Uncategorized | The Direction of Intention

Adapt Or Not [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on December 28, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

One of Kerri’s 2020 photo series is of discarded masks. I thought it odd the very first time we saw a mask tangled in the weeds on the side of the trail. I also thought it odd that Kerri jumped to take a picture of it. “Things you never thought you’d see!” she proclaimed after capturing her image.

Over these past several months her collection of images has grown exponentially. She adds to it almost daily. Masks in gutters. Masks on sidewalks. Masks in parking lots. Trail side masks left dangling from branches. Masks in aisle 9 near the peanut butter. What was peculiar a few months ago has become normalized. “Another mask!” she says and kneels to take a snap. I barely notice.

A new normal.

I’ve read that homo sapiens are a successful species because of our ability to adapt to changing environments. I’ve also read that entire cultures have vanished off the face of the planet because of their (our) ability to habituate the extreme – that is, adapt – to behaviors that collapse their (our) environment. Frogs in a pot. Just watch what happens to a cohesive community when the well runs dry or the fuel source is exhausted. Just watch what happens as the planet warms and weather-weirding becomes more dire. Fire season never ends. Hurricane season stretches on and on – we adapt our system for counting them because there are too many for the old system to contain.

We are not the first homo sapiens to deny what is right in front of our eyes. Denial, after all, is a cousin to adaptation.

Pandemics rage. People travel en masse for the holidays with no regard to the appeals of healthcare workers or the pleas of the CDC. Individual rights exercised at the expense of neighbors lives. Homo sapiens are capable of denying that they are a social animal. It’s romantic, this illusion of cowboys going it alone. An intentional snub of greater responsibility. Peeing in the pool.

It-is what-it-is. A new normal.

Each day we pass people on the trail. There are two distinct groups. Those with masks who pull them up when they encounter others. And, those without. “People who don’t give a sh*t,” Kerri whispers. The dividing line couldn’t be more apparent.

“Things I never thought I’d see,” I say. After a moment, I add, “You should take out your camera and start a new series. People incapable of adaptation!”

“We’d have to get releases, we’d have to get their permission” she says, always the practical one. Then, cutting to the heart of the matter, she said, “Besides, they’re not that interesting. People who don’t care are sooooo much less interesting than people who do care.”

Adapting to new circumstances – wearing a mask – is an act of caring. “Yes,” I sigh, suddenly understanding her mask photo series. Lost or discarded caring. It’s ubiquitous. It’s normalized.

Somehow, I manage to find her mask series hopeful. Some truths, like kindness – like caring, are universal. The lost masks are evidence. The litter of caring is everywhere.

The ancient norms eventually float to the top. The heat of the fire always – eventually – wakes us up or brings us together. Or we boil. We collapse. We persevere. We divide. We unite. We take a new form. We evolve.

Everything is different now. Nothing new.

read Kerri’s blog post about BECAUSE

Filed under: Edges, Identity, Merely A Thought Monday, Pattern, Uncategorized | Tagged: adapt, adaptation, change, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, denial, environment, homo sapiens, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, new normal, normal, normalization, responsibility | Leave a comment »

Story Your Light [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on December 22, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“A difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is the sun.” ~ Paul Valery

A newsflash from Captain Obvious: this has been a very difficult year. We’ve revoked permission to ask, “What else could happen?” because, in this year, something else always happens; something else climbs on the pile of the already insurmountable mountain of difficulties.

Robert Olen Butler wrote that a story is what happens when a yearning meets an obstacle. We humans love a good story of difficulties surmounted. There is great satisfaction when Luke Skywalker finally trusts the force, when Frodo returns the ring to the lava, when the underdog wins the race. We cheer when the skinny girl punches the bully, when the peasants rise and vanquish the brutal king.

The difficulty, the obstacle, evokes character. The difficulty also reveals character. This year of difficulty has revealed much about the character – and the lack of character – of our nation. Both/And. Healthcare workers run into the fiery jaws of this dragon-virus every day. With hospitals overrun, with numbers of infections skyrocketing, many of us ignore the pleas of healthcare workers to stay put, to avoid gathering, and fly off to play at Disneyland. Both/And.

