At The Edge

Here I am again, out on a cornice, overlooking the Abyss, feeling a kind of vertigo. I’m not here by choice, but it takes some part of me to stay here and look. I am done away with by the spectacle that unfolds around and beneath me. For some reason, I get to be a witness.  Is what I see my own folly, or something I can only guess at? My breath is not mine, not here. The Abyss seems to want me here, dizzy and awed. What I behold through the fear, anxiety and awe, is distorted by my own emotion, it is big and indeterminate.

I have been sitting in collapse, trying to live with the realization that the cultural house of cards is coming apart. I know not everyone is being affected in the same way. And, I know everyone is being affected, some more directly and immediately than others. I can feel this erosive process accelerating. I don’t know how long things that are familiar will last. I don’t know if what I am aware of is going to take 10 years or 100. But, I can feel it happening. I’m sitting here helpless, witnessing this certain demise, feeling emotionally overwhelmed, and struck with awe.

I’ve lived in proximity with the Abyss forever, but I only came to a vivid awareness of it when I had my stroke. Then I got it, that what I thought of as my life, wasn’t mine at all.  I began seeing things differently then, sensing the Abyss, and having my attention altered by Life. That is a long, disorienting story. Its been unfolding over time. Today, the latest version, finds me out on this cornice, trembling, and once again being made seasick by what I see, a roiling soup of potentials, all of which include demise, and some of which include evolution.

I know I should be glad. I am. Some of what I sense is evolution, the way these changes are going to bring forward other aspects of our humanity. But, I’m also horrified to see that all of the paths forward contain demise. In some it ends us, in some it alters us, in some it utterly transforms us. That is the good news. But, the bad news is the amount of pain, and the scale of it, that lies ahead. The good news is that some will be shaped by the pain, and made again in that crucible. The bad news is that all will know the pain.

I am constantly surprised by this life, it seems, that one thing is always joined with an other (or more others). I should know by now. The level of connection, of all things being coupled, is far more than I am used to. So, I should have guessed, and maybe I did abstractly, that demise might be accompanied. Sure, the probability of evolution is increasing, conditions are such that they are coaxing out of us the parts of ourselves that haven’t fit easily into the herd mentality of the mainstream. Diversity is giving us a chance. So is the gauntlet of environmental and deeply human limitations we are going through. Life is painfully teaching us what we need to know, evolving us, changing our nature.

Will we learn to fit in? It is too soon to say. What can be said with some assurance is that right now demise, collapse is happening. Are we learning from it? I’m not sure. I know that sitting here feeling it, directly experiencing the frayed ends, watching people losing functioning, is heart rendering. I know that evolution is messy and uncertain. It is working on us, using our own forms of neglect to help us awaken. I’m impressed by the possibilities implicit in this moment. If it is possible, I have an even clearer image of the pattern of creating through destruction. There is so much that is poignantly passing, and there is so much that is now full of beginningness!

I have long felt, as a disabled person, impoverished by my health and our dysfunctional social safety net, going without health insurance,  that I was living in a house of cards. I have made some peace with the realization that it could all come down some time. The improbability and seeming impossibility of this life has always impressed me. I’m kept from falling into depression by the even more miraculous awareness that despite it all, despite the improbability, we, I, everything exists, shot through with vulnerability, uncertain and here.

I am out on this cornice witnessing our death throes and birth pangs. I can’t make any of it happen. I am not immune to the pain and uncertainty. And, I am grateful for this moment. I am alive and I am witnessing, feeling, creation at work. It looks like the life I’ve known is being taken apart again, and I know it is simultaneously being put together anew.