Let’s Stay Together
Family of Macaque Monkeys in Japan. Photo by Suzanne Taylor Dater.
Human beings are searching for a way to live that might provide a sense of belonging, connection, security, and stability in a world filled with increasing despair, alienation, division, and violence. It’s as if all of us have a first row seat at the opening of Pandora’s box.
It is not an easy time for empathic souls to be incarnated on this planet.
Day by day, minute by minute, we see something new that we do not want to see emerging from the box. It’s exhausting, and I find myself collapsing into deep naps and waking up still tired.
What we need is not more information. What we need are ways to reconnect. As one more shattering reality emerges from the box, it’s too easy to become numb, distracted, tantalized by a random thought that floats through cyber space and into our precious minds and bodies like an unwelcome visitor.
What happens when we are plugged into virtual reality rather than into nature and one another? The temptation is to keep allowing ourselves to drift further and further apart from one another, stepping on to fragments of icebergs, breaking apart from one another as the temperatures rise, floating alone out into the distance. Through the mist, we might see one another, even wave, as evening darkens into the night, until we are too far away anymore, living in separate virtual realities, suffering from individual psychic viruses, floating farther and farther away from one another.
Communication. Ahhh. It requires time, and it requires the willingness to jump off our individual icebergs and into the psychic space of a person we used to know and love, perhaps very well, only now we can’t find them anymore.
Where have they gone?
Where do we ourselves dwell?
There is more than horror in Pandora’s box. Hope comes out of the box as well according to some versions of the myth, and we can consciously attune to it.
As I sit outside trying to transition into a headspace free from Pandora’s grip, I pause to feel the rays of sunshine that act as a healing balm, awakening my soul. The birds refuse to stop relaying messages with urgency to one another. The doves fill the air with voluptuous sounds. Their communications are divine, the Divine, a connection to a dimension of peace, timelessness and harmony. They remind us that we are supposed to be living together serenely with nature, ourselves, and our neighbors.
A beautiful friend tells a story of listening to one of her dear ones speak for three hours about how she felt isolated, unheard, and aggrieved. It required a high level of compassion, patience, and spiritual maturity on the part of my friend to listen to this loved one without trying to change, instruct, or fix. She held her personal feelings at bay in order listen. In making a conscious decision to be fully present with all of her heart to a loved one who was floating away from her on a cold, lonely iceberg, she provided sanctuary, refuge, and a space for healing.
In other times, and in other places, deep communication between human beings was (and still is) the norm of everyday living, integrated into the fabric of day to day life. When I was fourteen years old, I had the opportunity to stay in an apartment in Athens with my elderly Greek relatives. They had lived hair-raising lives, having survived the German occupation, having been made homeless refugees earlier in the twentieth century, and more. They were too old to mingle much in the streets by the time I met them, and my great aunt’s husband sat on his bed and coughed and coughed, suffering as he was from emphysema after years of chain smoking. During the afternoon hours, all of the stores in Athens were closed, as people went home for the biggest meal of the day and for a solid nap. But at 11:00 pm the cafes were flooded with people enjoying culinary delights, drinks, and conversation. It was a time of social freedom, connection, a time to come alive before falling again into a few hours of rest before the start of another work day. It was a time for lively debates, a time to celebrate the mundane aspects of everyday lives, a time to be fully present, alive, and in connection.
I want to become conscious of the ways that I allow myself to be highjacked by an endless flow of information and entertainment. I want return to the present moment and remain as closely connected to my friends and loved ones as possible, thus using technology in ways that pull us together, not apart. I want to meet as much as possible with those I love in person. I want to embrace the midnight café of everyday living.
I want to stay, let’s stay, together.
[i] The title for this piece is inspired by Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Take a listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiIC3A0ROM