Listen to the crows in the back garden. They are saying something.
In the crepuscule blue I hold myself, I heal myself. For once, I do not think of you.
…
An hour later the crows are still talking, this time on the other side of the house. It is late, but they remain inexplicably active. Planning revolution, I suppose.
…
everything
everything
everything
is waiting for you
(David Whyte)
…
She called it quantum enlightenment, and then, compassionable wisdom. I had never heard of such things, never seen such a mirror. It sounded beyond the capacities of a bounded being. Then she laughed and made an offhand comment about Jesus – “He was a popular guru, don’t you know?”
This is what makes you an animal — the power to feed yourself, and take control. Owning the face that you mirror. Don’t give up, she says, give in. Give into it. Feel that ground force reaction, the negotiation between two bodies of energy. Celebrate your connection to the earth, in your feet and in your hands as they reach out and feel the bark on the tree, the tender grass. Receive something fearful in a soft way, as a gentle wave might wash over your body on the sand. Accept the existence of something bigger than our mind’s manipulations.
Fight. Freeze. Flight.
Are these our only options?
Here we take ownership. Here we look in the mirror. Here we confront and celebrate our ability to produce and create and live. Trust the stability of this unceasing gravity. Trust the instincts you feel in your belly. And trust the facts, even if they change day by day. Create a ritual and live in that trust, find the pleasure in it. Trust me, there is pleasure there in the cracks.
(Just give me a little night music, then send in the clowns.)
Here we celebrate our ability to live.
…
On this day in Berlin there are clouds, and soon to be rain. I lay claim to facts that may still change, but one of them is, that I am not her, the woman from South Sudan, living in the middle of America, a refugee from war, orphaned at the age of 6, now working since some years in a meat packing plant, supporting her three children as well as a family back home.
A lot, a lot, a lot of people have died that I know, she says. At least 40.
All the data points in the same direction — systemic racism, proximity to environmental hazards, and then a thing they call “weathering,” which is basically the physiological reaction to the accumulated stress of racism.
“Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? And, having flayed them with the lash, have they not cast them alive to be devoured by worms, or onto anthills, or lashed them to stakes in the swamp to be devoured by mosquitoes? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup? Have they not put men and women inside barrels studded with spikes and rolled them down mountainsides into the abyss? Have they not consigned these miserable blacks to man-eating dogs until the latter, sated by human flesh, left the mangled victims to be finished off with bayonet and poniard?”
I’m feeling as good as I can be, she says.
Her husband should have had a Second Line funeral. He was an active member of the Zulu Club, known for his gumbo and open door Sunday dinners. The Social Aid and Pleasure Club, filling in the gaps of society’s vast inequality. We help each other bury our dead, we help each other celebrate life. We help each other, like a family should, sharing benefits and burdens.
Egg salad sandwiches, pickles, and peaches and cream. Pure Americana. That is what we have on our porch today, and what’s mine is yours, like always.
Scared me into life, he said. If I don’t know what I’m fighting I can’t fight it. The enemy of singularity. Our greatest mistake is to think we are alone in this.
Here to reimagine suffering, the existence of suffering, the duration of it. Move into the crisis, lean into it. Make your own bargain with the human condition. Make yourself the tiniest speck in the biggest universe. Rush towards the meaninglessness.
Below us the earth is rumbling, and all around, waves are flowing. What makes us feel stable in this world besides taking ownership of our place in it?
Make people drop their jaw, he said. Take pleasure in that, at least.
He came out at 18, started taking ballet classes while in business school. A Polish man that looks like God gets in a kayak and paddles across the ocean. Three times. Risking his life beyond normal measure and prepared to lose it with a smile of contentment.
That’s how God dies, with a smile. And his son dances.
Embrace the uncertainty of it all, enjoy the setting sun before the night of what’s to come. None of this is certain. It all depends upon what we do. Our state of mind and our corresponding actions.
That paramedic from Colorado, the veteran head of his crew, inspiring all the young ones, showing them, what to do. Then he succumbs, then he falls, then he dies, and they are all left watching. Left to act in his stead and become their own leaders.
Some deep and tender part of me is the one that thinks of you tonight. It makes me smile, in spite of myself. It makes me want more fun. More laughter. More leopard print sunsets. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and in my mind I turned to you and said, Don’t you think it’s just incredible?
Wearing love like armor. It could be your mother, your lover, your brother or yourself. But make it mean something. Reveal yourself like you have nothing to hide. Give a self-affirming embrace.
Okay are you ready?
Let go. You did it.
Don’t be afraid to keep shining. Don’t be afraid to keep singing like the clowns.
The world is full of surprises, the Governor says. Fool me once. You’re being foolish if you think this isn’t going to happen again. It was all wishful thinking, after that first superstorm hit. And then came the next. That was an eye opener for us all.
Now we must keep our eyes open. Rogue is the new normal, people; better get used to it.
The last question is for YOU, he says, with a smile. She was left speechless. Here we are swimming in this ocean of bittersweet beauty, just trying to get to the other side with a broken rudder and no power left in our devices.
