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A Voiceless Cry

Photoplotnikov

The sound of green footsteps is the rain

They're coming in from the road, now

Thirsty souls and dusty skirts brought from the desert

Their breath burning, mirage-mingled

Mouths dry and caked with dust

They're coming in from the road, now

Tormented-bodied, girls brought up on pain

Joy departed from their faces

Hearts old and lined with cracks

No smile appears on the bleak oceans of their lips

Not a tear springs from the dry riverbeds of their eyes

O God!

Might I not know if their voiceless cries reach the clouds,

the vaulted heavens?

The sound of green footsteps is the rain.

Nadia Anjuman

Starting Again

How quickly priorities can change. 

New year, new me! Lose 10 pounds! Find a job I can be more passionate about! Learn how to cook! The typical list goes on. Lists like this are made when we have the mental and emotional bandwidth to make them. This rarely extends to times of crises, where all of our faculties for problem-solving become trained on just getting through.

In just a couple of days, due to wildfires in Los Angeles, 30,000 people went from “new year, new me!” to new year, no home. Many people who built their homes themselves. People who raised families. Invested everything. All gone. 

Additional people were forced to evacuate and decide what to take with them. (For some context on the true magnitude of these fires, the burned area is 1.5 times larger than Paris, and nearly 2.75 times the size of Manhattan.)

A day into the fires, I spoke with a friend of mine who, along with his family, is now in a rental property, wondering where they will live this year. They have children whose schools have burned down, a community whose physical nucleus no longer exists, and have lost no small part of their life savings. Even if they were to return to their neighborhood, there’s no “neighborhood” to return to. 

He said to me: 

“It’s not just the homes. It’s hard to grasp, but the entire neighborhood where we have all lived is gone. The schools are gone. The shops. The markets. The library. The parks. There is nothing left. It doesn’t compute because we can only imagine a building or a house burning down. Not all of them.”

Audrey and I were among the lucky ones not forced to evacuate. Nonetheless, the fires came too close for comfort, and like so many others, we were placed on a “red flag warning,” and readied a bag in case we needed to go at a moment’s notice.

 It’s a nice idea that this moment is a clarifying one, forcing us to instinctively laser in on the things that really matter. Not for me. I didn’t know what to pack. My laptop comes with me everywhere anyway, as does my passport. Many inexpensive things that matter to me emotionally are sprinkled all over the house, so I really didn’t know which ones to take. Audrey wanted to take a little set of wooden penguins my mum bought for us, which was kind of funny (save the penguins!) I have a little pin from Disneyland Audrey bought me once, which has Disney’s Hercules on it and says “Go the distance,” but that comes with me everywhere too. 

So what to take? I really don’t know. 

Perhaps because I’ve had the experience of losing everything before, I’ve never let myself get too attached to the stuff I accumulate over time. (Though let’s be clear, I am attached to the many years of work it took to buy our home. I think people forget that when they say things like, “It’s only money.” It’s so flippant. 

For people who didn’t start with money, losing money isn’t just losing money—it’s losing all the time that was sacrificed to accumulate it in the first place. Time one cannot get back.)

 

As a brief aside, this friend of mine I spoke of above recently told me he and his brother were cleaning out their mum’s house after she passed. She had kept everything her whole life. And I mean everything. It had all felt so important to her. And it was. But to him? To his kids? Did they really need his and his brother’s baby teeth that she’d kept? Did anybody? Did they have a place for all the knickknacks, the furniture that meant something to her? 

They got rid of 95% of it. He joked to me that “no one in the future is going to decide they need to open a museum of my mother.” 

He’s right! And there’ll likely never be a museum dedicated to you or me either 100 years from now. Sorry. The stuff we accumulate will eventually just not matter. (Kind of liberating, no?)

 

Anyway, back to the fires. 

When we make our grand plans for the year, we rarely assume that a day later, we might be discussing such things. Our plans usually assume the year will remain typical. Often, when I plan out my days (though I’ve gotten better at this), my plans assume I will be operating at optimal efficiency, with zero unintended interruptions. I rarely have such days, and probably, neither do you.

In reality, there are always bumps in the road, challenges that divert us from our plans, and sometimes, whether literal or metaphorical, catastrophic wildfires. Sam Harris, who incidentally was one of those evacuated by the fires, once said: 

“If you think things can’t get any worse, that’s just a failure of imagination.”

