that the sunrise not leave us unmoved

On Minding Your Heart During these Times

An expression I’ve heard a dear Irish friend say:

Mind your heart.

There is no accurate American equivalent of this phrase, but I’ve come to understand it this way: when your world spins out of control, don’t forget about your heart. Don’t ignore it.

Remember to care for yourself. Don’t neglect your soul; listen to how your heart is guiding you; if your heart feels like it is breaking, it likely is; if your heart feels like it is swelling with affection, it likely is. It is possible that your heart is doing both simultaneously.

Mind your heart.

Last week, a close friend who lives in Colorado texted me to say that he’d dreamt of his late father, who passed four years ago July 4th. My friend had been out of sorts for a while, and couldn’t figure out why until he looked at the calendar. Why had the dream of his father’s loss awakened him in the middle of the night? Because, I told him, I think that our brains divert our attention as a way to protect our hearts. Because we otherwise are terrible at it.

Mind your heart.

We keep busy, we write To-Do lists, we clean, we clean again, we plan elaborate dinner parties, we work till all hours as though the world will come to an end if we don’t. This is not to say that any of these things are particularly wrong, or problematic. To-Do lists have kept me afloat for years now, and although I don’t love making them, they help keep me from slipping down the slope of wombat videos and Labrador Retriever rescues, koala sanctuaries needing help, VRBOs in Tenerife, and Rose Leslie in Game of Thrones.

But sometimes, the brain-diversion tactic stops working, and you suddenly find yourself in a swampy sorrow up to your neck. My father used to describe it the way he described a ticking human heart: pre-loaded with just so many beats, and when you’re out of beats, you’re out of luck. Similarly, once the diversion bucket is empty and you’re forced to look hard at what is happening around you, the world becomes impossible to ignore, for better or for worse and, as my Buddhist friends say, you have no choice but to sit in the pain. No amount of To Do lists will distract you from the fact that, as a species, we seem to be hell-bent for leather on self-destruction: the planet is burning, our leaders resemble characters out of Goldfinger (if Goldfinger was an angry six year old with the nuclear codes stuffed into his Osh-Kosh pockets), and it seems that a new official military tactic is to target young people. I don’t really care which young people we’re talking about or where they’re from or who they pray to, so please: let’s not split hairs.

The news has been a lot to absorb lately. And I know that I’m not the only one who has noticed this: it seems that a lot of us are out there, writing and talking about grief in ways that we never have before. Grief has moved beyond the feelings of profound loss we have when someone we care about has died, or a relationship, platonic or romantic, has ended. Grief has taken up residence in our bodies and spirits because we’ve reached the limit, collectively, of what we can possibly metabolize of the world around us.

Mind your heart.

And still, I have dear friends who believe with every fiber of their being that nothing is real, and that we are all just being manipulated, pulled this way and that way by artificial means to effect a certain outcome be it political or social. This has always been the case to some degree — it used to be called propaganda — but what my friends are saying is different: don’t assume that what you’re looking at is real, they tell me. Don’t assume that things you’re watching aren’t spliced together, they say, or Photoshopped, or posed. Don’t let yourself get so upset, they tell me, because you’ll never know the truth, from either side. You don’t know if those children are really dying, or if those people are really starving. The problem with this line of thought is the cynicism that it naturally engenders and once the cynicism dissipates, it yields the very worst thing of all: apathy. If the question about the authenticity of images of dying kids outweighs the actual horror of dying kids, one has to question one’s humanity. Don’t get me wrong: authenticity is very important, and image manipulation is a terrible and handy tool in the kit of hatred and division. But what is more important, I think, is the meaning of the image itself.

The binary makes it impossible to wrap one’s brain around the fact of human affection and kindness; it is meant to do the exact opposite.

The human heart is not meant to withstand the level of psychic and emotional bombardment that the modern news cycle throws at it, day in and day out, twenty-four hours a day. Divisionary tacticians know this, and they know it works: the binary says This person is bad, and that person is good. Or, this person believes X or this person believes Y based on their last name, or what passport they hold, or what they look like. But the modern human brain is big, evolved, and nuanced, and can make distinctions that the binary would prefer it didn’t. Because with nuance comes complexity and thought. I’ve seen this happen over and over again and likely so have you. You are this person and ergo you must think this way and if you do think this way, you are bad, but if you thought that way, you would be good.

I have admittedly fallen into this trap in the past, and, as someone who believes in the power of art and words and children and music and beauty and air and the sun and water and love and friendship, it did exactly one thing for me: it hardened my heart in the gravest, most impossible of ways.

Likewise, people who do not know me from Eve beyond my writing have drawn certain conclusions about me that have zero basis in reality except for the binary one that they have formed for themselves because it’s all just easier that way. If this divisionary tactic sounds familiar, it is: it’s what playground bullying is all about, and is tried and true. This person = good. That person = bad.

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In the last weeks, I have gardened less and less.

The vegetables were supposed to be mine, and the perennials, Susan’s. But with every news story, every bearing-of-witness, every moment of anguish shared again and again by a manipulative media deciding how I should feel and why, I’ve been almost paralyzed and too grief-stricken to even think about feeding that which would feed and sustain me: the tomatoes, the zucchini, the lettuce that I never bothered covering. Susan stepped in: she’s fertilized and watered, staked and tied. The binary has taken this from me because I allowed it to; I got tired and worn down by the pundits, the politicians, the manipulators. The binary has taken from me my innate belief that every life has the same value. Anne Lamott used to say that God loves Dick Cheney just as much as he loves my grandson, and while I used to have a hard time agreeing with her, I understood what she was saying. The binary makes it impossible to wrap one’s brain around the facts of human affection and kindness and empathy; it is meant, strategically, to do the exact opposite.

What if joy is not only entangled with pain, suffering, and sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through these things, wrote Ross Gay. The binary does not want us to care for each other; the binary wants us to hate The Other, even if we don’t know them. Especially if.

Joy is very complicated at times like this. And when I stopped gardening, I knew that I was in trouble. So I’m trying to do what my friend Deirdre once said to me: I’m trying to mind my heart, in every way I know how. It’s the mundane to which I am returning, trudging around, watering, sweating, weeding. I’ve stopped fighting the rabbits. And the sunrise, as the poet May Sarton once said, will never leave me unmoved.

No matter the news.