the cassandra pages

What is Real?

Snow-dusted fields near Lourdes-de-Joliette, Quebec. Watercolor, 6" x 9" in sketchbook.

Whether we feel like we're gradually sliding, or hurtling, into the new year, I think most of us agree that it is not without trepidation. It's hard to think of 2024 with some sort of glittery, jovial anticipation - not after the year just past, and not with our awareness of how rocky the next months are likely to be. I, for one, feel like I'm hurtling headlong, with very little control over external events. Which makes me feel like it's more important than ever to slow down, look around myself, and do some thinking. Not making resolutions, which I generally find unrealistic, but considering some ways to approach life in these unstable and uncertain times.

The first thing I'm trying to do is think about what's real, and that's probably why the first painting of the year is the one you see here -- a Quebec landscape in winter. We saw this scene from our car window when driving out to see friends in the countryside the day after Christmas, and I painted it quickly, from my photograph, on New Year's Eve. The snow is probably gone now; the effects of climate change are undeniable this year - we've had very little snow at all and the temperatures have been right around freezing, which is unseasonably warm. But the landscape itself -- its flatness, the small copses of trees in the plowed fields, the low foothills of the Laurentians in the distance -- remains very real and very much itself.

I'm still comforted by nature, even though the warming climate is frightening. I'm comforted by the clods of earth in the fields, the winter clouds, the shapes of trees and the wind blowing through them, the tiny branches and black trunks of trees, the tall dead grasses in shades of ochre, russet, beige and brown, the way the cold bites my cheeks, the taste of the apple in my hands. All of it is beautiful to me, and real, reminding me that I too am a natural being, I too am alive, with the capacity to observe, feel, and think.

The world inside my computer, which reflects the outer world of human beings and their actions, tells me what is happening, and I pay attention to that and think about it a great deal, sometimes taking actions as a result. But I don't have to scroll very far to see that my reality is quite different from that of many other people. Around the holidays, I was literally bombarded with posts by people who wanted to sell me something, or were striving to say "look at me!," with no apparent awareness that 22,000 people who four months ago were also eating, breathing, putting on clothes in the morning and making something to eat, changing their babies or going to work, going to school, and loving their beloveds, are no longer able to do anything at all. They are gone, dead, many not even properly buried. And the rest of the world is divided between those who are deeply aware of this, and those for whom it mean next to nothing. How are we to think about reality in such a situation? And as extreme as it is, this is just one area of deep concern affecting our lives and our futures.

To make things even more absurd, when the news (let alone social media) attempts to "move on" from these difficult topics, what they offer us becomes ever more bizarre. Yesterday the New York Times ran a piece about the danger of not cleaning one's navel; all the stuff that collects in there, the writer claimed, can build up to a point where surgery may be needed. "Have we really come to this?" I wondered. As if we don't have enough to worry about -- or maybe because we do -- does the news have to manufacture such absurdities for the already-anxious to obsess about? Have our powers of reasoning become so distorted and weak that no one even calls such drivel out for what it is? But of course it is only a short distance from our culture's obsession with celebrity and wealth and consumption to its hyper-anxiety about health and mortality amidst great privilege. Many of the institutions we once had more faith in, from the judicial system to universities as a bastion of free thought, to women's control over their own bodies, are under constant attack. Meanwhile the extinction of species continues at a staggering rate, almost unnoticed.

Many of us are struggling with the resulting dissonance between what we know to be right and true, and how much of the society around us, the government, and the media are acting. I don't think this is going to improve anytime soon; it is a feature of our world as we enter 2024.

Therefore I think it is a time to gird our loins, as the saying goes, and prepare for a long haul. Our armor needs to be whatever is the most real to us -- the people we love, books, art, music, our communities of friends, nature, animals, our faith if we have it -- and in continuing to do our deepest and most heartfelt work. We need to be prepared to take care of each other, to find hope in unexpected places and to share it, and take a very long view of the future.

 

Someone said to me recently that one advantage of getting older is having the perspective of years. I find that to be true. The world has gone through many dark times, seen many despots and dictators, seen wars, famines, plagues, and natural disasters, and the accompanying tragic, devastating losses. And then things change. In my own lifetime I've seen many pendulum-swings in politics; I've seen conservatism and progressivism and conservatism again; I've seen greater justice and the backlash against it. At the same time, there have been enormous advances in science, technology, and medicine that have saved and improved countless lives. The Cold War didn't become a nuclear apocalypse. Children don't die of polio and measles; far fewer adults are dying of AIDS than we once feared. The story is not entirely dark, even when we seem to be in dark times.

So I refuse to believe that humanity is doomed, even though I may not live to see the breakthroughs that help turn the tide of what we're living through now. I don't know what will happen, be lost or irrevocably changed, before that happens. But I am going to choose to be a hopeful person while not being an unrealistic one, and to try to see what I can do in my own small corner to keep hope alive. Being more mindful of my senses is one way to immerse myself in what is real and present in each moment of life -- and it's the best way I know to keep despair at bay.

