Broken Open

 

The shooting in Texas set this off. It once again, led to an experience that has been haunting me for some time. Living, in the midst of global collapse, is especially challenging.  It’s dangerous in a new way. The war in Ukraine, Covid, mass shootings, financial inequality, global warming, all of these things dominate my pedestrian concerns, and color my days with a darkening hue. The times we are living in, are hard to digest. I live in a kind of post-traumatic numbness. Fortunately, the pull of grief, and the desire for healing action, tear me open. I am exactly as broken as the times.

 

I’ve been wondering how to keep my sensitivities afloat during this flood of human dysfunction. Pain, hopelessness, and fear threaten to overwhelm my natural elder positivity. The possible death of the species, of complex life on the planet, and of life itself, overwhelms and confuses me. My own death looks better to me as I am bombarded with images of famine, floods, and drought. Will this nightmare never cease!?

 

I am struggling. I have a life — and I feel a sense of obligation to it. I fear there are many who are jeopardized right now, and many more who won’t be so lucky in the predictable future. What do I do? How do I live with knowing what I know? I am a witness to history falling down. Can I keep my eyes open, my heart engaged, and my soul ready? This is a moment infused with deep uncertainty.

 

I am a human caught in a mesh none of my ancestors ever knew. Instead of the great predator animals, and the mysteries of life, threatening, as it did them, this generation of humans is having to face the fact, that we are the ones who threaten us. Human danger emanates from human life! What I fear is a product of my kind. 

How do I respond to that awareness?

 

I don’t really have an answer to the depth of this conundrum. I wriggle uneasily with it. My sleep is fitful, interrupted by dread and shame. My trust in others, especially when they are silent about all of this, is provisional, uncertain, and limited. I am some weird combination of raw and numb.  The quality of my living is turning on the same axis point as the larger life around me. I am sometimes dubious about myself. Anguish sobers my days.

 

All of this, weighs on me. As I am touched by what is happening in Texas, Mariapul, Somalia, and parts of Ethiopia, I am spinning, caught in a vortex, that is changing my humanity, breaking my heart open, and making everything unrecognizable. Living with my heart broken — opened by a torrent of love, grief, and wonder, is all that is left.

 

I hope it is holy, to love what is dying. I hope that one can be present with a leaking heart. Sustaining a smile, being occasionally warm, touching what matters, holding another, all of this, is not only still do-able, but more powerful and essential in this darkening world.

 

The heart breaks open when what ails us appears. I want to be capable. I think the crumbling going on around me is leading me towards greater compassion. Broken for broken.  Broken for a shattering wholeness. So quivers the opening……

 

 

Dark Joy

 

“Stepping deeper,

 

into the darkness,

 

closer to the light.”

                                                                                    Bruce Cockburn

 

 

There are some things that are just not what they are cracked-up to be. Popular knowledge, just like common knowledge, is off the mark. Delusion is better informed. What do I mean? Well, for instance, going toward the light means that it gets brighter all the way. Right. But somethings, like joy, are not at all linear or predictable. Something else is at play. There is a waywardness to the advent of joy that can be breathtaking, for its unpredictability, and its irascible nature.

 

Joy seems to be predominantly a product of aging. There is something about surviving a long time, combined with the vividness of Life, that seems to cook-up a quality of elation that many call joy. This a wonderful experience, though I would submit a lesser form of joy. Joy that isn’t the product of surprise and doubt isn’t all that joyful. It is the scale of uncertainty that adds intensity to joy.

 

Dark joy is the kind that exceeds expectations, seems improbable, and follows suffering, misery, and uncertainty. One’s happiness is blemished, by memories that contain demonic and overwhelming forces. Dark joy is like the sun burning through storm clouds. It is the clouds, in part, that make the moment blaze so. Dark joy is marked, scuffed up by unexpected trials, the hardships that give grace its luminosity. Dark joy arises when all is lost and somehow you are still standing.

It is filled with irrationality.

 

All joy is blessing, but dark joy is a special blessing. Touched by the predacious darkness, this joy is strangely refined, bearing scars that convey the hostility of wild and incorrigible change. It has come through a difficult passage, and in doing so, has revealed another way. It is a joy that conveys something of the promise we bear. It isn’t a passive blessing, it wears a shiny luminosity, that conveys the miracle of perseverant action. Dark joy is what rises through the soil, brutal as all birth. It is the convulsion that bears fruit.

 

There hasn’t been a way to celebrate what comes to us out of the darkness. But maybe, dark joy will change the pattern. Unbridled joy! Run amok, tipping over our expectations, defying our conventions, releasing our wildness, allowing us to limp home. 

 

Dark joy oddly casts a light upon what is truly divine.