Dear friends I haven't met yet,
I just woke up from a long, complicated, Wizard of Oz-style "and you were there, and you were there, and you were there" kind of dream where I caught up with a lot of people, some of whom I hadn't thought of in a long time, and we talked, and some of us performed, or showed off art, or writing, or kids (who mostly showed off themselves), or other projects that have been not consuming us so much as transforming us and our recent and not so recent lives (and vice versa), to the point where maybe we haven't been in touch as much as we might like. Anyway. All of the people in this dream were very dear to me: the ones I've seen or communicated with recently or not, and the ones I know well and not so well, and the ones I've never seen or met or communicated with, let alone know at all. Those last, of course, are you. And I want to tell you, even though I have no way of writing to you, exactly what I want to tell everyone else I saw in that dream that I do have a real way of getting in touch with (and whom I will probably be emailing not long after I post this little missive).
So. Friends, it was good to see you. No matter how long it's been since we last saw each other, or spoke, or wrote, or exchanged stupid email or whatever little time sucks the Web just distracted us with, I've missed you. I hope this letter finds you well — at least as well as you were in my dream last night, if not better (and we were all pretty great). I think you are both the best thing that has ever happened to me, and that our friendship is the best thing I do, and every time I edit this sentence it gets a little longer and clumsier when what I really mean is just: You're the best. Thank you.
There. That is what I wanted to say, or at least what will have to do until I can say it in email or on paper or the phone or in person. Everything else can wait.
Love,
-Tracy
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
04 April 2008
26 February 2007
44. Compassion
Dear compassion,
When did you infect my brain?
Um, I write that like it's a bad thing, but really it's not. I just don't have a better way to express my surprise at the weird-but-good ways in which you manifest in my life — for instance, the event that inspired me to write this letter.
I was riding to work in the bike lane along a busy street, when a big, scary dog — a Rottweiler maybe? something bred to kill — lunged at me from the back of a parked truck, where it was tied up. I swerved, managed to stay out of traffic, was relieved to see that the dog couldn't reach me, and my next thought — a split second after "holy fucking shit run away watch out for cars" and "it's okay, it's chained up, I'm safe" — was "oh, that poor animal." Being tied up in the back of a truck next to a busy street with cars whipping by is not my idea of a good time. But that thought, that reflexive moment of empathy, completely overwhelmed my fight-or-flight response. I rode on in a daze, suddenly oblivious to the adrenaline coursing through my veins, marveling that I could go from "it's gonna kill me!" to "poor doggy" in far less time than it takes me to put those thoughts into words. That was when I started thinking about writing you.
Sometimes I feel like you and your friend, kindness, are in short supply in this world, compassion, and I know I'm often part of the problem. So it's okay if you've infected my heart, or my brain stem or whatever involuntary nerve cluster reacts even faster than my oh-so-verbal mind. For one thing, as stupid and clichéd as it may be to say, experiencing you makes me feel better about myself as a person, even if I'm frequently startled to find myself possessed by the better angels of my nature, so to speak. It's even oddly appropriate that I can't write you very articulately, since those possessions seem to be faster than the speed of words. Go ahead and grow inside me, compassion, not like a tumor but like an immunity to the ways in which I'm brought down by the world when the people in it suck. And please, feel free to replace that part of my brain that made me fill this letter with so many adverbs. Thank you for everything, especially good things to come.
Love,
-Tracy
Published 26 February 2007, title abridged 1 December 2011
When did you infect my brain?
Um, I write that like it's a bad thing, but really it's not. I just don't have a better way to express my surprise at the weird-but-good ways in which you manifest in my life — for instance, the event that inspired me to write this letter.
I was riding to work in the bike lane along a busy street, when a big, scary dog — a Rottweiler maybe? something bred to kill — lunged at me from the back of a parked truck, where it was tied up. I swerved, managed to stay out of traffic, was relieved to see that the dog couldn't reach me, and my next thought — a split second after "holy fucking shit run away watch out for cars" and "it's okay, it's chained up, I'm safe" — was "oh, that poor animal." Being tied up in the back of a truck next to a busy street with cars whipping by is not my idea of a good time. But that thought, that reflexive moment of empathy, completely overwhelmed my fight-or-flight response. I rode on in a daze, suddenly oblivious to the adrenaline coursing through my veins, marveling that I could go from "it's gonna kill me!" to "poor doggy" in far less time than it takes me to put those thoughts into words. That was when I started thinking about writing you.
