Where Everything Depends
Vine and branch we’re connected in this world
of sound and echo, figure and shadow, the leaves
contingent, roots pushing against earth. An apple
belongs to itself, to stem and tree, to air
that claims it, then ground. Connections
balance, each motion changes another. Precarious,
hanging together, we don’t know what our lives
support, and we touch in the least shift of breathing.
Each holy thing is borrowed. Everything depends.
— “Shaking the Tree” by Jeanne Lohmann
This week the city utilities folks dug a big hole at the bottom of my yard, and given that it was not in our modest garden and given that we have two young children in our home, this hole was a source of great rejoicing.
They covered it over with steel for safety, and they left a huge pile of dirt nearby.
Oh what joy it is to have a huge pile of dirt nearby.
My five year old, particularly, runs straight to the pile every morning before school and every evening after. Screens, who needs ’em. We have a pile of dirt.
And on Tuesday, at the before-school dirt pile visit, I found myself pulling up a lawn chair and sitting to watch her joy from the base of the pile.
She stood on top and turned her face to the sun, and then we entered this cycle of play: Where she would scramble up the hill with dirt sliding down around her, throw her arms up at the top in celebration, then… then… she’d sliiiiiide back down straight into my arms, where she’d bury her head in my chest and say “I like you mommy.”
Then she’d turn right around, scramble up again, sliiiiide down again, like me again. And on and on we went.
It was one of those moments that snaps you fully present and you can hardly think anything but thank you. And it’s a moment you could live in forever. The only kind of eternity you can touch.
And I have a strange and very human mental quirk in moments like these, which is that I immediately find myself solemnly recalling that it will end…That this joy cannot last, and would not be quite so precious if it could.
It’s not so much a grief as a poignancy. And I do welcome it. For one thing, it’s just true, this impermanence. And for another, it lends a sense of depth and shade to the joy, to have it tinged with foresight of loss.
This time at the dirt pile I found myself fast forwarding ten years, to when my five year will be fifteen, and thinking, “I wonder if she’ll ever say she likes me then.”
And then I snapped back to the sunlight and the sliding dirt and the still tiny face pressing into my breast. And I felt over-turned by sorrow-tinged joy, which I think might be the only true kind.
Nearby my new dirt pile is my old free pantry, which has lasted for three years now, through cycles of abundance and bare shelves. And recently for the first time someone tagged it with a bit of graffiti, which I love, because it now reads in stylish sharpie handwriting “Nothing Lasts Forever.”
Which is to say, each holy thing is borrowed.
Which is to say, everything depends.
Oh this knowledge of impermanence. This sense of the precariousness of life, how it teeters at the edge. How it tips and slides, and sometimes that slide takes us into loving arms and sometimes into disaster.
It is so hard to stay open to this feeling, teetering at the edge of love and disaster. Whole systems are built to protect those who can afford their participation fees from this sensation of precariousness. Whole societies are built, supposedly, to offer us some sense of security in the face of the terrible fact: that everything depends. That we all depend… On each other, when we’d rather not. And on forces we shall never see or understand.
The folks in our community who live on the street, who visit the pantry in the yard to check whether it might have what they need to help them survive, they mostly do not have the luxury of ignoring this fact, this vulnerability to life’s terror alongside its beauty. We have created a culture where any sense of security costs dearly, both in resources and in freedoms.
Power hoarders, systems of oppression, and empire have a millennia-tested strategy to utilize the truth of precariousness in our lives. This strategy is to ensure that any sense of security the majority of people cobble together through deep community is taken away by individualism, policy violence, or outright violence, and is then sold back to people at the cost of their power.
Consenting to this exchange has created a culture that preserves a sense of safety for only a few and that demands in exchange our innate human freedom to connect, to enjoy, and to move freely through this life balanced between loving arms and disaster.
These systems of oppression and power have long been in place, and during periods of relative earthly and economic stability, those with privilege can mostly ignore the systems themselves and the precariousness they hide, while those closest to the edge continue to teeter at the brink.
But here we are now, in the midst of the most precarious period we’ve faced as humans on earth, and no one can ignore it. The climate has changed, and the economic system that rushed that change has created the most lopsided, unbalanced distribution of resources we’ve seen in a long time. Systems are crumbling and sliding down around us as the future of human life on earth is thrown into question.
We are wondering whether we will survive. We are witnessing the many species who have not survived. We do not know whether we will slide down this hill toward loving arms or disaster. It is a whole new level of global precariousness. It is one that shoves itself to the forefront of all of our lives, now, no matter our privilege.