 

Day by Day

Snow on the terrace. Fountain pen in sketchbook, 9" x 6". March 4, 2022.

A friend posted a cartoon the other day - you may have seen it - that was a variation of the little fish being eaten by successively bigger fishes. In this one, the earth was the little fish, the next bigger one, with its mouth open ready to grab the earth, was COVID, which in turn was about to be devoured by THE WAR, and then by the biggest one of all, CLIMATE CHANGE. It would be amusing if it weren't such a perfect illustration of all of our nightmares.

Coping, I freely admit, has been harder than ever as we watch the unfolding of a brutal war on our screens, and wonder, for the first time in many many years, about the possibility of a much larger conflict, and even nuclear war. I grew up during the Cold War, when the "Iron Curtain" was a reality in Eastern Europe, when Germany, and Berlin itself, were divided and people who tried to cross borders were shot, when the idea of speaking to a Russian or meeting a Russian in real life was something of fantasy. Even arts or sports exchanges were extremely rare. When the term "glasnost" became associated with Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, I had already lived more than 30 years with an entirely different idea of what the Soviet Union represented than a 35-year-old person must have now. At that time, we were involved in a Vermont initiative called "Bridges for Peace" that helped facilitate some of the first citizen exchanges between the US and the USSR, and while we didn't travel to the Soviet Union ourselves, I remember the preparatory meetings, and the first gathering where we welcomed a group of heavily-chaperoned Soviet citizens, heard their impressions, and had a chance to ask questions. One person remarked on his astonishment at the size of our grocery stores and the amount and variety of food available. A few years later, there were visits by Russian musicians and choirs; each time, it seemed, they had a little more freedom, and acted more relaxed, so that eventually we could simply be people together sharing meals and an art form that we all loved.

The Iron Curtain fell, the Soviet Union broke apart, but the West has changed too. We take so much about our present lives for granted; we are so complacent.

Porcelain doll with broken hand. Fountain pen in sketchbook, 9" x 6". March 7, 2022.

I've felt heartbroken by current events, as well as frightened, and not just for the Ukrainian people. Even if it is contained, the ramifications of this war will be felt by all of us, and who knows where it will end: are we, in fact, going back to the Cold War years? Will all the diplomatic, economic, and collaborative progress of the last forty years be lost? What about nuclear containment? What kind of weapons will be unleashed? Will nuclear facilities be protected, or will there be another horrific event like Chernobyl? Will the conflict spread to Eastern and then Western Europe? It's unthinkable. The scale of the risk is so much greater and more complex than the well-meant but naive yellow-and-blue flags and sunflowers cropping up all over social media. If you send aid, please do it through established and reputable channels where it has a chance of getting through.

It is a very sober time: a time when I feel called to silent reflection, learning, and meditating on history and on the present, as we still deal with Covid and climate change and all the other pressing problems of our personal and shared lives that seem dwarfed by each day;s news. I haven't been able to write much, but I've tried to draw. I hope you are finding ways to cope, and would be glad to have you share your thoughts.

Manon, sleeping. Fountain pen in sketchbook, 9" x 6". February 24, 2022.

 

The Truth in Ordinary Things

In his Nobel address, Seamus Heaney spoke about the issue that's been obsessing me lately: how, as artists, do we continue to do our work when the world seems to be so filled with sorrow, violence, and despair? What is our responsibility toward expressing that? How do the quotidian and personal intersect with the larger issues that we face, and with the suffering of people far away? The ink and watercolor drawing above might not feel connected to those things, but I discovered it actually was. Let me begin, though, with Heaney.

He starts by quoting a poem by W.B. Yeats, from his series "Meditations in Time of Civil War", written when Ireland was struggling internally following the war of independence from Britain. Yeats had noticed honeybees working in the cracks of an old Norman tower where he was living, and he used that image to speak about the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of senseless human tragedy.

Heaney writes:

"[The poem] knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minivan are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences in times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth-telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust..."

Then he goes on to quote a passage from the Iliad, where Homer describes a woman who runs onto the battlefield to her fallen husband. As she bends down to take the dying man in her arms, crying out, she feels the spears of the enemy prodding her back, and is soon bound and led away into slavery. Heaney praises the concrete quality of that image of the cold spears on the woman's shoulders, noting that:

"Even today, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear-shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Homer managed to express the tragedy of war in a document that has lasted for millennia. Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings and Picasso's "Guernica" have the same direct power. But it's important to remain true to ourselves: we are not all given to painting or describing things literally. Heaney himself seldom wrote directly about the Irish "Troubles," but used images and metaphors from the past and from his own life -- things as simple as plowing a field -- to evoke exactly what he wished to say.

