Being in a spiraling existential depression for three years has opened me in many ways. Long have I been in a conversation desert. Many days my voice opens only for an empty word with a cashier, a question to the professor during lecture, a dark-humored deflection from another grad student, a dishonest exchange with a roommate scurrying in the door in which I don’t tell him about my day as he hastily hits me with a “How-are-you.” Although it has given me time to reflect and change, the prolonged lack of healing connection from family or friends has been sorely painful.

Small nudges here and there have kept me alive, frankly. If I were in prison, at least I could expect sorrow. But in the bounty of San Luis Obispo, with free time in my schedule and few responsibilities, the desire for authentic connection is allowed an innocence, a virginity, which makes its disappointment all the more raw. I’ve also been alone on my graduate research, which has been to heal the intellectual and psychological challenges in aerospace engineering, as an embodiment of the macrocosmic problems of human schisms and environmental degradation. Developing from scratch industrial-grade management strategies for facilitating positive spiritual change while surrounded by pragmatic engineering students in their twenties is not going with the current, to put it one way.

     To be frank, there have been many days where I’ve cried to God to kill me. I’ve also prayed for stock market collapses, nuclear attacks, epidemics, earthquakes, fires, etc. Having my mission in life be to open my heart, to guard and understand the balance in the soul and the world such that even the most mathematically tight formalities can effuse with a loving wonder makes living in a place with so many people doing epicurean things, most of whom would rather look at their phone screen than give a glance to my face, all the more isolating. It is sheer poison to willingly open one’s heart again and again to greedy Californians, many of them being strangers, knowing they will have no consequences to the unseen pain they daily cause you. And church gatherings, however quaint, generally positive, or occasionally uplifting usually leave me feeling exhausted from unaddressed idols in others and unhelped idols in myself, eclipsing the faint glory behind. The unshowered face of a vagrant and the summer-faded grass dressing the hills speak greater comfort to me than the shining facades of downtown SLO. The soulfulness of my research only exacerbates the problem. To follow Christ is to honor a world-encompassing empathy, one that draws all things together and seeks their collective preservation and harmony, and this seems right to me, over and over. In that vein my poor little human heart has had its depths shredded again and again by the intensely dreadful vanity of real living. I’ve stared death straight in all its little faces for a long time. My life could go at any minute, in its whole or in its parts; coronavirus is a pesky fly on the shoulder.

   All too often, I have made my bitter complaint before others and watched as my “friends” try to push the gravity of my inner suffering into some category where they don’t have to deal with it. Friends, family, pastors have tried to fix me, telling me to stop being anxious, or to stop being sad because there is hope and it is sin to be sad, or that I am thinking too much. My questions tend to press up against the limits of what people can handle, and this means that I am left with the dross, the useless residue of human philosophies habitually misapplied outside their intended domain of use. Subsequently, people have given me all kinds of paradoxical advice and criticism: I’m too cerebral and too dramatic, too puritanical and too all-over-the-place, too focused and too spread thin, narrow-minded and spacey, unrealistically optimistic and unnecessarily glum, generous and selfish, arrogant and shy, wise and clutzy. It’s kind of my identity to be like this.

     Apparently, I represent the opposite to whomever I’m speaking—I might actually be all things to all people, all things, that is, except predictable (perhaps). If someone is one way, they tell me I’m the other way. Such individuals don’t see the fuller picture, namely that someone just the other day told me the very opposite. It begs the question, “What am I actually like?” as well as the similarly terrifying supposition, “What is anyone or anything actually like? How much of the world is just us?” If only I could put all my failed teachers in one room and let them listen to each other, then they would find the delightful truth that they are all, at bottom, full of it. After a while, I just nod my head. I have to simultaneously listen carefully for the wisdom and light they offer while also detaching myself from their misapplied guidance. The thing is that if I knew all things or had clearcut faith in something I could stand self-assured. But I don’t; everything is sinking sand. I, like everyone else, need somebody to talk sense to me and help me think through life; it is a creaturely need to talk and process with others, true regardless of how soulful or pragmatic you are. Yet the problem is that my particular habitat is essential. It is in my nature, as far as I’m practically concerned, to deal with generalities. And so when there is a Gordian knot no one can untangle, I am not merely hindered by it, I am incapable of continuing my ordinary life for the reason that my interpersonal and intrapersonal needs are only met when those abstract things are recognized and respected. Whether I’m right or wrong in this does not change the fact that I get my motivational sustenance by picking through garbage bins and sunbathing during unclouded interludes.

