Digging Out
The Unaware, The Dark, & The Unknown
In every age there is darkness. It was here on the first day humans evolved into consciousness and it will likely be here on the last.
Our job is to survive, heal, and stand before all darkness and never back down.
This is the vital work of humane evolution.
[2016]
This week’s addition to Hellscape the Sequel survival list is…
Breakfast!
Waking up with the “ohmygodthisreallyhappeningagain” thought, followed by “whygetoutofbed,” means it’s been me dragging myself upright and wondering how long that’ll work. Eventually, I arrived at a bottom-level survival technique—waking up my mouth.
Two mornings into Hellscape the Sequel, I came home from hiking—walking with a couple Midwest hills mixed in—and ate eggs, two slices of toast with jam, and a couple strawberries followed by Halloween candy. My mouth was kind of happy and that was enough. The next day, it was eggs with jalapenos and cheese, tortillas, plus more Halloween candy. I noticed the sun snagging a couple seconds in front of the clouds and felt upright enough to add another survival tactic. I began deleting twitter.
The process brought a weird lightening, as though every post contained toxic waste. It also gave me a fuller sense of the national big picture. Scrolling memes and videos from the last month, I took in the full effect of where things are. I saw the enormity of what’s ahead. Surprisingly, it didn’t make me dive back under the covers. Instead, I became determined to excise the shite that’s been cluttering my thoughts.
Excising shite is one of many hellscape tips I gathered during two-plus decades of therapy:
There are mental health benefits associated with excising clutter and focusing on what matters—even if the excising makes situations more real.
Excavating a heart from stress, fear, twitter, and the trampling effect of a chaotic time period, isn’t easy.
Excavation reminds me of another mapless dig.
Tommy lived across the street from my childhood house. He had a corner of his backyard devoted to an ongoing archaelogical site. Every day for most of a summer, my brother and I went to Tommy’s and used tools and paint brushes, imagining we would find dino bones. Entire days spent brushing away dirt, and one night too thrilled to sleep after a large fang seemed to appear just as it became too dark to dig anymore. The next morning, it was gone. Tommy, my brother, and I decided the fang had been stolen by a pack of ravenous tigers or a competing archaeological gang, a gang that would make more money than we could count and the fang would be displayed at a museum. We never found another fang and when the summer ended, the site was abandoned.
The outline is there. I sense it still beats. Yet, these days, it’s harder to tell if the more fullsome version of humanity exists—beyond the dreams of long dead messiahs.
As twitter slowly extinguishes, it reminds me that this darkness has always existed. It has been hiding in plain sunlight, tricking people into thinking it had evolved out of the uglier human conditions. My story about coyotes howling on the trail several nights ago (read about it HERE), carried a yipping echo of the the unaware, the dark, and the unknown.
The coyote is considered by some indiginous cultures as “the trickster,” due to its ability to adapt to an ever-evolving environment with crafty agility.
The Coyote… teaches us to drop sentimental attachments to the way things used to be and get on with surviving the way things are now. Coyote knows that life is change and nothing is too sacred to change.
[2024]
“Get on with surviving the way things are now.”
For me, “survival” carries a frightening tremor beneath the word. As though survival is always up in the air. And, if I’m bodysurfing the wave of “what is”…. survival IS always up in the air. Maybe, that’s an element of this deletion process. Learning to adapt to the reality and not the fantastical thinking that should’ve been excised long ago. Perhaps, holding reality by its unflinching beady little eyeballs might enable the climate shouts coming from the planet to wake up humanity’s lazy survival instinct.
I know a bit about dodging reality. I had a lengthy love affair with evading the truth. Some part of me had known “you can’t handle the truth,” to quote Jack Nicolson’s character in a A Few Good Men.
It seems inconceivable that decades later I am more ready now, just as what comes to me as a great unveiling arrives. It feels like a reckoning is here and the truth will not stay unknown…. even when lies, upon lies, upon lies are thrown at it. Which for me means remembering to hold onto what helps me survive until the chaos shifts—much like when I outlasted a riptide…
It was a beautiful day, hundreds of people were dots of color on the shore as I frantically tried to swim back to shore. A riptide swirled beneath me and wouldn’t let go. I gulped salt water and understood I might drown. Exhausting down to a weak dog paddle, my face barely above the rolling tide, a voice came to me from somewhere I couldn’t locate.
“Do not fight a riptide or you will drown.”
At fourteen, having spent a bit of time in religious lessons, I believed it could be God speaking. Though, in my limited experience, God hadn’t seemed much of a hands on presence and more of an “egads what are you doing” sideline viewer. Then again, the world came to me as a weird place and therefore, anything was possible.
As I tried to determine where the voice came from, a thought-suggestion that I should float until the riptide let me go filled my mind.
When the riptide released me several miles from where I entered the water, I began wondering if I had been taught riptide survival in school or saw it in a movie. It could also have been true that my version of God saved my life. It’s a good story either way.
The riptide feels ancient.
It has been here many times before.
Eddying quietly until the force of everything brings it closer to the surface, ensnaring lives and the systems humans build.
As the riptide brings a harsh unveiling of what is
Listen for the echo of a voice from long ago
Don’t fight a riptide or you will drown
Float until it lets go
And, share the story…. over a big breakfast.
May the waves carry us to shore.
eMMe
The not fighting a riptide image is one I will carry. Beautiful writing, eMMe.
So beautiful! Thank you!!!