What Fragility Demands + Elk Sounds
Just before sunrise I sat in my office with only the small lamp on in the corner. Neither the day nor I were all the way awake. I had two minutes before a meeting. I put a block behind my back against the chair to be upright – now just sixty seconds, almost out of time to be still. I had the deck door slightly ajar even though it’s cold in the mornings now, cold enough that elk are coming down and burrowing in the tall grass on the hill above the old wellhead to bugle and snort before the light.
You know what makes life better? Learning how to handle yourself, starting right now to tend to your soul even and especially if it feels pointless because you are looking into chaos, no one can hear you and what would you even say?
Fragility is a great teacher. Follow fragility home, instead of into outrage. Many things are outrageous. Go home, to center. There is some way that you know how to do that. There is something that you know how to do that brings you there.
I don’t feel like telling you specific words. I feel like trusting you to be still even if it is for one minute I trust you not to waste another second. I want to trust the world.
This week pointed out our fragility. This week pulled out our souls like a fish pulled from the sea onto the deck of a deep-sea fishing boat.
When you are thrashing like we have been, fragile and scared, you go home. You don’t give up, you find center. Fragility is valuable. Don’t waste it.
For some, the route will be religion, for others something personal and private. Home is where the heart is and when your heart is in the wrong place for you, fragility reminds you to go home.
How dare I consider taking care of myself for a moment when I am safe, fed, and privileged?
Being a good person does not mean suffering to uselessness. Feel and act, instead of consume and atrophy.
The lesson my body keeps teaching me in practice is that I am not the body, that I must know myself as more, as soul energy, part of great nature, a micro-manifestation of simultaneous degeneration and expansion, as most connected when most fragile, like the earth itself, or a country.
When things feel most tenuous, pray for love not loathing by embodying love, not loathing.
If I were to know myself as loved, intelligent, and empowered, what would I be capable of seeing or knowing?
The elk don’t wake me but I hear them as soon as the alarm does. Yesterday I was in town and waited until nighttime to drive home because of the work on the highway. I went over to Stacey’s and talked to Ed sitting on on the couch Stacey wants to replace. I stayed later than planned talking to Ed on the couch because it felt good in the house.
The last time I was at their house was in the middle of winter. Logs, kindling, and old cardboard were piled around the big enclosed fireplace in the center of the room. Last night there was no wood but remnants of summer camping, fishing, and people who visited. I perked up and started making jokes and I like that side of myself.
Even though it was time to leave and get to bed I went to the kitchen and laughed with Stacey and Caro for a while.
I’ve thought a lot about looking down from the sky if ceilings and roofs were invisible but still kept people safe and dry. There’s a majestic, wordless film called Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio that contrasts nature and the industrialized world. The Hopi word koyaanisqatsi translates to "life out of balance" or "chaotic life.”
The time-lapse photography of California freeways from the sky stuck with me. The headlights and taillights and the serpentine roadways above and below each other looked like blood moving to and from the hidden heart of a giant life.
All those headlights and taillights from above reminded me how small we are and yet how much of an impact we make, how every moment inside ourselves blood is moving and energy is shifting and we are both in and out of control all the time.
If we were able to look inside the earth like looking at those highways in the film, we would see microorganisms in the soil scurrying about their life’s work. There would be patterns, pathways, stops and starts and the foundation of it all would be a great effort to stay alive and safe.
Fragility is a reminder that you are valuable and your currency must not be wasted, not even when the scale of the world seems too large. Currency is energy, and your energy is valuable.
If ceilings were invisible but still able to keep people safe and dry we could look from way above and see into all the houses. If bodies were like houses with ceilings then we could see into each other without words.
Look into your own center. Your heart is a pump that needs to receive energy and that is what your fragility is asking of you. That is your teacher calling you home. In the house of the body the heart is the hearth.
Look into yourself and be your own teacher. For a little while leave alone the memes and quotes that show you how right you already are and go to the places you have been avoiding, alone, and quiet. I know you may be hurting.
An empty house grows cold. Cruelty is cold. Somehow an empty house falls apart while a lived-in home is preserved. Do not give all of your heat away and go cold. Fragility is speaking to you in sadness or anger. When people get very sad or very angry life becomes very fragile.
Imagine your body as a home, and look in as if ceilings were invisible. Make it feel like evening with a fire, feet in socks, books, and warm drinks. Make it feel okay to feel.
It’s nighttime now and the elk are bugling and snorting again, just like they were in the morning. I wish you could hear the sounds as they are very hard to describe. I ate dinner on the deck. I eat simply when I am alone. It’s getting dark earlier but I could hear plenty of rustling in the tall grasses even when they were not bugling and snorting.
Telling you about the elk and reminding you to go home inside is how I finally got home by listening to the call of fragility even if it took all week, and I wanted to write a longer piece, it’s late at night, and I’ll be up early in the morning.
And now it is time for you tell yourself how you will go home.