This phrase has always been a kind of morbid comfort to me any time I find myself complaining about something I disapprove of, like a pulled hamstring, an overwhelmingly busy workweek, or a difficult relationship (no, not you, Audrey).

Well, that phrase was fully substantiated last week, by people whose imaginations could not have conceived of the extent of the damage that was done to their city and their life in the space of 48 hours and beyond. And yet, the phrase remains true. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to consider how things might have been worse, had people’s family members or pets been inside, which in some tragic instances, they were. 

This, however, is absolutely not something that is helpful to point out to someone who is newly traumatized by such a staggering loss: “At least you’re still alive!” This has been given a name—toxic positivity—and, sadly, too often it takes the place of listening to someone and connecting with them in their pain.

 

For those of us living in LA, there’s something deeply disconcerting about this whole thing—how damn out of control it makes us all feel now that we are educated on how, exactly, this kind of thing happened in the first place:

OK, so let me get this straight . . . it just needs to not rain for several months, be especially windy, and some fires need to start, and a firestorm could send flaming embers flying miles in every direction, starting fires at a scale no municipal firefighting service, no matter how well-funded, could possibly be equipped to handle? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm . . . right. So what you’re saying is, none of us have been safe this whole time, and there’s nothing you can tell us that “really” means we are safe here in the future? OK, got it.

This isn’t the kind of reassurance we like to have as human beings. 

It makes us feel out of control in a way that shakes us to our core. 

“What do you mean it could all just end at any moment? 

That can’t be right. We have self-driving cars but you can’t save my house from burning down?”

I believe that for many, the finger-pointing that occurs after a situation like this is a reflection of this shocking and unwelcome encounter with the feeling of being totally out of control.

 

In her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery, which synthesizes clinical and social insights into the aftermath of trauma on its victims, Judith L. Herman writes:

 

"To imagine one may have done better may be more tolerable than to face the reality of utter helplessness."

 

So what can we do in the face of utter helplessness, or total loss? 

Well, one thing I know is that in the times when I’ve experienced massive, seemingly intolerable setbacks in life, I survive by resetting my baseline. 

I adjust my starting point to where I actually am now, instead of where I thought I was before the cataclysm hit.

As an example, someone I know came to me for advice in a bitterly acrimonious divorce whereby in her 50s, she was losing half of her savings to a narcissistic husband, who had never worked, nor contributed to raising their children, but now demanded every penny he could get. She had to sell the house she loved to pay him what he demanded, move to a part of the city she didn’t want to live in, and face a future where she would no longer be able to retire when she’d hoped.

I told her that continuing to compare where she is now to where she thought she was financially before the divorce was a recipe for misery. 

Instead, she had to mentally reset her starting point to where she actually was today, and then build from there. Only then could she feel the satisfaction of making progress again. 

This wasn’t positive talk. It came from hard-won experience.

 

The second survival strategy in times like this is 

to remind ourselves that there are certain life-giving things that haven’t been taken away. 

Whether it’s the friends who love us, the community we’ve built, or simply the fact that we are still breathing and have the ability to go forward and make an impact in our own little way, we can remind ourselves of the profound things that remain with us, or within us.

 

But there is a simple, natural, and beautiful survival strategy I’m seeing all over LA right now. 

People are talking. 

This seems to be because we collectively have something non-trivial to talk about—a socially acceptable pain, a shared reference point of grief, sympathy, and worry.

Friends who haven’t spoken in months or years are reaching out to each other. 

For my part, it’s even reconnected me with friends I haven’t exchanged words with in years who live halfway across the world, but wanted to check in on me. 

But it’s not just friends. People in coffee shops are chatting who would normally keep to themselves. There’s something bizarrely cozy about it. Like we are all huddled together talking about this thing that’s happened. There seem to be fewer strangers around.

It makes me a little sad for everyday life when a natural disaster isn’t happening, because in many ways, there’s no less pain on those days. On any given day, we all walk around with our own localized, individualized, hidden sources of pain that sit right beneath the surface, begging for solace and connection. Most days, we neither feel entitled, nor courageous enough, to allow people access to these parts of ourselves. Others, feeling the same instincts, give us the impression of having none of these challenges of their own.

 

I just watched the Avicii documentary and was reminded of how even a world-famous DJ who appears to be on the top of the world can be on the brink of their own internal natural disaster without even the people closest to them realizing it. By the accounts of his friends, he seemed to be in good spirits on his way to an adventurous trip to Oman, where it would later be discovered he took his own life. 

