Hi, Friend.
This isn’t much of a pep talk, unless you find commiseration uplifting. I do.
I’m writing to you as a person without words. Or, rather, as a person without the right words—the ones that might somehow say the thing. Maybe, like me, you don’t know how to wrap your head around the world right now, let alone find the language. Maybe, like me, you feel more than a little scrambled.
“The world is fifty percent terrible” feels like a very conservative estimate today. With so much cruelty and greed on display, I can hardly believe we’re still checking email, going grocery shopping, and watering our plants—business as usual. And yet, as soon as I’m ready to scream into a pillow, my son gives me a hug out of nowhere, or I look up in awe at the clouds, or I read a message from someone I love.
How not to feel scrambled? There is so much to marvel at and be grateful for, and so much to grieve and rage against. I keep coming back to Rilke’s “beauty and terror.” It’s not beauty or terror, it’s and. We get both, and I don’t know what to do except acknowledge both—call them out, loud and clear, when I see them.
I have seen plenty of terrible this week. So have you. I have seen cruelty and greed beyond comprehension. I have also seen and felt love, gratitude, generosity—and I hope you have, too. We need the beauty if we’re going to keep fighting the terror, and we have to keep fighting. What choice do we have?
I don’t have the right words, but I’ve been turning to poems to find them. That’s where I always turn. I’ve been reading this W.S. Merwin poem daily, a kind of secular prayer. Maybe you could use it, too.
Tomorrow there will be a parade in my town, with marching bands and floats, and all the neighborhood kids will run into the streets for candy. At night there will be fireworks set to music—“God Bless America,” and “America the Beautiful,” and that awful Lee Greenwood song. You know the one. And I’ll be torn—because on one hand, what do we have to be patting ourselves on the back for? But on the other hand, the kids scrambling for candy, and the musicians playing, and the families ooh-ing and aah-ing at the fireworks are enough to make me well up.
It’s both. It’s always both. And, not or.
And there is beauty to see, “dark though it is.”
Love,
Maggie
The current circumstances remind me of experiencing the death of someone you love. You are sad. You grieve. You're overwhelmed. But life keeps going, and it is a good thing that it does because, as you've noted, it offers moments of joy and beauty, and those are a balm and balance for the pain.
I will not be celebrating America tomorrow. I will be with my family, at home, saying thank you that we are safe and together in this moment.
I look forward to meeting you in Greece 🇬🇷 at Rosemary’s House this fall, if I am still standing.
Check out what I wrote today about all of the emotions this empath is feeling right now.