Riches in the Ruins

I put a new national parks calendar on the wall that says 2025 (January is buffaloes in Yellowstone, btw! Nice.) and as the second part of that ritual dictates, I’m trying to parse how to live more fully. This is a question that beeps like a 5 year old spamming the “why?” button. It comes like a period at the end of every thought, if not in the middle of one. It is a song, that when first noticed can be identified like a thrush calling from a canyon, but over time becomes a periodical cicada in synchronicity with the thousand thoughts and feelings belonging to a body.

Am I living a good life? Am I a help to anyone? Am I happy? Do I feel optimistic? Do I share my good fortune? I know these questions may make the reader uneasy, and that I, in my hard-to-label life, am often a subject of well wishes that wander into worry. For what it’s worth, I am trying not to hold other’s worry against them, for I worry too. Though not usually about individual people so much as about their plight and our greater fate.

 

But what is quite so concerning about these honing kind of questions? Shouldn’t one review and take inventory? Especially with question that aren’t centered around tally marks and decimal places? When is it not ok to hold the weight of things in both hands? During COVID, I feel like for a brief moment amongst the trembling and uncertainly, people slowed down, and held on tightly to what was actually within their grasp, and had so many takeaways. And while many people ran fast and afraid in all directions, a lot of us saw for the first time whether in light or aspect, something about what was possible, and what might happen.

That is to say, our current reality. The attempt to shutter as much of our government as possible, push out institutional know how, traumatize employees, especially marginal ones, for a two fold goal. A stronger and less checkable executive branch, and a consolidation of wealth past anything the world has ever known. All while we cruise past 1.5 degrees of warming. And the opposition party to all this? What opposition party?

 

That is to say, the ritual of my yearly questions was also changed by the pandemic. Of course I want all the best for my friends and family, but I also want a life for everyone, and I often struggle with my place within it all. I know that defeatism is not the answer, and I believe deeply that we must collect our strengths and our communities together, because no matter what happens, we will be here on this planet and we must find a way to live on it. And I think the people around us will be the best hope we have for answering both sets of questions. About the world, and the way in which to live on it, to be happy, to be of any help, to feel optimistic, to share our good fortune. And so here we go together to pick our riches out of the ruins.