Sometimes I feel like you and your friend, kindness, are in short supply in this world, compassion, and I know I'm often part of the problem. So it's okay if you've infected my heart, or my brain stem or whatever involuntary nerve cluster reacts even faster than my oh-so-verbal mind. For one thing, as stupid and clichéd as it may be to say, experiencing you makes me feel better about myself as a person, even if I'm frequently startled to find myself possessed by the better angels of my nature, so to speak. It's even oddly appropriate that I can't write you very articulately, since those possessions seem to be faster than the speed of words. Go ahead and grow inside me, compassion, not like a tumor but like an immunity to the ways in which I'm brought down by the world when the people in it suck. And please, feel free to replace that part of my brain that made me fill this letter with so many adverbs. Thank you for everything, especially good things to come.
Love,
-Tracy
Published 26 February 2007, title abridged 1 December 2011
03 August 2005
21. Newborn Babies
Dear newborn babies,
For what it's worth, welcome to the world. I want to apologize, over and over again, for the state it's in. I know it's not all my fault; for one thing, the way things are now is the product of everything that has come before, less than 26 years of which had me in it, but still. There's so much wrongness that most of the time I can't even think of anything to do to make anything better. I'm just one person, and there are so many people, and speaking as just one single solitary mess of a human being I get overwhelmed by my own stupid petty little problems, let alone those of the entire human race. Some days that makes me angry, some days it makes me sad, and some days it makes me wish I'd never been born. But life isn't something you can choose for yourself, little ones, which is perhaps its greatest irony. The good news is that despite the fact that life is in many ways one long cruel joke, there's a lot to enjoy. Let's start with you.
I hope, in as non-ableist a way as possible, that you're healthy, because life will be easier for you with the standard number of eyes and ears and appendages for a person of any size. Likewise, I also hope you're relatively free of genes that'll make you prone to illness, both physical and mental. But whatever state it's in, that body you've got is a marvel. People have been trying to understand it and things like it since as long as there were people, maybe longer, and there's plenty that's still a mystery. But one of the good things about being a person is there's all this history and exploring and understanding for you to build and grow on if you want to learn it. And that's getting on to the next great gift you've been given, which is your mind. You can think about anything with it, even if you can't always understand everything. Maybe someday you'll think that's pretty awesome. I sure hope so.
Now I want to take a paragraph to write about your family, by whom I mean the people you'll live with at least until you're old enough to wonder why you live with them, but probably longer. It's likely to include the people your immediate family lived with until they were old enough to wonder, too, even if they're unlikely to define their families in quite the same silly cynical and all-inclusive way I do. Anyway. What I'm going to write now is something I wish someone had told me sooner instead of leaving me to figure it out: your family are the people who will see you at your worst, and you will see them at their worst. If you're like me, and I know I am, there will be times when you will hate your family for being such a bunch of freaks, but the fact is no one's normal and everybody's pretty good at hiding it most of the time but not all of the time and comparing your insides to other people's outsides is a surefire way to make yourself feel bad about not just your insides and their outsides but the whole world in general. What's more, since your family are the people you can't hide from all the time, you'll get to know their insides a bit, and comparing what you see there to other people's outsides isn't going to be a picnic, either. Dang. None of that sounds very reassuring at all now that I've written it, but it's still important, at least to me, as a way of keeping things in perspective, and I really don't mean it in an all bad way. What else can I say about family? Well, like life, you didn't choose them, but you're mostly stuck with them, too. And at times you will love them even if they are such a bunch of freaks that it's hard to imagine that just about any other group of people would be at least as freaky if they were stuck together all the time, and I hope the times you love each other for no reason outnumber the bad times by far.
But while I'm talking about the other people in the world, I shouldn't stop with your family. Neither should you. At some point some well-meaning older person may try warning you to never talk to strangers, but like all rules, that's really just a guideline. It should be more like, "Be careful when you talk to anybody, not just strangers, but don't be too careful, because living in fear is no fun." If you never talked to strangers, you might never make any friends, and believe me, friends are way up there on the list of things that are just plain awesome about being human. Maybe more than anything else I could wish for you, I hope you'll make and cherish many good friends, and I hope they become just as close and dear and in their own way impossible to you as those family freaks I was telling you about a bit earlier.
What else? I could've sworn I had more to say than this, but then again I started this letter months ago and I didn't keep very good notes on all the topics I wanted to cover. That said, I wish you luck in training your memory and learning in general and of course figuring out ways to sort through your thoughts and decide what's important to you. There's no pause button on life, unfortunately, or I'd spend a lot of time between moments, thinking, hiding, and generally missing all the good stuff. Go ahead and live all your moments, because there's no way of knowing whether or not the life you've got is the only one you're getting, and you might as well make it a good one even if it turns out I'm wrong about reincarnation. All our lifetimes are full of countless chances to live right, and all we can do is make the most of those chances as best we can.
