And So It Has Always Been

You hear a lot of people saying these days that life’s never been so difficult, that the country has never been so divided, etc. I’d guess that the 700,000 people who died during the Civil War would beg to differ. That the 4 million slaves in 1860, whipped, raped and chained every day, would highly disagree. I know that every generation believes that its story is special, unique in its own kind of ugliness, that the herculean heroics required to recover from something so heinous as - fill in the blank/pick your poison - are distinctively unparalleled. We should all know by now this isn’t so.

Annie Dillard wrote, “There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time-or even knew selflessness or courage or literature-but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”

I’ve run back to this quote many times over the course of my adult era. It comforts me to see that Dillard was doing the same math in 1999 - the year of Columbine and the first camera phone, an earthquake in Turkey that took 17000 beloved lives, the invention of Napster (another disrupter that ultimately did not destroy) and a long awaited peace accord that finally ended the Kosovo/Yugoslavian war. So it goes.

Don’t get it twisted - I wish it was different. We all do. But I believe so deeply in the beauty of human beings - in their inherent inclination to be and do and make good. I am trying my best to keep my eyes open to opportunities to witness Life loving itself - showing off when it could be ashamed - with its sandy shores and Sunday mornings and works of art and protest used as timely tools of radical and revolutionary defiance.

In the last three days I have stumbled upon seven intrepid men on a motorcycle trip across the country, watched a mama mockingbird protect a nest full of babies that she built in a bougainvillea bush in my backyard and looked a wild coyote right in the face when we crossed paths on my street corner. Yesterday a little girl in a crooked pink crown and a dirty old arm cast covered in a rainbow of hand scribbled signatures waved at me when she walked by and an elderly neighbor who has been homebound for months returned to his throne on his sunlit Santa Monica stoop. So it oftentimes goes in the other way, too, gang. Don’t forget.

Here we go,

Anne

WATCHING: AJA MONET: TINY DESK

READING: UNREASONABLE HOSPITALITY

LISTENING: SPEYSIDE

GOING: PETITGRAIN BOULANGERIE