For myself, I know that it would be a stretch and probably false for me to try to draw pictures of human suffering, or to devote myself to describing it graphically in words. It's also important to keep things real: I don't feel comfortable talking about events I've not witnessed or been told about directly, only my own reaction to those events. In the case of the crisis facing our earth, that's a different matter: we're all experiencing those changes in our own lives, and nature has always figured heavily in my art and writing. I was serious when I wrote about finding trees a powerful symbol of human resistance and resilience, or realizing that there is often a hidden symbolism in my still lives.

The act of drawing/painting is often a meditation for me -- even a kind of prayer, if you will -- in which I allow myself to be led by intuition in the choice of objects, the medium, and how I depict them. There are a lot of "no's" on the way to the eventual "yes." In the case of the seemingly innocuous still life here, I now realize that there was more going on than a clichéd "bowl of cherries": the deep red color of the fruit, the memory of their bloodiness on my tongue and hands, the sense of sudden interruption of a meal represented by the torn, partial piece of bread. Looking at it later, I recalled a passage in Nadezdha Mandelstam's book, Hope Against Hope, where she describes the evening when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was taken away by Stalin's henchmen - he would later die in a concentration camp. But she writes about how he was eating a hard-boiled egg, which he had just dipped into salt -- and that image is what stayed with me. Probably what the viewer sees in the still life is simply moment of calmness and beauty -- and that's also as it should be. I just find it interesting to realize that for me, the maker, there was quite a bit going on, and whatever healing or calmness I found in the making also had to do with the choices and subterranean current I followed, but barely recognized at the time. I felt satisfied with the result - it felt right and somehow complete, but I couldn't have explained why.

Does this subconscious process impart some ineluctable quality to the finished work? I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure it's my job to know. I feel like my job is to show up in response to the inner prompting, and do the work.

To close, I was moved by this passage by Marina Tsvetaeva, from a collection of letters written in 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted recently by my friend Rory (thank you!) Tsvetaeva was referring to Rilke, but Rory has replaced his name here with "the poet":

"[The poet] is neither the mission nor the mirror of our times; he is their counterpoise. War, slaughterhouses, flesh shredded by discord – and [the poet]. The earth will be forgiven for our times for the sake of [the poet], who lived in them. He could have been born only in our times because he is their opposite, because he is essential, because he is an antidote. That is what makes him our contemporary. The times did not commission him, they brought him forth… [The poet] is as ineluctably necessary to our times as a priest is to the battlefield: to be for these and for those, for them and for us: to pray — for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen."

When I read that last line, "to pray for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen," I thought of the images of the funeral of the young Palestinian boy recently killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza: the rawness of the sorrow on the faces of his friends and relatives, the wrongness that they are there at all, the fact that killing has gone on and on and on since Homer's time and long before that, and we never ever seem to learn.

Heaney again:

Poetry's power (is to do) the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."

So our mind's eye holds the families killed by the suicide bombers in Kabul, the children killed by the retaliatory U.S. drone strike. And yet, in the face of all this horror, we must continue to create out of "the vulnerable part of our consciousness" which is right in spite of the wrongness all around it.

 

Hermit Diary 60. Full Circle

When I began writing this blog, eighteen years ago today, it seemed appropriate to name it after the Trojan princess Cassandra, cursed by her spurned lover, Apollo, to utter prophesies that would always be accurate but never believed. That was on the eve of the Iraq War, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, which I was certain would plunge the world into an endless war between cultures, and a great destabilization that would cause untold human misery through civil war, destruction, loss of life and livelihood, and migration that would be rejected by much of the western world, which would also refuse to admit they had caused it. I am not happy to say that I was right; I would have loved to be wrong.

At the time, I couldn't have predicted the exact shape that the far right would take in the United States, or in other countries: this has been worse than I ever anticipated. Climate change has accelerated even faster than I feared, and I never would have thought the United States would actually withdraw from international environmental agreements - thankfully, this decision has been reversed. I didn't know that I would not only move to Canada, but become a Canadian citizen, though it was a possibility. I'm appalled but not surprised by the racism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and violence of these years,  as I wrote in that first blog post in 2003:

And so I’ve spent the day -- this day that feels like an ultimate Good Friday -- trying to work, trying to do "normal" things, well aware that nothing is normal, that it may be a very long time before the world feels normal again. As a pacifist and a liberal Christian, I’m wracked by two conflicting emotions: the desire to be peaceful and centered ... and an intense anger at everyone who has contributed to bringing us to this abyss. On this day of self-examination I don’t exempt myself. Somehow it doesn’t help in these final hours to know that I’ve been a dedicated antiwar activist, to know I’ve tried. All I have to do is look around at my comfortable home, or hear the oil-burning furnace come on, or draw some clean water from the tap. All I have to do is walk over to the filing cabinet and take out last year’s tax return with my signature at the bottom, authorizing the use of my money for whatever purpose my government decides. What percentage for tanks and bombs and depleted uranium shells? I could do the math and figure out my personal subsidy. If I really wanted to go crazy, I could do the math.

