Please forgive me for going on and on about this.

Call this a spoonful of sugar.
 

Someone who read my previous blog post said that current political conflicts are nothing new and that they are “nothing that a simple healing patch of behavior can end.” Whoever suggested the divisions in our country could be ended with a Bandaid? Not I. There is no magic pill or, God forbid, silver bullet, either.

 

The hate-filled divisions are real and heartbreaking. The cruelty is heartbreaking. And yes, the seeds of division and hate have always been there, from the beginning of our history, and – let’s admit it – there is no way for all Americans to come together completely and permanently. 

Storm clouds!

Where does that leave us, though? Having faced that reality, what are our choices? What do we do now? 

 

- Continue to scream at each other and escalate the domestic arms race – until what happens? 

 

- Or give up and retreat into bitterness, each of us, for the rest of our lives? 

 

Please forgive me if I reject those as viable options. 

 

Let’s me make the question personal for myself. Who am I going to be for the remainder of my life on earth? Do I want, while alive, to add to the world’s storehouse of love or to its arsenal of hate? Will I be grateful for my life or choose to be miserable and blame my misery on evolution and world history? Take the most selfish view possible, if you like: As far as I see, it points in the same direction as altruism. 

Both sides now --

This morning (still dark, these long mornings of autumn’s waning daylight, and I am in the autumn of my life, too, my time growing ever shorter), it occurred to me that America’s present crisis is deepened, if not entirely driven, by grief. We have all experienced loss, and it hurts, and we don’t know what to do with that pain. Readers of this blog, as well as my close friends, know that personal grief has been with me for a while now. Grief. Shock. Paralysis. Disbelief. Mourning. Life torn apart, never again to be a shining whole, the companion of my days and nights forever gone. 

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,” wrote the poet Auden in his own grief. He ends his poem with, “For nothing now can ever come to any good.” Is that what you feel about your country? The world? Your life? 

 

(Had Auden been wrong, as he writes in this poem, to think that love would last forever? What do you think?)

 

For myself, I can’t afford to let myself feel that “nothing now can ever come to any good.” Two seven-year-old boys, great-grandsons of the man I loved, are at the beginning of their lives, as are so many little children whose lives are only now beginning. It’s too big a job, yes – I can’t control the course of the future, true – but I can’t give up and crawl into a hole and die, either.

I live in a beautiful place.

I realize that I am a lucky woman, spared the anger that many people suffer in the throes of grief. My husband was 85 years old and had followed his passion and found success as an artist. The beauty of his work lives on. The two of us had a second chance to make a rich life together, to make our dreams come true, even (priceless gift!) to grow old together. And at the end, we had time to say goodbye. So Fate spared me anger and resentment and gave me gratitude, and I am grateful to have had that through the grief his death brought. 

 

But despair? Heavens, yes! Grief goes on and on, and despair, while it doesn’t fill every hour, lurks around every corner, ready always (especially in those first, early, dark hours of morning) to jeer sarcastically, “What’s the point? Why bother? He is never coming back!” And that, my friends, is hard.

 

Like a wounded animal, I needed to be alone before I could face the world again, and I still need time alone even now, but already in those first weeks a demanding puppy did not allow me to stay in bed with my head under the covers, and once back in Michigan there was my bookstore to open, David’s gallery to arrange, grass to mow, the puppy to exercise and train. Looking back at May 2022 from October 2023, I see now that it was good for me not to have available the escape of total isolation.

 

Anger. Despair. Pain. What about exhaustion? Grief is exhausting. So much of life can be exhausting! The ongoing crisis mode of American politics is exhausting. So yes, we all need to take time out when we need to, when we can. 

 

And then? What?

Even under cloudy skies, with winter coming --

Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes not to give up, to keep living. Whatever it takes not to be cruel, not to be mean, not to seek revenge. A cat to feed, a dog to walk. Grass to mow, books to sell. Books and poems to read and write. Flowers and trees to plant and tend. Other people with their own griefs, who need an understanding listener as they struggle. Whatever it takes. One day, sometimes one hour at a time – which is the only way we ever truly live, anyway.

 

Not simple. Not easy. Often – let me say a challenge. (Let me say challenge rather than a struggle. Though either word is descriptive, I seek strength in choosing my words.) 

 

In every era, certain words get overused and lose their power in daily speech, but consider – amazing, awesome. The gift of life is one none of us had to earn. Human beings did not invent or build this glorious planet. Who, reflecting on the gift of life, can see it as anything less than amazing? Who, looking at the beauty and force and age of the universe, can see it as otherwise than awesome?

Unquenchable life!

