Plus Ça Change

The Merry-Go-Round of "Real Life"

I am intrigued by the Groundhog Day nature of what we call “real life” in the US. The seemingly endless cycle of the same thing: forest fires and global warming, rising prices, forced immigrant removal, continuing war, bloviation and farting noises that emanate from the nation’s capital, unhappy so-called allies, lies and more lies from a corrupt, venal, wannabe authoritarian regime, judicial resistance to those lies, the deluge of “wisdom” being spread about AI – good for us, bad for us - and the endless, repetitive cycle of attention-grabbing and advertising that passes for social media, where most people seem to get what is too-often called “news.”

Add in the endless “analysis” of all the above, predicting success, failure, war, elections, next week’s ballgames, combined with relentless expansion of spending the American people seem to want to waste on betting on those outcomes, still searching for the gold ring or the pot at the end of the rainbow.

And the continuous expansion of the phenomena known as “influencers,” hoping for the same gold ring, people who may know something about something or are just inventive and glib enough to capture a fragment of attention, be anointed by social media, and make some money while they have it.

And “thought leaders” who milk the attention they get, using a label that neither explains whether what they are doing is actually thinking or whether anybody really cares that they think (is there a Ph.D. somewhere in “thought leadership?? I want it; been thinking all my life.)

I turned this all off for two weeks. Went on retreat into the other, much more real world of spiritual practice and ancestry. Turned off my phone – the ubiquitous device that supposedly connects me to the world and got in touch with community and personal reality and the vulnerability I can try to run from by digesting the endless output of Groundhog Day.

Investigated things like love, sorrow, joy, the “good medicine” my heart and my ancestry bring to me.

Walked in total silence through redwoods, here for centuries before I arrived. Experienced the energies of nature and the six directions – East, West, North, South, the sky, and the earth.

Watched a thinner pine free, 100 feet in the sky, as its crown swayed in the wind. My eyes slid down its trunk as the pine mirrored the six-foot sway at the top in less visible movement all the way to the ground. I wrapped my arms around the base one day and felt that microscopic movement. Its roots, I knew, carried messages to other sister trees around it, through buried fungi. Science has now discovered what the ancestors have known for generations – the trees are alive and support each other, communicate.

I sat, in meditation, together and alone, sharing similar wisdom from traditions millennia old. This is not “thinking” wisdom, it is much deeper, in the ways our minds can reset and change through silence and concentration. A knowledge science has begun to replicate with modern tests, as with the knowledge of trees.

Then I visited my ancestors, the childhood homes I lived in, homes that are no longer mine. To see the changes over 70-80 years since I lived in that hot, valley farm/college town in the Sacramento Valley. It was 100 degrees out there, the dry heat the West and Southwest have experienced for millennia; it’s not new, just hotter.

I visited external and internal spaces and released my ancestors from their pain and suffering and relieved my own.

For two weeks, this was my real world, one I shared on the journey, with a loving partner. It was deeper, richer, both more solid and more fluid than what we perceive as the “real world” I returned to.

There, in that world, nothing had changed. I had lost nothing of what passes for “news.” The Iran war was still going, as was the one in Ukraine. The climate was still roasting. The lawyers were still arguing and the judges still deciding and passing cases up the chain to a supine supposedly “supreme” court. ICE was still on the streets. Democrats were still divided, some of them cowering as if tyranny could not be confronted and would just evaporate in November.

I was still getting pinged multiple times a day for campaign contributions with dire warnings served up as the unappetizing invitation to give. Swipe left and declare it spam, which doesn’t stop the flow at all.

The columnists are still doing what we/they do – write and never look back. Write it again tomorrow with different links, reputations and notoriety enhanced, errors and wrong predictions forgotten.

I am not new in calling this a merry-go-round, not “news.” I can get off and when I return the carousel is still turning, the horses rise and fall, going in a circle, heading nowhere.

And I can go to a real horse farm nearby, where a local acting troupe plays outdoors a story told for more than 400 years, about falsehood and nonsense and love in Illyria, and the foolishness of the human race. A story strangely called Twelfth Night, though it has little to do with that.

I can laugh, watch the stars as they emerge in the darkening sky, and cry with joy at the successful resolution of the love dilemmas the Bard created.

Now that’s real life!