At some point, you've probably heard the story of the Native American telling his grandson about the two wolves fighting inside each of us, one good and one evil, and how the wolf who wins will be the one you feed. There's a version of this fight going on in my life right now, and likely other lives as well, but it goes like this: one wolf is chasing me, trying to kill and eat me. The other wolf is me, and I'm running in circles, eating my own tail.
It takes a lot to fight the battles of the world and the battles in yourself at the same time. How do you fight injustice, oppression, and violence when you can barely squeeze out the energy to brush your teeth and go to work in the morning? At first I thought I might have clinical depression (I recently decided to give up caffeinated coffee when, after drinking an espresso milkshake, I heard a Cat Stevens song and cried for no reason), but now I'm unconvinced, because I'm not constantly unhappy or apathetic. It's just that I'm only happy when I'm allowed to be human. I was happy the other morning, eating yogurt as slowly as I wanted in the warm, sweet wind, and sitting in the soft grass at Duke Gardens, watching ducks paddle through the water and listening to people speak different languages--not understanding, but enjoying the sounds, the cadence. I was happy spending as long as I wanted tinkering with a poem by the ocean, and playing music with my friends after a good meal. And I was happy standing at an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, sweaty and sun-browned after a weekend spent hauling my camera gear through gold mine tunnels and up log-cabined hills. Nothing beats feeling sunlight on your skin again after an antibiotic treatment leaves you so allergic to the sun that you can't walk outside for five minutes without a scarf around your ears. Nothing beats letting a sea of mountaintops swallow your problems for a moment, either.
The big problem right now is that carving out the time and space for being human requires saddling and reining in all the forces in my life, body, and mind that try to suffocate that time and space, and shifting destructive behavior patterns as old as my bones, all of which feels like training wild hogs to wait tables in a fine restaurant. It also requires being more faithful in my spiritual practice, which these forces also suffocate. But at this point, I can't even stick to a simple exercise routine because it involves getting up earlier than I'd like to, no matter how great it might feel in the long run. I've drunk the cultural kool-aid of instant gratification, and now I'm getting tired and nauseous trying to purge it from my system.
To me, "being human" doesn't just mean more leisure time--it means doing the things you exist to do, in the way you were meant to do them, and in a way that leaves the world better than you found it, not just the things that keep a roof over your head (if these are one and the same for you, congratulations!). It also means re-establishing yourself as more of a creator and less a consumer--cooking at least some of my own food rather than just buying frozen dinners all the time helps with this. Lastly, it means taking time to relieve the stress on our bodies caused by a society that's rapidly out-evolving them. No amount of company wellness days can change the fact that humans are not built to sit or stand by themselves in one place without sunlight for eight hours a day.
While I'm spinning in my circle figuring all of this out, the wolf outside stalks closer. The news is a game of "who hates whom today?" or "which volatile regime are we threatening today?" or "who thinks I'm not a person today?" or "whose skin color or religious garb was a death sentence today?" or "who tried to make a point with a bomb today?" or "who got shot or stabbed for doing the right thing today?" On one side, I'm being hit with the reality of just how much mental and physical energy it takes to practice what I preached two blog posts ago, and on the the other, the reality of living in revolutionary times. It's not quite as romantic as eighteenth century paintings, Les Miserables, or Rage Against the Machine might have you believe. I haven't lived through a literal revolution yet, but this dark weight in the air, and the tension of global affairs dripping into our daily lives, is enough to make me afraid of one.
Though I'm nowhere near breaking this circle yet, art and spirituality will probably be the two things that help me the most in doing so, especially in those moments when they blend together. I live for those moments. I never thought a church sermon and an episode of Welcome to Night Vale would perfectly compliment each other, but they did on this year's Easter weekend. The latter was a live performance of the podcast I saw in Durham on Good Friday, in which the incomparable Cecil Baldwin energized the audience at one point by stating that being "good" was an action, not just a passive state of being, an idea I've expressed before but often fail to live up to. Later, on Easter Sunday, the pastor of my church proclaimed that we live not in the old world, but in a new, post-Easter world, where love has won and will continue to win, no matter how long the struggle (I'm paraphrasing, of course, but this seemed to me the essence of what she said).
She gave a similarly thought-provoking sermon around Pentecost Sunday, examining the thoughts and emotions Jesus' disciples might have had after seeing their leader and hero ascend to Heaven and leave them to figure out where to go from there. It made me realize that, in a sense, people in my generation (millenials--you know, the people killing Applebee's in the holy name of avocado toast, or something) are having our own post-ascension moment right now, whether we're religious or not. Many of the heroes we grew up with, especially influential artists, are dying off, and we're gradually inheriting more and more of the world and becoming the captains of its cultures and progress. We're coming to grips with the responsibility of being our own heroes at a hostile, polarized point in history.
I don't know when I'll reach that moment where it feels like I'm actually going somewhere and making an impact instead of just spinning around while life keeps moving, but the best I can do right now is remind myself that we live in a world, however oppressive or violent, that like love, this too is possible.
