The weight of the world feels so intense, and I am so tangled in it.
I just completed a half-day online mindfulness retreat and boy, did I ever relate to that reflection. I’d recently finished Ben Rhodes’s After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, described by The New York Times book review as Rhodes “going out into the world to understand how it has become such an illiberal authoritarian mess.” He feels we, as a country, particularly due to the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 banking collapse, are largely responsible for “disseminating the toxins that now infuse the world.
It left me reeling.
We have fallen from grace in the world, he tells us. It’s a chilling and compelling narrative, and as if it wasn’t enough, the list of suggested similar reads that followed my kindle version—Last Best Hope, Twilight of Democracy, The Cruelty is the Point, Preventable—amplified my anxiety just with their titles.
And fast on the heels of reading Rhodes’ s book came this: “Citizens, Not the State, Will Enforce New Abortion Law in Texas”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulations-texas.html?referringSource=articleShare
My God. People in Lakeville figuring out who in Texas has had an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and suing them or the doctors who’d done it, getting $10,000 as a prize?
And then there’s the voting rights catastrophe.
I want to care about the world without collapsing into its suffering.
But just being alive these days is feeling like an emergency. My back has started to hurt again—fused fourteen years ago, it’s succumbing to more arthritis and nerve compression, despite my yoga practice and daily 3-4 mile walks. The painters still haven’t finished after months of being daily companions, we need a new roof, and the deer and groundhogs had a party in my garden when we were on vacation. Our only son has moved to Europe for his work, and I miss him terribly.
My constant anxiety was forcing me to know I needed to relearn everything I’d struggled to master in the last thirty years of countless retreats, dharma talks and sanghas. I’d been lately resisting the sitting practice that had been so much a part of my life for those years –I wasn’t sure why but didn’t stop running long enough to figure it out. But in the quiet of my sitting at Sunday’s retreat a possible answer emerged. I have just turned 79, and although many people glibly say, “age is just a number,” I know they are wrong. I have most likely lived the lion’s share of my life and because I am so aware of that, I am running to do, see, feel, everything I can --before I can’t. There are more books to write and read, places to see, yoga classes to attend, love to make, meals to prepare, mountains of saved cards, letters, files, and pictures to go through, friends and family to spend time with, flowers to plant. That growing pile of unread New Yorker magazines. Another retreat. Strawberries to eat.
I guess it was hard to be still because of fear, usually the culprit. But since the reasons for my resistance were pretty unconscious, I hadn’t needed to pay the kind of attention that would have made me stop and face my finiteness.
What would happen if I did? If I continued to?
I feared I would collapse into that suffering.
The retreat teacher suggested putting all these concerns into a “nest,” saying we could have freedom in the midst of suffering. The world will keep spinning, she said, but we can simply notice that, feel its pain, creating that container to sustain us despite it.
But.But.But. I want to say. Not so easy. Can I do this now with all these new and frightening issues? Untangle the tangles of my worries and shape them into that nest she talked about? Can I simply be a witness for a time, find some peace and silence to take back into my messy, finite life, accept things as they are? After all, I just wrote a whole book about struggling to do exactly that.
Maybe I’d better reread it.
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To help a bit, I just became a monthly contributor to Planned Parenthood—it’s something I can do for myself as well as for PP. I suggest you do it too; they have a huge fight on their hands, and we must win it. https://www.weareplannedparenthoodaction.org/onlineactions/6iOI0_HnUUmPu_6_SRgayg2?fb=true&sourceid=1006441&ms=4NALz2100K1N1A&&msclkid=ba0ca7bd350a186b16fbc74dbce4a86d&gclid=ba0ca7bd350a186b16fbc74dbce4a86d&gclsrc=3p.ds
Also, great news! One of “my girls,” Eileen Ahmed, has published a collection of her poetry, foreword by me. Get yourself a copy, be inspired, and help her out. https://www.amazon.com/Couldve-Been-Inspiration-Soldiers-Spiritual/dp/0578839814/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Ahmed%2C+Eileen&qid=1626377244&s=books&sr=1-1