On this Sunday before Thanksgiving, I am at school sitting at my desk grading papers with the fluorescent lights off and only a little LED lamp that my mother-in-law bought me for Christmas one year plugged in and shining brightly. I would like to be caught up on my grading before I leave for Minnesota for break, but I know that I will only be closer to caught up, because I am still so far behind. I am the furthest behind I have ever been in my professional career. And I am not actually sure I will get caught up in time which is a scary feeling actually. I am not really sure what got me this far behind.
Unless it was cross country season where I spent nearly every Saturday in a bus and outside in the hot sun for hours watching middle schoolers run. Unless it was the addition of a lot of new expectations for communication with people which wears me out in a way I can’t explain. Unless it was my own mental health not allowing me to use every weekend for work because I needed some time to not think about teaching. Unless it was my own relentless struggle with my faith and how to live it in this world. Unless it was that I am paralyzed with fear about the next four years and beyond because let’s be real no one is doing any real systemic thing to try to change this world and it’s functioning exactly as it has been built to function, Capitalistically.
I recently bought a new t-shirt from a former coworker who makes their living by screen printing shirts and being an artist, perhaps one of the new, and last, noble professions. They always make some shirts that donate money to different causes, an admirable thing to do. The most recent shirt I bought from them is the softest, most beautifully colored, best fitting olive green tshirt with an image of a Ball/Mason jar with a black ant and a red ant inside it. They designed the tshirt to reflect Kurt Vonnegut’s famous scene from Cat’s Cradle in which one character say to another: “‘What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight.’ The bug fight was so interesting that I stopped crying right away–forgot all about the old man. I can’t remember what all Frank had fighting in the jar that day, but I can remember other bug fights we staged later on: one stag beetle against a hundred red ants, one centipede against three spiders, red ants against black ants. They won’t fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that’s what Frank was doing, shaking, shaking, the jar.'” I like to think about my shirt in regard to Henry David Thoreau’s observation of ants in Walden, once at war they will simply kill each other until there is nothing left. And the fight is unsettling to watch. We are the ants in both scenarios. As both authors make clear. We’ve been spooned into a jar and the jar is being shaken to shit by systemic nonsense while we simply try to kill each other, metaphorically, of course, because literal killing is frowned upon, unless the person happens to be different than—and usually less powerful than—we are.
Why am I writing today of all days about being behind and about humants? Well, I haven’t written here for a really long time, and it’s almost thanksgiving, and I usually want to be thankful at this time. But this year I am really struggling to find the good in this world. Really. Struggling. Are there things for which I am grateful, thankful, blessed (as the good Christian folk say)? Yes. I am thankful for existing. I am thankful for family and friends. I am thankful for a job. I am thankful for my dog. I am thankful for the sunrise and sunset, the stars and moon, the trees and grass, the water and the land. I am thankful for shelter, food, intellect, students, coffee, and I could go on and on making a list of a million things for which we should all be grateful, thankful, blessed. For which I am thankful.
What I am thankful for pales in comparison to the terror I hold at living life every day as my authentic self in this world right now. I could even explain how the smallest most mundane things thrill me and how people look at me with suspicion when I talk about how in love with this physical world I am when seeing an egg broken on the ground with ants feasting inside on the yolk that is stuck sticky on the sides. Or how people dismiss me when I explain how the lavender of the soy bean fields is my favorite color in this whole wide world. Or how people can’t see that this world is on fire in so many ways, big and small, macrocosmically and microcosmically. We can’t sustain this. We are bifurcated and shored up on those two sides. Everything is not a binary. We don’t talk with each other anymore. We don’t try to be curious or seek understanding. We’ve been made to fear the other. Fear breeds anger breeds fear breeds anger breeds fear… eventually we simply hate.
So, where does this leave me? At a precipice. Do we move forward as if nothing is happening, or do we figure out now how to get caught up, how to live a life we love, how to be grateful, thankful, blessed for the small things, how to right the systems that make us into humants? How do we begin to undo the damage of hatred and separation that is the hallmark of this time period? Do we start a conversation with someone not like us? Do we dare, DARE, share a meal with someone on the other side? Maybe a meal like some bread and wine?
Reason Breeds Insanity 