In the arc of every great story there must be a loss. The difficulty has to win-for-a-moment in order to evoke the light. The obstacle serves as the catalyst for discovery. The discovery serves as the introduction to the next obstacle. Let’s face it, a life without difficulty is flat and void of tales. It’s a cycle of life.

It is tempting, when sitting in the belly of the whale, to think that the belly is the end of the story. It never is. It is the moment to weep. Yes. It is the moment to sit still and wonder what to do. Yes. It is the moment to run around in a last ditch effort to create enough belly-havoc that the whale burps you to the surface and spits you out to face the next obstacle, the next difficulty, that will someday become the story of ‘I didn’t know I had it in me.” The moment of greatest creativity. The Hail-Mary pass.

The story of your light – of our light – and how it came into the world.

read Kerri’s blog post about LIGHTS

Filed under: Story, Two Artists Tuesday, Uncategorized | Tagged: david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, difficulty, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, light, obstacles, Paul Valery, Robert Olen Butller, story | Leave a comment »

Walk To The Fence [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on December 14, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“When people disliked each other or wanted to damage each other, they often did it through destroying the person’s harvest. This is the world of pisreoga.” ~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

Pisreoga is a Celtic term and lives beyond the reach of Google. It is ancient. The desire to do damage to others who are different or disliked is also ancient. Destroy their harvest. Define them as less than human. Erect obstacles to their participation or power. Starve them.

It’s exhausting.

In Rolling Stone, Wade Davis wrote these words in early August: “In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.”

Four months on, now more than 3,000 Americans are dying everyday. Our death rates and infection rates soar while our government proves itself again and again to be dysfunctional and incompetent each and every day. Our citizenry is divided with several million growing fat on a diet of delusion and misinformation. Our insatiable hunger for misinformation – to believe the worst with nary a fact check or thought-stop – is our nation’s Achilles’ Heel. It poisons our harvest. Our gullibility poisons us.

What is going on? The world of pisreoga.

It’s a precarious community in which neighbors, out of vindictiveness, destroy each other’s harvest. No one thrives when no one can be trusted. Poisoning the neighbor’s harvest eventually – and always – blows back. All are poisoned. The harvest of a poisoned community is its unraveling.

That is what is going on. An emperor with no clothes. Red-hatted-screamers riding the Titanic of party loyalty all the way to the bottom; a nation goes with it. Oaths-of-office that mean absolutely nothing. Sowing the seeds of doubt and misinformation as a tactic to retain power. Useful idiots signing on to garbage lawsuits, undermining the very harvest they were sworn to protect, cheering for a bloated naked ego.

Pisreoga. A failed state. To obstruct. To do damage. To destroy the harvest rather than deal with the realities, rather than walk to the neighbor’s fence and say, “We have a problem. Can we talk?”

read Kerri’s blog post about WHAT IS GOING ON?

Filed under: Edges, Identity, Language, Merely A Thought Monday, Perspective, Uncategorized | Tagged: Anam Cara, communication, covid19, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, delusion, failed state, harvest, John O"Donohue, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, obstacle, pisreoga, power, Wade Davis | Leave a comment »

Consider The Numbers [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on December 7, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

There are numbers. Then, there are the realities that the numbers represent. For instance, I am writing this a few days before the post date. Between the time I write this post and the time it publishes, more than 9,000 people will die of COVID-19. The counting-unit-of-measure is not golf balls or jelly beans in a jar. It is not socks lost in the dryer. It is lives lost. People who otherwise would be alive. People who celebrated the new year and hoped 2020 would be better than 2019. The counting unit is people-who-die-of-COVID-19.

9,000 is a number. So is 276,000. That’s today’s number. 400,000 is also a number. That’s the estimated number of lives lost in these divided-united-states by January 1, 2021. People. Dreamers. Seekers. Grandparents. Sisters. Uncles. Friends.

