A Li'l Ragey

Some of my friends reading this post might also see me posting on Facebook or Twitter. And they might have noticed that I've gotten a little less flowery and a little more ragey on my socials. Rage is maybe my least favorite emotion. It eats me all up inside, loses me friends, and gets me the silent treatment from family, who are obliged to love me anyway (in the case of my rages, from a bemused distance). Nevertheless, I have given rage some reign recently. A little gallop in the wind, so to speak. An airing of grievances.

But I worry this rage could be unhealthy, so I'm trying to not feed it things like fear and negativity, gloom and doom. Because we know that stuff is only gonna grow wild, and it doesn't take much for it to sprout into a whole toxic garden of hellacious thorns.

Still, there is the current reality. It is what it is, and considering that reality, you know this rage isn't unfounded or misplaced. If you're reading this, it's quite possible you feel it with me. But when I try to put my finger on the exact cause or source of my own rage, what comes back is the lame phrase "oh....just.....all of it!" And by "it" I mean all the noise that comes in the whirlwind of living in honest-to-goodness pandemic times. The inane policies. The creepy conspiracy theories. The admonishments to do and be better humans. The face-palm-worthy stupidities of leadership. The limits on where I can go and whom I can see. The current efforts to undermine our electoral processes. The failures in protecting our essential workers. The pasta shortages. For real. Pasta shortages. I can't even.

Oh, and cancer. Especially the fact that clinical trials, on which so many late stage patients depend for treatment, are stalled because of the pandemic. Access to other treatments and surgeries have been delayed as well. That sucks too.

And the senseless, needless deaths.

People, I'm trying to turn my rage into good, to harness it as creative and productive energy. I'm trying to keep out of trouble and out of jail (it's nearly impossible to get good cancer treatment when you're a felon). But some days containing that rage, even to a speedy canter, is hard. When I express it, stomping around the house, shouting about the latest absurd headlines, bemoaning the fate of the country, it doesn't change anything. Except my foul mood. I do feel better after a good stomp. So go ahead, darlings, stomp and shout. Embrace your inner toddler for ten minutes, or ten days. It's fine. 

People who love me advise again and again...avoid the news, avoid the socials. They'll just make you upset.

I don't want to be that ostrich.

So I'm gonna ride this rage and hope it doesn't buck me off. And I'm gonna being fuckin' grateful I'm alive to feel it.

Listicles from a Plague Year

Stay off Facebook, they say. Stop watching the news. Meditate. Do yoga. Use this time to X. Now is the time to try Y.

Here's a list of ten things you can do to fend off boredom, address your fears, organize your home, and be a better parent/human/pet-owner/sustainable-gardener/atheist/christian/buddhist/poet/ teacher/citizen/doer-of-anything/while-not-doing-anything during the pandemic.

Hey, List-makers!

I'm not bored. I have plenty to do. Plenty to think about.

And I'm not doing any of it. Hardly.

More than one well-intentioned person has pointed out to me that Shakespeare did some of his most remarkable writing during plague times. That's awesome for him. I'm socially-distance-walking around my neighborhood taking pictures of flowers and posting them on IG because that's about the extent of my mental and emotional bandwidth right now. Oh, and I'm also lecturing my FB friends on the importance of political engagement and voting. Really.

The woman who delivered groceries to my door today was at least ten years my senior. I'm 57. Let's get fucking politically engaged over that privileged cancer patient shit. How did my cancer somehow trump her seniority? Isn't she supposed to be getting groceries delivered to her, too? Damn.

Breathe. Be grateful for now. Live in this moment. Yes. Of course. I'm especially good at that. I have metastatic cancer. I'm grateful for every day I wake up. I know the future is imaginary.

Seems like lots of other people are registering that too. We can talk all we want about hope, about "after this." I do it all the time, as in "for my next treatment after this, I'll try X." But we don't really know, do we? Not really. Not ever. It just feels...more so not ever now. Weird, huh?

I still think, though, that most of us are going to be okay. Eventually. That's not a scientifically supported observation though, just a rough calculation of the human spirit left on the planet keeping it spinning. A lot of folks won't be okay though; that's true, too—I think especially of those directly traumatized by illness, and the first responders and medical folks who have had to deal with impossible circumstances. And the economic catastrophes everywhere. But somewhere, in the misty not ever...well, I don't really know. Maybe ask one of Macbeth's witches.

Beauty Anyway

It poured rain today, Easter Sunday, drenching everything here in Nashville into a soggy mess. In some places there were severe weather watches. Some of my friends up north still have snow. As far as I know, the Easter Sunday churches weren’t packed, because they weren’t supposed

to be open. Christians who celebrate Easter today and those who will be celebrating Orthodox Easter next week, like Jews recently celebrating Passover, are compelled to keep their observances at home.

And whether or not we individually subscribe to a religious observance right now, this time of year feels like a pivot point for lots of us, as we step for real into spring, new beginnings, stirred by pretty days. Still, right now especially, we’re all terribly...uncertain about what comes next.

Because it’s Easter, I can’t help but think about what historians believe life was like for the folks who eventually became Christians in the earliest times, in the last millenium’s first decades and centuries. For the most part, those folks were Jews (and some Gentiles and others) who had, according to the various stories circulating around the Mediterranean in those days, experienced and witnessed some remarkable things while hanging out with this weird carpenter turned radical rabbi/street preacher. Or if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes, they’d heard the tales. Their own customs and religious practices as Jews had been suppressed and surveilled by the Romans. Their holiest temple had been destroyed, rebuilt, and then destroyed again. Many of their families had lived centuries as refugees far from their ancestral homelands, and some of them living in and around Jerusalem were themselves refugees from other territories. The local and imperial governments couldn’t agree on laws; currency markets were shaky, income inequality crushed the working people, xenophobia thrived, little wars were breaking out all over, and health care sucked. You can see why a street preacher, or even a story about a street preacher with an optimistic message might have gained some traction with that crowd.

That story isn’t one to which most Americans today subscribe, though. It doesn’t bring people comfort in the way it might have even just a few generations ago, and there are lots of good reasons for that, which I won’t get into here. Let’s just say the cruelties inflicted on others in the name of that radical rabbi/street preacher have pretty much discredited most institutions trying to stake a claim on his story.

And yet some people have faith. It might not be a religious faith, but they believe in goodness.

They believe in beauty. They believe in the power of a seed to germinate into something beautiful, something edible, something tall and shady, something wild. And now, now is the time for sowing, friends. Get your beauty planted, people; we’re going to need it in the coming days.

Humans crave beauty. It’s one of the reasons I take so many pictures of flowers. It’s why we paint, or sing, or write poems, or dance. Beauty is its own life force. I think that’s one reason so many cancer patients turn to art when they fall ill, when they are dying. In the ugliness of illness, in the destruction of our bodily temples, we reach for good, and we long for beauty.

It’s my third Easter since diagnosis; my third year of snapping pictures of blooms, of dealing with pollen allergies. It’s my first living with threat of coronavirus. I can’t see far enough into the future to know how that one is going to end, so I’m going to try doing what has worked for me in dealing with cancer. Train my eye on the beautiful and pull it in. That doesn’t mean I’m not acknowledging or caring for the things that are not beautiful; I live with a hideous disease deep inside my body and see awfulness in my community every day. It’s grim stuff and it needs fixing. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have beauty anyway.