The Art of Building
Bridges
I’ve learned from talking to people
over the last several weeks that many of us—and this includes myself—went into
depression after the last election. When
the external structure, perceived as more or less supporting the greater good,
collapses …. What are we left with? The
days have just started to become longer, the light beginning to return to the
northern hemisphere after solstice and the mad stand-still of Christmas. Is philosophical light increasing, I find
myself wondering. It feels like we have
just entered a long dark night.
To
reference a famous poem* by Wallace Stevens, there are many angles for looking
at the odd bird of the 2016 Presidential election. Stevens’ long cold stare at existence always
gave me chills, and in my lifelong career as an optimist I never viewed him as
a kindred spirit—perhaps until now.
1.
Not all of us who lost this election got
depressed. The Bernie kids, as I
affectionately call them, felt vindicated, being angry enough not to care about
a dusty old concept like the lesser of two evils. They were also (though I sincerely hope I’m
wrong) naïve enough to believe that, in fighting the Good Fight, giving up the
bridge because you can’t capture the mountain is an acceptable strategy. Those of us who are depressed are focused on
who took the bridge on the main artery, and what sort of trafficking is
underway now that wasn’t there before.
2.
Possibly, we too are naïve. Possibly the uber-idealists have the stomach
for revolution because they are not weighed down by grief for the past, nor by
romantic visions that need some renovating.
I maintain that idealism and pragmatism are both essential. But so, I
admit, is the spirit of revolution.
3.
This is a personal
challenge for everyone. It is no longer
possible to putter on as if things were “normal.” We suddenly find ourselves in a country whose
democratic process, such as it is, chooses figureheads who espouse racism,
classicism, and xenophobia, who prescribe anger and the use of force as the
solution to everything. Empathy and
compassion have been cast out of play.
In the weeks after the election I listened to many clients in my therapy
practice voicing fear and demoralization, saying in one way or another: I don’t
know how I’m supposed to live now. I
witnessed their distraught faces, noticing my own effort to keep breathing
steadily. I wrote checks for the food
bank and the Syrian refugees, and signed petition after petition. I continued my usual practice of waving and
nodding to road construction workers I passed on the way to and from work, and
connecting wherever I could with people who didn’t look like me—a well-dressed
white lady of a certain age. How am I supposed to live now? Solidarity seemed more valuable than ever.
4.
But nothing feels like enough. It’s a tightrope walk not to fall into
further depression. What is depression, but the sink-holes in the
self over which there is no bridge. Ah,
but those places are our teachers, my zen learning whispers. The collapsed places of “What am I going to
do now?” are our schoolbooks in the classrooms of life. We can either fall into them, and move
further and further from the light of our knowing, or we can focus on how to
bridge them.
“What gives you joy?” I ask people
constantly. Singing they say. Writing. Being outdoors. Being with animals. Helping others. Making art.
And I try to help them begin building that joyful thing into their
lives. Nothing feels like enough? Go deeper.
Take my hand. Do it anyway.
5.
It doesn’t really matter what the sink-holes
are, they’re the same for all of us.
When something we think we can’t live without collapses—a marriage, a
social or spiritual community, one’s livelihood or health, a loved one’s death
or departure—it’s the same crisis: What am I going to do now? This is the essential question for
everyone. We each have a choice about
whether or not to face it. Am I going to
avoid it by becoming depressed or engaging in addictive behaviors? Or am I going to look at it squarely and keep
breathing, give voice to my feelings and try to stay open?
6.
Irony of ironies, openness itself is a bridge.
I can pour concrete over something, shutting myself down and refusing to
feel and acknowledge. Whatever it is has
an energy of its own, and it will come bursting through like tree roots under a
sidewalk, take my word for it. Or, I can
stay open to feelings, ideas, imagination that allows me to see my way across and
through—to the meadow or sandbar or bit of flotsam I believe is on the other
side.
7.