“Lives lost” is also an abstraction. Words. Easy to say. Easy to write. There’s no reality until there is a reality, though, these days, realities are readily denied. Actively denied. In the face of medical professionals pleading with us to listen, emergency rooms overrun, refrigerator trucks serving as morgues, there are still folks who look at the numbers and cry “HOAX!” No one they know has become a number. Not yet.

Mask wearing and social distancing. The two most potent actions we can take to make the numbers smaller. I won’t go on. Enough said. It’s been said from the outset, again and again and again. Masks. Social distancing. Wash hands. Disbelief and/or truth-resistance makes more and more people, each and every day, become numbers-on-the-news.

Life minimized. Life reduced.

Here’s something to think about. Our dear 20 tested positive. A pandemic-disbeliever sauntered mask-less into a space where he was working. She cried “HOAX!” He breathed her hoax-aerosols, already loaded with virus. He has chronic asthma. He needed to order a new phone but didn’t. He wanted to make sure he survived before he spent the money. I’m not sure how to reduce his fear-of-dying to a number or some other abstraction that makes it count-able. “On a scale of 1 to 10,” the interviewer asks, “how afraid are you?”

Of this I am certain. The woman who shared her virus-loaded aerosols with 20 also shared her virus-loaded aerosols with many, many other people. It was apparently her “right” to reduce other people to abstract numbers. She shared her aerosols with us, too! And we never met her. For some reason her hoax-belief was not a protection against infecting other people. She bragged of going to parties and restaurants. She proudly made resistance-statements by going to grocery stores unmasked. Her aggressive pandemic-disbelief, I am certain, sent infection-ripples far and wide. 14,200,000 is a number. People in these delusion-laden-united-states infected by negligent-others. So far. As a denier of reality, she will, I am certain, take no responsibility for her contribution to the numbers. The odds are, she will have contributed in her small way to the 9,000 who will die between the time I write and the time I post.

She may be one of them. A number.

read Kerri’s blog post about COVID TESTS

Filed under: Merely A Thought Monday, Perspective, Uncategorized | Tagged: abstraction, covid 19, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, death toll, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lives lost, numbers, pandemic, pandemic deniers, reality | Leave a comment »

Practice Inner Hospitality [on Not So Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on December 2, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“What you separate, the soul joins.” ~ John O’Donohue

A few years ago, when we went to Hippy Tom’s farm, Kerri said, “It feels like we’re inside this man’s sickness.” There was stuff everywhere. A hoarder with a farm. Her comment about the farm has become a code-phrase for us. “Hippy Tom,” she says, and I know we are talking about these-un-united-states under the influence of the outgoing president. A nation living inside of one man’s sickness. The hater-in-chief.

The Bidens’ messages of unity and perseverance are akin to a doorway, an exit from the crazy farm. Although we are running for the door, not yet free of the madness, we can see it from here. We can catch breaths of air free of delusion and division.

“When you decide to practice inner hospitality,” John O’Donohue writes, “the torment ceases. The abandoned, neglected, and negative selves come into seamless unity.”

Practice inner hospitality. The rules that apply to individuals also apply to organizations as well as nations. Practice inner hospitality and the negative selves will come into seamless unity. “The soul adores unity.”

Although our systemic root belies this, soul of this nation has never been isolationism or white supremacy. The soul of this nation has always been our diversity, our willingness to embrace the new, to find a northwest passage, to step foot on the moon, to embrace, to invent and reinvent, to reach. To improve. To challenge a fossilized belief.

Perhaps it is now time for us to review, renew, to at-long-last turn and face what we have not yet faced in “this beautiful, brave, complicated nation.” To look with honesty and clarity at all of our history, our negative and ideal selves. To balance what has been too long unequal, ugly, denied.

