May 1, 2020: The Cry We Haven’t Yet Had

I always find it kind of funny that normal people are always saying autistic children “live in their own little world.” When you work with animals for a while you start to realize you can say the same thing about normal people. There’s a great big, beautiful world out there that a lot of normal folks are just barely taking in. Autistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t, or don’t. Temple Grandin   

There are many pandemics. Some are just more obvious than others. Hoo-nōs

Physical distancing (aka social distancing) is not new, we’ve likely been at it since the dawn of us.  Neither is moral distancing, spiritual distancing, economic distancing, etc.  We expend enormous amounts of energy constructing and preserving our world view, including our social and individual views. And to help us not be responsible, we attribute our construction to insight about how it all is. And sometimes we do know how certain things are, but forget how we put together the big-ticket items in the first place, like who knows and who doesn’t and who gets and who doesn’t, etc.

No, we are not responsible for all that goes on, but we are for our individual and collective constructions, including that most powerful of brass rings, godly secrets, constructed so those secrets are available to some, but not all.  There is nothing new about that bit of flimflam because, well, that’s the way it’s meant to be, from God’s mouth to some ears.

Sure, some can be better listeners, but that doesn’t mean or even imply selectively sent information.

The constructions we are vested in, can hold us tightly.  And when assaulted by contradictory evidence, we tend to hang on even more tightly to our worldview-lives. We get dogmatic and dogma in a sea of change is likely to create a lot of anxiety and pathology—and an additional uptick in the expenditure of energy to hang on while seeking a redemptive release from the pressure. Cottage industry anyone?

As I can feel my own grief from just recent events this year alone, standing patiently by, I can feel a lot of pain rising up.  It’s clear a good cry is in the works.  But I suspect that beyond the present grief, there is a lot more and a cry I have yet to have.  Sometimes letting go is a way to stop and start again, as hanging on, though perhaps effective for a time, is just hanging on.

An apocalypse of tears can mark renewal, while an apocalypse of blood-letting can be deadly.  Ironically, a good cry might help create the space necessary to decrease the distance we have between each other, along with a new lightness about our own inevitable constructs.