     The spiritual path is no child’s game or backyard garden, it is a Serengeti prowling with lions, leopards, hyenas, and snakes, not to mention easily upsettable buffalo, rhinoceroses, and elephants; oh, and the waters have crocodiles and hippos in them. To exist with wellbeing on the spiritual plain is to navigate this perilous and magnificent ecosystem. The Masai people of the African savanna use thorntree branches to fence their villages, including cattle and goats, from the lions outside. At dusk the lions come and sniff at the border, looking for weak points. The Masai cannot survive within the narrow confines of a thorny fence; it is the fields of wonder outside their camp by which they are sustained. Fences provide them a safe refuge for the night; but their flourishing cannot be reduced to basketweaving indoors. That being said, it is not the role of everyone to hunt. There are some who stay in to give a place for those who go out. Within each of us is a hunter and a basketweaver, and we cannot live without both.

     Moreover, the problem is that we as human beings tend to reject the spiritual wilderness for the comfort of the cradle. We do this because we do not want to be afraid or suffer. So when there are some who insist on going out of the camp to gather resources, they are usually looked down upon. It is preferable, the insiders assert, to kill the lions and replace the wilderness with a city. In this way, the need for wilderness does not have to be acknowledged, since the consequences of civilization would be offset to future generations. Even moral conservatism, with its strength and toughness on display, is in essence an addiction to safety. It is a boy denying the world outside himself.

     Thus a duality is produced between safety in illusion and danger in reality. Those wishing to stay at home turn wilderness into pleasantry and those wishing to go out take civilization for blasphemy. Some are wise to observe and reject this duality. But more often than not, their primary act of service to the world is to inform others that they have seen this duality, and that it is immature. Thus they unwittingly build a new village across the valley from the old village, and the cycle repeats. After a little time, some of the new villagers see the village has grown stolid. Thus Christians left Judaism, Protestants left Catholicism, New Agers left Protestantism, Constructivists left Positivism, Environmentalists left Industrialism, Siddartha left Hinduism, Lao Tzu left Confucianism (more or less), America left Britain, etc. It is no wonder Nietzsche asserted that dynamism is the place of eternal return; the form buckles to the spirit, and the spirit precipitates new form.

     We bounce around like pinballs, but usually we do this unreflectively or over such long periods of time that we don’t get around to noticing our paradoxical life. It is the special sorrow of few to bear the explicit knowledge that we have a habit of creating and destroying villages, of deserting and becoming parents. It is the especial woe of even fewer to actually use this knowledge to change longstanding paradigms, which is only possible by treating mind and world as existing on a loose continuum. Now this is not to say that the intelligentsia are the only ones who can enter nondualism; accessing nondualism is not contingent on the measure of knowledge one has. It is more difficult to be ethical with much than it is with little. The lure is in the formalism. Yet for all the good the collective action of the uneducated and the freespirited could accomplish, it is not enough to turn the tide of unbridled reason. Reason must speak to reason. Today we are in a place where imperial industrialism—rational reductivism fueled by an aura of power, the ghost of intuition in chains—is bolting out into unflowered corners of egotism. And the result is “market corrections.”