There is great space in our national divide. The flaw, as the Amish remind us, is there to let in the grace. The soul joins. It can show us a path, once and for all, out of the sickness of the farm.

read Kerri’s blog post about AMBER WAVES

Filed under: Awakening, Emergence, Identity, Metaphor, Uncategorized | Tagged: Anam Cara, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Diversity, division, equality, grace, ideals, inequity, inner hospitality, Joe and Jill Biden, John O"Donohue, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, soul, Thanksgiving message, unity | Leave a comment »

Cope Another Way [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on November 16, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” ~ Mark Twain

From the national department of absurdity, I read in my morning news trawl that people-on-the-right were fleeing their tried-and-true social media platforms because they are tired of having their facts checked. They’re tired of being flagged for hate speech. They’re moving to a new platform that allows them to claim as true any old thing that fuels their fantasy. Of course, their new platform purports to have standards. In the absence of truth, they will be monitoring and censoring pornography and nudity. Bare bodies are shunned but bare lies are encouraged.

Google the question “Why Do We Lie?” and you might stumble across this phrase: lying is a ‘maladaptive coping mechanism.‘ Why are the good folks on the right fleeing from fact-checkers in search of an inadequate coping mechanism? Why are they – and, therefore, we – so deliberately racing from the truth? Truth is, after all, supposed to be the glue that holds a society together.

Perhaps, in our case, truth is not the glue that has held our young nation together. Perhaps the current hunger to lie is because we are [once again] confronting our truth? Division, not truth, is our glue. We know it. And we pretend it isn’t true. Denial of the truth is a lie by another name.

Plato reminds us that Zeus feared the power of the original humans so he split them into two separate parts. Our forefathers feared the power of a united working class so, taking a page from Zeus’ handbook, they split their budding society along the color line. And, in an “improvement” on Zeus’ original recipe for division, our god-fathers, in a single action, as a single action, reduced the black faces to less-than-human while simultaneously granting extra privileges to the white faces. They linked the privilege of the whites to the suppression of the blacks. White supremacy and Black Lives Matter are inextricably linked. It is the sad gravity that binds us.

It’s the truth we have never been able to face and, historically, when we dare to part the veil and have a look, there is a concerted effort by the working whites – those on the other side of the diploma divide [so many false divisions…] to run for the comfort of the supremacy-lie. It’s a safe space.

We embrace our maladaptive coping mechanism because we are afraid of facing the consequences of our truth. Great fear of status loss drives the wearers of red-hats to the lie-saloon where they can drink their fill, amp their anger, and fight progress. Fact-checking gets in the way. It’s how the system works.

Fueling the supremacy-lie is the central appeal – it’s the only appeal – of the outgoing titanic Liar-In-Chief. Supremacy stories, after all, require the supremacists to think they are victims. Facts become assaults. News becomes fake. Deep states and conspiracy theories abound. A good victim story is necessary for an Us and Them world. A good victim story is necessary to hold onto the promise-lie of white supremacy.

Division by design.

“The lie” crumbles in a social media space that checks facts and flags hate speech. What could be a better alternative than a gossip-circle-social-media-space where lies are called truths and truths are branded as lies?

Division, running from truth, pretending the division isn’t there, has worked well as a national glue if you are a god-father. It kicks the can down the road. Perhaps it’s time we sent Zeus and our forefathers a note. If we want to grow up as a nation, if we want a united people dedicated to ideals like freedom and justice for all, we need to look at our shadow and seek shared truth. Unity is a much better glue than our comfortable age-old division.

We need to cease fleeing into our maladaptive coping mechanism, look at ourselves, our leaders, and, together, begin telling – and expecting – and guarding – some truth.

read Kerri’s blog post on HUNGRY FOR LIES

Filed under: Identity, Language, Merely A Thought Monday, Metaphor, Pattern, Perspective, Uncategorized | Tagged: Bacon's rebellion, black lives matter, coping mechanism, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, division, fact check, hate speech, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lie, maladaptive coping mechanism, Mark Twain, plato, social media, truth, white supremacy, zeus | Leave a comment »

Define ALL [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on October 6, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

Kerri named this photo “peace shadow.” It brought to my mind a project begun by a group of artists in 2009, The Peace Shadow Project. They make and collect shadows all over the world. When the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the force of light released by the bombs burned shadows of people into the walls. As a way to enter a conversation about nuclear weapons and advocate for a nuclear weapons free world, the artists “burned” shadows of survivors – with strong light on photo paper – and displayed them all over the cities. Then, they asked people all over the world to send their shadows.