After a day of clouds the sun comes out to set and reflect on the walls around me. It is a fragile opening, at best. One that occasionally looks over its shoulder to the good old days, even against our better judgment. Stay the course, straight ahead. The dreaming detour is not relevant at this moment.
Like this I give you the chronological order of my day, intentionally unresolved.
It is time for a Public Service Announcement. Aka, go outside and listen to the birds sing. There is a tree that is blooming with big white petals that look like leaves and when they fall on the ground they almost melt under peoples’ footsteps, dissolving into the gravel until they cannot be seen. Night falls slowly now and there are not so many people out. I make my peace with the pieces of the day and give my strength to the ground, step by step.
In New York people are creating a Public Service Announcement about masks. Because for some reason, maybe the Governor’s lack of persuasive communication skills, some people (still) don’t seem to get it. The Governor is going to go hoarse asking people, telling people, to Wear A Mask, so instead let’s have the New Yorkers say it themselves. All those creatives sitting at home in Brooklyn, get to work. Show us what we have to lose, what we have to gain, by coming together in this time. Make me tear up, not because I’m wearing a mask, but because you all care so damn much.
“I know That Guy, by the way,” says the Governor. “See him every day.”
Some well-intentioned but misinformed friend biding out quarantine in Bali posts something about learning from our Neanderthal ancestors how to stay well in this time, implying that masks are unnecessary. I comment that I find this position questionable. Love is the answer to all questions, he says, <heart emoticon> <heart emoticon>, and I decide not to bother mentioning that the Neanderthals went extinct, by the way.
The president continues to microdose on Hydroxychloroquine despite all doctors’ orders and in meantime loses face with Fox News. Seems the followers have started to question the authority of the bully ordering them around. Finally. Club Sanity in the Republican Party seems to have at least a few members not willing to go down with the ship.
“Let me give you a little context so you don’t get lost in the details,” the Governor says, “These are what you call, ‘lagging indicators.’”
One of the reporters calls into question the system of contact tracing.
“First of all,” says the Governor definitively, “This is not a shoddy system. It is comprehensive, exhaustive. This reporting system does not come from the gospel, either — we just made it up.”
Give us a little credit, will you?
Alas, it appears the reporter has little credit to give.
“This is an accusation you are facing,” she says in a strained voice. I say strained to disguise the fact that I find her questions banal and annoying. I believe she is the one who asked repeatedly about or not the Governor regretted any or all of the decisions he has made as Executive Officer, the one who seems ever ready to focus on trash on the beach, rather than the pretty shells. The Governor, however, seems used to it. It’s a bad day, he says, when we aren’t getting sued by at least three people.
Meanwhile, the disproportionate suffering of the black and Latino communities is not lost on him. We are creating targeted strategies to highly impacted zones, he says, working with faith-based networks. Strange how people abandon faith, as they move up the rungs of the social ladder. And yet it is our faith that so often provides social aid and pleasure.
What does your zip code profile say about you? What does it say, about what could happen to you?
On this evening I turn up Whitney Houston, and ask for the discovery of a higher love. One deep within, or in the stars above. Think about it, there must be a higher love. Without it, life is wasted time. Look inside your heart, and I’ll look inside mine.
Things look so bad everywhere. In this whole world, what is fair?
Where’s that higher love I keep thinking of?
Well, says the Governor, nothing is pre-destined. It is a consequence of your choices and your actions. As well as those of the people that surround you, and whether or not they wash their hands and wear their masks. The government can’t mandate the behavior of people, but social pressure can.
I would have lost a lot on this bet, he says. Who would have imagined, that all the front line workers, all the police officers, all the transit workers, have a LOWER infection rate than the general population? Than people staying at home? Than all those hippie Neanderthals walking around with their proud immune systems?
(Those last words were mine, not his.)
But this is clearly becoming his favorite fact. The fact of the mask. The fact that the mask actually works.
Here we gather, even at a distance, in good faith. All our internal displacement put aside. The lack of any kind of centralized system causing a default hive mentality to begin presenting. All the independent individuals of the West, threatened by the Eastern hive, and at the same time, they are beginning to like it inside the hive.
All of us except Seinfeld, it seems.
“What else is annoying in the world besides everything?”
One can only suppose the pearls of his humor are born out of extreme irritation. I allow the soundtrack of my evening to be dictated by these same bourgeois creatives from Brooklyn that might otherwise annoy me in Prospect Park. But tonight they are refined, understated. Seems the algorithms work best when your source material is most diverse. As one New Yorker once told me, your soundbite needs to be both interesting, and concise.
At the time I was coming from Vermont. Seems we had more time to chat up there. More clowns to sing, more rounds to circle. Greater distances between destinations, and perhaps more proximity, in the end. More snow drifts, anyway.
In some parts of the country the virus spreads, unchecked. In the locations where we have come together in common sense it has been contained, and tamed, this beast that we were made to encounter, perhaps it became our strange teacher, if not a friend. For it taught us what is truly important, the force of our life.
Lest we offend you
You overworked gravediggers
You are welcome here
Good night.