The Flush Of Some Faint-Dawning Day
Have you been feeling at all like you were in a dark cave, with no clear way out? Right now, there is no end in sight to our current situation and no exit. Just a lot of what ifs and best guesses and wear your masks and keep your distance and be patient. The Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur has a strange resonance.
The Minotaur was a monster half bull and half man. As the unnatural offspring of a woman and a beast, the Minotaur had no normal source of nourishment and thus devoured humans for sustenance. Sounds like a virus we all have gotten to know. King Minos, following advice from the oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to hold the Minotaur.
When Theseus decided he would kill the Minotaur, he carried with him a ball of thread given him by Ariadne, the love interest, so he could find his way out of the darkness. That’s why these stories have endured over the centuries. They speak to something universal through all ages and it doesn’t matter if any of it is historically factual or even possible. I can let myself imagine what it would be like to have a line guiding me like that in a dark and unfamiliar space.
Here’s the thing: it looks to me like gratitude can be viewed in the same way, apprehended through any experience, however seemingly oblique. Start with anything and follow the Ariadne’s thread back to gratefulness, whether it’s a holiday or a rainy day or another pandemic Monday like today. I can get up and look around and a path, however dim, to gratitude will show up, if I’m looking for it. There is at least some certainty there.
I followed the thread back to our garden. I know that Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, believes that agriculture was the worst mistake humankind ever made. The author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, calls it our biggest fraud. That may very well be true in the largest sense, but today I’m glad for agriculture and I’m thankful for our garden. I’m glad for sun and I’m glad for the pitchfork and the wormy dirt and the morning finch and the evening swifts and being able to get a cold beer when it’s hot and to say yes, yes, yes to all of it instead of no, no, no and to just be glad for one more day never promised to me.
I am reminded of a story about author James Michener. During World War II he had a narrow escape trying to land on a Pacific island airstrip. He was grateful to be alive and swore an oath that when peace came “I would live the rest of my years as if I were a great man. I did not presume to think that I would be a great man. I have never thought in those terms, but by damn, I could conduct myself as if I were.”
I can conduct myself as if I were grateful, even if I don’t feel it. I can follow the Ariadne’s thread out of the cave. There’s light and there’s dark, there’s life and there’s death and despair over the way things seem. There is also dim light and a way out, for this too shall pass. As W.E.B. Du Bois once asked “All this life and love and strife and failure — is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?” What do you think?
