Where do you go for the positive things? Because it can be hard to leave your house, to go out into the world. Everywhere you’re confronted with, if not outright horror, then sadness, and defeat at the overwhelming scope of human challenges, of challenges to our humanity. It’s no better to stay home, where you might spend hours each day reading the news, or scanning social media; that is often, in fact, where we’re confronted with the outright horror.
In Texas, floods drown children. In Ukraine, soldiers die daily by the dozens. In Gaza, starving kids lose their limbs and their parents and their lives while fighting for a handful of dry rice. In Minnesota, politicians are shot in their homes, families and dogs included. How do you keep your heart open, your chin up, in the face of this? How do you keep going?
For me, sometimes a poem helps. I came across one recently that felt right for the times, but the fact that it was written and the very nature of poetry, of course, is that it’s often right not only for this time, but for the time in which it was written, and likely for the time before it was written, and it will be right for many, many times after this, our time. Good poetry speaks of truth and transcendence, is transcendent. You just have to let the words in, let them sink into your bones, and then give them a pathway back out into the world through you.
Our Real Work
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
~Wendell Berry, 1983
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