Emotional Tides
It’s a good phrase. They come in, they go out. Not in gentle fashion, lately, which makes my head feel like one of those bright orange inflatable buoys that are tethered to the seabed a ways off shore, letting you know that you’ve swum out too far and really ought to turn back before you drift off to Malaysia. In my case, the buoy has come unmoored, gotten its lines tangled beneath the pier, and is continuously battered against the pylons by the movement of the water.
Yes, yes, I know I said there’d be fewer of these sorts of post in the coming weeks, but that was Sunday, and this is Tuesday, and sod off.
Over the weekend, I attended one of those peculiar gatherings of affluent and semi-affluent people (as though most of us here in America, in comparison to the rest of the world, are anything else) who have come together in one place for the express purpose of creating community and being real. This generally involves sitting around in a circle and passing some sort of object around, talking about things, and emoting.
Prior to yelling at you to get off my lawn, hitching up my belt, and going back inside to watch Matlock, I will tell you that in my day, we had a proper talking stick, and not a crafty little wooden angel, and we burned sage and sweetgrass, and fanned the smoke about with an eagle’s wing that was bestowed upon the guru-who-was-not-a-guru by a gen-yu-wine Native American shaman-type person. Where we summoned in the spirits of the four directions, this group read a few rules from a sheet of paper. We intuitively managed participation based on the needs of the moment and of the person speaking, gently signaling stick-passing time with a sweet little tap on a bronze Tibetan singing bowl. This weekend we had three minutes each and a digital timer, and when the infernal device made its beeping noises the keeper of said device silenced it by pushing buttons which also beeped, and then rang a small little jingly bell as though that might make up for the piezoelectric intrusion.
Lest I complete my slide into what might best be termed pagan snobbery, I must say that I’m all in favor of people getting together with people as often as possible, for whatever reasons they can come up with, and having genuine experiences with each other. It’s an important thing to do, and our culture is sorely lacking in communal ceremonies that don’t involve dressing nicely once a week and driving somewhere to sit in a building built for God.
That said: for a long while, I sat in circle every week, with a much smaller group of people, and I will always remember the intensity, the connection, and the power of intention that I felt there. Our circles usually took place in the evening, and opened with earnest convocations. There was smoke! And fire, if you weren’t careful with the sweetgrass braid. You just can’t match that experience while sitting in a sunny room with a wall of glass and a vaulted ceiling among 35 other people who are all waiting for the beep, even if you put a little Buddha statue and a candle in the center of the carpet.
Yes, everybody was real, and the laughing meditation that erupted at the end of the thing was a genuine joy to participate in and to watch. But at one point during the proceedings, I thought to myself, “There are over a billion people on this planet who don’t have access to potable water.”
It is so easy to get caught up in the problems between our own ears, and I write that as someone who is currently so wrapped up in his head that he can see the backs of his own eyeballs. In our First World bubble, this tendency is downright pernicious. I am learning, in a deeply personal, extraordinarily painful way, that part of the solution to my own problems is to focus outwards rather than inwards. This starts small: a writer’s group, Tango lessons, an acting class, a book club, taking risks by introducing myself to people and asking that they, in turn, introduce me to others.
Keep turning outwards, and gazing farther afield, and eventually you’ll see those billion people without water, and the two million children dead from that lack. And once you’ve seen them, there’s much about this country and its people that looks decadent, and petty, and small. The cowpoke from Texas with the daddy issues is not what’s wrong with this planet.
This is not something I’ve ever articulated on these pages before, but I believe that it’s this spoiled insularity that eventually caused me to recoil from the virulent anti-[insert your favorite politics here] extremism that so shamefully dominates our political discourse. It’s what made me drop politics from these pages, as I was writing in the service of something that I found, at some level, to be repugnant. This is not just because I was arguing for the necessity of slaughter. Simply participating in the debate in the popular fashion was enough to sap my strength of mind. In my defense: it’s really easy to write screeds when you’re drunk. But it’s also easy to quell your conscience.
This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to make some sort of declaration of intention about something-or-other and tie it in to the water theme in a clever way, but I’m not going to, because I’m barely in a state where I can make dinner for myself, let alone save the world. My focus, for the moment, remains necessarily narrow. It should be sufficient to say that something is happening to me. Something that has to do with space, and expansion, and the end of a long night spent in the small, dark closet of my self. I feel this now, in this moment, and so I’m writing about it, fully cognizant that tomorrow might be another day of dread, panic, and tears. Now is all I’ve got, these days…and, quite possibly, it might be all I’ll ever have.
So: I write and, having writ, move on.