Let me end today with an idea from my most-beloved philosopher, Henri Bergson. (Here is an interesting take on Bergson that I hadn’t read before but found congenial.) One of Bergson’s most basic and important insights was this: 

 

The “road ahead” (the future) is not there. 

We build our road as we travel through life.

 

My images today are from the world around me. Thanks for reading.

Always renewing.

You’re Not Getting a Complete Picture

The other morning I had an e-mail from a reader of this blog that read, “Pamela, I have just read yesterday's blog. Your dedication to loving life inspires the same in me!”

I do love life. Indeed, what else is there? Everything else for the human species — love, honor, integrity, good deeds, art literature, our very appreciation of beauty in the natural world — depends on our being alive and receptive and responsive. At the same time, we all need reminders of the wonder of life, such as this one I found in the words of a Western painter:

...You’re a little biological entity that has some very miraculous sensory organs, and you have a brain so you can organize it and understand it partially. And you’re fragile. You live a very short time in a hostile, and yet friendly, universe because you evolved in the ecology in which you live. And you can either shrink from the world in fright and try to avoid the reality of your perishability and sense of being no more, or you can throw yourself into it and say it’s an adventure. And I’m going to drink it to the full and experience what I can and record what I can, and distill and understand what I can. 

- Wilson Hurley, painter, in an interview, in WILSON HURLEY: A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION

Reader, thank you for your message and for the subject heading you gave it: “Grateful.” I am grateful for your words of encouragement! It helps to know that anything I’ve written was able to help someone else! 

Look for the singing bird

The truth is, though, that I do not put my whole life online in this blog (or anywhere else), and if you think I don’t have dark nights of the soul, you would be very mistaken. Sometimes (though these have been uncommon lately, I’m happy to say) I even have dark days of the soul. Thinking that warm spring days had arrived, for example, I found it difficult to be plunged back once more into freezing nights and winter-cold days filled with bitter, relentless wind — and the coincidence of learning, as another overcast morning dawned, seeming to dawn with grudging reluctance, learning that same morning that someone I had believed was dedicated to the betterment of the world and the downtrodden is working instead with very different aims than those he states publicly — well, that coincidence brought me very low, very low indeed. And even on the best of days, a dark current often runs intermittently beneath and behind the brightness, because the general direction of our government these days and of world governments and societies in general is not one I can see as “bending toward justice” or likely to create a better life for future generations. 

It is not disagreement, as such, that weighs heavily on my heart but the hatred and vitriol that too often accompany it. Why should other Americans brand me an enemy because our beliefs about the country’s good differ? Was one bloody Civil War not enough? This hatred makes my heart heavy. The wise counsel dialogue, and I have tried to initiate dialogue — on violence and on partisan politics, attempting to allow myself to be vulnerable in hopes that those who see me wrong would not see me as an enemy but as someone with whom they could share not only their views and beliefs but also their reasons and feelings. What I got back, other than encouragement from friends already in agreement with me, was a resounding silence.

So if you see me as flying above political tumult and dwelling in another, simpler, more lighthearted reality than anyone else, you see a partial picture at best! Should I correct my presentation of self by including pessimistic gloom, despair, and nightmares in these posts? And if I’m not going to do that, why even mention the bleak side of my mind and heart today?

Little tree of thorns

Thorns, yes

But it is also full of life

I asked a friend, a writer and artist, how she managed to maintain her sunny, upbeat attitude in today’s difficult national climate. I wish I could remember precisely her response, but it went something like this: “I’m trying to lead with my strength.” Happiness was not her only emotional state, you see, but the one she chose to share with others. She chooses, continually, to share her strength, rather than her weakness.

Painter Wilson Hurley was not unaware of his own “perishability” but chose not to dwell on that and live in fear. Neither am I unaware nor unaffected by the ills of the world and the horrors perpetrated by mankind, but I refuse to let that aspect of reality blind me to the wonders of life and the world, which are equally real. (Besides, as I say, my attempts to invite dialogue on the sorrow and anger infecting us all went nowhere, and beating a dead horse is the last ploy of the defeated.)

“Il faut lutter,” my friend Hélène wrote to me long ago. “Il faut se blinder contra la vie.” She had lived through war, had lost her husband to other women (not one but many), had no children or any other living relatives, and her old age was spent in poverty, every day a struggle — but she never, even while retaining a sharp mind and keen awareness of world events, never lost her charming, childlike joy in pleasures that required no expenditure of money: the song of a bird, a letter from a friend, sunshine through her window falling on her “little garden” of potted herbs. These were her armor, talismans in the struggle not to lose her love of life. She was really not barricading herself against life, you see, but only against life’s sorrows, and she used life’s joys for her barricade. Even that doesn’t fully capture it. Rather, the joy in a bird’s song for a while took precedence over any other thought or sensation. My friend was not hiding from reality behind a barricade of birdsong, because the singing of the bird was as real as anything else and worthy of attention. 

