P & Q

Rain is drilling through the trees and somewhere to my left it is pounding out different notes on the stones of the walkway. It is menacing the withering blossoms hanging on to the Mountain Laurel by my window and carving snakes into the mud. It’s a hard rain, as Bob Dylan said. Yesterday a woman in the local CVS—where isn’t there a local CVS—said of the forecast, “we need the rain,” and I thought that was probably true after the week of extreme heat. We need the rain.

In the past couple of weeks, while I have been at an arts residency, I have had immersion in something else we know we need but don’t often have—peace and quiet. This is a state that is hard to come by now. It requires that we get off the socials, keep news consumption to a minimum, use the computer as a typewriter rather than as a portal, and in every way imaginable protect our minds from being a host for messages that all lead to the compulsion to buy or buy into something we don’t need and is possibly destructive. We heal when we do this periodically in order to be put back in touch with ourselves and with the beauty of our world.

It is too easy now to become jangled by news alerts and to bemoan the state of the world. But what we are being served up as a steady diet by newspapers, TV, movies, books, and so on is conflict. Conflict sells. Conflict is jazzy and engaging; we can take a side and have an opinion and feel involved. We desire to be aware of what is going on in the world, but we make the mistake of thinking that learning about different conflicts is what makes us aware, when there are other kinds of awareness that might help us do better. There is strength in being aware of eternity, of the guidance we may receive from what we call our conscience, and of the signals others send to us that belie what they say.

Yesterday I spent a quick minute on the Internet and was fed the news that a sheik in Saudi Arabia/Afghanistan (the report was credited to both countries) has decided that women need to further cover themselves when in public and should wear their head veil so that it covers one eye. If both eyes are exposed, there is a danger that they may be tempted to wear makeup or in some other way be impure. “Women only need one eye,” was the quote. My immediate reaction was visceral. My stomach roiled, and I was overwhelmed with the pain of being a target of misogyny. It took me the better part of a few hours to regain my equanimity after seeing that squib, and then to do a bit of research into its validity. It seems a sheik did say this and claim it was backed up by shariah law, but I couldn’t get a sense of where and how this interpretation was being enforced. I did understand, after I reclaimed my equilibrium, that I am the audience for that story, and it came my way according to the algorithm trigged by my presence online. The story aroused a huge sense of conflict in me between how I imagine the world could be and the horrible things that are happening. It rendered me angry and hurt and curled up in a ball of whimpering frustration. The most I can do about the laws against women in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia is to donate and make calls and write letters. I do not underestimate the power of these methods, but I do not think they will change anything as long as there is money to be made by ranking human and animal rights low on a list of priorities. Many people I know have become discouraged by the onslaught of bad news and the conflict we all feel between justice and how things are. But if it is in any way the case that our thoughts create our reality and our collective thoughts create our collective reality, then we would do well to keep our minds on peace and love, beauty and kindness. Is this willful ignorance? I don’t see it that way. It is refusing to be a dupe.

We need to understand and observe the natural world. We need to experience the feeling and the strength imparted by deep rest that puts us in touch with timelessness. We are alive now in an instant of time, and we need to be aware that the world existed before us and it will go on after us, and that a big picture perspective will help us decide where our priorities should be. We need to deeply know what it is to not feel conflict so we can assess its effect on us, and to understand when we can do something about it as opposed to when we are weakened by scrolling and scrolling in its thrall.

We need rain, but after it has rained, we need to step outside and breath the rinsed air, without carrying our phones with us. We need peace and beauty, and if we miss a few news developments while we are in that good place, the world will go on. It may go on longer if we discover inside ourselves the strength to protect our earth, to make choices on her behalf and not out of a need to alleviate the pain of our immersion in conflict.