The anger persists, and toward mid-afternoon I realize a lot of it is anger at that particular kind of high-testosterone male aggression that is fueled by revenge. It cannot see the victim, cannot empathize, cannot imagine another way other than striking out with violence. It feeds on itself and on talk with other like-members of the species, enlarging, encouraging, exaggerating, moving inexorably toward a violent, cathartic release...

This is the maleness that has given rise to, and perpetuated, all patriarchal systems. Theirs is the personal patriarchy that treats women as property but insists it is only protecting them. Theirs is the patriarchy that institutionalized oppression of women, and allowed slavery, and fought tooth and nail against emancipation and equal rights for any groups other than itself. It is the patriarchy that destroyed native cultures, and gave rise to colonialism and empire-building. It is the patriarchy that chooses theory over empathy, the patriarchy that always knows best.

Eighteen years later, I wonder how many deaths will it take. The United States has glossed over so many, from the bombing of faraway innocent children to the murders of its own Black, Asian and Hispanic citizens; deaths in the desert and at the border and in prison camps; deaths of women from domestic violence; deaths during an invasion of the nation's Capital;  even -- incomprehensibly -- the deaths of little American children gunned down in their classrooms. Right-wing hatred is continually directed at The Other, but the perpetrators of this terrorism, in almost every single case, have been angry white men.

Still, I never would have predicted what the world has lived through over the past year: a pandemic of such magnitude that it brought the entire world to its knees, cost the lives of millions, and caused untold human suffering that has been unjustly borne by the poor, by people of color, the elderly in care homes, those working in high-risk professions without proper protection, and those without access to technology. 

Because I am not in those categories, I have been safe throughout this long year. Two days ago, I had my first vaccination. It was given in a huge conference center here in Montreal, the Palais des Congres: Quebec has made a commitment to vaccinate all adults with a first dose by our national holiday, June 24, St-Jean Baptiste Day and they are moving very fast toward that goal. The nurse who gave me my shot seemed to be about my age, and I asked her in French if she had been working throughout the pandemic. No, she replied, I'm retired, but I volunteered to come back and do this because I have the training. Merci beaucoup, I replied, and our eyes smiled at each other above our masks. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude -- for the scientists who dedicated themselves to developing the vaccine, the people who were working to deliver it, for being in a country that believed in science, planned well enough and has the money to provide for its citizens, and for reaching this point of greater safety. And I felt overwhelmed, at the same time, with sorrow for the loss, suffering, separation, and disrupted or damaged lives that may take years to recover, if they ever do.

--

I also couldn't have predicted that I would have spent this year making music with a virtual choir, or that an online reading group I organized would have just finished reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon via Zoom, where we can see each other and talk easily in spite of physical separation. The final words spoken in that play by Cassandra, before she dies at the hands of Agamemnon's wife, remind me that human beings haven't changed that much since this lament was written 2500 years ago:

Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well

a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind

one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out;

and that is far the most unhappy thing of all.

 

 

So, as with the images I've posted here, it's a question of holding both the darkness and the light. It's been a year since I began my pandemic diary here. We will continue to be very careful until we've had our second shots, and I think today of my many friends in Europe who still have no access to vaccines, as well as the people of Mexico and Brazil and so many other countries who are having to wait, and wait, while the virus continues to surge. But the light is returning to the north, and to our lives, as we begin to see a way out and a way forward. I'm working on several creative projects that will attempt to express and preserve something about this time, and I may consider publishing a collection of the essays I've written here -- it would be good to know if any of you would be interested in that. I also want to try to encourage others who are younger and having difficulty seeing their way into the future. It's somehow easier when you've lived a long time. Life, you find out, is always unpredictable in both collective and individual ways, and part of living is learning to deal with uncertainty -- not that any of us are able to do that with perfect equanimity, or all the time. Here is a final excerpt from that first blog post, which I think still holds true:

Yet I believe the days of patriarchal power are numbered. The ranks of women and men in all cultures who understand and voluntarily choose a different way of being are increasing. Threatened people will instigate huge battles to maintain the old systems, and for a time it may feel that we are going backwards. It’s unlikely that these changes will happen in our lifetime; perhaps they will take another hundred years or more. But the ultimate trend is clear.

If I am going to deal with my own anger constructively, perhaps I can dredge up some compassion for people who sense, even dimly, the threat to the only system they know, the only way of being they can comprehend... they are locked in a cage that only they can see. How horrible it must be to experience life this way, whether you are Osama bin Laden, hating and fearing the West with its personal freedom, its emancipated women, and its lack of understanding of all the traditions and values you hold dear, or George Bush, thinking that friendship and loyalty can be bought with dollars, terror quelled by violence, and true democracy established by the forced occupation of a sovereign people and the repression of your own.

