Are we really connected to the world? Are we even connected to ourselves?

I know that I'm not, and it hurts to realize how removed and afraid I am, and yet I can only imagine that to be truly connected, as tuned in as one should be, would be unbearably painful. I don't believe that it's possible for a normal person - basically anyone who is not a truly enlightened being - to be strong enough to survive that kind of awareness, no matter how necessary it is to the salvation of the planet.

“Sometimes,” he tells me, “people ought to just leave well enough alone. Everything’s moving too fast these days. We’re so busy, we can’t see what’s in front of our noses anymore. We don’t need to know everything that’s happening, every place in the world, every damned second of the day.”
He pauses to look at me, to make sure he’s got my attention.
“What we need,” he goes on, “is to connect to what’s around us and the spirit that moves through it. Our families, our neighbors, the neighborhood.”
“The tribe,” I say.
“Same difference.”*

“Dissociation” is a term I’ve had to think about a lot. Of course, for the longest time, I had to think of it from a “keeping myself out of the looney bin” kind of perspective. The DSM-IV (1994) defines the distinctive feature of dissociation as "... a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment." All dissociative disorders are defined as causing significant interference with the patient's general functioning, including social relationships and employment. Dictionary.com says that dissociation is a psychological defense mechanism in which specific, anxiety-provoking thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations are separated from the rest of the psyche. Oh, DID, how well I know thee…
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the social and familial aspects of dissociation. Dictionary.com says that to dissociate is to remove from association; separate.

We all do it. We all have no choice but to remove ourselves from an enormous percentage of the reality that surrounds us, or our jumped-up mutant monkey brains would just explode. I turned off the TV more than 8 years ago because I suddenly ceased to be able to block out the massive, overwhelming and crippling grief that I experienced when I watched the news or “reality tv” and realized that each of these “stories” was about real people. People with whole lives and families and friends who were experiencing the entire reality of what, for others, for “viewers”, was just another sad case, or something to discuss at the water fountain or bitch about with your friends. Another irony, another safe and distant heartbreak that would be forgotten in time. I stopped being able to forget. I stopped being able to not feel. Every bomb that goes off, every soldier that falls – no matter which army they fight for, every car that crashes, every child that is taken, every prostitute slaughtered, every wife beaten, every hostage killed, every unnatural, unfair death and disaster that becomes a blip on the news is actually a lifelong world of pain for whole families and communities.
Yes, I am completely aware that I am choosing to not "know" (though I believe that, unless we are in a classifiable state of denial, and that's a LOT of work, we always know what is happening in the world, whether we see or hear the specifics.) what's going on - I could see someone saying that I am sticking my head in the sand, so to speak. I know that watching the news and being "informed"*** and aware might be called a way of lighting a candle rather than cursing the dark However, from my own tv addicted perspective, as well as watching the moods and modes of the people around me who do watch the news - or don't, it seems more like a case of flying into the candle and cursing the heat - and it seems to leave ones' wings invery sorry shape. I feel a tremendous amount of guilt over the fact that I'm not Changing the World and Saving the Planet. Of course I blame myself (it's ok, I blame everyone else equally...) for what's happening to our country right now. You've all watched me throw myself against that wall over and over again. (You know, George Bush never wrote me back.) It'd be easy for someone who didn't know me - including myself, sometimes - to think that I was throwing in the towel, rolling over and just letting these hateful, powerful people destroy our lives. When I was throwing myself against that proverbial wall I was always sad, scared, angry, exhausted, defeated, vengeful and worried. Even more than usual. My natural paranoia was tweaked to a fever pitch (read back a year or so if you don't believe me) and I felt as if I was failing and on the edge of apocalypse every day. Honestly, the edge of apocalypse has only inched closer. I am an optimist, but also a realist. It's a fault. But failure is something that I can't afford. I'd honestly rather die than live with the kind of failure that comes grouped in sentences with the words 'apocalypse' and 'edge'.
The worst part of it for me is that in order to cease ALL hypocrisy and try to truly practice what I am preaching, I have to find a way to overcome my fear of being close and making real commitments to other people, especially my family. The safe, and I believe utterly acceptable and understandable option has been to choose a new community, one almost completely free of my past****, and then starting off with new choices and boundaries. Before I moved here, I'd also never had any kind of serious involvement with "the community", so that has been a relatively harmless for me yet significantly helpful for others way to achieve what I believe is a reasonable step in the right direction, a conscious step toward changing the world and saving the planet with no capital letters. I'm talking about the every day things, the things we're able to do without seriously hurting ourselves; the things we desire to do that won't seriously hurt others; the things we need to do sometimes that we just have to sacrifice less important things - even our pride and safety and beliefs - for.
I believe that most of my family (I'm not so sure about the younger ones, hopefully I'll live long enough and they'll be patient enough for me to know) understands why it's hard for ALL of us to be as connected as we all believe we should or could be. I'm sure that we all feel the pangs of life getting shorter and time flying by without making a true family connection. I also believe that we all hold it against ourselves as much as we hold it against each other, and hopefully we forgive ourselves as much as we forgive and love one another, despite the distances. It's possible that I'm the only one who feels terrible guilt every day over not being able to be the peacemaker, or at least the one to make the first serious steps (this time), but I seriously doubt it. And I know that none of our guilt is worse than our fear, the only other thing as strong as our bond to each other and the past.