Depression, trauma, anxiety, and fear can be just as devastating to our individual worlds as anything that happens on the outside.

 

In a call for support to his contact list this week, a friend of mine signed off an email by saying: 

“In LA, a lot of people need each other right now.”

He’s right. But isn’t that also true of everyone, all the time?

You don’t need to be in LA right now for this to be true in your life. 

Someone you know is going through a devastating heartbreak right now, whether you know about it or not. Someone is having anxiety about their health, or is experiencing a chronic pain they are afraid is never going to go away, or thinking about an ex they fear they will never get over, or questioning their worth, or feeling lonely and isolated in ways they’ll never admit on social media. Maybe that someone is you.

None of us should wait for the next natural disaster to talk to each other. 

Huddle up, and let’s talk.

Key Takeaways

1. In the times when I’ve experienced massive, seemingly intolerable setbacks in life, I survive by resetting my baseline. I adjust my starting point to where I actually am now, instead of where I thought I was before the cataclysm hit.

2. In times like these, we can remember that there are certain life-giving things that haven’t been taken away. Whether it’s the friends who love us, the community we’ve built, or simply the fact that we are still breathing and have the ability to go forward and make an impact in our own little way, we can remind ourselves of the profound things that remain with us, or within us.

3. Depression, trauma, anxiety, and fear can be just as devastating to our individual worlds as anything that happens on the outside.

4. None of us should wait for the next natural disaster to talk to each other. Huddle up, and let’s talk.

What About You?

Is there someone you can reach out to in your life to see how they’re doing? 

Those check-ins often mean more than we realize. 

And what of your own situation could you share with someone today that you might have normally kept to yourself?

You sharing it could not only help you receive more support, but also give someone the invitation they need to share more of themselves. 

Matthew Hussey

O barbeiro

 

Motion Mídia

Nos últimos meses, olhava-se no espelho

e via um intruso. Irritava-se com ele.

Já estás aqui outra vez? Será possível?

Sai daqui agora mesmo.

Para a rua, vagabundo, dizia-lhe.

Era-lhe doloroso, era-nos doloroso,

toda vez que ele tinha que ir ao banheiro.

Tínhamos que conduzi-lo pelo braço, convence-lo

do porquê.

Ele se tornou o dono desse lugar, dizia,

quem lhe deu as chaves?

Pouco a pouco o do espelho tornou-se mais um em casa.

Chamava-lhe o barbeiro.

Em vão, diziam-lhe que aquele homem era ele.

Eu nunca tentei porque sabia

que aquele homem era outra pessoa,

que em seu delírio ele tinha razão.

Pouco a pouco fomo-nos resignando

à invasão do barbeiro.

Uma noite, ao sair do banheiro, deixou a luz acesa.

Quando minha mãe lhe disse: Deixaste a luz acesa, ele respondeu:

Deixa-o, ele está lá dentro, o que podemos fazer?

Meu pai compreendeu que o barbeiro, o intruso,

tinha vindo busca-lo.

Agora o está barbeando naquela barbearia

que há sempre do outro lado do espelho.

E de lá me olham, sorriem para mim,

me esperam.

Juan Vicente Piqueras

Ninguém nos ensinou a...

De forjados princípios nos fomos criando grandes em tamanho e diminutos em poder e capacidades reais. Foram-nos passadas as bases sólidas para os passos futuros e, no cômputo geral, apreendemos o mais importante na mescla de princípios familiares, religiosos, sociais e quejandos.

Falaram-nos muito de pecados e nada de como se limpa isso, além de ninguém ter explicado o que é isso de pecado e porque é que o Carpinteiro falou em atirar pedras. Contaram-nos a história da outra face mas ninguém nos disse quando parar de a dar; bem como essa coisa de orgulho…e da ira divina…e dos infernos…e do bom nome…etc.

Chegamos a jovens adultos com uma pasta cheia de papelada com rabiscados princípios e ao entrarmos em contacto com a sociedade onde nos inserimos por labuta profissional e diárias deambulações, começamos a perceber que fomos enganados por alguém…ou por muitos alguéns.

Sim, claro, a teoria lê-se muito bem mas, no primeiro percalço percebemos que nos socorremos de uma mão cheia de nada…damos a face mais vezes que o bom senso dita, desviamo-nos constantemente das tais pedras do julgamento e o orgulho quebra-nos mais pernas que as quedas da bicicleta.