The world sees through them both, as it begins to see with clearer and clearer eyes all patriarchal systems that promise protection in exchange for economic or political or sexual submission. On this eve of destruction, perhaps we can try to look forward, far forward, seeing these terrible and tragic events as part of the death-throes of patriarchy: a crucial step toward real freedom and justice for all the earth’s people.

 

Home from a Journey

Dear Readers, apologies for my long silence. I've been away on a trip to Greece, a place I've wanted to visit for an entire lifetime. As the title of this blog implies, I've felt a personal identification with ancient Greece and its stories, gods and goddesses, art and thought. It's what I studied when I was young, and for a while I thought I'd either be a ancient art history professor or a conservator of antiquities. That's not how my life turned out, and part of the reason for this trip was to revisit that earlier self, as well as the place, and see what I thought from a different point in life.

It was a marvelous journey, filled with surprises and adventures not only in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, but in the mountains of northern Greece; and not only concerned with ancient history and art, but also with a quest to see and learn more about the Byzantines. We were gone for sixteen days, and started our travels in Berlin, where we visited one of the best collections of ancient Greek vases and sculptures in the world, at the Altes Museum, as well as going to the Reichstag, taking long walks, trying to stay warm (it was almost as chilly as Montreal) and eating some excellent German food. Then we flew to Athens, where we began and ended our travels in Greece.

I have a lot I want to write about, but it's going to have to wait a bit because...Christmas...and singing, and friends and family, as well as some significant responsibilities here at home. The jetlag in this direction, back home, was really fierce, and I've been really busy besides. Today is the first day since returning a week ago that I've had any time to work on my pictures and videos, and I did get them transferred to my computer. So, eventually, there will be more to share here.

Travel completely engages me when I'm there, and then feels almost unreal when return to my own space. And yet, flight makes those sudden shifts in reality possible. I wouldn't call it disorienting, per se, but it is certainly strange to find yourself inhabiting an image like the one above, that you've seen in countless sources, from textbooks to travel videos. We don't go on tours but figure out our itinerary and plans completely from scratch, and unexpected things happen, so during the trips we always feel like we're very heads-up, paying sharp attention; there's a high level of intensity. I try hard to really be in a place -- to feel it and engage with it with all my senses as well as my mind -- and not just be a person behind a camera, capturing moments like trophies. It takes time to think about a significant journey and to see what I've learned and how it has changed me; I'm doing that now and will be doing it for quite a long time. And I already want to go back. There were good reasons why, as a young girl, Greece got under my skin. I see that better now, and am glad I wasn't disappointed by being face to face with the real thing. Yet I also see that I made the right decision to live a less linear and more personally creative life; it was a better fit with who I really am, but in many ways, it has been a reflection of the values and ideals that attracted me to the Greeks in the first place. As a woman, I'm lucky I live now, though, instead of back then.

So, more to come, soon. 

 

All of Us, Together

Today and every day, until there's no need for such a day.

Thinking with Merton about America's Predicament

The Orange Line has fancy new cars, and whenever I get on one of these shiny trains, I feel like I must be one of the first passengers. That's why when I sat down early yesterday morning, it was a surprise that the empty seat was warm. I hadn't seen anyone exit, so they must have gotten off at a previous station. Of course, I told myself, thousands of people have already taken this train, it is no longer brand new. But the strange feeling of someone else's presence persisted, along with my musings about the places our bodies temporarily occupy in an urban environment, only to be replaced by another anonymous body, and another.

When I am on the train, I'm often going downtown to sing, or returning from singing, and though I seldom wear earphones or use my phone, bits of music play repetitively in my head. Yesterday I was going to the cathedral to sing a complex modern Mass in the morning, and later, music by Orlando Lassus, and I have noticed that this awareness sometimes makes me feel special. But the warmth of the empty seat, and the presence of the other passengers, reminded me that no one is any more special than anyone else, or, rather, that we are all equally special, even though I may have been the only person on the train who was thinking that.

The Montreal metro platforms aren't crowded on Sunday mornings, but as the trains arrive, they make me think of Mexico City, where the opening and closing mouths of each train disgorge and swallow up vast quantities of human beings. There, too, I often remember Thomas Merton's words: "What if everyone knew that they were going around shining like the sun?"