I know this is a silly letter to write. By the time you're able to read this, you won't be newborn anymore. Even if someone were to read it to you right now, before you got too old to be considered newborn, there's no telling how much you'd understand and absorb, much less remember. But I think about you, little ones, and it fills me with a mix of envy, and relief, and hope, and despair, and love. I guess that's life. Again, for what it's worth, welcome to it.
And happy birthday.
Love,
-Tracy
P.S. I tried to write this letter in the most general terms possible, but I would be a big liar if I said the idea of writing it arose full-formed in my brain, unprovoked by events in my world. That said, "Dear Newborn" is dedicated to Stony Raine Lohr III and her parents, Stony and Janelle, on her birthday, 5 February 2005, even if it took me a really long time to write. Hey rugrat: good job on those teeth! I was sort of arbitrarily waiting till you'd been around 6 months, but I appreciate the reminder that it's well past time I declared this letter done and sent it out.
Started 10 February 2005, text updated 14 October 2005, title abridged 1 December 2011. Reformatted 8 September 2013, last updated 6 June 2014.
For what it's worth, welcome to the world. I want to apologize, over and over again, for the state it's in. I know it's not all my fault; for one thing, the way things are now is the product of everything that has come before, less than 26 years of which had me in it, but still. There's so much wrongness that most of the time I can't even think of anything to do to make anything better. I'm just one person, and there are so many people, and speaking as just one single solitary mess of a human being I get overwhelmed by my own stupid petty little problems, let alone those of the entire human race. Some days that makes me angry, some days it makes me sad, and some days it makes me wish I'd never been born. But life isn't something you can choose for yourself, little ones, which is perhaps its greatest irony. The good news is that despite the fact that life is in many ways one long cruel joke, there's a lot to enjoy. Let's start with you.
I hope, in as non-ableist a way as possible, that you're healthy, because life will be easier for you with the standard number of eyes and ears and appendages for a person of any size. Likewise, I also hope you're relatively free of genes that'll make you prone to illness, both physical and mental. But whatever state it's in, that body you've got is a marvel. People have been trying to understand it and things like it since as long as there were people, maybe longer, and there's plenty that's still a mystery. But one of the good things about being a person is there's all this history and exploring and understanding for you to build and grow on if you want to learn it. And that's getting on to the next great gift you've been given, which is your mind. You can think about anything with it, even if you can't always understand everything. Maybe someday you'll think that's pretty awesome. I sure hope so.
Now I want to take a paragraph to write about your family, by whom I mean the people you'll live with at least until you're old enough to wonder why you live with them, but probably longer. It's likely to include the people your immediate family lived with until they were old enough to wonder, too, even if they're unlikely to define their families in quite the same silly cynical and all-inclusive way I do. Anyway. What I'm going to write now is something I wish someone had told me sooner instead of leaving me to figure it out: your family are the people who will see you at your worst, and you will see them at their worst. If you're like me, and I know I am, there will be times when you will hate your family for being such a bunch of freaks, but the fact is no one's normal and everybody's pretty good at hiding it most of the time but not all of the time and comparing your insides to other people's outsides is a surefire way to make yourself feel bad about not just your insides and their outsides but the whole world in general. What's more, since your family are the people you can't hide from all the time, you'll get to know their insides a bit, and comparing what you see there to other people's outsides isn't going to be a picnic, either. Dang. None of that sounds very reassuring at all now that I've written it, but it's still important, at least to me, as a way of keeping things in perspective, and I really don't mean it in an all bad way. What else can I say about family? Well, like life, you didn't choose them, but you're mostly stuck with them, too. And at times you will love them even if they are such a bunch of freaks that it's hard to imagine that just about any other group of people would be at least as freaky if they were stuck together all the time, and I hope the times you love each other for no reason outnumber the bad times by far.
But while I'm talking about the other people in the world, I shouldn't stop with your family. Neither should you. At some point some well-meaning older person may try warning you to never talk to strangers, but like all rules, that's really just a guideline. It should be more like, "Be careful when you talk to anybody, not just strangers, but don't be too careful, because living in fear is no fun." If you never talked to strangers, you might never make any friends, and believe me, friends are way up there on the list of things that are just plain awesome about being human. Maybe more than anything else I could wish for you, I hope you'll make and cherish many good friends, and I hope they become just as close and dear and in their own way impossible to you as those family freaks I was telling you about a bit earlier.