Ninguém nos ensinou a amar desalmadamente, sem perguntas nem questões, para que pudéssemos irradiar essa energia de tal forma forte que nunca conheceríamos o significado do julgamento, nem da necessidade de pensar em dar ou não as várias faces.

Ninguém nos disse que este caminho teria todo o tipo de pessoas e que poderíamos apenas atrair aquelas que achássemos necessárias para a nossa aprendizagem, bem como os mestres que nos ensinassem a recordar quem realmente somos.

Ninguém nos ensinou a olhar para além da flor que cresce no jardim, nem da árvore onde um dia se pendurou o nosso baloiço….olhar para a vida que ali contida nos pode reforçar e atenuar ânimos.

E, também, ninguém nos disse que um dia amaríamos com toda a nossa alma e isso nos faria bem se não carregássemos o medo da perda.

Esta falta de informação fez com que deambulássemos como principiantes em busca dos princípios de vida que realmente nos conduziram até aqui e, assim, acabámos por nos reinventar várias vezes, no entanto, fazendo as contas a tudo, até não foi mau porque acabámos por compilar um livrinho simples e fino com tudo o que é essencial.

Caminhamos com pouco peso...basta-nos o coração!


Alexandre Viegas

New Year’s Morning

Only a night from old to new!

Only a night, and so much wrought!

The Old Year's heart all weary grew,

But said: "The New Year rest has brought."

The Old Year's hopes its heart laid down,

As in a grave; but, trusting, said:

"The blossoms of the New Year's crown

Bloom from the ashes of the dead."

The Old Year's heart was full of greed;

With selfishness it longed and ached,

And cried: "I have not half I need.

My thirst is bitter and unslaked.

But to the New Year's generous hand

All gifts in plenty shall return;

True love it shall understand;

By all my failures it shall learn.

I have been reckless; it shall be

Quiet and calm and pure of life.

I was a slave; it shall go free,

And find sweet peace where I leave strife."

Only a night from old to new!

Never a night such changes brought.

The Old Year had its work to do;

No New Year miracles are wrought.

Always a night from old to new!

Night and the healing balm of sleep!

Each morn is New Year's morn come true,

Morn of a festival to keep.

All nights are sacred nights to make

Confession and resolve and prayer;

All days are sacred days to wake

New gladness in the sunny air.

Only a night from old to new;

Only a sleep from night to morn.

The new is but the old come true;

Each sunrise sees a new year born.

Helen Hunt Jackson

On the fear of aging

 

Vejaa

In January many of us feel the pressure to set some kind of goal or intention for the year. 

But in doing so we rarely address the real challenge that’s keeping us pinned where we are—our deeper wiring. 

A calendar change isn’t enough to reset old patterns, self-sabotage, and doubt.

What if instead of making a superficial decision around what you wanted to achieve this year, you made a promise to yourself that this would forever be the year you changed the underlying belief systems that have been governing your whole life when it comes to YOUR 3 Relationships—your relationship with yourself, others, and life? 

 

On getting a year older

Never once did I watch the iconic helicopter scene in the film Jurassic park without my mum remarking on the fact that it was shot in Kauai, Hawaii, and that it had always been her dream to go. We resolved this dream be put off no longer, and off we went. 

One of the most remarkable moments of our trip so far, aside from seeing two humpback whales leap out of the pacific ocean, took place during a conversation we were having in the swimming pool.

 

The sun was beating down on what should have been a frosty New Years eve in England, but instead was the bright green and blue coastline of Wailea, Maui. Amidst the faint sound of a ukulele playing somewhere (there’s always a ukelele playing somewhere here), and a warm coconut sunscreen-infused breeze, the subject turned to getting older.

I had read some comments from people for whom the new year had ignited their fears around aging: the possibility of irrelevance; the notion of losing their looks; the gall of being asked their age on a date.

My mum (Pauline), it turns out, had a lot to say on the matter. 

What she said was both profound and powerful. 

I wish you could have been there. She spoke with the wisdom of someone who was truly done with worrying about such a thing.

First she let us know that she herself had no plans of becoming invisible with age (to know my mum is to understand that such a thing would be impossible). She also reminded us that in certain cultures in the East, age was held with a kind of reverence, not embarrassment—where the accretion of years was something that garnered respect. If you’d reach a certain age you knew a thing or two, and should be listened to.

