And You Want to Travel With Her

The past few days have been filled with music and words, sacred lyrics and meanings, which are emerging from the soil that has lain dormant for the past few years.

Maybe, this idea of dormancy is just with me, in my personal experience of slipping down into the pandemic in a strange new city, before I could ever even find the names of people or places around me.

And, maybe this awakening from dormancy is with everyone around the globe, all of us who have endured and survived the pall which fell upon humanity beginning in March of 2020.

Not all of the planet suffered: without the rampant, ceaseless and nauseous flow of automobiles, factory exhausts and emissions, and general noise that humans must make everywhere we go – honking horns, shooting weapons, driving jackhammers to dig up what was only last week paved, and blowing up mountains to extract ore and push in new highways – the other forms of life living on the planet had room and time and space to emerge, fly, swim, flock, procreate, and take up space.

Did we notice, though?

Most of us were busy using our brains to harness technology so that we could learn to order everything we need online and have our social lives and children’s schooling take place entirely that way. Being creatures who value tangibles such as grades and report cards, we did not factor in the much more important part of school than reading ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic: developing age-appropriate social skills.

But, here we are. We have vaccinated ourselves so that we can once again emerge from hiding from one another and go back to work, school, and caregiving. We bump into each other awkwardly, now in 3D, where we can’t just text or emoji our ideas and feelings to a differently coloured bubble on a screen and engage with non-verbal physical cues. You know, those social and interpersonal communication skills we learned in grade school, which, as pointed out above, our children missed out on.

And the birds and fish and polar ice caps and clean air and quiet that filled in while we were hiding away from each other, are being again overcome with the sound and the fury of human beings emerging, just as noisy and dangerous as we were before March of 2020, with noise and dirt and just as ignorant to the opportunities to listen and learn, as ever.

Instead, I see one big Temper Tantrum happening on this planet. We want it, and we want it now: the revenge travel, the revenge oppression of the oppressors, to cancel culture and overthrow governments, and abolish the the holy books and their millennia of accrued wisdom of the human condition. And why? Because nothing works anymore, and nothing is the way we want it.

It’s true, nothing is the way anyone wants it. We can’t stroll downtown and find the same lively scenes of arts and culture and shopping and commerce and restaurants and green spaces, because no one went down there to work and become culturally enriched for almost three years. Now, civic centres and universities are sites of social unrest, protests, confrontation, and homelessness. Offices are vacant, pedestrians and cyclists are struck by careless drivers, and there just aren’t enough social service resources to address all this anger and discontent and flaunting of established laws that only a few short years ago meant something. Now, everyone is a victim. Or a perpetrator.

This is so sad. Here, humanity has had a once in a millennium opportunity to emerge with a clean slate, only rivalled by the Great Flood that so many cultures have written about in their origin stories. In which everything that was known or understood was wiped out, everyone sheltered in place until it was over, and then slowly, tentatively, emerged.

Perhaps we are at the stage when the dove that the Biblical Noach sent out is coming back, because there is not yet any dry land with a tree for it to perch upon. Perhaps we are at one step before that, where anger and ignorance of the earth and its creatures had not yet fully been drowned out by the risen waters.

I think of Leonard Cohen’s poetic song, ‘Suzanne’. I think of the lyrics,

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our Lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

Do you see Suzanne?

I do.

She is there, like us all, going out for the day to pick among the angry workers, selfish drivers, desperate people cutting each other off; to protesters telling us what to think or do, to the banning of library books, and the making of conversations where no one is listening, and no one is right, and everyone is wrong – and she is also finding flowers.

Suzanne shows you where to look among this mix of garbage and flowers, because there really are heroes amongst us who carry on with pride and honour despite harms and pettiness; and our children do go out in the morning.

You can see them – they are those of us who find ways to go about the day with love in our hearts, the children whose glad eyes gaze up to the morning sky and still know the sun and birds and subtle inspirations – there will always be people like this, and I feel safe and inspired and comforted.