Lately, I have been depressed. Since when? We are all here in middle age trying to solve our overwhelm with hormones but, even with the assist, I feel bent helpless, dislocated between the training and surround of my young years, the legacy that came with me out of my mother's cut stomach muscles and wove its way silently through a half-told story I played along with: the irrevocable path from that to this, the world I ache to exist in, soaked in an uncomfortable awareness of the extreme limits and slant of my own perspective, so that even my daily actions feel like ripples of a stone dropped in the deep past.
Yearning for purpose and community and wisdom: it is so trite. We are here in the foie gras factory: the Earth suffers (the violence of extraction; the violence of mono-cropping; the violence of underpaid, unrepresented labor; the violence of the slaughterhouse) so that we can be stuffed in all our sense holes. The different discomfort I long for: the time and training needed to meet my needs and the needs of my neighbors with my own hands. The lack of that: a cyclic state of fear and agitation, car commute and digital currency exchange, the infinite distraction loop of media and reaction to media - I mean we've all heard it, we all feel it. So trite.
Years ago I was lamenting the vast ache in me the shape of the public school system in Portland, Oregon, in which I was working at the time. The person I was speaking to, who at the time I thought of as a friend, who neither lived in the U.S. nor worked in public schooling, turned to me impatiently, in what I could only identify as scorn, or rage, and said: if you don't like it, do something about it then. We aren't friends anymore; on bad days his words still plug up my throat, throb in my head. It doesn't help that I can remember him speaking to his own children in the same tone. What a bunch of whiners.
I've been puzzling over the concept of having goals in life. Perhaps this is an American thing? I sense that I am meant to have goals; that if I did, I would feel less lost, less helpless. The public schools which still agonize me, as my second child redoubles the effort to thicken her skin in the fourth week of 8th grade, all have goals: from 84% attendance to 91% attendance for target populations, for example, over the course of 2025-2026. Reading these goals, receiving the daily automated calls from the attendance system, I feel only coercion and surveillance. I do not feel concern or collaboration. There is no one on the other end of the line. This maps pretty well with what I occurs somatically when I reach for a goal right now.
Even in the garden, I feel dislocated. I am tending, observing, reaching for presence, inviting connection. But the whole thing, despite that I am doing it, that I make choices and enact them, witness the plants' expressions and respond, feels dramatically beyond me. I feel small: a pill bug coming on winter, a moth with tattered wings: either I can do it, but it doesn't matter; or it matters, and I can't. The big box of metal pieces that will become a raised bed; the bamboo sprouting, the failed grass, the thicket of thistles along the fence. How to engage with them without the voice of my ex-friend in my mind, without the robot call: this is a message to inform you that your spirit, infinite and organic, ever changing, dust to dust, was absent today from doing everything it has been assigned.
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