But there was one particular thing she said that hasn’t left my mind since, and made me want to write to you this week. 

She recalled how her own mum passed around the age she is now (mid-60s, which she wouldn’t mind at all me telling you).

She expressed how lucky she feels to have every extra day her own mother never had. When she sees another wrinkle on her own face or body, my mum can’t help but be grateful for what that wrinkle represents: the fact that she’s still here.

This idea struck me precisely because it indicates the profound way in which our insecurities have us getting it totally backwards. We lament the parenthetical lines appearing around our eyes, the hair that frustratingly keeps seems to have better places to be than atop our head, the body that seems to be adding padding as though, unbeknownst to us, we are imminently moving to a colder climate where we will need it.

But what if each of these unwelcome additions or subtractions were simply a reminder of how lucky we are to still be at the party at all? 

The writer Christopher Hitchen’s, in his days fighting terminal cancer, comically described what he believed most upset people about the predicament of dying:

“It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you.”

I recently heard the Irish poet David Whyte speaking of his own darkly funny meditation on our final days, whereby he remarked:

“[Dying is] the ultimate generosity of giving ourselves completely away at the end of our lives—​​of getting out of the way. One of the great frontiers of human maturation is where you realize that actually, it might not be a tragedy that you’re going to die, the rest of creation could actually be quite relieved to see you go.”

Both of these reflections made me laugh upon hearing them. Especially David’s. I’d never before thought of death as the ultimate act of generosity in “getting out of the way”, but something about that idea instantly seemed to relieve me of my self-centredness, and act as a pressure valve for my fear of dying.

But the real point for our purposes today, is that if we haven’t been tapped on the shoulder and told we have to leave, nor are we being called upon to perform this act of generosity yet, shouldn’t that be the headline, and not the bodily degradation that is stoking our insecurity?

In other words, we are very much still lucky enough to be at the party. 

Through this lens, even physical difficulties can be considered a reminder we are still here.

I’ve been around long enough to need a hip replacement? Hooray!

The next time you bemoan your aging looks, remind yourself how many people would have given anything to live long enough to have etched an extra few grooves on their forehead. 

How many people would have loved the chance to walk enough miles that they cannot walk another without the aid of a stick?

My mum’s framing around aging wasn’t a framing at all, but a deep sense of gratitude for her life. This gratitude I saw in her had a secondary effect. 

It revealed the superficial and limited nature of being afraid to age in the context of being less attractive to other people—the absurd subtext being: the whole point of living is to remain attractive to those we hope to date. 

Now that can’t be right, can it?

As I listened to my mum speaking, I watched in awe of this powerful woman, with a deep gratitude for life, not clinging to anything, certainly not an earlier version of herself, nor the attraction of those she once would have been attractive to. That couldn’t have mattered less. Her mind was on the trees she had seen that morning on our walk along the beach, the breeze she was enjoying, the fact that she had the opportunity at all to be in this majestic place that, as she acknowledged, “so many people will never get to see in their entire lifetime”.

She had captured a fundamental truth: 

that the point of getting older was not to obsess to an unhealthy degree about remaining attractive, but to become ever more grateful for the years one was given, and to put that gratitude to work in the living one does. 

As I’ve watched my mum moving through Hawaii, I see the exquisite presence with which she approaches everything. I see an enchanted child, in the vessel of a wise, mature woman, and it strikes me that this is the form of staying young we should all aspire to.

Far from a regression, it is a recapturing of wonder. 

To say child-like wonder would be to do it a disservice. 

When a child looks up at a bird, or a tree, they may experience awe, but not the deep gratitude my mum is feeling. And yet, through that fusion of the fusion of this increasing awe and gratitude a powerful new iteration of my mother is born.

I don’t need to tell you how attractive that makes her. You already know. But that’s not the point. 

When the wonder of the world becomes more and more visible to you, there’s no time to waste caring about who you’ve become invisible to.

Key Takeaways

1. If we’re still lucky enough to be at the party, shouldn’t that be the headline, and not the bodily degradation that is stoking our insecurity?

2. The point of getting older is not to obsess to an unhealthy degree about remaining attractive, but to become ever more grateful for the years one was given, and to put that gratitude to work in the living one does.

3. When the wonder of the world becomes more and more visible to you, there’s no time to waste caring about who you’ve become invisible to.

What About You?

What insecurity or complaint could you use as a reminder of how grateful you are that you still get to be at the party at all? 

 

Matthew Hussey