Merton wrote those words after having a spiritual experience -- a revelation of oneness -- on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky, one day when he had left his monastery of Gethsemanii for a medical appointment or some similar reason. I had a similar revelation while waiting at a deli counter in a grocery store in Hanover, New Hampshire, nearly twenty-five years ago, and from that point on I have known that I am connected to every other being; that we all possess, at our core, the same divine spark (Merton called it "the eternal diamond"); and at the same time, that we are each entirely unique, special, precious, beloved. It's not explainable in words, and so I will not try; it's better (while still being impossible) to try to live out of that awareness in all of one's relationships. But it is also clear to me, as it was to Merton, that most of humanity goes around unaware of who they actually are, and of the potential for love, compassion, harmony, beauty and joy for which we are made. Babies come into the world open and trusting and full of potential -- but then other people and the world begin to impinge, and the separation, alienation, and undermining begin, accompanied by a gnawing hunger for love and for something ineffable that we sense is out there. All our lives, we remember the grandmother or father, the teacher, the friend who saw the spark within us when we were young, who saw us as we really were, who recognized and tried to nurture the best in us. And all our lives we suffer because of those who did, and do, the opposite. Under good circumstances, or sometimes against all odds, some people find their way and manage to live lovingly toward others and toward themselves, in spite of setbacks. Most struggle. And a few slip into the darkness and become capable of terrible things.

--

We can blame society, parents, religious institutions, educational and justice systems, the economic situation into which we were born, racism, homophobia, misogyny: all are part of the systems that maim and destroy people. Today I read a number or articles about guns in America that sought to prove that gun control was the answer to that country's epidemic of violence. But until a society looks beyond the gun to the hand that holds it, into the mind that picked it up and felt the need to buy it, and beyond that mind into the forces that not only made the gun easily available but created the desire to be prepared to shoot and kill, there is absolutely no hope for change.

Let's be clear. This is a country that fought a devastating, bloody, and still unresolved civil war war over the right of certain human beings to own and enslave other human beings. It is a country that committed genocide on the native peoples. It is a country that has treated all its "enemies" who were not white and European as sub-human and unequal, and still does -- and steadfastly refuses to discuss any of this history or to acknowledge the legacy of violence, injustice, and inequality that is interwoven and perpetuated in its national narrative. America definitely needs gun control. But what it needs more is a gigantic mirror.

Thomas Merton's life and thinking were profoundly influenced by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race, which he saw as potentially the most terrible development in human history, not just because of its ability to create Armageddon, but because of what the existence of such weapons does to the human psyche. Merton was born in 1915 and died, accidentally, at age 53 in 1968. I was a teenager then, certainly influenced by growing up just after WWII, by the Cuban Missile crisis and the continuation of the nuclear arms race, then by the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of those times. My life has already been a decade longer than Merton's. I've seen the failure of the anti-war movement to significantly endure past the mid 1970s, and have been dismayed by the rise of corporate power, the increasing disparity of wealth and opportunity, the militarization of American society, the persistent threat of nuclear war, and the incredible lack of compassion for immigrants and anyone who is "other", as well as our own poor and disenfranchised. The wrong turn after 9/11 has plunged the world into much greater instability and fear, and gravely altered American society: much of what we are seeing today has felt predictable to me for a very long time.

And yet, the sense persists that humanity evolves on a time frame that I cannot see or comprehend. I've just been reading some ancient history, about Greek and Roman city-states in other parts of the Mediterranean. The cruelty of the tyrants and states in those days was on a scale that we can barely imagine. When a city was conquered, its entire population was often destroyed, or sold into slavery. And these were not uncivilized or unsophisticated people, they were often, as the writer put it, "educated people who spoke Greek and simply ran afoul of the massive inferiority complex of the Romans toward the Greek world." We don't physically enslave entire populations now, or crucify 6,000 slaves along the nation's most prominent highway, as the Romans did after a rebellion. We do other things that, on the surface, at least, seem less devastating and less cruel. 2,000 years of history have not taught a majority of human beings to share, or to lose, or to resolve difficulties without resorting to violence in our words or actions toward others, or by turning that energy against ourselves in destructive ways we don't even recognize.

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So I am not particularly optimistic about humanity in general in the short term, but individuals can actually live differently if we are willing to keep our eyes and hearts open, and resist the temptation of following the herd. We can do a great deal for one another to make these times more bearable, especially if our relationships go deeper than the general discourse on social media. We can find strength as well as solace in the arts, in our work, in the natural world, in learning, in openness to difference and ways and people we do not know. We can learn to see and refuse the violence in our own selves, nipping it before it flowers into malevolence that affects our own spirit and those around us. We can try to be the people who see the best in each other, and encourage that, especially in the young.

There is so much work to do. Please, let's get on with it.

Back, slightly battered, with some thoughts on risk and reward

A quiet neighborhood on the way into Mexico City from Benito Juarez Airport.

