Dreaming the World

A gusty morning following high winds and rain overnight. The shy is clear and the late autumn sun is brilliant. Somehow, many of the trees edging our yard have kept their burnished leaves through all this storminess.

I had a lovely streaming conversation with former students, now friends, last night. We caught up with each others’ lives and projects, and took a deep dive into the ways story is central to each of us. We discovered a shared sense that the stories we hold dear live at the margins of the culture right now.

It turns out that each of us is attempting to build communities in which our preferred stories are shared as central to everyday life.The discussion highlighted for me just how isolated Jennie and I are here.

Yesterday afternoon I grabbed a camera and took the scooter out for a brief photo shoot in an intermittent light rain. The sky and day were November dark and the rain shifted between a fine mist, a drizzle, and a more persistent light rain. As I headed home the rain became more determined and I began to get wet.

An friend drove up, stopped, and expressed concern for my well being. I assured her I was enjoying my outing and would be fine, whereupon she waved and drove off. A few minutes later, as I was settling in at home, the phone rang. Apparently our friend had called another friend and expressed concern about my safety in the rain. That friend, satisfied by her wellness check, then told me that the first friend had stopped at her daughter’s house, grabbed an umbrella, and gone back to find me. Whereupon, I called the first friend, and thanked her for her concern and efforts on my behalf. It was all very sweet.

That story, of course, challenges my narrative about isolation, although it does not change my feelings or the need to have more community around me. The reality is that we all need a complex web or relationships in which to be embedded, and building community here is famously difficult.

One more thought about stories. I imagine there have been end of the world stories told by humans for as long as there have been humans. That said, it seems that since just before the election my news feed has been saturated with end of the world stories, all curiously without a plan to address the issue under discussion. While it is certainly true that we collectively face a long list of existential threats, the questions that puzzle me are: “Why all the attention to End Times now?” And, “Why this attention to real problems on media controlled by people who deny the issues exist?”

I’m not much into conspiracy theories but I wonder, given who controls most of our news feeds, whether the dooming and glooming, and the refusal to propose solutions and actions, is part of a larger project designed to leave us feeling, and acting, hopeless and demoralized. Thoughts?