The New Moon and partial solar eclipse have come and gone, and I am busy between trips, but rather than skip this month’s blog, I wanted to share a couple things that have nurtured me this week.

Amidst the turmoil (or worse, depending on where you are) of climate disaster, war, election lies and “regular life,” some nurture might be welcome. I found these things brought me back—for a bit anyway—to a calm and warm heart. May they do that for you.

This recent facebook post by Rebecca Solnit,* reminds us who we are and what that means, especially in crisis times.  

Who are you? Who are we? The history of disaster demonstrates that most of us are social animals, hungry for connection, as well as for purpose and meaning. It also suggests that if this is who we are, then everyday life in most places is a disaster that disruptions sometimes give us a chance to change. They are a crack in the walls that ordinarily hem us in, and what floods in can be enormously destructive—or creative. Hierarchies and institutions are inadequate to these circumstances; they are often what fails in such crises. Civil society is what succeeds, not only in an emotional demonstration of altruism and mutual aid but also in a practical mustering of creativity and resources to meet the challenges. Only this dispersed force of countless people making countless decisions is adequate to a major crisis. 

One reason that disasters are threatening to elites is that power devolves to the people on the ground in many ways: it is the neighbors who are the first responders and who assemble the impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild. And it demonstrates the viability of a dispersed, decentralized system of decision making. Citi-zens themselves in these moments constitute the government—the acting decision-making body—as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered. Thus disasters often unfold as though a revolution has already taken place.

Two things matter most about these ephemeral moments. First, they demonstrate what is possible or, perhaps more accurately, latent: the resilience and generosity of those around us and their ability to improvise another kind of society. 

Second, they demonstrate how deeply most of us desire connection, participation, altruism, and purposefulness. Thus the startling joy in disasters… After 9/11, New Yorker Marshall Berman cited Nietzsche: “Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to trouble, does not deny suffering per se: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided it can be given a meaning.”…The joy in disaster comes, when it comes, from that purposefulness, the immersion in service and survival, and from an affection that is not private and personal but civic: the love of strangers for each other, of a citizen for his or her city, of belonging to a greater whole, of doing the work that matters.

These loves remain largely dormant and unacknowledged in con-temporary postindustrial society: this is the way in which everyday life is a disaster. For acted upon, given a role, this is a love that builds society, resilience, community, purpose, and meaning. Private life matters immensely, but the language for prizing eros and domesticity has never been stronger, and the language for public life more atrophied, at least in the mass-media mainstream of the English-speaking world. Around the periphery come crowds of ideas about gift communities, direct and participatory democracy, civil society, urban regeneration, beloved commu-nity, joy, and solidarity. People have never reached toward these things in more ways, and the many alternatives being tried out across the country from agriculture to decentralized decision-making systems matter, as do the broader examples around the world…It is the ability to describe and cherish the other loves that makes disaster’s moments of mutual aid last. You may be able to enjoy what you cannot name, but you can’t cultivate it. 

Disaster may offer us a glimpse, but the challenge is to make some-thing of it, before or beyond disaster: to recognize and realize these desires and these possibilities in ordinary times. If there are ordinary times ahead…

As one illustration—especially moving in our current times—Solnit cites a paragraph quoting a woman journalist in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: 

Jacobsen believed that something in that joy was lasting. She concludes, “Most of us since then have run the whole gamut of human emotions from glad to sad and back again, but underneath it all a new note is struck, a quiet bubbling joy is felt. It is that note that makes all our loss worth the while.  It is the note of a millennial good fellowship…In all the grand exodus…everybody was your friend and you in turn everybody’s friend. The individual, the isolated self was dead…Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close around us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors. Never again shall we feel singled out by fate for the hardships and ill luck that’s going. And that is the sweetness and the gladness of the earthquake and the fire. Not of bravery, nor of strength, nor of a new city, but of a new inclusiveness. “The joy in the other fellow.”

Below are two short videos I made this past week while up in the bluffs near Maiden Rock Wisconsin. 45 seconds of the sweet song of a creek. And a minute or so of a mesmerizing dance put on by wind in the pines (yes, that rushing sound is wind, not water!).

* I have cut some of this post for length. You can read the full post on Solnit’s facebook page, which I believe you can access even if you do not have a facebook account.