It’s what I love about artists. They (we) believe that art can transform consciousness. And so, a shadow might make us think of what we do, why we do it, how we do it. Pipe-dreamers all!

It made me ponder what art project I might offer these once-united-states. What might make us think? What could transform our consciousness so that we might occupy a single story, join together in a bigger identity?

I believe that all the many forces at play that ail us can be boiled down into a single word. ALL. We wrote this word in our documents of inception. “All men are created equal.” We have, since the beginning, wrestled with this word, ALL. Who does it include? Who does it exclude? BLM is the latest challenge to the word ALL.

The men that wrote the word ALL into our documents of inception meant white-land-holding-males. They believed that they were chosen, that their destiny was manifest, granted by god. By definition, when you believe yourself to be chosen, the word ALL becomes complex at best. It only applies with caveats.

Does ALL apply equally to women? What about black Americans? LGBTQ people? What about new immigrants? What about people who worship Allah? Or Shiva?

My art project would be the ALL project. I’m not sure what shadow might be burned or face might be photographed – what might be the art of the ALL project. I know that it would be intended to transform consciousness – to confront the forces of ugly exclusion. It would be meant to open doors not only of acceptance, but of belonging.

read Kerri’s blog post about PEACE SHADOW

Filed under: Art, Creativity, Two Artists Tuesday, Uncategorized | Tagged: ALL, consciousness, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, peace, peace shadow, transform | Leave a comment »

Click-To-The-Loo [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on September 28, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

Language is fluid and ever changing. For instance, twenty years ago the words “hide,” “snooze,” and “unfollow,” had little or nothing to do with social interactions. You might snooze an alarm-clock but never another person. In 2020, in the alternate reality known as social media, people snooze, hide, unfriend, and unfollow people on a daily basis.

Language is powerful. We both define and reveal ourselves by the words we choose. It’s as easy as the click of a button to eliminate people from view. Click. Gone! Magic. The power to insulate. “Unfriend” and “unfollow” ensure that our engagements are only with like-minded people. Is it any wonder that we no longer need to find common ground? It’s a simple equation: you bug me/I snooze you. “Hide,” “snooze,” and “unfollow” are the words of bubble creators. Fortress makers.

Closing the gates might lock others out but it also locks us in. Either way, click. Gone! A smaller world. Raise the gates for agreement.

Closing the gates is not a function of disagreement. I heard this said the other day, “People say things on Facebook that they’d never say in person.” True. It is corrosive and ugly. There is rarely space for civil disagreement. Ideas are attacked as a first action. Responses are salvos. In other words, no one is snoozed for being kind. Courtesy and consideration rarely result in unfollowing or the ultimate nuke: unfriending. There is no space for civil discourse. We snooze, hide, unfollow because we are assaulted or we assault. Social media is startlingly anti-social.

Many years ago, I had the good fortune to listen to Stephen Hawking give a lecture on the possibility of multiverses, a string of multiple universes. His theory involved bubbles that occasionally bumped together. The bumping opened small windows of communication between the bubbles. The great miracle of two universes brushing together is that they, even for a short time, can communicate. They can share experiences.

Our great miracle is the opposite. We construct bubbles against each other. When our universes bump together, windows are slammed closed. We believe ourselves all powerful when, with the click of a button, we can extract a voice from our “stream.” So powerful is our illusion of the button, we’ve happily become the buttons. No courtesy, no kindness, no listening, no consideration necessary or expected.

Click: assault. Click: be gone.

read Kerri’s blog post about UNFOLLOWING

Filed under: Language, Merely A Thought Monday, Uncategorized | Tagged: anti social, bubbles, civility, communication, corrosive, courtesy, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Facebook, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, kindness, language, language matters, multiverse, social media, Stephen Hawking, ugly, words | 2 Comments »

Direct Your Gratitude [on KS Friday]

Posted on September 25, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

Skip wrote, sharing some of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It was a breath of fresh air in a week that’s been chock-a-block with disrespect, deceit, and hypocrisy:

Skip wrote, “I love her discussion of what the tribe does each morning:

Here the school week begins and ends not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address, a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as the Words That Come Before All Else. This ancient order of protocol sets gratitude as the highest priority. The gratitude is directed straight to the ones who share their gifts with the world.