     Nothing can break this cycle for good except wisdom transformatively applied within the specific domains of knowledge responsible for each article of destruction. This means that if we want to fix things, prophetic voices must be devoutly committed to their field. For what she’s worth, Greta Thunberg cannot stop the reincarnation of wasteful politicians; neither will oil tycoons listen to her. The fact of the matter is that we have energy needs and oil is presently meeting them. Moreover, contrary to the implicit belief of most environmentalists, fossil fuels are not unnatural to begin with: they are the remains of ancient fern forests and marine algae—and they are being recycled by combustion. The problem is not the substance of fossil fuels but the imbalanced rate at which their products integrate into their surroundings. So both sides in the climate showdown are off in some fundamental way, and this discord propels the cycle of materialism and animism ahead into future generations. (And, remember, this is the same cycle that causes people to isolate me in their discordant realities. How am I supposed to live a normal life when my simple need to vent to someone about my day is inhibited by cosmic undertones acted out on a microcosmic stage by me and my acquaintances?)

     Wannabe changemakers ought to become engineers and political philosophers and education researchers and journalists and investors. If environmental balance is better than rampant industrialism, then it should be possible to demonstrate that more ethical technologies are also more profitable, the global climate crisis aside. And it should also be possible to win more votes if you stand up for good in the mature decorum of the good (rather in than some idealistically inflated persona), for good leadership is preferable to partisan power when it is understood that the outcomes of anyone’s decisions rest more on good leadership than the particular school of thought from which a decision is made. (By the way, the technical term implied by the maxim, “There is more than one way to skin a cat” is “multiply realized.”) Educational administrators responsible for supplying big tech firms with computer monkeys do not have to be treated as oligarchs if they are presented with empirical science about better educational styles which clearly leads to their increased profit as institutions. Furthermore, the swelling seas of hyperactive finance and media are inexorably tidal: so long as there is a moon, the frothing seas are bounded.

     If we are brought low by catastrophes in the near-term and we do not come to understand the underlying forces that produced them, as well as the shortcomings of attempts to prevent them, in their specific contexts and in their larger contexts of humanity, biology, and cosmology, then we are sure to meet the fiery ghost again. However equivocally the thrush call fills the forest, however anechoic her spiraling sounds may seem, there is a thrush making the noise. If you hear a thrush, there is a thrush; it just might not be where you expect. Jumping ship into laissez-faire industrialism or eco-ludditism only prevents the cycle from being broken once and for all. When we turn to indignation or apathy, we disavow the feasibility and longevity of the good. We must be carefully optimistic if we desire the change that is in fact possible.

     My soul inhabits a peculiar place, somewhere that is at once in the heart of the mountains and the seat of the city. It is not the mere in-between of reason and spirit but the synergy of the two, the gardenlike fusion of wilderness and metropolis, each paradigm mirrored in each, that I love. And for this reason I live in solitude. When I venture out, I feel the reproachful looks. When I invite people in, they all too often soil my belongings. I’ve crossed the point of exhaustion too many times, where my will becomes too weak to be patient in small scenarios. What light affliction of circumstance I carry like a backpack contains in it the real idea of the whole world groaning in pain. What I experience is not unique; I experience the essence of what everyone experiences. My world is everyone’s world generalized. We all share in these things. Meaning and gravity aside, still I am a creature with creature needs, even if my habitat is in essence. Being a deeply reflective and affectual person makes the simple lack of reciprocation, the vacuum of regular human presence, the failed compassion especially hard. Perhaps the err is mine in looking for human companionship; many counselors have told me this is so.

     Yet my soul cries out, No! Connection is the root and germ of this whole world, and no number of broken bonds is enough reason to give away my connection to life. Life is a rhythm of bleeding, and to resist the flow is to sit out from the dance. It is better to be hurt than to hide and never love. Courage-gratitude is the appropriate response to the givenness of life.

     The trouble is that we are left in this world to pick up the scraps from our Father’s table. We hunger and we thirst. Our wanderings are often more intense than we want to acknowledge. So in times like these, when the world is visibly awry, we find our underlying decay more real than the flourishing which usually seems near to being attainable. There is a gift here that can be received. In the isolation and the shadows, amid the fiery ashes the community that is our world is brought close. Those who lose wealth meet the poor, those whose lights fail are united in night’s womb.

