Notes of despair
This week on the blog, I’m sharing the content of my most recent email newsletter. If you aren’t already receiving my monthly-ish newsletters and would like to be, sign up here.
I am filled with despair over the school shooting in Uvalde, on the heels of the shooting in the grocery store in Buffalo.
I have found myself questioning speaking out about gun violence from a platform mostly devoted to wonder and wildness and connection to the earth. But we disconnect ourselves from each other and from the earth at great peril. Thomas Merton says, “Someone will say: you care about birds. Why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. We are in the world and part of it, and we are destroying everything because we are destroying ourselves morally, and in every way. It’s all part of the same sickness.”
So I interrupt my usual newsletter content of delight and wonder and curiosity with notes of despair and outrage. Except, then, I also share a few thoughts on how our despair is connected to our joy, and perhaps even a requirement for our action.
Some thoughts:
How we treat our fellow humans, particularly our children, is inextricably bound together with how we treat the earth. So is what we’re increasingly comfortable with.
We cannot get comfortable with the murder of children. We cannot become comfortable with this kind of violence. It is not inevitable. We can’t excuse this, and we can’t deflect from this.
It is overwhelmingly devastating to realize that the death of these children won’t stop politicians in Texas or DC from clinging to their power. Let’s call it what it is—not pro-life, but pro-power.
And yet. The systems that benefit from this kind of violence are counting on our overwhelm. They are counting on our despair, which means devoid of hope, to render us silent and to render us immobile.
And yet. I keep stumbling upon the words of poets and philosophers who seem to indicate the opposite: that perhaps it is from the depths of our despair that we access the depths of our joy, and the power to lead us back to hope and into action. We must feel our despair, fully feel it, but not become rooted in it. As Robin Kimmerer says, “The question is, what do we do in response?”
So instead of my usual format, this month I offer the remainder of this newsletter as a curation of writings on despair, from poets and writers whose words offer me solace and point me back towards hope, love, and action.
This month, I hope you will do what you can to take care of yourself. May you rest, but may you not get comfortable. We have much to do in response.
With stubborn gratitude,
Liz
From the poet Amanda Gorman’s latest poem “Hymn for the Hurting” written in the wake of Uvalde:
Maybe everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed & strange.
But only when everything hurts
May everything change.
From Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass:
“Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
From Kathleen Dean Moore’s stunning new book of essays, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World:
“Repeat the sounding joy. The more hollow a heart, the more resonant it can become. I would make of this body, this life, a sounding board, tuned to that sympathetic vibration, which is sympathy, which is feeling together, which is compassion for all the world.”
…
“Weeping is the start of our grieving, not the end. It invites—no, it morally requires—movement toward Awaken. Our grief is not only a measure of our love but a measure of our obligation. It is therefore our responsibility to awake to the work of saving what we can of the songs.”
…
“Poets warned us, writing of “the heartbreaking beauty that will remain when there is no heart to break for it.” But what if it is worse than that? What if it’s the heartbroken children who remain in a world without beauty? How will they find solace in a world without wild music? How will they thrive without green hills edged with oaks? How will they forgive us for letting frog song slip away? When my granddaughter looks back at me, I will be on my knees, begging her to say I did all I could.
I didn’t do all I could have done.
It isn’t enough to love a child and wish her well. It isn’t enough to open my heart to a bird-graced morning. Can I claim to love a morning, if I don’t protect what creates its beauty? Can I claim to love a child, if I don’t use all the power of my beating heart to preserve a world that nourishes children’s joy? Loving is not a kind of la-de-da. Loving is a sacred trust. To love is to affirm the absolute worth of what you love and to pledge your life to its thriving, to protect it fiercely and faithfully, for all time.”
Ellen Bass’s poem “The Thing Is”
The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.
Nikita Gill’s poem “More Notes on Survival”
More Notes on Survival
Someone is talking to me
about the light at the end of the tunnel
and all I can think of is after.
What happens after we meet the light.
After the grief ends.
After we walk into happiness.
Won’t there be another tunnel,
another painful passage,
another trauma simply waiting?
And the answer is, yes,
because in the book of being,
life promised to be a moving thing.
It promised to be both fight and flourish.
It vowed to be both lesson and respite.
So the love will end.
The light will end.
The joy will end.
And as we keep walking,
we find it again.