Category Archives: post bucket

I have not been looking forward to transitioning from a seven minute commute to one that takes up the better part of an hour. Traffic tends to be light at six in the morning, but there are a lot of miles to cover. People tend to be disparaging about the long haul I have elected, but I don’t think it has to be a dead space. I’m finding that the mandatory pause between work and home has the potential to be a time of intention, rather than a waste of minutes. I want to find a way to preserve this space, and make something of the protected time instead of falling into the easy habit of turning to the radio, podcasts and phone calls to fill it in. On the days I succeed, I tend to arrive home more focused and ready to embrace being there, rather than just collapsing. On the days I don’t, I tend to feel frenetic and unfocused walking in the door and that energy doesn’t seem dissipate readily. Time will tell if I can make something of this protected pocket of my day.

“He who has the most grace …”

Every once in a while, I actually settle into a peace about the trajectory I have set for myself: to return to Alaska, to work in medicine, to run dogs, to spend extended time in the wilderness, to carve a home out of the woods with a rambling garden and a small menagerie of chickens and goats and horses. Even in re-reading this blog – which now spans twelve years! – I find posts from a decade or more ago reinforcing these more recent experiences and declarations. They demonstrate over and over that this track is one that is able to interrupt, or at least shorten, the recurrent episodes of darkness. That in it I find a contentment and happiness that I haven’t yet found in any other context – it is this deep feeling of contentment, of homecoming, that struck me when I first came north and compelled me to dig in my heels to stay. The daily tasks born out of building this kind of life become the constant meditation, the necessary cycle of breath, that stops the steep spiral of hopelessness and despair I seem to fight against, to one degree or another, on a daily basis.

But as soon as I begin to believe my own surety, I come across something that gives me gut-wrenching pause: a recent article on refugee camps in Africa, marking the total population of the two largest now well over half a million people, the point that these are not even the millions of individuals recently displaced by the more popularly covered Syrian crisis, the brewing Yemeni civil war, Boko Haram, North Korea. Closer, there are the daily reminders that Philando Castile was murdered by police just a mile from our home, and that sharp racial disparities continue to be ignored and minimized, engendering perpetual generations of inequality and suffering at our own front door. The list is endless and overwhelming as I sit in my safe warm home with food on the table, clean water from the tap, a steady job to go to in the morning and reliable transportation to get there, no fear of being killed by a stray mortar or jittery cop in the mean time.

Long ago, newly arrived in Surabaya as a wide-eyed nine year old, I was introduced to the idea that “he who has the most grace, pays.” Operating in this framework, regardless of fault, the person most financially able to make restitution after an accident becomes the responsible party. I saw this play out over and over again through a decade of coming of age on Java, and it sunk in.

Through this were woven the edicts of early Christian indoctrination (despite adult attempts to keep study purely focused on the work of salvation):

“Seek justice, correct oppression …”

“… do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor …”

“… and do no wrong or violence to the resident alien …”

“… defend the rights of the poor and needy …”

“… love your neighbor as yourself …”

“… maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute … ”

“… is it not to divide your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless and poor into the house …”

“do not look to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

This echoed through the narratives I encountered the literature I was coming more and more to both love and escape into. Courtenay presented PeeKay, fighting for racial justice in South Africa, and Jesse’s plight to drive home the violent hypocrisy race-based laws in the early years of Australia. Anne Frank scribbling away in her hiding place, facing unjust persecution and death. Harper Lee’s Atticus and Scout. They all spoke to a responsibility, more, an imperative, to do better, to be a voice, to give back.

The idea that with great power (or privilege) comes great responsibility echoed down from the French revolution, to high school US history courses, to comic books consumed on the sly. It sank in deeply, quietly steering my studies towards sociology and anthropology, driving me to inner city internships and then jobs with homeless, disabled and mentally ill individuals after graduation.

The idea of an obligation to fight for social justice, the idea that a good and moral person with privilege owes it to the others inhabiting this earth to do this, is a foundational stone I cannot remove. Coming around to committing, then, to funnel my energies and resources to a trajectory which prioritizes my own peace and contentment first, throws me into turmoil every time.

Finishing an unsatisfying book, a struggle to get through, too close to home and too far from it all at once. Being able to set it down knowing you have given it every chance, put it down and picked it back up, put it down again, and finally that you have closed the back cover knowing (as you did from page fifty or so) that is was not offering what you sought. But that you finished it anyway. There is an undertone of genuine satisfaction in this feeling, too.

It’s hard to remember the true taste of it, afterwards. The fear is still there. A disquiet memory of being utterly caught up in the unrelenting crush of a thing neither tangible nor even fully definite. A hint of the deep pressure over the sternum, stealing breath. Dark curtains threatening the corners of vision. A welling up, a gasp, a loss of air and of hope. But the intensity of the unrelenting pile of moments are lost in the morning. The seconds, and minutes, and hours where relief refused to present itself, where avenues of escape usually followed were walled, boarded up, nailed definitively shut. The unspeakable images of deep and abiding despair grow in frequency and intensity. But in the morning there is only the whisper of the demons fleeing into the shadows cast by dawn, their grip relinquished but their long fingerling imprints still burn on skin, a grip around the arm, tendrils still reaching out from the dark edges of the morning, grasping.

The clarity of light over the river after sunset two days after the solstice, even in these southern latitudes, throws the the trees, the moored riverboats, the bridges and houses over the bluffs into sharp focus. Abandoned industrial buildings still haunting the city’s shore are backlit in the glow, sunset hues reflect off dark water and onto the flat bases of cumulous clouds to the east, eliciting a breath of disorientation. The curve of the earth suddenly seems small from this late vantage.

The water changes quickly and imperceptibly from the bright blue-grey under summer sunlight to the deep charcoal-grey of dusk, losing contrast as the light tilts up and away with the spin of the planet. Streetlights blink on, somehow bright even in the deep golden hour light still highlighting every edge, every leaf, every ripple.

In Galileo’s time, there was fierce debate about the nature of the milky way. The sky was so awash with stars, the earth so devoid of manmade light, that the strip of night sky looked to the naked eye like a single entity – one bright source and not a hundred billion individual pinpoints in the dark. Yet the character of cyclic illumination that our small, local sun provides has been consistent for every generation of humankind that has walked the surface of our world. For all our innovation, invention and progress as a species, daylight remains the exclusive purview of our star.