“The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.”
—Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
For the past year and a half, I’ve been receiving daily emails from USAJOBS, the employment site of the federal government. I used to receive notices about a huge variety of interesting jobs with US Fish and Wildlife, CDC, Veterans Administration, NOAA, USDA, EPA, Forestry Service, along with others. Now the only departments hiring are Navy, Air Force, and Homeland Security.
It strikes me how clearly this expresses this administration’s worldview. If all you emphasize is war and defending and expelling, your only relationship with the world is fear and anger and aggression.
That recognition stops me in my tracks.
At any moment in our lives we have a choice about how to inhabit the world. We can notice the child needing help; the wonder of salmon spawning in a river where they have not been witnessed for decades; the librarian feeding the curiosity of someone who wants to know about the history of country music or how to build a chicken coop.
When I put myself in the shoes of any person who approaches the world with anger and distrust, my body has a physical response: I feel claustrophobic and contracted, ready to spring out and destroy anything that comes close—because everything is a threat. It feels tense and vigilant, ready to kill and control in order to feel safe. The irony is that no matter how much control it gets, it will never feel safe. Its aggression makes it impossible to notice all of the possibilities for beauty and kindness.
That’s not the way I want to inhabit the world.
Sometimes I try to feel what it might be like from the other side: What if I were a salmon fighting my way upstream to lay eggs and then die? Or the huge sequoia that’s grown for a millennium? Or the mushroom growing at the foot of that tree?
Every moment, our breath is a powerful antidote to the disembodiment of fear and anger. It’s a way to return to ourselves; an invitation to feel our body on the earth and inhale the beauty of existence… to allow that to infuse our very essence, then pause in silent reverence. And then to exhale, in sacred offering to all beings.
Prayer
May we pause; may we feel the earth and the sky; may we find ourselves in the large and in the small, in the self and in the not-self, in our bodies and in the infinite, in the now, in the then, and in the yet-to-come… may we welcome all with curiosity, grace, and compassion. Svaha.