     Being sad for several years gives me an outlier’s outlook on the wave of illness coming through. The heavy circumstances around me are somehow refreshing and comforting. I don’t feel quite as lonely as I have been. Everyone else is also isolated and reclusive, openly considering and acknowledging the dark things. I’m normal for once. Maybe it’s the sense of there being less denial of transience, less denial of the inadequacy of our circumstances. After all, we can no longer place our hope in toilet paper. People are being explicit about their fear of death; and so for once we can look our gift horse in the mouth. In gloomy nights our eyes adjust to the almost necessarily comedic brevity of life, which is somehow neither an ignorance nor a blindness toward life’s tragic elements. Then, the depravity of real living comes out as partly illusion. Our will to survive, elevated and exalted, exhibits itself as an addiction to constancy, and in this way adds unnecessary suffering. My vision of pure meaning leaves raw sense aside. The blue jays continue to scrub up the grass; the mockingbird hops along; the laughter returns. Still, the loud sourceless sound of pain is not false; but what it is not is alone among sounds.

     Every Sunday at communion, I rip the bread and feel Christ’s body, my body, the world’s body broken: its necessary decay. I sip the cup, and drown my throat with expectations of a world flowing with Spirit, not caught up in a false permanence. Communion is a regular experience of something close to contentment. The reality of death and decay in this world themselves are dying, each day unto eternity. Life is nothing stagnant, but is always changing, dancing, ever renewing itself. No matter how great the changes around us there is always a love with us in the bottom, not in spite of our sufferings but as our very being, in its change. The pain and loneliness of life are artifacts of the momentary incompleteness of change; for one day change will wrap itself up, having no more to change. Even as the shore fades before the ocean, the remnant of the transient is a greater gift than the loss of what does not remain. The seasonal cycles themselves are a-changin’.

     This is no intellectual lifepreserver, a stick I prod myself with to initiate comfort. This hope is the thing that I sometimes find when I’m in the deep darkness. It is the pinpoint of light that resiliently shines in the deepest forgotten corner. It is not outshining the darkness, nor is it overwhelmed by it. It is just there, a faint glimmer in the shadow-center. One cannot hope apart from knowledge of deep darkness, for the good that is hoped is a quiet song—quiet with regard to the moment, that is. Nor can the darkness assert its reign now and for all time and silence the hope. Nothing cannot change, and what is left over at the end of all things is the movement, the meter of time itself: light. Like a crystal beyond the hours, light’s procession is endless. It is the avatar of matter and energy, the synthesis of particle and wave, of part and whole, of moment and eternity. To have hope is to look to eternity in the present. It is not to ignore the present, nor to ignore the eternal. Light is accessed from a place deeply inside time, at the deepest point in the present, which is itself outside time.

     I wonder what Joseph, the youngest of twelve, thought of in the well when his brothers tore off his rainbow robe and abandoned him to the pits, traded him off. What did he see in the stars then, looking up from the mud? With what did he clothe his soul when all alone in Pharaoh’s dark prison? How did Job feel rolling raw in the dust? With what tone did God speak to him? How did his spirit go on pleading, and how did he muster the heart to pray for his friends? Why did Jesus call his disciples friends on the night before his passion? Why did he in his excruciation choose his most sensitive friend to become his mother’s son, his replacement? What is it about this that seems to show a both-and beyond the mere either-or?

     So, COVID aside, the moment we are in opens my heart up like a flower, for many have come to visit the neighborhood of my soul. Perhaps some have come to stay and call it home. Perhaps then the company of flowers will invite the butterflies’ return. And reader, you are welcome in this village outside convention, place, and time. You might be lonely here but what you are not is alone in your loneliness. The thrush call fills the air here for all time.

March 13 & 23, 2020
San Luis Obispo