These Times of Transformation

My second newsletter, in which I talk about pain and suffering. I don't think they'll all be like this. I promise to post one soon about my dog, Rose.

Hello, dear reader. You’re still here. Huh. Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it? After the grand and booming All aboard! call of my first post, after christening this Little Courtyard of a sloop with the champagne of my sparklingly articulated belief that this newsletter could be pretty cool, we find ourselves stuck here on the deck together, waiting for the wind. I imagine us flubbering about in the harbor. I imagine myself blowing into the sails while you stand there uncomfortably, watching. I imagine saying to all 481 of you, Hey, guys, so I know you’re just here to enjoy the ride, and some of you are even paying me to take you somewhere, but, uh, do you mind grabbing an oar and putting your back into it? Since I don’t know where we’re going, though, I’d probably just ask you to wait with me and listen for the wind.

Which is what I’m doing now. And behold!, these words start to flow.

So: What do I know about this newsletter? I know it’s a place for me to share stories and ideas for these times of transformation. “These times of transformation…what is he talking about?” Okay, maybe we’ll start there.

Full disclosure, right off the bat: “Transformation” is a nice way of saying apocalypse. Catastrophe. Unmitigated and unstoppable disaster.

Wait, wait, hold on! Don’t jump ship! I’m not a raving lunatic, I swear. I’m not standing on the sidewalk here with a cardboard sign that says, “The end is nigh,” shouting, at no one in particular, that we’re all going to burn in hell. I don’t believe in hell.

However, I do believe in suffering. Or rather, I believe that suffering is real, is a thing that’s happening around me and within me and all over the place, and that the accumulated mass of our collective suffering has gained so much momentum over the course of ages that it will soon, or is now, taking us over the cliff of our known world, into what (if not our annihilation) we do not know.

You see me trying to hoist these sails, the wild wind flapping the canvas while I try to get a tight trim. You look around at your fellow passengers whilst I reveal to you all, my dear readers, that the magnetic pull on the compass I’m using to guide us is the pull of our unarticulated agony, which is the pull of the truth, which is either the tragic pull of The End of Us or the necessary pull of Our Beginning, or perhaps a bit of both. You see signs of concern on people’s faces. Uncertainty. Everyone’s looking around at each other, searching for someone who seems to know for sure whether it was a good idea or a bad idea to sign up for this newsletter.

“We can still jump ship. We haven’t even left the harbor yet.”

But you know what I mean, don’t you, about suffering and how it’s picking up speed and taking us toward some event horizon of sustainability beyond which we will not be able to proceed with our regularly scheduled programming? One can only take so many mass shootings. So many wars. So many private and public violations of our sanctity, and of the Earth’s sanctity, and of the sanctity of all things. One can only bear the confusion and the consequences of our confusion for so long. At some point, something’s gotta give.

I think that’s where we’re at right now: something’s giving. And maybe something’s being given, too, as things give way. That’s what I’m here to wonder about in this newsletter, in your company.

So I wonder: Where are we right now? Where do we find ourselves in this long trajectory of human evolution? What moment, in this ancient string of moments, have we been born into?

Just take a glance at the headlines. Take a look into your own mind, a gander through your own heart. I don’t know what to call wherever it is where are, but it’s clearly not whatever Peace is. Stuff’s tough right now, people. Real tough. Been tough for a while. So tough we might even risk calling it something like hell. Let’s be real, you know? Call a spade a spade. Take honest stock of what we’re doing to ourselves, to each other, to the Earth. What are we doing? Again, just look around. Skim the newspaper. Peruse the comments section of any old YouTube video. And, if you’re feeling especially brave, take a peek inside. There’s a war going on, and war is hell, as the soldiers tell us. Bless them for their courage to face it, to stare right into the full-blown, unedited, enfleshed reality of what we are all contending with in our own unique ways: war, or hell, or the suffering that is the natural consequence of our confusion.

This may sound harsh, or dark, or morose, so I should quickly clarify that I don’t think hell is bad, necessarily. Hell is hell, that’s all. Like the desert, or a mountain, or Manhattan, or a lake. Just another part of the landscape. Suffering is suffering. It’s where we are, folks. Nothing wrong with that. But to be in the desert, and to convince ourselves we’re in Manhattan, now that’s a problem. We can’t survive the desert if we can’t identify and name that we are in the desert, and to then begin learning about the ways of the desert. Therefore, I tune my compass to the magnetic pull of suffering, not because I want to suffer or to make anyone else suffer, but because we are suffering. That’s what’s happening, within and between and underneath, so let’s learn the ways of the desert so long as we’re in it. Let’s find out what it’s here to teach us. Let’s listen to it, and be honed by it, and clarified in the passage. That’s my logic. What other choice do we have? Pretending we’re in Manhattan just won’t do.

The desert is in Manhattan. The desert is in the mountain, and in the lake. The desert is everywhere. Suffering may be better likened to water. It moves through us all.

Now you’re eyeing the life jackets. There’s a life raft right there. You could probably make a run for it and box out any other chumps who try to take your spot.

But hang in there with me for a sec. What object or idea or relationship has arisen from something other than suffering? Each of us came from the suffering of our ancestors, and from the mothers who bore us. And that can of seltzer you just drank, what gash in the Earth is still recovering from the aluminum harvest? What delivery man’s lower back was thrown out hauling the cases from his truck? What grocery-bagger gave up hope that she will ever escape this job which depresses her spirit so, a job you need her to do so you can buy your seltzer? Someone’s gotta do it, right? And it sure ain’t gonna be you. And that’s not even the extent of it, concerning your seltzer, but we also need to consider your laptop, and your lungs, and the indigenous peoples displaced so that the school you send your children to could be built, and all the children, and all the animals, and all the supernovas in the night sky, exploding, dying, to provide the necessary elements for life to arise: the carbon that is your bones, the iron that is your blood.

Do the stars suffer with us? Is that what we see shining in the night sky above, the gorgeous, life-giving light of their agony?

What would change, if we knew that suffering was the price that is paid for our every breath, and if we lived into our worthiness of this unbearable gift?

Okay. Fine. But what does this have to do with my newsletter?

I’ve confessed I don’t know where we’re going on this boat, but I know I’d like to go somewhere true, and to get somewhere true it makes sense to me that we’d have to start out true, and so I tune my compass to truth as best I know how and ahoy!, avast!, look where it points us: to the fact that we’re hurting right now. And that the hurt is here to guide us. Unless it’s all one big terrible meaningless mistake. But I, personally, eschew such nihilism.

I choose to believe that our suffering (that rupture with one of my best friends, that argument with her mom, that bullshit from your boss) is telling us something, guiding us somewhere true, if only we can listen to it and follow it, learn from what it’s asking us to feel, or to look at, or to change. I choose to believe that our agonies are waiting for us to trust them enough to take their outstretched hand, so that they can then do what they are here to do: lead us into whoever it is we are becoming in these times of transformation.

And so I’m offering this newsletter twice a month, because damn, dude, transformation stings, and a story can soothe, and ideas can fortify, and it’s just nice to sail together, you know?

Stay aboard with me as long as you want, dear reader. You can always jump ship. There are so many ships in this armada of humanity. We are, each of us, our own. But you’re not on my ship, after all. You’re on your own, and we’re all sailing together here, for shores unknown. Thank you for sailing beside me.