We returned to the snowy north from two weeks in Mexico City last night. As usual, it was a good trip, filled with color and warmth, a great deal of art, and the activity of a vast metropolis, but complicated this year by the fact that, at the end of the trip, we both had bike accidents. J. wrenched his knee when his bike slid out from under him on the rain-slick marble plaza in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and I took a more spectacular fall the following day when I tried to leave the bike path and hit a curb that was obscured by a deep puddle. J., ahead of me, had just exited safely in what I thought was the same place. My bike stopped and I kept going, landing on my face and smashing my right shin. It all happened so fast I can't tell exactly what happened, except that I tried to break my fall with my hands, and that it hurt quite magnificently when my nose hit the sidewalk. However, that nose didn't break, there wasn't a lot of blood, I was able to walk home with J.'s assistance (he was, of course, horrified), and except for a floor-burned face, fat lip, and impressive swelling and bruising on my leg, I'm OK and on the mend, and J. is too; his injury was in some ways worse but a lot less obvious.

Lying on a bed with ice packs for a day gave me some time to think. I guess some people would consider our style of travel too risky, or perhaps not age-appropriate, but the advantages of being willing to go off the beaten path have been tremendous for us. The surfaces in Mexico City are extremely irregular everywhere; you really have to watch out even when walking on the sidewalks, because there are holes, loose paving stones, bulges and dips, obstacles. The air quality is often terrible. The metro is extremely crowded, and could be - I suppose - scary and confusing, but it's also fast, efficient, and a way to share getting around the city with ordinary Mexicans that you would never experience otherwise. It's important to know what neighborhoods to avoid, and when; which cabs are safe and which aren't. You can buy all your food in fancy restaurants, or you can shop in the local mercados and street markets. If you do go onto the streets, poverty, helplessness, medical calamities, and desperation are going to be in your face, along with awareness of your own privilege and mobility. It helps to have a basic knowledge of the language, and to be able to communicate respectfully and personally with local people and ask for their help if necessary, when you yourself are vulnerable. In sum, we've found that we need to be extremely aware of our surroundings at all times: it reminds me of downhill skiing, where there is risk and real-time decision-making, to be sure, but also the reward of a different world of experience, with full attention in each moment. It only works if you are willing to be changed.

Crowds in the centro historico. There seemed to be few international tourists in the city while we were there.

So much travel has become a prepared and sanitized experience, which is why the unpredictability of global terrorism has kept many Americans, in particular, at home. It would be possibly to go to Mexico City and experience it entirely differently than we do, from luxury hotels to vetted cab rides and guided tours. Personally, I think each of us has to consider the statistics, our health and preparedness, and our own personal balance between risk and discomfort with  uncertainty. I have never been afraid of flying; some people are. I regularly ride a bike in Montreal, where many people (especially my age) would not, and the paths are actually smaller, busier, and more dangerous than in Mexico City. We each make choices.

I grew up with a mother who was extremely risk-averse, especially about physical things, and a father who was much less so and determined to make me grow up unafraid. But, in general, people in my family did not travel much, or far: I've had to learn to do it. Part of that process has been learning to cope with some travel anxiety that came from my upbringing, and, ironically, that's been helped by occasionally getting sick or hurt or making a mistake, and finding out that I can survive. J. who was brought up by an international family and traveled a lot more than I did in his youth, has been a huge encouragement and help. I've discovered that if you're willing to travel the way we do way, you learn a great deal more than from taking cabs and staying in sanitized places that are prepared for western tourists. Interaction shows you how kind people are, and how willing they are to help. But it's not only that: I've learned a great deal about myself along the way, and gained a constantly shifting perspective rather than a fixed one. The stability in my life comes from an internal place, rather than external; I am grateful for that. I also realize that it's not what most people want, because at times I too find myself fighting with it, resisting, grasping for certainty and predictability. And then I step back, reconsider, and settle down.

I'll post some images of what we experienced over the next days, as we re-enter our life back home. One of the best aspects of this trip was staying in an apartment rather than the hotel we've used for the past four years; it allowed us to relax more and to cook our own food from the bountiful markets. And I found time to draw and paint; if we were to spend a longer period there I'd take better supplies and be even more intentional about it, because there is so much that calls to me.

Re-centering

Here it is, the second week in February already, and because of political events I haven't accomplished half of what I had hoped so far this year. Maybe you're the same. At first I was merely depressed by the prospect of the upcoming inauguration, then very quickly derailed by the new administration's first week, the marches, the mosque shooting here in Quebec, and my own need to focus upon and write about these things, as well as touching in with a wide circle of friends and family. Phoenicia brought out Dave Bonta's new book, and there's been quite a bit of work associated with that. I've been singing, seeing people, reading, making meals...but it has all felt like I'm distracted, not only from what is going on, but from myself. What happened to drawing, printmaking, painting? What happened to my own writing? I've been off-center, and needed to get back home.

This week I've felt like I'm finally regaining some ability to focus. I haven't done any particularly good drawings, but at least I've taken up my pen. And I'm working hard on a writing project that is now going well.