I am dissociated, by every definition. From society, from the news, from my family. Sometimes I am even dissociated from myself, my friends and from the community, but one can only hide for so long from the things immediately outside ones' door - and I think that's the answer. There's no easy fix to the struggle within the me that belongs to my family. There's certainly no easy fix to the struggle within me that is a product of my past. There seems to be no fix at all to the struggle that is me vs. the world government/society. But I can try a little harder to be nice to my boyfriend and his folks, to my friends, to the people I work with and for, to my neighbors, to the folks I've known so long through the library, to burgeoning artists, and kids who need a little more, to people I meet in stores, to people who ask me for things that I can give - my tribe. I can try to do more to generate kindness in an unkind world, to remember that what I put into the world is magnified by the people it changes. I can't stop people from doing horrible things to each other anywhere but within my immediate scope (and luckily my immediate scope reaches pretty far through donating my artistic time to organizations like Steps to Hope and MRAF, or straightening the house and making a nice snack for people like my friend Buffy, who counsels at-risk kids and makes their lives more liveable), but I can help the people around me deal with what's within THEIR immediate scope, and pray that the influence continues to spread. And meanwhile, I can - perhaps most importantly - take care of myself too, and try to overcome the fears that keep me from making even more of a difference. Light a candle and bless the light. I can't Change the World. I can only change me - and diapers. And that definitely makes the world a better place. :)


Morning and Night **

Beyond our town the bottomlands flood each year.
Someone's son goes walking, never comes back.
Weeks pass. Town square talk reclaims the days.

Tonight I hear the rain remember roots
and think of elders gone the long way back to dust.
What we know by heart we doubt the most.

I have a wish to be at someone's door,
unannounced but welcomed anyway, ushered in
to dine and sing and sleep the sleep of kings.

But this is a world of slaughtered saints.
Random shots are fired, while morning and night
our mothers turn their faces toward the sleeping hills.

So quickly has the century come and gone.
For a while let's ask each other simple questions
and make up answers that can keep us home tonight.

************************

Much love,
-s


*- from a story called “Masking Indian”, from a collection called “Tapping the Dream Tree” by Charles DeLint

**- from "Morning and Night" by Jeff Hardin, from Fall Sanctuary. © Story Line Press, Ashland, Oregon.

***informed on what our !#*$'d up media wants us to think...

**** meeting Rachel (and keeping her kids) and finding her connection with my college years has been very strange...