Offering: May 21, 2022

strange water, social media & public wailing

Image description: An Eastern Pennsylvania woods in late spring with cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are Seven of Cups, Two of Swords, Ace of Pentacles and Six of Swords.

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

I have been thinking about social media and about algorithms and about simple technologies. I have been thinking about the sphere of mirages. I have been thinking about essential, elemental work that is not novel and that does not try to be. I have been thinking about wailing. 

I have been thinking about nurturing and about strange water. I have been thinking about how the Greek Old Testament says you will go through strange water but should abstain from it. I have been thinking about proverbs. I have been thinking about the lines that go: “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant! But he does not know that those who go in there perish.” 

I have been thinking, and thinking, and thinking more. 

Again, I have been thinking about social media, and what the author of Meditations on the Tarot calls the sphere of mirages. I have been thinking about strange and stolen water, which “flows and sweeps consciousness away in a delicious current of easily-won illuminations and inspirations…with no responsibility of rendering account to anyone at all about anything at all…receiving illuminations gratis, that it has not prayed for.” (Seven of Cups)

I have been thinking about my earlier, simpler work. I’ve been thinking about the terror, before my book came out, how it would shoot out in the night. First I’d see the glow of its eyes and then it would dash over the threshold. I’d lay awake trying to coax it back in. I’ve been remembering things it would say to me then.

Things like, the work was too self-focused, too individualistic, too small. I’ve been thinking about Wendell Berry’s essay “Think Little.” The one where he says “there is no public crisis that is not also private.” And that because of our helpless dependence on bureaus and institutions, “we do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us.” 

And that even though most of us aren’t personally responsible for mining and drilling and giant corn colonies that extinguish all else, wrecking worlds, “we are guilty nonetheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance.” I’ve been thinking mostly about what Berry says next: "We do not have a particular enough sense of their danger.” 

I have been thinking about what motivates change, and about guilt. I have been thinking of my friend Charlie, who died, who said once that guilt is a powerful motivator but a lousy guide. I have been thinking about how ninety-three-year-old environmental activist Joanna Macy has outlined ten fears we aren’t willing to feel that keep us from acting in the face of enormous violence and existential threat and how fear of guilt is one of them. 

Macy’s chapter in the edited volume Ecopsychology is titled “Working through environmental despair.” It is clean water on a hot day that not much is strange about. And I hope not to minimize her brilliance in saying that her chapter presents a simple technology: Feel your feelings. If you can do it, you can move forward. If you can’t, you can’t. (Six of Swords)

It is basic behavioral therapy in a way, in that it begins with a question about what you are willing and unwilling to feel in order to move in the direction of your values (Ace of Pentacles). And it is beyond behavioral therapy in that it doesn’t treat the individual self as the final frontier in healing. 

I have been thinking about why I know of no spaces for group wailing. About how I wore black and cried loudly at my grandmother’s funeral at her church in Medford, Massachusetts even though we were not that close. I have been thinking about the men in my family, who’ve endured unspeakable things and who don’t cry when their moms die. 

I have been thinking about simple interventions. The unremarkable kind whose instructions are not complex nor nuanced and could fit on an Instagram post but that wouldn’t get shared much. Strategies for healing that come with no promise except that you do them, it’s hard, and if you bail no one comes after you.

I’m going to be honest with you. This week we had our primary elections here in Pennsylvania and I didn’t know who was running. I showed up to the voting station at the school down my street and voted democrat. Knowing it was the least I could do, hoping not to make things I don’t like, worse.  

Wendell Berry argued that we need to “gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out” to bureaus and institutions and to reassemble them in our selves, families and neighborhoods. He wasn’t saying don’t vote, just that a vote is the minimum. He was saying vote for who you think is most likely to do the things you think are right and then show up at the meetings and hold them to it.

And I know we’re all busy so I’m sorry to say, but according to Berry, we have to do more than that, too. We need, “better minds, better friendships.” We have to be willing—there’s that word again—to give up things we think we need, but do not.

I was thinking about this a lot as I put out on the curb a cardboard box large enough to hold a small child, that a thin pole with a rope and a fuzzy toy on the end had arrived in. A toy, for my dog. Because, writes Berry, “to be fearful of the disease and yet unwilling to pay for the cure is not just hypocritical; it is to be doomed.”

Sometimes it helps me to read things like this that are stern and judgey and call me names like hypocrite because let’s face it, it’s the truth. And, sometimes, it’s the last thing I need. But ultimately I’m a lot more curious about the avoidance that lives in the heart of hypocrisy than any value judgment on it.

As I mentioned, Joanna Macy has named ten fears that keep people stuck in patterns of inaction in the face of injustice and ecological crises. Her list is interesting to me because I’ve spent years considering the mechanics of stuckness and how to get unstuck. (Two of Swords)

And while some of the fears she lists are the obvious ones—fear of guilt, fear of pain, fear of being judged as morbid—there are others I’d never considered. Like some people have a “fear of appearing stupid” writes Macy, for complaining without having a solution prepared. 

She writes, “Our culture values competence,” and “people are inhibited from expressing their anxieties because they feel that in order to do so they need to be walking data banks and skillful debaters. Taking action on behalf of our common world has unfortunately become confused with winning an argument.”

I am back to thinking about wailing. I am thinking about how a fixation on solutions and competence relates to repressing emotions.

And I don’t have anything new to say about it except that yes, it can be so easy to feel like you have no right to express despair or fear or anger if you didn’t bring a better idea or a suggestion to offer that might set things right. 

I am thinking about how hard it is to sit with distress without trying to fix it. It is like having an itch and being told not to scratch.

Somewhere along the way, a big tale was told that said crying and wailing and lamenting have no value in and of themselves. And I’m thankful there are people who have been doing the work of remembering simple technologies. Like wailing. Like showing up angry at a city council meeting. 

And I’ve been thinking about how—in spite of strange water and social media and mirages and algorithms—I want to be someone like that, who builds homes for hard feelings and who can hang out there, too. 

To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.

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Also, I’m teaching a Tarot 101 class next month, if you’re interested. 

Thanks so much for reading and for being here. See you next time.

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Sources

Anonymous. (1980). Meditations on the Tarot: A journey into Christian Hermeticism. TarcherPerigee.

Berry, W. (2012). A continuous harmony: Essays cultural and agricultural. Counterpoint.

Macy, J. (1995). Working through environmental despair. In T. Roszak, M.E. Gomes, A.D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, healing the mind. (pp. 240-259). Sierra Club Books.