Unfortunately, these times reminds me of what it feels like when we, or someone close to us, gets an unwelcome diagnosis. For a while, you can't think about much else. But eventually, you see that life goes on, even though you have to deal with the new situation, and it remains in the back of your mind. A life that, for a while, felt simpler just got more complicated. But the clarity of passing time shows us that we not only need to multi-task, we can do it. I'm glad to see that most people who have decided to resist have not lost their determination, but we've also settled down into the mindset where we realize this is going to be a long haul. So I'm taking action, staying informed, and trying to take good care of myself and those around me -- but I'm also doing my own things, because they're also important. I hope you are too.

So, I'm curious -- how are you coping with the reality of the moment in which we find ourselves? Have you been able to find a balance? And what role does social media play in your day -- have you been using it more, or less? Do you think it's helpful, or not?

At a Safe Distance

Beneath a photograph of the refugee camp at Calais, France, known as "the Jungle", in yesterday's New York Times, this caption appeared:

"The squalid camp, growing and festering for over a year, has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis."

The sentence was a quote from the article itself. This morning, the first thing I saw when I checked my Instagram feed, were the photograph and caption, posted by Teju Cole, with the following comment (quoted here with his permission:)

Sometimes it's not the photo, it's the caption. Sometimes it's not the caption, it's a single word. What work is the word "festering" doing here? The caption is an excerpt from the article, which you can find yourself. "Squalid" is permissible in context but imperfect, but there are at least two problems with the framing of Calais as a "symbol of Europe's faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The first is that this is a crisis for those who must leave home, not for those who receive or refuse them. Europe does not have a migration crisis. The second problem is that Europe is not a country. There's a reason there's no "Jungle" in Germany, and there's an opposite reason there isn't one in Switzerland. Whatever is happening in Calais is about French policy and British policy. Italy is another thing. Hungary is a different thing. But that's all about the framing.
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What I keep coming back to is that word "festering." I've heard it before. What festers? What instinctual response do we have to that which festers? I think I know the kind of work the word is supposed to be doing. That work is all about mislocating the crisis. And when the crisis is mislocated, when it is about those who must witness the crisis rather than those who must undergo it, then other actions, otherwise unimaginable, become compulsory. After all, what is one to do with people or places that are "festering"?

[Later this morning, I note that the caption has been changed to read "The squalid camp has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The text remains the same in the article itself; the New York Times does follow TC (one of their own critics and authors) on Instagram.]

What, then, is actually "festering?" In my opinion, it is our hatred and fear of "the other" who will somehow take away or undermine what we feel is rightly "ours" -- our jobs, our health, our security, our resources, our prosperity...and, if we dig deeper, our very whiteness and privilege: god forbid, one of them might intermarry with one of our children.

Well, you know what? That's exactly what I did. 35 years ago I married the son of a Syrian immigrant and a refugee from the Armenian genocide. And that changed forever my ability to be indifferent to or distant from those who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, American, Protestant, English-speaking, Euro-centric...you can fill in the adjectives yourself. I was already a young person leaning in the direction of difference; I was curious and open. But I had not yet been broken open. And if we carefully defend ourselves forever, if we hide behind words and never take action, our hearts will never be broken and we will never truly understand or help the other out of that brokenness. We will simply sit at a safe distance, maybe spouting outrage and sadness at the world's ills, but our empathy will be temporary and we will not have to change, grow, or give anything that is an actual sacrifice of self. Outrage is, frankly, cheap. My question to you is, what are you willing to do?

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Language does matter: I agree. We have seen it at work in this deplorable election season, both for good and for ill. We are not, in general, careful with it, but taking great care with words is supposed to be the job of journalists, as well as speechwriters.

I would like to recommend another article, "What Does it Mean to Help One Family?", about the Canadian response to the plight of the refugees, which shows the complexities of both immigrating and helping. We will be welcoming a refugee family through the cathedral sometime in the coming year; at the present time they are still mired in paperwork in Beirut. This will not be the first time I've tried to help people making a new life in a new country, nor will it be the last, and every single time I know that I am not doing enough. I feel compelled because of my parents in-law, who had been helped by others and who never forgot that. Their story changed me: for their sake, as well as my own conscience, I cannot turn away. And then I became an immigrant too -- an immigrant with money, relative security, and language skills, to be sure -- but I found out firsthand what it means to leave your past behind, with all its practical and emotional connections and knowledge, and have to begin again to build a new life in a new place.

We all need to be more careful with the language we use. We cheapen our empathy by spouting  platitudes, we speak when we ought to be listening, we use words for effect and shock value that linger and cause great harm, and in this word-intensive internet environment, we invest a stream of empty words with weight as if they represent acts of actual sacrifice or self-emptying.

Words matter; they descend from our heads to our hearts and continue to live there, as a sort of compost for our emotions and actions. In the heart, certain things fester, and others flower; which way it goes is ultimately up to us.