Dust on the Snow

Rather than ice and snow or mud, this year we’re tracking in sand.

I can almost pretend it’s not winter: the constant sunlight, the clear blue sky without a trace of clouds… Only the single-digit overnight lows and the constantly burning wood stove keep me pegged to the movement of the spheres. The lack of moisture portends trouble in the coming growing season, but New Mexico has lived through that before. The grasshopper plague may well return, but maybe one can learn to eat them — in some countries, no one would even blink.

The main thing is, I feel different. I wonder if anybody else does, besides my mother. Poor beleaguered Helen called the other day to thank my wife and me for the flowers we sent for Christmas. I was scared to death, but she sounded like a normal mother, radiating love and gratitude. She even said, “All those things I was talking to you kids about, I don’t know WHAT that was…” I told her I loved her, and I meant it. Do not question or attempt an explanation, just accept. This is how it is.

And how is it, in the larger picture?

My own work, the inner work, has risen to the top. Slowly but surely, an expanding field of relative calm now spreads out from the center. I know what I have to do and want to do. Whenever I feel myself being pulled into the black hole of despair, I remember the work and something shifts a little bit. The panic subsides or floats a little farther off. This suggests a tipping point has finally arrived. Given my history, you might say this is why I’ve lived this long, to reach this stage and follow through. How lucky is this? How great a gift, especially considering what’s happening in the world?

Our “system,” our way of life, is certainly collapsing. In relative slow-motion, perhaps, and with short-term happy surprises that mask the overall direction, but to me, there’s not the slightest doubt. We’re at a turning point in history, on the cusp of a great world-wide transition. The Great Recession is well on the way to something much more significant than anything merely having to do with jobs, the dollar, or the price of housing. Virtually every institution will have to adapt, or much more likely, simply disappear. I’ve known that I would live to see this day since I was a little boy, and now it’s finally here.

To cite just one small example, there are places in Florida and probably elsewhere (see this New York Times article) where the median price of housing has fallen to less than a third of what it was a few short years ago. The downturn hasn’t ended yet and may not ever, as we pass into a whole new era that makes comparisons obsolete. Ten years from now, there might not be national currencies based on debt. We might not even need to have a nation. (Think of all the time and energy we’d save!)

No one knows what’s coming, but I feel it’s going to be good. Perhaps that’s the inner work for us as a species, to give this space to grow.

When my wife and I gave up everything we knew by moving from Maryland to New Mexico and threw away our personal “safety net” — in quotation marks because maintaining it was inexorably draining the quality from our lives and threatening our health — we experienced through courage (or stupidity!) what many people are just beginning to deal with now. For what it’s worth, I guess you could say that we were actually ahead of our time: suddenly no equity, no health insurance, a drastic drop in income, shock, shame, fear, and years of wrenching self-examination… However, like one gentleman says in that New York Times piece:

“What I’ve learned is the strength that you can reach down and get,” he says. “I’m the same guy. No matter what I had, I’m the same guy.”

How many times in the last 10 years have I said something like that to myself? It doesn’t make the pain go away, but it does allow a few degrees of separation: I am not the fear, I am that which notices the fear, an entirely different dynamic. Whatever I am is here and always has been, and now THAT is what I must pay attention to.

Besides, there’s dust on the snow in Taos, New Mexico. In Africa right now are active volcanoes that could create instant climate change, and not the kind that most of us are worried about. Nature has the upper hand in everything, and whatever I am is on that team.

How then can I possibly lose?

Related posts:

1. IOWA! (w/ Dust Storms & a Blizzard on the Way)
2. Dust Devils for Dummies
3. Hummers in the Snow
4. SNOW… [Updated 2X]
5. Snow Hysteria, Stupid Qwest