to welcome the peace that will follow.
Lately, I haven't been dreaming. So, just now, I said out loud, "Please show me a dream from before, the one that I need right now," as I opened my journal at random. There I read, from April 4th, a dream I had forgotten about - of being in Africa, surrounded by elephants. They said, "We've been waiting for you to wake up." I asked them what to do and told them we felt so helpless. They said, "We would rather die and disappear than continue like this, in these small patches, everything so fragmented. This has happened before, perhaps it will keep happening until the humans 'get it'." I told them, "We do not accept this outcome. We do not want to be part of a failed effort." The elephants said, "Tell the sacred stories. It will feed them." Water burbled up out of the ground like a fresh spring and I heard, 'This is how the stories will feel to the people.' There are Sacred Stories, the ones from long ago that will always be so. And there are the sacred stories that occur every day, in each of our lives. We must tell them. All. Meaning, we must tell all the stories, and all of us must speak the sacred stories we have lived and are living now.
One of the original Liberia dreams concluded with the words, Everything is ready. We understood this to mean that, in another realm, preparations had been made and the way was open, if we were willing to align with the possibility of that promise. And so, I wonder: Is that still true? And, if it is, what, exactly, is being asked of us - besides everything? I ask that sincerely. Yes, we must pick up our garbage. Yes, we must grieve. Yes, we must change everything, starting with ourselves. But, is it still true that Everything is ready? If so, what are the images that leapfrog past the headlines and the torment and lift us into a landscape so compelling that we no longer inhabit the world we knew before we closed our eyes?
