Apocalypse, now

Like everyone else, I’m watching the news and scanning the internet every few minutes for updates on the hurricane approaching Florida. While I’m at it I check in on the dozen or so major wildfires burning near my own home in California.

Fire and flood. Today, the Apocalypse arrives in high definition, even to those of us who are far away. A hundred years ago, I wouldn’t even have known that all this was happening. Nowadays, it storms and burns in my mind all day.

As for me, I’m absolutely fine. I’m sitting here in a comfortable chair with the air conditioner humming. This kind of comfort feels almost obscene when I think of all the people who are in the path of destructive forces. Inside my head, there’s a map showing a trajectory of loss. Barbuda, where survivors grieve and pick through the rubble of their lives. Florida, where some of my loved ones are boarding their windows and leaving homes that not exist when they return. All the places across the country where people are coughing their way through smoky days, wondering when the fires will turn toward their homes.

Despite the pain and the panic of it all, I feel oddly glad to know what’s happening to others. In my magical-thinking mind, empathy has heft and weight: maybe if I focus very hard on those who are suffering, I can somehow lift a little weight off their hearts. Of course I know this is ridiculous, so I also send money to help hurricane relief, to support firefighters, to help the orphaned children and pets.

But is it just magical thinking? Is it ridiculous?

I’m not sure.

Just before Hurricane Katrina formed in 2005, I had a dream one night that some of my friends from the Oprah Show were re-enacting a scene from Gone With the Wind. They were standing in a place I knew was Louisiana, surrounded by people trying to get by in the wake of a disaster. A week later, as the Oprah crew interviewed survivors in the Superdome, I saw on my television almost the same images I dreamed.

Now, watching the news reports, I’m reminded of “the telephone effect,” which is the sense we get that someone is about to call us, just before they actually do. A series of well-designed and vetted studies have shown that this effect happens far more often than can be explained by random chance.

Maybe when we turn our thoughts to others, they feel it. It seems likely that this has always been true, but it took the invention of telephones to know it.

In South Africa, I regularly see huge webs spun by Golden Orb Spiders. A single web can stretch between trees, but sitting in the center, the spider can feel the slightest tug at the web’s periphery.

Here’s what I’m wondering. What if the web of technology is literally extending our sense of self so that threads of communication open up between our souls? What if our hearts really can feel one another aching, breaking and healing anywhere our cameras and satellites can reach?

I have to say, this feels more true to me than the thought of total separation. Maybe the magical thinking is our belief in disconnection. Maybe the threads of empathy that link me with the people of the Leeward Islands, with the people of Jacksonville, with the people of Oregon, are the reality. Maybe we humans, in our hundreds of millions, truly are one being in many bodies.

For the past few years, scientists have known that if they feed spiders a diet of graphene (an atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms), the spiders can spin webs stronger than any fiber previously known. Stronger than Kevlar. Strong enough to hold a human.

What if this incredible material is metaphor reflecting something real happening now, as humans become more destructive than ever before, but also more creative? What if we are learning to hold one another in the strands of love that have always been our highest potential?

I’ve long thought that we twenty-first century people are the heir to ancient “technologies of magic,” real connections that can link us mind to mind, heart to heart, in the metaphysical world. And now our magical-seeming technologies are linking us more and more tightly in the physical. If we bring all our resources to bear in the floods and fires happening right now, how many humans can we hold? How much love and plenty can we generate for those who have lost their homes, their precious things, their loved ones?

I’m crazy enough to indulge my hopes, even while my mind acknowledges our cultural beliefs about disaster, loss, annihilation. For a while, I’m just going to believe, and damn the naysayers. I’m going to believe that my love can actually touch disaster victims, can be an infinitesimal help right along with my dollars and cents. I’m going to believe that others — strangers — can and will hold me up when it’s my turn to hurt. I’m going to believe that the threads connecting all of us are growing stronger.

Stronger than any fiber previously known.

Maybe — maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe — strong enough to heal our troubled world.