What brings us joy is as worthy of attention as the flaws of the world we would mend if we could. Is that better? We will be here only a short time, and each of us has a different way we can help others. Sharing joy can be one of those ways, as my American artist-writer friend and my Parisian friend Hélène showed me. 

So I am not going to delve publicly into my fears and sorrows here on “Books in Northport” and only bring them up at all to say to anyone else who feels sad or fearful or pessimistic or hopeless, today or any other day or night: You probably feel alone, but you are not the only one. To be alive, to be human, is to struggle.

But where do you, where might you, find joy? What do you, might you, love? This winter I find my bliss in the sublime indifference of mountains and desert I love more each day, as well as in the companionship of my husband and our dog and our neighbors. Also in the peaceful nearness of cattle and horses. The occasional butterfly on a warm day. And all these are real aspects of the real world.

Passing through

What the future holds, none of us knows. We are passing through life, and all we have is today. For now I am here. And so, if I can share even the smallest quotient of my happiness or maybe “inspire” someone else to find it wherever he or she may, please consider these seasonal retirement postings as my “mite” for the collection plate. For now, it is what I have to give. On my good days. And if you want something cheerier from me today, go back to March 28, 2015. The sun sets, the sun rises. 

Sunrise

Sources of Fatigue

Physical illness, depression, and normal aging can all sap one’s energy, but those sources aren’t the ones on my mind today. I’m thinking about what has come to be called “compassion fatigue” and the more recent tag, “outrage fatigue,” a phrase I only ran across last Friday for the first time but instantly recognized as a diagnosis I could claim. “Outrage fatigue,” I noted on Facebook. “Yep. That about sums it up.”

[Until correcting the paragraph above on 10/31, I had typed--but not intended--to say that compassion fatigue "about summed it up." I meant "outrage fatigue," and that's what I had posted on Facebook. I find outrage infinitely more tiring than compassion.]

A friend quickly cautioned that they are counting on our fatigue. (Aren’t these sides fatiguing in themselves? Sadly, they are very real, and that’s discouraging, too.) So, the outragers and their staunch supporters are confident that the rest of us will eventually turn our backs on the struggle for justice: that is my friend’s very important reminder to me.

When I diagnose myself as fatigued by outrage, however, I don’t prescribe for myself or anyone else a permanent flight from reality. Just a break! An evening away from the news, at the very least, because let’s face it – every day there is news to outrage the ideals of civility, decency, and fairness, to use a few simple, old-fashioned terms.

After I’ve had a little break, however, I go back to dig deeper into the idea of compassion and outrage fatigue, and, underneath both, what I find is a despair bred of feelings of helplessness.

If we are called upon, day after day, to feel compassion but feel we can do nothing to ease suffering, we feel helpless, and helplessness is only one step away from despair. If we are outraged, over and over, but feel powerless, we are vulnerable to despair, too. And the horrid thing about despair is that it paralyzes – and when we allow paralysis to get a grip on us, we truly are helpless.

Here’s something else I think I see: a connection between outrage and compassion. If we ourselves are not being personally victimized, why should we feel outrage except for the fact that we also feel compassion for those who are?

So what can we do with our compassion and our outrage?

I took Sunday off from the cares and problems of “the world” and spent hours cleaning floors, catching up on laundry, making soup, filing, recycling, and giving the dog a bath. It felt good to address tasks I could accomplish in a single day, with nothing but determination and raw physical energy. An added benefit (in addition to a clean dog and clean house and clothes) is that taking action to address these ordinary little home jobs also energizes me for larger, more difficult tasks, the kind that can’t be accomplished in a day but require dedication over the long haul. Little successes remind me that I am not powerless.

Neither, of course, am I Superwoman. No one is (and no one is Superman, either). Bigger tasks cannot be resolved in a single day. Family, friendship, community, country – whenever human beings are involved, there’s no shortcut to a long relationship, and I fully expect to leave this world with the struggle for justice still going on. Well, so what? Is that an excuse for shrugging off my own responsibility? I don’t think so.

Other people with good, positive, constructive, feasible ideas are pioneers who break trails for the rest of us. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, and The Revolution Where You Live: Stories From a 12,000-Mile Journey Through a New America, by Sarah van Gelder will be books that help me move forward.

One day at a time? It’s the only option on life’s table.