I called it “The Last Barn” even though it isn’t. I’ve been taking photos of it for some years now, and it sits out on a beautiful road near the Vermont-New York border. Vermont and New York are not the same thing, they are two very different things with two very different identities, and this old barn sits right on the line between the two.
It is falling apart, the doors are off, there is junk and debris inside, you can see right through it to the hills and Green Mountains. I think of this old barn as a warrior, hanging on, reminding us of our past, cautioning us not to forget what has come before of us, and is rapidly vanishing.
I know it is not the last barn, but it might be a spokesbarn for the others.
I was thinking of love and hope today, both are clichés, and writers are taught to hate clichés.The irony is we writers also know that clichés become clichés for a good reason – they are almost always true.
Clichés are words and phrases that are used so often they become less effective, and tend to be dismissed and ignored. Clichés are considered bad writing, words and ideas so common they have no impact. From the first, writers and journalists are taught never to use cliches.
Love and hope are cliches.
The very idea of love and hope are invoked so frequently and so inappropriately and inaccurately that they are numbing, they have little meaning or impact in our every day lives. They put us to sleep, they are neither newsworthy or addictive, as is apparent from the news at any given time on any given day.
You will not find a single mention of hope or love in our political campaigns, on our daily newscasts or the thousands of messages beamed into our tablet and smart phones every day. Love and hope are considered by journalists and politicians and pundits and the people in power to be metaphors for weakness, naiveté and irrelevance.
The story of tragedy is also a cliche, it is always the story of love, hope and community. Tragedy is the one time these cliches are recognized and invoked and celebrated.
The good news from tragedy is that we never love more, help more, empathize more. When we see the worst of us, we also see the best of us. That is the great story of the human being.
When there is tragedy, we come running, we open our hearts, our wallets, our faith. We worship the idea of the First Responder, the brave souls who rush into burning buildings and face bombs and bullets to rescue us. People open their homes to one another, share their food, bind one another’s wounds. In tragedy, we are all brothers and sisters. In normalcy, we recede and return to our other selves.
We are at our best in tragedy and catastrophe.
The irony of being human is that it takes tragedy to make us truly human. We are the only living thing that rescues and seeks out community. But being at our best does not often see to be our natural state, just look at our political campaigns. When it is our natural state, in the midst of tragedy or conflict, great men and women appear to rise up and inspire us. Sometimes.
The people running the corporate media understand that fear and anger are addictive, and thus lucrative. They make a lot of money from fear and anger, the renegade siblings of love and hope.
Love and hope are not. Stories of love and hope are not considered serious news, and do not ever make the news. We don’t take them seriously, the people who speak of them are considered weak.
The people who preach love and hope are found on the edges of society and culture and news, not ever in the center. They are not the people who give interviews in Washington, or appear on panels to explain the world to the rest of us in 20-second sound bites.
We profess to admire Gandhi and King and Jesus and Merton and the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa and Mandela and Pope Francis, but since they so often speak of love and hope and so rarely embrace anger and judgement, we don’t really believe them or pay much attention to what they say. Or we use their names and spirits to gain more power and wealth.
Their values are rarely reflected in our daily lives, even as they are evoked more than ever.
We hide behind them all the time, but we don’t do what they did or what they urged us to do.
That is what the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt means when she says criminals force us to contemplate the meaning of evil, but only hypocrites are rotten to the core. Again and again, we are drawn to hypocrites like moths to flame because they never speak of love and hope, cliches that have become less and less effective.
The demagogue is a vampire, he feeds on the fear and anger that is so integral a part of the human condition. Only the strong and the determined can walk away from it. Only, I think, the truly chosen.
In my life, love and hope have become central tenets of my faith, even as I sometimes forget them or fail to practice them. I take them very seriously, they are my real truth. They keep me grounded and clear, they give me strength when the ugliest and most broken part of human beings is revealed to us. They have saved my life.
Perhaps one day fear and anger will become a cliché, but as long as men are running so much of the world, fear and anger still shape our lives. Hope and love are orphan children, the lurk in the background, they peek out of the bushes, they are never invited to those green rooms for croissant and coffee.
I have a different experience of love and hope, they are not clichés to me, and both rescued me, and while they both may be clichés, their power and meaning are very real to me, and very intense and dramatic. They are not greeting cards for me, or sappy ads on television, or the preaching of dead spiritual gurus, they have been my own hope and salvation. Selfishly, they have brought me what I need and what I want, they have brought to me to life.
The thing about love, for me, is this. When I love, I become better. I become more empathetic and compassionate, I am compelled to be less selfish and angry, I am called to learn and listen and grow and change. When you love someone or something, you wish to keep it, even when it means understanding yourself in a new and different way.
When we love, we become better than we were, and when we become better than we were, then everything we see and touch becomes better as well. Love and hope are not selfless, they are quite selfish. They bring us the life we want and sometimes, deserve.
