“The time-out-of-joint which we called the time of strangeness lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which is to say, 1000 nights, and one night more. And yes, we have lived another 1000 nights since those days, but we are all forever changed by that time. Whether for better or for worse, that is for our future to decide.” (Salman Rushdie)
To love the beautiful mind — even and including your own. Our collective meditation.
I go out into the night and find lilacs to twirl around. The sun is setting gloriously and ominously all at the same time. It is the implicit curfew these days, sunset, and though she is getting later by the day, the tone definitely changes as soon as she goes away.
There are now tape strips outside every store, instructing one to the appropriate amount of distance one must keep. The guy in the corner store seems stressed. I get my beer and go home with my lilac. Nothing else to do but keep my distance. Soothing nothingness in the age of the irrational.
(Why don’t you give me another chance to fail you? I dare you.)
Earlier in the park I felt like I was in Japan. Was it because it looked like Japan, with the forest of rhododendrons? Or perhaps because my state of mind felt like it should in Japan, calm and expansive, noticing day-to-day changes as they happen.
“You know when you know they’re nice? When the going gets tough, then you know if they’re really nice.” That’s what the Governor’s grandmother says, and in this moment it is all the more true and relevant. We are in a pressure cooker of character, both weaknesses and strengths exploding. Both the best and the worst rises to the surface. And sure, some people are going to break your heart. The people you wanted to be there by your side, rock solid, maybe they aren’t. Under the pressure they just crumble. But then there are others, sometimes ones you’d least expect, and there they are, rising to the occasion. God bless them. How beautiful is that? Life is options, and I guess it is a choice sometimes, if you let yourself crumble, or if you choose to meet the next wave as it is rising up again.
Paddle Paddle Paddle. If you’re lucky you just might catch it.
On Rikers Island there is a man in his 50s who wants to get out of prison. He speaks to his lawyer, a young woman, like his all-serving wife. You gotta get me out of here — I don’t care about anyone else — I’m gonna die in here. He has a health condition, attempted robbery while on parol last year, which landed him back in. When asked by a reporter if he was a threat to society, he said he couldn’t even walk. All the same, I wouldn’t let him out, not with that attitude. “I don’t care about anyone else”? Yeah, obviously you don’t. The only reason to let you out is to save the others, not because you deserve impunity. Like we said, this is Cause and Effect on steroids. To be in this together — that is not a white collar set of ethics, or a blue collar set of ethics, or red ethics, for that matter. It’s just doing what’s right, which is caring about others.
“Is it really so, that the one I love is everywhere?” (Tara Brach)
Spring seems to be turning quickly into summer and the streets smell like it, the breeze feels like it, the light looks like it, even if it isn’t the same like always.
(Are your hands chapped yet like mine, from all the washing ?)
I find my patience with social distance waning, in the sense that I almost mock it at times, but this has more to do with human stupidity than an opposition to public health. A woman waiting 15 feet in front of the door to the pharmacy seems both ridiculous and excessive and in any case lacks both fact and function. It is probably easy for us all to judge each other a little more right now. Many of our own triggers are already raised. Nonetheless I find the fact that the man stands 12 feet behind me a sad state of his character, and decide immediately I wouldn’t want to go to bed with him. Because it is all just so misplaced, misguided, rooted in fear and therefore smells like decay. This kind of distance is not going to save your life.
Leonard Cohen, in his famous blue raincoat, waiting in line for his prescription. I have a blue raincoat, let me wear it out. Songs of love and hate, aren’t you tired of it yet? Do we always have to be on opposite sides of the argument?
They want people to continue consuming, going into stores, driving cars, freedom from tyranny they say, freedom to die in a hospital using public funds if they want to, fighting all this arbitrary fascism that’s trying to save their lives.
In India, Mexico, and the Philippines, ignorant masses are throwing bleach on health care workers. Because supposedly they are dirty. Because they are actually saving your ungrateful lives. Maybe there are limits to insanity, but delusion, it seems, has no ends.
Today is the first day I wear face covering, and it is a baby blue bandana. A Puerto Rican friend from Jersey is already up-cycled ethnically stylish ones. I get the sense that maybe this is actually a thing now, just a part of life for a while, at least in the cityscape. Which is, really, all the reason more to move out to the land. I am already planning my exit, but for the meantime, this is what they are asking us to do. Or rather, maybe they were asking before, and I waited until they made it mandatory. But I’ll do it now, no complaints. I am a cooperating citizen. In action, it actually feels like a mandated practice in Pranayama, deep breathing, for society in general. Calms the nervous system, anyway, breathing in containment.
Does make you look a little funny, though, the mask, like I’m ready to rob a bank. But I’m happy with my cowgirl look, rather than construction worker or dentist or paramedic. I like the all-cotton version, thankyouverymuch. Will match my matte black Bronco perfectly. Let me even speak to you in Spanish, officer. Let me let you judge my legality, when you cannot see my face. All that facial recognition software, now thwarted. How’s that for human irony? We are always just getting in the way of ourselves. Giving ourselves more work to do than necessary. One of these days we will learn how to default into ease. Or at least be easy about it. Here in Germany, most citizens just wear their masks, without a large sense of conflict, of it being MY RIGHT to make a decision about whether or not to wear a mask. It’s just common sense at this point, and “The Commons” is a concept that seems to apply much more palpably in Europe than it does in America the Beautiful where people make a habit to fight against themselves for everything, just to be able to say it was their choice, that no authority controlled their liberties. Now in America, those liberties have already gathered 50,000 deaths. How about that for the justice of freedom? It is easy in the context to appreciate the German sense of order — here we are not submitting to a law, it is just a reasonable communal contribution to the preservation of public health.
