Red Cedar

I’m reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing right now – an early sixties classic exploring political and sexual disillusionment in cold-war Britain. Although a bit dated in terms of womens’ issues (this is pre-feminist writing) it is an excellent read, focusing mainly on the life of Anna Wulf as she distances herself from the crumbling British Communist Party and works to understand her particular position as a “free woman”. When this book was released in the early sixties it was disavowed by the good “leftists” as being anti-communist and reactionary, as I’m sure her book The Good Terrorist must also have been. But her work truly is some of the only honest left fiction I have ever read. Lessing tears out the myths of ideology and instead examines the human questions behind what motivates our action, our love-making, our relationships, and our own lack of faith in our political programs.

Even though the times are so different for me (a woman of a similar age and political proclivities as Anna Wulf), there is so much in her search that resonates right now. The inability to operate outside a group for whom coherent politics are at the core, a sexual liberation that often results in disatisfaction, a disavowal of personal experience based on social conditions…. it is as though we are mere mirrors of past movements, not sure of what to make of ourselves once the task of world-changing becomes too impossible or broken.

I have an ongoing discussion with a friend of mine convinced that since the world is on its way to collapse our best course of action is to find happiness with other people. He believes nothing we do can change that fact anyways and so there is no point to keeping the struggle going, or even talking about it. (Why tell our stories? he once asked me when I talked about writing a book, What is the point?). I have known this friend a long time, and hope this really is a peace he can find in himself, but that same peace does not exist in me. It seems too hollow – to lack the depth of the human-ness of which we are capable.

The other night I spoke with a different friend online because I was in despair. Deep, horrid, darkness. “I want to give up, I want to walk away, it is too difficult, there is too much work. I don’t want to. I can’t. Please tell me I’m okay. I want to be okay”. We spoke for over an hour like this and I allowed myself to enter fully, to give over to my grief intentionally, to express openly all of the things stopped up inside of me because I have to be a soldier and be strong until this (most recent) storm passes. He expressed that I needed to take care of myself – but! I said… grief is part of my self-care process, it needs to come out!

This does not mean to dwell with grief, but to give it an entryway when it knocks on the door and simultaneously open a backdoor so it can blow out again. Just as I can’t turn away from moments that are ecstatic and joyous, my despair is also not to be ignored. I am just lucky I have people in my life who will listen me out until I am tired enough to curl up and sleep.

This is what rings empty about pursuing only joyous or ecstatic experience – is it is not authentic to our natural state as beings. While true that our civilization engenders a lot more fear and anxiety than we would encounter in a more natural state, it is not true that our “best” state is one in which we ignore the reality of suffering in the world, or turn ourselves away from service to others.

My friend Velcrow was on the Sunshine Coast Friday night, answering questions after showing his film Bones of the Forest as part of a forest-defense benefit for Mt. Elphinstone. In reponse to one person he emphasized that one way out of our despair, our hopelessness and pain is to take action on the world around us, even if it at times seems futile. As a lifelong activist, this is something I know… action as a balm for suffering…. but it also echoes something I learned from studies my friend Dayna shared with me about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Work with children experiencing trauma in Bosnia over a period of years showed that those children who were immediately engaged in tasks following a traumatic event (such as witnessing the loss of a loved one, or being shot at) were far less likely to exhibit signs of PTSD in the weeks and months to follow. These tasks were often very simple – asking the child to fetch water for another person, or to assist in moving objects around a medic station to faciliate traffic flow…. things the children could do easily, but that engaged them in some minor problem solving. It seemed that pulling the brain out of its shocked state and putting it into action acted as a buffer from future pain-responses based on the traumatic incident.

If it is true that as Chellis Glendinning says, we are all suffering from advanced trauma due to civilization, then surely task-based action must be some way to immunize ourselves from the deadening and fear that comes with PTSD over the long term? Perhaps the only way for us to get healthy is to resist, engage, make art and projects, have street theatre excursions, make music, make debate – alongside our more grounding practices of mediation, yoga, dancing, healthy eating and quiet walks in the forest.

What I do know is that I have been grateful to do Darren’s support work over the past four months, if only because it has given me a focus and direction in a fearful and difficult time. Not only has this work given me a sense of meaning in the midst of “out of control” events, but like all experiences, it has given me a chance to prove a different quality of myself to myself. Dedication to a struggle, a forest, a river, or a person are ways in which our loyalty and love are tested and proven, even if we are overwhelmed along the way. How else would I ever know what all this struggle meant if I was not pushed to explore both the dark and light feelings, and conversely – how would I know myself if I was never tested, if I never turned off the TV, connected to other bright souls with a light that will never cease for me?

While I am not sure I can tie this all together at the moment (though obviously these thoughts have been swirling around for awhile), it seems to me we are sold a perverse idea about enlightenment and its relationship to happiness. I don’t just mean in the mystic sense either – for the consumer world pushes an enlightenment based on goods, but the principle is the same. We are so conditioned by our society it is hard to strip it away and see it for what it is, making it easy for even those who were once dedicated to struggle to shrug off service to the world and focus again on their individuated path to happy things (which is not to say enlightened). Discovering ourselves and healing, it seems, relies on much more than this – and I still believe that activism in all its forms (struggle, service, art, community) is a pretty integral part to this process no matter that so many forms of “spirituality” debase action.

In The Golden Notebook, Anna is very much concerned with the questions of individualism in her time as it related to the left and the disintegration of the self. We are now 45 years since that book was published and I think the questions at the core are the same – What is the point? What should I do? How can I make my life meaningful? How can I combat despair and alienation? Am I healthy? Am I well? The questions of our hearts and souls that can only be answered by our own contentment (and by this I do not mean happiness) and the richness of our service. This is not to say there is some overarching point or meaning, but there is place and context – there is experience.