What else? I could've sworn I had more to say than this, but then again I started this letter months ago and I didn't keep very good notes on all the topics I wanted to cover. That said, I wish you luck in training your memory and learning in general and of course figuring out ways to sort through your thoughts and decide what's important to you. There's no pause button on life, unfortunately, or I'd spend a lot of time between moments, thinking, hiding, and generally missing all the good stuff. Go ahead and live all your moments, because there's no way of knowing whether or not the life you've got is the only one you're getting, and you might as well make it a good one even if it turns out I'm wrong about reincarnation. All our lifetimes are full of countless chances to live right, and all we can do is make the most of those chances as best we can.
I know this is a silly letter to write. By the time you're able to read this, you won't be newborn anymore. Even if someone were to read it to you right now, before you got too old to be considered newborn, there's no telling how much you'd understand and absorb, much less remember. But I think about you, little ones, and it fills me with a mix of envy, and relief, and hope, and despair, and love. I guess that's life. Again, for what it's worth, welcome to it.
And happy birthday.
Love,
-Tracy
P.S. I tried to write this letter in the most general terms possible, but I would be a big liar if I said the idea of writing it arose full-formed in my brain, unprovoked by events in my world. That said, "Dear Newborn" is dedicated to Stony Raine Lohr III and her parents, Stony and Janelle, on her birthday, 5 February 2005, even if it took me a really long time to write. Hey rugrat: good job on those teeth! I was sort of arbitrarily waiting till you'd been around 6 months, but I appreciate the reminder that it's well past time I declared this letter done and sent it out.
Started 10 February 2005, text updated 14 October 2005, title abridged 1 December 2011. Reformatted 8 September 2013, last updated 6 June 2014.
19 January 2005
3. God
Dear God,
I can't send this letter for obvious reasons, but I probably shouldn't even be writing it at all because frankly, I don't really believe in you. Which is not, as far too many people seem to think, that I think nothing is sacred — more on that in a bit — it's just that I'm sick and tired of people shaping that sacred in their own image, and not even all that well, or maybe too well, I don't know.
Fact is, as far as I'm concerned the universe is just too big and awesome and complex for our puny little human minds to understand, but we don't like to admit it, so we invent order for it, even if it's an order that can't possibly be big or complex enough to be anywhere near the truth and simultaneously something we're capable of understanding. That complexity thing's a bugger for sure and I had more to say about it which I've already forgotten. Maybe I'll remember and add it in later, or maybe I'll just have to write a sequel to this letter, even if Alice Walker already did the "letters to God" thing way better than I'll ever be able to in The Color Purple. For now, I'm done with the part of the letter that addresses the idea of the god I don't believe in, a guy in the sky who's all-powerful, all-seeing, and all-knowing, though it's a little unclear if he's all-caring or even a little caring, and people somehow still keep going to church and fighting wars and making each other's lives miserable over it.
The next part of this letter is addressed to what I do believe is sacred, and when I say what that is it'll be clear why this is a letter I can't send. See, as far as I'm concerned at the end of the day the only truly sacred thing is our human capacity to be good to one another and bring out the best in one another. If you want, you can call that love, and then you can say that God is love if you like to quote the Bible and banter around with really loaded words. There ya go. If anything is sacred to me, if anything gives life meaning or whatever — which is probably fodder for at least another paragraph — it's the fact that despite all the awful things that people do on a daily basis, to each other, provoked and unprovoked, so on and so forth, we also do good to each other, just as reasonably and unreasonably. Who needs an ineffable, inscrutable Lord that moves in mysterious ways when we have each other, friends? Not me.
And so yeah. Dear goodness which I sincerely hope is inherent in all us humans — please don't stop. Please don't go away. Please, continue to give me signs that you exist, because stupid little things like that are ultimately what give me hope that maybe the human race won't destroy itself and maybe it actually shouldn't destroy itself. Please, let me continue to find that God-nature or Buddha-nature, or love, or whatever, in real people. And maybe let me continue to hope that we can all begin or continue to find that goodness and love in each other, instead of projecting all our hopes and dreams and fears into an imaginary friend in the sky. Let me continue to dream that people are capable of being good and loving without priests who tell them to impose their beliefs on each other, and that someday maybe we can all at least act as though there's magic and sacredness in all of us, and there's no need to complicate things with a not-so-shared hallucination of holiness separate from this physical world we inhabit. If you ask me, not that anyone did, that idea of a god that I don't believe in is at once too simple to explain the universe and overcomplicates human affairs all at once.
