Things Fall Apart. They Need To!
Notes to Pandemic IX
“The only time we ever know what’s really going on … the only time we ever know what’s really going on — is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land.” Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart.
“ …nature creates form but it also destroys it, and it’s the balance between the two that suffuses nature with such peace. But if the strength of the human mind is its ability to create form out of the formless, and map meaning onto the world through the structure of language, its weakness lies in its reluctance or refusal to demolish it. We are attached to form and fear the formless: are taught to fear it from our earliest beginning.” Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark.
“[there is] a need for us to find spaces where we can fall apart which is what I call grieving, not in only human terms. A falling apart that is part of the motions part of the processes that is stitched into the fabric of matter itself. The materializing world is grieving, wherever movement is, there is always loss, wherever there is loss there is a need/desire for grief.” Bayo Akomolafe, interview, For the Wild.
Hearts Break and Things Fall Apart. They Need To.
I went to bed last night and woke up this morning feeling devastated.[1] Whether or not Biden ends up winning after all the votes are tallied, in my mind this election was proof of how messed up we actually are. The fact that Trump’s presidency wasn’t handily repudiated as the nightmarish sham it was; the fact that I don’t and can’t understand how my fellow citizens can see in him anything but the opposite of every value I hold dear leaves me feeling powerless and heartbroken. Truly. And yet, as I feel this grief, this sadness about the low place we have come to as a society, and my inability to make sense of it, I am reminded of some pieces of timeless (and timely) wisdom:
Shanti-Deva the Buddhist Saint says, “The heart that breaks open can hold the whole world.” The point is not to fear facing the dark, the grief the despair that constitutes our present. To let our hearts break feels like accepting death, or at least that nothing will ever be whole again, that we will break up into a million pieces along with it, and never come back together. And yet the truth of the matter is that it is in learning to accept this breaking up, this death, as part of the necessary flux of nature and reality, that we can truly wake up and even glimpse the capacity for wholeness. So, please in the coming days, allow yourself to grieve, don’t push the feelings away. Don’t rush to busy and distract yourself. Feel the loss, and from there you will be able to see more clearly, to love more strongly. As one of my favorite contemporary thinkers, Bayo Akomolafe, puts it in a recent interview, “…we hardly have spaces for falling apart, we don’t know how to stay in the indeterminacy and the slowness of the compost, we want to get back into the game quickly.”
Letting our hearts break feels similar to letting go of solid ground beneath our feet, the world(s) and institutions we know. And yet if we were a bit more honest with ourselves, we might be able to begin to accept that much of our effort to elect Biden was itself part of an inability to let crumble the world and institutions that have been dysfunctional and destructive for quite a long time now—when either party was in power.
In this vein, I have been returning to Pema Chodron’s book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times often in recent months. There are so many gems to cite, but I will point to this one, for now:
The only time we ever know what’s really going on … the only time we ever know what’s really going on — is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep. Right now — in the very instant of groundlessness — is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness. (Chodrom, pp)
Since the pandemic began, I have been eerily and resolutely clear about the fact that this pandemic and this year more generally, are functioning as revelators (incidentally, the etymology of the term apocalypse is to uncover and reveal). They are showing us with x-ray vision all of the dysfunctions of the system(s) we have been living in. We’re not seeing anything that wasn’t here before, and yet this momentous year, 2020, we can no longer look away, pretend that it’s not happening, or that it’s not that bad. It is, in many ways, worse than we thought.
I initially began to write this as I was feeling a deep sadness and loss in the news of Barret’s life-time appointment to the Supreme Court. Her record is sooo troubling with respect to the Affordable Care Act, workers’ rights, reproductive freedom, the environment—her appointment literally seems to threaten every major justice and environmental issue I care about. So, I internally threw up my hands and implored “How!? WHY!? What can we do from here? How can we handle any more !?! As I did my little internal plea around the Supreme Court appointment, and now again, on the morning after election day, an answer that I had known deep down but hadn’t really allowed myself to acknowledge fully, made itself more audible and clear: This moment is not only about revealing, it is about things falling apart, and dying— in some cases being violently and messily torn down. As uncomfortable and ugly as this process is, it is necessary. More than that, it is in this dying that we might be able to bring about a much more beautiful future that we want rather than continuing to make due with the remnants of the violent and abusive pasts we have inherited and can’t seem to let go of.
For too long those of us who consider ourselves to be “progressives” and “liberals” who believe in social justice, but live with a level of relative privilege have had a sort of half-assed activism: we want change, some of us even bandy about the term revolution, but when it comes to institutions like the Supreme Court,[2] and the institutions we have just accepted as part of this “democracy,” we actually tend to be very conservative in our leanings. The fact of the matter is that our supposed democracy has been undemocratic for a very long time. It has upheld in its core documents and institutions the continued enslavement and segregation of black, brown and poor bodies; the rights of corporations to make profits above the earth and people; the priority of winning rather than growing. There is no need to list here all of the deficiencies of the system. I think we are familiar with them—and if not, check out some of the books linked above. My point here is to acknowledge that while devastating on one level, on another, the continued failures of this democracy to support the kind of world we want to raise children in, might be a sort of hidden blessing.
If we can cultivate our capacity to be in the dark and formless for a while,[3] if we can remember the importance of the beginner’s mind, we might be able to start to build the world we truly want rather than settling for trying to salvage and plug up holes on this completely dysfunctional and leaky boat we are currently sinking in.
[Having studied social movements, social change and human societies for the better part of my adult life, one thing I am struck by is that on whole we modern western humans find it almost impossible to willingly let go of the things we know. The majority of us hold on to them, even when it is clear they are not working. It is only when forced, ejected or rejected from such realities, that we try to experiment with new forms. They don’t always work, but just having the freedom to try is a powerful antidote to the “infernal (non)-alternatives” we constantly find ourselves choosing between. ]
This doesn’t mean I am dismissing the importance of the election, nor of fighting to make sure every vote counts, I will protest if Trump tries to steal the election; it just means I am increasingly aware that whether or not the election is won by Biden, the fact that it is this close is an important reminder that our institutions are failing, and we need to embrace this failure for the potential and grace it holds, without rushing to assert what comes next.
As Richard Rohr puts it:
Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next. We usually enter liminal space when our former way of being is challenged or changed—perhaps when we lose a job or a loved one, during illness, at the birth of a child, or a major relocation. It is a graced time, but often does not feel “graced” in any way. In such space, we are not certain or in control. …
The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive—erased tablets waiting for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we are most humbled. Liminality keeps us in an ongoing state of shadowboxing instead of ego-confirmation, struggling with the hidden side of things, and calling so-called normalcy into creative question.
…In liminal space we sometimes need to not-do and not-perform according to our usual successful patterns. We actually need to fail abruptly and deliberately falter to understand other dimensions of life. We need to be silent instead of speaking, experience emptiness instead of fullness, anonymity instead of persona, and pennilessness instead of plenty. In liminal space, we descend and intentionally do not come back out or up immediately. It takes time but this experience can help us reenter the world with freedom and new, creative approaches to life.” Richard Rohr, April 26, 2020.
Let us inhabit this space between worlds. Together.
—
[1] Refers to Nov 4.
[2] Cheminsky, Erwin. The Case Against the Supreme Court, 2014; Cohen, Adam. Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty Year Battle for a More Unjust America, 2020.
[3] See Krauss quote above.
Originally published: November 4, 2020