(All the same this mask order meant I needed I pass a train by on the way back into town; couldn’t take my ice cream cone inside when you need to wear a mask.)
What an interesting job to be an ice cream scooper for a season, watch people’s personalities on display with not only their choices, but how they articulate, how clear or indecisive, and here, it’s just about ice cream. What happens once one scales up the content of the decision? Makes me smile, but no one knows that, because they can’t see behind my sunglasses and mask. Still I tell them invisibly that even though I can’t see your faces, I love you all, my masked companions here on the train. We are in it together, and here we are still on these unbelievably clean trains that are near empty.
We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in this — and the good is beautiful. Let us focus on that, design that system. Avoid attractive nuisances. Anticipate and plan ahead, be good scouts in this time. Communicate the circumstances and facts, and maybe not so many feelings, because we all have feelings, and they are all so complex, though maybe not always relevant.
We changed reality, are you aware of that? And yet, still, we need better systems. We have seen failures in this time of great measure. Exposed all our weakest links, both in society, as well as individuals. Values make us who we are; values like honor and dignity — on that level we all have the choice to become essential. We all have the choice to be valuable. We take action, in society, in our lives, and then monitor, how did these actions function? Did they serve us well? How about our willing to sacrifice, for we will always need to sacrifice. There is no relative context for death and no death that did not mark a life. It’s not about having medals on our jackets, we must find honor in our souls. We must live like our grandparents in the Great Depression, almost losing everything, but losing it together, and then living on.
In the ocean there are phosphorescent dolphins swimming through the bay, and we should take pleasure in the color of that water, the magic of it, the gleam of at least one part of the world in recovery. In the political landscape, We have yet to learn. We continue versus Them. Whoever They are, We are against Them. The dolphins don’t care, they’re just swimming around in phosphorescent water, but above surface, it’s still We against Them.
You know what? Let’s just stop for one moment the Partisanship.
Even in this moment when people are dying all over the country you still want to play your politics. I’m speaking to the families of people who died. Many people have died. Every day, still dying.
America is better than this. Better than what the government is representing. We are also bearers of charity, good neighbors on the prairie. THAT’S America, the Governor says, even though in truth there are still two Americas, two sides of men, and have been since the beginning of time. For while there are Americans of charity then and now, there were also the ones who road across the country with guns sticking out of the windows of trains, shooting buffalo dead for no reason, and those same good neighbors took over an entire continent, took away a continent, from people who were in most cases far more compassionate and simply not comprehending the degree of self-interest one side of humanity could have. They were ignorant, inexperienced with that side of what was to become America, with that side of the world. With that whole realm of dark selfish possibility.
Yes we are loving. We are loving because we have to be. Because there are many who are full of Greed and Hatred, and if we let them take over then where will we be?
Sometimes the people lead, and the politicians follow.
Just a little way of saying “we care.” A little dose of Humanity 101.
So get it done. If it makes some people unhappy, so what. Be nice, be clean, be human. Do not fall victim to the delusion of pity. It is a false choice to say we are taking away your home if you are sleeping in subway car. You have the option to stay in a shelter and get help, but you don’t have the option to stay in unsanitary conditions in a subway car. Sorry not sorry. Be better than that. Be better than sleeping in a dirty subway car. Sleep somewhere else, and we will clean it. Both of us will be doing something we haven’t done before. Society itself is being doused in Pinesol and getting a deep cleaning.
It starts with determination, he says, as if the existence of determination is self-evident. As if conviction is a common characteristic in your average human. As if determination, or lack thereof, isn’t after all the crux of so many other problems.
(Wait a minute, just so I get this straight, last week I had people outside protesting that they want to go back to work, now I’ve got people trending #extendthelockdown? Welcome to America. By the way both sides are operating on emotion, not fact. Just for the record. Just so we’re all on the same page. It’s the soundtrack of an election season tailgate party, and not only is that illegal, it’s like poison right now.)
Meanwhile in Deutschland people are protesting the death of their summer holidays, and in the back garden there is a woman singing Amazing Grace in the rain. Somewhere far away is the wail of sirens, while the drums continue to beat.
There are so many things to learn, and even more to remember. Like the fact that the stock market is not the economy, and that money does not mean abundance. Inequality is becoming a matter of life and death in these situations, and people are making a rush for safety. But my spending is your income, and vice versa. As human beings, to reciprocate we invest in each other. Without that action, the survival of democracy itself is in danger of being replaced by a de facto autocracy.
There’s a democratic nation that has become a dictatorship — that could be us within a year.
I wish our politicians were as good as our people, he said, responsible and resilient.
It’s bigger than any one of us, but not all of us. So we move on to the “Next Problem.” It’s like a bad game of dominos. Always easier to say No and point out impossibility, because change will always encounter opposition, because change is difficult and sometimes painful. But don’t get cocky. Don’t get arrogant. That’s a lesson in life.
I go out for a walk towards evening after the rains clear out. The sun is showering potent rays at this hour, on point and clear, a striking contrast to the surrounding clouds and wet asphalt. It appears as bright as I have ever seen it, and all the while, just looming in the side of the sky and fast approaching, a darkness like you’ve never seen, a huge ominous bank of clouds heading right for the ball of light in front of me.
Just keep your eye on the ball, I think. We just have to keep our eye on the ball, even when we can’t see it anymore, even when it is covered by clouds. A light this bright doesn’t just disappear because an individual area’s view is obscured. We might have to move to a higher elevation, but the sun is shining, it is still shining behind the clouds.
Just keep your eye on the ball.
It’s there, even if you can’t see it, I promise.