I don't know how to end this letter. I don't want to go back to addressing the idea of the god I don't believe in, much as I'd like to ask protection from Its followers. Nor do I want to address specific gods I don't believe in, or the religions that claim to follow them, because this letter is probably offensive enough without getting personal. The one idea I keep coming back to is a sentence I've seen attributed to the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, one of those people whose story makes me think that maybe organized religion isn't always all bad, but I digress. "Deliver us unto each other," he prayed, and that I think is a hope worth praying and dreaming for. Imagine freedom from the guy in the sky, the great cosmic daddy who tells us how to behave or else, and instead living with the knowledge that all we've got is each other. Is it a bleak way of looking at the universe, this thought that we're the only god we've got? I think maybe it explains a lot that's wrong with the world: We humans kinda suck at being God. The good news is that we're all that's stopping us from getting better.
I guess that means it's go time.
Love,
-Tracy
Started 22 November 2004, posted 19 January 2005, last updated 6 June 2014.
I can't send this letter for obvious reasons, but I probably shouldn't even be writing it at all because frankly, I don't really believe in you. Which is not, as far too many people seem to think, that I think nothing is sacred — more on that in a bit — it's just that I'm sick and tired of people shaping that sacred in their own image, and not even all that well, or maybe too well, I don't know.
Fact is, as far as I'm concerned the universe is just too big and awesome and complex for our puny little human minds to understand, but we don't like to admit it, so we invent order for it, even if it's an order that can't possibly be big or complex enough to be anywhere near the truth and simultaneously something we're capable of understanding. That complexity thing's a bugger for sure and I had more to say about it which I've already forgotten. Maybe I'll remember and add it in later, or maybe I'll just have to write a sequel to this letter, even if Alice Walker already did the "letters to God" thing way better than I'll ever be able to in The Color Purple. For now, I'm done with the part of the letter that addresses the idea of the god I don't believe in, a guy in the sky who's all-powerful, all-seeing, and all-knowing, though it's a little unclear if he's all-caring or even a little caring, and people somehow still keep going to church and fighting wars and making each other's lives miserable over it.
The next part of this letter is addressed to what I do believe is sacred, and when I say what that is it'll be clear why this is a letter I can't send. See, as far as I'm concerned at the end of the day the only truly sacred thing is our human capacity to be good to one another and bring out the best in one another. If you want, you can call that love, and then you can say that God is love if you like to quote the Bible and banter around with really loaded words. There ya go. If anything is sacred to me, if anything gives life meaning or whatever — which is probably fodder for at least another paragraph — it's the fact that despite all the awful things that people do on a daily basis, to each other, provoked and unprovoked, so on and so forth, we also do good to each other, just as reasonably and unreasonably. Who needs an ineffable, inscrutable Lord that moves in mysterious ways when we have each other, friends? Not me.
And so yeah. Dear goodness which I sincerely hope is inherent in all us humans — please don't stop. Please don't go away. Please, continue to give me signs that you exist, because stupid little things like that are ultimately what give me hope that maybe the human race won't destroy itself and maybe it actually shouldn't destroy itself. Please, let me continue to find that God-nature or Buddha-nature, or love, or whatever, in real people. And maybe let me continue to hope that we can all begin or continue to find that goodness and love in each other, instead of projecting all our hopes and dreams and fears into an imaginary friend in the sky. Let me continue to dream that people are capable of being good and loving without priests who tell them to impose their beliefs on each other, and that someday maybe we can all at least act as though there's magic and sacredness in all of us, and there's no need to complicate things with a not-so-shared hallucination of holiness separate from this physical world we inhabit. If you ask me, not that anyone did, that idea of a god that I don't believe in is at once too simple to explain the universe and overcomplicates human affairs all at once.
I don't know how to end this letter. I don't want to go back to addressing the idea of the god I don't believe in, much as I'd like to ask protection from Its followers. Nor do I want to address specific gods I don't believe in, or the religions that claim to follow them, because this letter is probably offensive enough without getting personal. The one idea I keep coming back to is a sentence I've seen attributed to the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, one of those people whose story makes me think that maybe organized religion isn't always all bad, but I digress. "Deliver us unto each other," he prayed, and that I think is a hope worth praying and dreaming for. Imagine freedom from the guy in the sky, the great cosmic daddy who tells us how to behave or else, and instead living with the knowledge that all we've got is each other. Is it a bleak way of looking at the universe, this thought that we're the only god we've got? I think maybe it explains a lot that's wrong with the world: We humans kinda suck at being God. The good news is that we're all that's stopping us from getting better.
I guess that means it's go time.
Love,
-Tracy
Started 22 November 2004, posted 19 January 2005, last updated 6 June 2014.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
