Harrowing the Day
It's an Inside Job
It’s time to reflect on waking up to the “Inside Job” of Harrowings - and for that I’ve opened this post with Don Henley’s title track of the album of the same name: Inside Job.
“(…) Learning about forgiving and hanging on to the joy of living (…)” - that’s what we are here to do, I’m convinced. I am forgiving everything and everyone to set myself free of expectations and open myself to the possibilities of a creative life. Throwing caution to the wind, I’m allowing my inner life to leak out through my fingertips flying over the keyboard and the hope is that it will resonate with others and we’ll go on this “harrowing” journey together. It is the season to be harrowed….both with All Hallows’ Eve in the offing - followed less than a week later by Election Day when we will determine who of the two choices the D/RNC provides us will hold the Office of President of the United States for the next four years. Fear reigns, if one looks at the message the media would have us buy into, but I’m here to advocate love over fear.
Now, what does this mean? Living in Washington, DC, as I do, we can assume that there is no doubt about the electoral votes of the District. The rest of the country though? Well, the electoral votes of many of the states hang in the balance. Do I want to explore that? Do I want to attempt to influence anyone? I do not.
What I want to say is that we need to extend ourselves to collaborate and cooperate rather than compete and recriminate. We need to work together and every cent we spend is a vote for the world we are co-creating. Patti Smith said it well and I’d like to amplify her signal through the noise.
People have the Power - that’s the fact. So, what’s it going to be? Time will tell.
In the meantime, in the end, we all become stories, as Margaret Atwood said from “The Writing Burrow” - amplifying her signal therefrom doesn’t mean that I agree. It just means that I believe that perspectives shared allow us to see the truth and act upon our own information synthesized from the inputs.
We need to be prepared for whatever comes and arming ourselves with love and light is highly recommended. Love can overcome hate - hate only propagates needless suffering. This leads me to the thought that some suffering is needful. Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of a little revolution now and again being good for society and, through his work, he was able to articulate a future for our country, flawed though it is and as he was. This brings to mind just how “cancelled” he’d be and, to some extent, IS, in our current landscape. Let’s leave that aside for a moment.
I’d prefer to focus on what I, as an individual, can do to effect change in our world. I can write. I can advocate, I can amplify certain signals through the noise. It’s love and light and compassion, caring, collaboration, and collaboration that I want to amplify.
We are not so far evolved from our ancestors - and here I am not talking about the ancestors living a few generations ago, but rather our ancestors who were not yet Homo sapiens sapiens. We are primates. We are very much like those ancestors of a scant 10,000 years ago who began to settle with the development of agriculture. As a species, we would not have survived to develop the technologies that have now allowed our population to very nearly treble in the course of my own lifetime.
Where does this lead us? It leads me to the conclusion that we are ill-equipped to manage the technological world into which we have been thrown. We are born into this - and when I arrived at 3:21 AM on February 4, 1963, we were just a few months beyond the Cuban Missile Crises. The Eastern seaboard of the United States could easily have been vaporized including me in utero in October of 1962. We averted that. We, as a species, averted that. Growing up, as a teen and young adult, I assumed that vaporization in nuclear war was very likely to be my ultimate fate. When I was 10, we were transfixed by the spectacle of the Watergate trials. As I turned 18, Ronald Wilson Reagan, had just taken the oath of office a month before. John Hinkley would attempt to assassinate him just a few hundred yards from where I now sit. The fact that Reagan survived was something of a miracle. The world transformed due to the policies he put into place. Some would say that it transformed for the better, and as I toured Berlin in 1994, around a half-decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I could feel that the world was a different place. I’d spent the early summer in an immersion program at the Goethe Institute at Prien am Chiemsee with classmates from around the world - including those who hailed from the former Yugoslavia. I became friends with a Croatian diplomat, Drzislav Skeljo, who had lost his brother in the war of Croatian Independence. We talked about what that was like sitting up late at night in the shared kitchen at Bahnmeisterei - our student house of the time.
Where am I going with these stories - it is that we can bond together, one on one, and build trust with each other even if we do not speak the same language. Drzislav had very limited English and I had absolutely no knowledge of Serbo-Croat dialects that he understood. So we talked in German, late into the night, and I felt his experience and made a friend.
So, if there’s anything I wanted to say, let’s all remember to be friendly with each other. We are all us. There is no “them” - just friends we haven’t met yet.
Let’s not forget that Music is Love. It was my pleasure to attend a performance by the young lady on acoustic guitar, Leslie Mendelson, last night at the Kennedy Center. So, let’s try to bring it together and be the change we want to see in the world.
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