We Are Participants and Witness All At Once
A baby was found alive in a trashcan in Dorchester, the largest neighborhood in Boston, the other day. I had just punched in at work, 6AM, barely had my two masks in place and my grocery apron tied, when I noticed the news item on the break room TV. Some neighbor heard the infant’s cries.
I had to stifle sobs, actually, thinking about how such a nightmare could have come to pass. It was like I got pushed down the stairs. I was overcome that quickly and had to get my shit together.
A later report said the mother had been located and they were both in the hospital. I haven’t really wanted to know any more of the sordid details.
I had just quoted from David Whyte’s Consolations in a post last week. He referred to the “deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level.” When I found out about the baby, discarded like rubbish, I thought, at first, “A privilege to belong to this? Seriously, David? Who the fuck needs this? Deep privilege, my ass.”
But, yes, I thought later, this is the part that breaks our heart. You don’t get to cherry pick in this life. You have to say yes to all of it. The poem Desiderata advises “And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”
Still a beautiful world. I have to hang onto that belief at times like this. As if the pandemic weren’t enough for all of us to deal with right now. “Do not distress yourself with dark imaginings,” the writer goes on, speaking to my own dark imaginings about the person or persons who could have done this unbearable and nearly unspeakable act.
I found some more useful words in David Whyte’s book.
He wrote, “Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are, miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tiny hue of a winter landscape.”
I had to read and reread that.
That we are, miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair.
He goes on, “To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.”
It’s hard to figure all of this out on our own. It’s easy to get lost. Life is indeed an approximation, as my friend so often reminds me.