All the classes stand together in the atrium, and one grade each week has responsibility for the oratory. Together, in a language older than English, they begin the recitation. It is said that the people were instructed to stand and offer these words whenever they gathered, no matter how many or how few before anything else was done. In this ritual, their teachers remind them that every day, “beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.”

Today it is the third grade’s turn. There are only eleven of them and they do their best to start together, giggling a little, and nudging the ones who just stare at the floor. Their little faces are screwed up with concentration and they glance at their teacher for prompts when they stumble on the words. In their own language they say the words they’ve heard nearly every day of their lives.

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.*

There is a pause and the kids murmur their assent.

We are thankful to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us everything that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she still continues to care for us, just as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send thanksgiving, love, and respect. Now our minds are one.

The kids sit remarkably still, listening. You can tell they’ve been raised in the longhouse.”

*****

A legacy of respect and gratitude. A duty to live in balance and harmony. An orientation of responsibility both to self AND other. Can you imagine – will you imagine – the members of our red team and blue team meeting on the streets and joining hands with protestors of all colors and religions and sexual orientations, starting each day, together, speaking The Thanksgiving Address, “Today we have gathered…” Directing their gratitude straight at the ones who share their gifts with the world. Gratitude set as the highest priority.

It is a legacy to be admired. Words that come before all else. It is a legacy to be desired.

*The actual wording of the Thanksgiving Address varies with the speaker. This text is the widely publicised version of John Stokes and Kanawahientun, 1993.

LEGACY on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART is available on iTunes

read Kerri’s blog post about LEGACY

Filed under: Gratitude, Identity, KS Friday, Uncategorized | Tagged: balance, braiding sweetgrass, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, Gratitude, harmony, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, legacy, legacy from released from the heart, love, mother earth, respect, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Address | Leave a comment »

Recognize The Divine [on KS Friday]

Posted on September 11, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence.” ~ Neil Postman, Technopoly.

“Regularly throughout conversation in Gaelic, ” John O’Donohue writes, “there is explicit recognition that the divine is present in others.” Social fabric is tightly woven and made strong by the recognition of value, divine or otherwise, in all members of a community. During my travels in Bali I was moved again and again by the interconnectivity, the deep assumption of coherence that wove together daily life and community. “If two cars crash, “Budi told me, “the driver’s first thought is not that the other is to blame, it is that they are supposed to meet.”

And when the devaluation of others becomes a national pastime as it has in these once united states, pushing down the head of an other in an attempt to elevate the self – the preferred action of all drowning people – saves no one. It only delays the drowning of all involved. That sound we hear is the rending of our social fabric, the breaking apart of the ship. Those shouts of triumph and scorn coming from the top deck will be short lived. Confusion is a lousy organizing principle and guarantees a watery grave for all on board.

We are awash in information and so we are also awash in an assault on information. Misinformation is our Achilles Heel. So weakened by gaslighting are our public institutions that the single most damning confession of our lifetime, a president admitting for all to hear that he knew and lied about the deadly virus, is shrugged off. “Yeah, well what about Nancy Pelosi’s hair!” I shuddered when I read the inane defense. We flatten. Our values fade as fast as our perspective. Thousands died who did not have to – heads were knowingly pushed under. Thousands will die who do not have to; an estimated 410,000 by the new year. Disposable people.

Neil Postman wrote, “What makes science possible is not our ability to recognize ‘truth’ but our ability to recognize falsehood.” Replace the word “science” with the word “community’ and the statement rings just as true. A community that cannot recognize falsehood is in trouble. A community that will not deal with truth is destined to drown in its own willful confusion.

We will not find our way through this paralysis until we can step out of this car crash and, instead of pointing our fingers and blaming, we step toward each other with wonder at what brought us together, until we are willing to ask, “Why did we meet?”