The thing about hope is that is the most powerful tool in the human consciousness for living lives that matter, that are filled with meaning and purpose. When I was alone, I hoped for someone who could share my life. When I took a bad photo, I hoped I could take a better one. When my first book was rejected, I hoped I could write a good one. When my marriage of 35 years collapsed, I hoped I could find one that worked for me. When I was broken, I hoped to heal. When I was angry, I hoped for peace of mind. When I was afraid, I hoped for change. When I despaired for my work, I hope to find a way to keep doing it.
I do not have everything I want, or everything I need, but what I hoped for, I found. Love. Creativity. Meaning. Connection. Hope works. So does love. Hope is the engine that brings me forward, that gives me strength.
I was afraid of love and hope once, I never wrote of either. I am not afraid of hope and love, I am not ashamed of those cliches.
Today, another onslaught of horrific news. It is hope that brings me to the idea of a better world, where love makes us better and hope heals. It sounds like a cliché even when I write, and writers are not supposed to like clichés.
But we are also supposed to be authentic and tell the truth, and hope and love is my truth.
We planted two trees, we thought of it as a life memorial, but also to remember the people in Orlando. Some politicians are already demanding that we get angry, but my hope and prayer is that we become less angry, not more. There is plenty of anger. I have worked so hard to be less angry, and I am less angry than ever before in my life, and I can tell you it is a good and healing and hopeful thing.
I do not ever trust anyone who sells anger, anger and hate are the scourges of the world, the architects of all of the Orlando’s, and there are too many to count or remember. We choose life, and we choose help. This ugliness will pass, and we believe in better days, not angrier ones.
That is what these two trees now mean to us. Trees for life.
“The darker the night, the deeper the grief, the deeper the grief, the closer to God.” – Dostoyevsky
We planned a festive day, planting two butterfly bushes and two swamp birches next to the farmhouse to celebrate out sixth wedding anniversary. Life intervened, as it often does, and instead, we talked about it and we dedicated the bushes and the trees to the victims of the Orlando killings, another human act that seems beyond comprehension to me.
I can’t and wouldn’t tell anyone else how to react, I can only write about how I react and have hope that it might be helpful to someone else. We can’t do much celebration today, but we can feel gratitude.
When I hear of a tragedy like this, in a sense too large to really comprehend initially, I do not have the skills to explain it or comprehend it, so I withdraw from the outside world and turn inward.
I can only say what I feel, not what you must feel.
Healing and hope are inside of me, not on any screen. The politicians will call for rage, but that’s not my path. I’d prefer to feel grief and gratitude for what I have.
Another disturbed and broken man, I shake my head at a society that trembles over the specter of terrorism but lets the mentally ill and violent buy acquire most lethal weapons in the world to kill innocent people, including children and the unsuspecting young, again and again.
And all in the name of our freedom to die horribly. We are broken too.
I ask myself where hope is and I turn towards it. I believe in it.
Today, I have no interest in the posturing and exploitation of politicians, seeking votes and power even as the blood still flows and people struggle for their lives.
The media has nothing new to tell me after the first awful news, and i do not believe it is either healthy or helpful to wallow in the details for days, and suffer the repeated trauma of hearing them repeated again and again, hour after hour, day after day. I can only imagine what this does to the nervous systems and emotions of the gullible and the unaware.
That is not information or understanding, this is a profit-making addiction, a technological Opiod, and I do not care to succumb to it or support it.
I ask myself, “what do I love?,” and I go to it.
Maria, the dogs, my friends, my work, my camera, my farm, the donkeys, the horse, the sheep. How blessed I am to have so many things to love. I believe blame, like guilt, is a poison, and I not embrace blame or judgement. I am no better or wiser than anybody else.
Maria and I put the devices aside for the day and meditated for 15 minutes, the quiet and introspection was healing. We sat out on our chairs and held hands.
I thought of the victims and of the killer, and I thought of the anger and fear that will sweep in waves, a kind of poisonous tsunami that is, even as we speak, engulfing people whose vulnerabilities and sensory systems are battered with horror.
I will learn what I need to know, not more than that. To me, blame and judgement are the tools of the weak and damaged, they are not my tools or choices.
We dug the holes and watered the plants and dedicated the bushes and trees to the dead and injured, and to their families, who have suddenly crossed from one side of the world to the other and whose lives are plunged into darkness and despair. It is not me, but a part of me can feel what it might be like to be me.
Where is hope?, I sometimes wonder.
In the small things. Acts of love and kindness, acts of generosity and compassion, time with someone you love, a walk with the dog, some time along, some time in thought. It has always worked for me. I have to heal, too, not quiver and shout. The answers for me are in here, not out there.
Perhaps empathy, not accusation or hatred, is the best gift that I can offer myself, the most healing thing. For them, for me. I hope there is a way for me to help these people, that is one of the good things social media can do, and I will look for it.
The darker the night, the deeper the grief, the deeper the grief, the more I feel.
The Joy Dog was curious about our anniversary gifts, she actually sat quietly and watched curiously. Everything is her business, and I lay down on the ground to take her photo, she was fascinated, before leaping on my suddenly and trying to chew on me, as she loves to do. The pirate eye always gives her away when she is looking for trouble. And she is almost always looking for trouble.
