When I play the piano, I sometimes finish a
piece by holding my foot on the sustain pedal
and listening intently as the sound fades and
eventually merges with the surrounding
silence. When the last note is barely
audible, there is a moment when I'm not certain
if I'm still hearing the note or imagining it,
whether it's part of me or part of the world.
No matter how hard I struggle to discern where I
leave off and others begin, ultimately I find
that there's no telling. I cannot convince
myself that there is such a place.
I cannot find a ramrod boundary line, only
watery expanses, and in the diminuendo I'm
always being carried out into the world. I
grapple with a question once posed by the
psychologist June Singer: "The space
between us, is it a space that separates us or a
space that unites us?"
The world continually reminds us that our calls
both do and do not belong solely to us.
Just as calls issue from our own bodies in the
form of symptoms, they also come from the body
politic, of which we're each single cells.
Where an affinity of wounds connects us to
others, where the world in its shocking
condition touches our lives in a personal way,
we can find ourselves responding to a call and
turning from sympathizers to activists.
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What we each determine is a fitting response is
entirely subjective. One person might take
on multinational corporations or federal laws or
the plight of an entire race of people, another
might adopt a child from the Third World, and
yet another might simply sweep the street in
front of the shop every morning. For some,
all the activism they can handle in this life is
in trying to heal their own souls, though by
most accounts this is the work of the
world. Contemplative nuns and monks,
writers, and most artists serve the world best,
for instance, in solitude. They touch the
world most intimately when they're completely
alone, conferring their medicine through prayer
and painting, through writing books and working
the beads. They may seldom see a soul yet
be engaged in the deepest soul work, which
simultaneously serves the greater community.
The world never stops calling, never stops
acting as though it belongs to us, and its pain
is always gathering force like storms
offshore. It sends out flares the way we
send signals into space, always hoping that
someone will come across them, will understand
what they mean, will trace the calls. It
shouts to us from the sickroom, from the cold
calculus of the daily news, and from whatever we
can't stand to look at and so avert our
eyes. The world gets harder and harder to
ignore as it gets smaller and its problems
bigger, as whatever hits the fan gets a little
more evenly distributed.
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