The world is so beautiful, and more of us than ever are also confronted with its terror.
How we will respond to this precariousness is the question of our age.
And the answer has profound material implications.
Because in the face of such mass uncertainty and insecurity, fascism is offering a compelling option and many are taking it — all over the country, all over our world many are taking it. Many are standing in line to claim their portion of fascism’s false promise of security in the face of the most precarious time we’ve ever encountered. And when I really let myself feel how close to the edge we are all teetering, when I peer into that void, I can almost understand why.
But in the end, this promise of security is one the powers of empire cannot fulfill, and of course, it comes at the cost of our own power, our freedom. It comes at the cost of the human kin that are sacrificed, and therefore at the cost of our very souls.
We see this terrible trade happening all around us — the illusion of security in exchange for book bans, attacks on queer and trans folks, fever pitch white supremacy, all of which are raging around us right here in Missouri right now. These are some of the costs of consent to fascist control in exchange for an illusion of safety.
Yes, there are many who have consented to the compelling option of fascism, and the promise of security at the cost of freedom.
But there are many too, who know in their bones that cost is too high.
Who do not consent.
Who refuse to be sacrificed.
Who are fighting for their own lives and those of their loved ones.
And who are contesting for our collective liberation and our mutual thriving.
And for those folks, who are staying to fight, I want to suggest that the battle we are fighting here is not primarily against hate but against anxiety… Against deep, soul-destroying fear and its attendant need for control at any cost. Fearful control that is absolutely directed toward particular groups of people and ideas. But that is in fact a profound and soul deep anxiety.
This anxiety denies of the truth at the heart of life itself:
That each holy thing is borrowed.
That everything depends.
What we are seeing in the flailing oppressive systems around us is in large part a culture collectively unable to stay present to the poignant paradox of life, entwined as it is with loss. This is not only a political problem. Or even I think an ethical or philosophical one. It is a spiritual question, or several:
Do we have the tools to gaze into the face of life’s impermanence and to respond by opening ourselves further, rather than closing ourselves off.
Do we have a steady practice of presence to pain and love, which dance together?
Can we the feel true joy that is always tinged with profound sorrow, and welcome both into our hearts?
Are we committed to a deep practice of community where everything depends because each one is depending on each other?
These are the questions that lead us back to our humanity.
These are the spiritual inquiries that can lead us away from the brink of fascist control and help us slide, if we must slide, toward loving arms — toward each other, instead of disaster. For that is the only response to precariousness that makes any sense in the end — turning toward each other.
American educator John Bradshaw once said: “We are all hurtling through space on a rock and we’re all going to die. You would think we would be holding hands and singing.”
Too often in the face of insecurities of all kinds, we build walls between us rather than joining hands to sing. The truth, though, is that in the face of life’s terrors, its fragility, its impermanence, the only thing that makes sense is connection.
Physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté has written: “Safety is not the absence of threat. It is the presence of connection.”
Fascism promises safety by destroying connection, when in reality openness to others is our only way to true and sustained safety — safety which comes not from defense and isolation but from connection.
Real, vulnerable, deep connection with one another is the best security there is, because then we can rely on each other, because then we’ve got each other’s backs. And it is available to us now, if we will unclench our hands, step right up to the edge, and risk trust in the face of all that in fragile and impermanent. And risk love in the knowledge of loss.
This kind of vulnerable connection is balm for our hearts, the answer to our anxious culture, and the path away from the false promises of empire.
Indeed, it may be our deepest political, ethical, and spiritual call: to turn back toward each other.
In this precious and precarious moment we are invited to allow ourselves to be, in the words of the poet Ross Gay, undone by one another.
We are invited to be undone by one another.
Undone as in unfinished and incomplete — allowing ourselves to sink into the truth of our individual, collective, and perpetual emergence.
Undone as in nakedly vulnerable — in such entangled relationship to one another that we interdepend openly, wholly.
Undone as in full of sorrow-tinged joy, which is the only true kind, which is the joy we find when we live open hearted and open handed before the truth that each holy thing is borrowed, belongs not to us, slips through our fingers like water, like sand.
If you want to turn away from the false security of empire and toward to mutual liberation and safety of true connection, this is the invitation: Think of how you are undone. Think of where. Go there.
To the foot of the dirt pile.
To the little free pantry.
To the redbud already going from blossom to leaf.
To the ruins where life is springing up wild and free.
To the edge where your open heart finds another.
Go to where you are undone, and don’t look away. Stay with it.
There lies our only freedom.
There lies our only safety.
Undone, open, and beautiful.
Where each holy thing is borrowed.
And everything depends.
