This Is the Day

Easter sky quill in the desert

When I’m heartbroken about the world, it’s more difficult to write. A prominent voice within me asks what’s the use? How do my attempts to compose, create, or clarify quell this ongoing catastrophe? As if anything I do right now could ‘make it better.’ What an egoic fantasy.

Yet choosing to stop writing altogether is worse, somehow. I am one of those people who needs written expression (mine as well as others’) to digest, process, and make at least some vague sense of what is going on, internally and externally. When I go without writing for too long, it’s as if I’m losing some inner appendage, renouncing my ability to perceive. And so I tell myself: the loss of your faculties will come soon enough. In the meantime, write. When, how, and as you can.

I have been thinking lately that our world, or at least our species, might be in the hospice stage of its evolution as environmental, political, and cultural crises proliferate. I recall when my friend, KD, was dying of cancer, and the hospice nurse who stayed by her side in those final hours. How carefully she turned and tended to and washed KD’s body. Smoothing lotion on her limbs. Dampening her lips. Comforting. Inviting me to share memories out loud. Not denying her impending transition. Not speeding it up. Being with her, and being with me, her friend, through it. Perhaps not curing, but healing.

“This is the precisely the time when artists go to work,” Toni Morrison famously wrote about what creators do in times of fear, calamity, or despair. "We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal." Sometimes I bristle when I see this quote, the stony part of my heart wanting to hunker down and be left alone. Besides, I might say to myself -- she's addressing artists, not wannabes like me ... 

Nevertheless, here I am, writing. I was in the desert yesterday for an annual Paschal potluck, with a blessing and healing ritual led by my St.Francis-inspired friend, Amadeo. He included poems and prayers to Brother Rain, Sister Wind, Grandfather Space, and our generous ancestors, the Stars. We were reminded of interbeing, the term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, the recognition that all things are connected and dependent on one another for existence. It brought to mind a revelation I had years back about the significance of collaboration—be it among communities, ecosystems, species, ideas, creative impulses… Nothing that exists gets here on its own. Work, writing, nourishing, tending – is always in some way a collaborative effort. It seems I sometimes forget that – perhaps a hazard of years of introverted work.                                                             

Thus I’m reminding myself that writing, (and praying) too, is always collaborative. This gives me strength: seeing myself, all of us, our work, as part of a cosmic web, everything threaded through everything else, receiving and generating, inhaling and exhaling … irrepressibly birthing and dying.

Blackout Psalm 118 (King James, with updated verbs, with use of Karl Rahner’s various names for the Lord. See this post for explanation on "Blackout Psalms.")

Give thanks,

for mercy endures forever.

I called out in distress:
the All-Merciful answered
and set me in a large place.
It is better to trust in the
God of Stars and Flowers
than to put confidence in princes.

My strength and song,
the voice of rejoicing is
in the tabernacles.
The stone the builders refused
is now the cornerstone.
This is marvelous in our eyes.

This is the day
the Womb of All has made.
We will rejoice
and be glad in it.