rallying. staying with the dark.
I got my first COVID vaccine yesterday. An allowance for caregivers & a lot (lot) of refreshing web pages. I’m deeply grateful for it.
Of course, getting the vaccine is deeply, deeply bittersweet. I went for a hike afterwards, Silver Falls in Salem, and just sat with the reality that this medicine that I’m privileged to get is actually something my dad needed, vitally. And he never got it.
The philosopher Hanzi Freinacht talks about this idea of “depth” in people. Of experiencing a wide range of subjective states - from the horrible to the ecstatic and all in between.
For a while I used to describe one epiphenomena of the grief experience as gaining this weird sixth sense: being able to sense people who, for whatever reason, could join me in my experience. And a more obvious, parallel experience — like I’d disappeared into some weird, invisible, Sophie’s World style layer of reality. That somehow my heart and motivations and inner workings were just utterly invisible to most people.
I developed an irritation with people who would say what they thought were the right words but in a basic, embodied way I still felt invisible. Maybe because that language stopped the thing which actually helped when people wanted to relate, but didn’t know how: which was just saying “I want to be here for you but I don’t know how to.” One best friend said that to me and it was powerful.
There were surprises too. I started and still text with the one friend my Dad made at an assisted living home. It’s incredibly sweet. Somehow it was just obvious to me at the beginning of the cycle of grief: oh, she gets it. She can see me.
Hanzi’s idea of depth fits well. I didn’t know it was possible to miss someone this much. I didn’t know it was possible to get used to the idea of raw despair coming and going so much that you just start to get used to it. It’s like I cycle into the despair, it sneaks up on me, I don’t quite see it coming, and then I’m in it. And eventually it hits me I’m in it - and then eventually I come around to things like my therapist, or, the bodyworker who helped me tremendously in this time, or mushrooms, or something, and my brain switches off of the hell track and into something approaching a calm, quiet, melancholy but workable place. I never thought I would get calmly used to the idea of my brain cycling in and out of something I call the hell track.
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So I was just with all of that, walking, quietly in the Silver Falls in Oregon, this medicine in me, tracking the bittersweetness of it being a privilege to get a medicine that my dad needed.
I’ve been in a new question, which is, how to stay with depth. Depth and complexity.
The NFT crypto craze has been very polarizing, but the main thing it makes me think: what is it about NFTs that allows people to take a stand, to rally for or against it, that seems to be absent with the clusterfuck of 2020? I’ve seen many more thinkpieces about NFTs being the future, an ecological disaster, a house of cards, etc. and I think, huh where are the thinkpieces about - what went wrong in our democracy last year?
Now I wonder, maybe this is what trauma does. It makes you wonder why everyone else isn’t interested in the trauma as much as you are. Like: NFTs here really are just a foil for, a thing of social and emotional interest that isn’t the clusterfuck of 2020. But like, I bet people still get super amped up about K-pop bands on social media and I’m not like “WTF K-POP (we must be doomed).”
I think for me there is an underlying burn, hunger, craving for something resembling justice, or accountability, or just … something. I remember when in the full force of my anger, last summer, I found myself thinking two things a lot. One: the entire contortion that society is in, is on some level to keep people from having the experience my dad and I had. Loss of life and loss of love. This entire miserable isolating lifestyle that is awful and complaint worthy is basically saying god forbid I experience what you are experiencing.
Two: no one, on the left or on the right, wants to go through an experience like this. It’s dark to not say goodbye to a loved one in person and feel robbed of that chance. It’s dark to grieve by yourself instead of in community or ritual. It’s dark to watch a pandemic rip through your father’s nursing home case by case and feel powerless to do anything about it.
And, specifically, it’s a kind of dark that just feels human to me. That transcends the political self. It’s just dark. Left or right, young or old, faith-based or not, it’s not an experience anyone would wish on anyone else.
Somehow hewing to a place of Beyond Left and Right gave me a kind of energy. I know this is not what people want to go through, no matter who they believe themselves to be.
So I have been directing this question inward lately: what allows me to stay with questions like this - of depth, of the incredible complexity that seemed to turn into a flashpoint with 2020 - how do *I* stay with them?
Somehow that question is relieving to ask. I think it shows me - ah, the irritation at “distractions” like the NFT craze are just showing me my own values. I still have something to stay with, stick with, understand here. I know for me, there can be an exhaustion at staying too tight to a political or societal question, and there can be a deep hollowness when I don’t engage it.
But just naming the question - for me, personally, feels like a relief.
I’m starting to mobilize myself out of Portland, where I’ve just been in a self-made grief sanctuary for 9-10 months. This is the first time I feel in my body goals, motivation, energy to be moving and doing again. It’s powerful, it’s relieving. I’m actually quite impatient for the next chapter of things - a healing ceremony in Arizona and seeing my mom in LA - to start. I haven’t been hungry or really that interested in life in a while, but now there’s a deep, deep impatience. Like - can I get started already?