Dreaming the World

A clear, cool, midwinter morning in a year in which winter has been largely missing. The crows are out and about in the field adjacent our home, occasionally sunlit as they stroll between shadow and light. Last night the coyotes were calling excitedly in the field.

I’ve found writing this blog difficult as I search for something optimistic, or at least hopeful, to say. I’ve been reading about Europe before and during the world wars, and of course finding uncomfortable parallels between then and life in the U.S. now. I am left with an abiding sense of being on repeat, which I guess makes sense given Ground Hog Day has just past.

I find myself bouncing back and forth between grief, anger, and fear, with the first two predominating. Of course, we have indeed all been here before, collective insanity apparently being a fundamental aspect of homo sapiens. Perhaps our short life spans contribute to our insistence on forgetting the horrors of our parents and grandparents, and ignoring the terrors and genocides of the moment.

I imagine denial is a fundamental human coping mechanism as I can see it working in my day-to-day life. As Freud and T.S. Elliot noted, “man cannot bear very much reality”. One simply cannot pay attention to the disintegration of the world, all the time. One has to have joy and play in order to make living bearable.

Still, our collective destruction of this beautiful planet breaks my heart, and the tendency of people to push the pain and suffering away by saying “I’ll be dead by then’, leaves me enraged. The world ecosystem is already crashing down around us and our children and grandchildren will be alive, and have to make their way in a much diminished and more dangerous world. Chances are they will remember how it was when they were kids and be enrages, rightly, with us.

Of course, some very adaptable species, most likely including homo sapiens and coyotes, will endure, and when we emerge from the dark, Coyote will once again try to make the “next world” a better place. Of course, Coyote will make mistakes and the world will be as it is, both what Elie Wiesel called, “an enormous slaughter house”, and as Momaday knew: “a house made of dawn”.