I can also share this experience with others
who, no matter who they voted for, have suffered some sink-holes of their
own. We’re all in this together. We all have different gifts and
resources. And we all have wounds and
losses. This is the fabric of human
existence. We’re all working out of the
same book in this classroom. That
happened to you, and I understand because this
happened to me. In this exchange we have
formed a connection, thrown a rope across the abyss.
8.
Eight, the number of infinity. “Your trauma becomes your treasure,” I say to
people—even when I’m clinging to the outcropping, swinging out over empty
space. . . . . For the last few
paragraphs I keep thinking of our attic in the old house where I grew up. Three generations before me had put stuff up
there that was no longer useful but couldn’t be thrown away: crystal and china and fine old clothing and
outmoded lamps and furniture and baby things and precious artifacts like my
brother’s Cub Scout uniform and a blouse my mother hand-made in 4-H Club. The letters her first husband wrote to her
during the War. By the time I was in
junior-high I often joked that archeologists of the future would find us buried
in our ancestors’ detritus. I was
powerfully drawn to these emblems of loss.
But it was my brother who first led me up there, taught me to navigate
the territory with careful balance, striding mindfully upon the rafters,
avoiding the floorboards between that might hold the weight of an ancient baby
carriage but not 50 pounds of solid 6-year-old.
Once he even coaxed me into a far, scary corner where an upended oak
dining table obscured the lurking shadows beyond. When we’d gone as far as we’d fit under the
eaves, he reminded me of an Alfred Hitchcock show we’d recently seen, and then
ran off, giggling with adolescent mischief.
9.
Nine, says Denise Linn in The Secret Language of Signs, is “a number of completion . . . a
symbol of universal compassion, tolerance, and wisdom.”**I don’t remember how I
got down—it was that terrifying. Our
artifacts lay suspended above the weather below: my mother’s depression, my father’s anger—our
island on the vast plain of old farm culture that was rapidly dissolving in the
acids of commercialism, itself fueling the Sixties Revolution--a thousand
grassfires running wildly toward each other.
They were just about to shoot the President. Treading a skewed bridge of steps from rafter
to rafter in my whirlwind of fear, I did get down without falling through—perhaps
developing a muscle that sustains me now.
10. This is
not enough either, I agree. Take my
hand, so that I can try to go deeper.
11. (“intuition, clairvoyance, spiritual
healing”**) What kind of muscle are we
developing at present? It’s hard to
believe that anything good is happening.
All I can think is, when nothing good seems to be happening out there,
we work harder in here. Isn’t this what we learn in meditation
practice? If we show up expecting
fireworks, we may be disappointed and give up too easily. If we get
fireworks, we may be all the more likely to give up the next time when we
don’t. When we show up in the open sea,
filled with the flotsam of what once was, none of it capable of carrying us
now: we find out what we’re made of. We find out about our stickability, the
quality of our imagination that can keep us focused on the pole star even when
we can’t see it. We find out whether or
not we can believe in a pole star, and whether the one we choose rhymes with
our gut knowing, whether it heals or sickens.
12. “You gotta serve somebody,” goes the
grinding wail of Bob Dylan—maybe the first and last great bard of our age. The error of Post-Modernism, I believe, was not knowing that. It’s all theory anyway, right, and in grad
school we become expert at considering theories. Considering
is the skill we are taught—not choice, not commitment. Perhaps now there is nothing but choice. What will we save? What will we support? What will we protect in this new era of the militant
demagogue? .
13. Oh my, I’ll let you go looking into
this one on your own, faithful reader. A
number vilified by Patriarchy, a number of evil, upheaval, lawlessness. And/or, the number of lunar cycles in a year,
the number of the Goddess. The “birth to
the spirit, the passage to a higher level of existence” says one internet
source.
As the light returns:
It is snowing. And it is going to snow.*
Let us keep breathing. Let us keep our balance.
*“Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45236
**Ballantine Books/Random House: 1996, p. 213.
