The Daily: 16 July 2024

It’s the age old question: Why do bad things happen to good people? Or maybe, why do bad things happen at all? Though we would like for more of the people we consider bad to suffer the bad things… schadenfreude is a bitch…

Most of the world’s religions are attempts to grapple with the apparent indifference of the world to our wants. We want to live a long time, perhaps forever. We want to keep all our favorite people and things together and to ourselves. We idealize the beauty of youth, the controlled order of linearity, the crystalline perfection of our ideals. We do not like endings. We do not like time and decay. We do not like unremediable discomfort. (My spell-checker does not even admit that unremediable is a word.) We rail against unsanctioned change. We flatly refuse to believe in entropy and the finality and inevitability of disintegration. We think we can overcome all this, despite all evidence to the contrary.

We can’t understand that we are not the center of the story. Ever. Not even of our selves. (Because what part of we is us…) We keep interjecting into the conversations around us, not with any thought of contributing, only to pull the focus onto ourselves. We slap selfies over every moment, desperately hiding the luminous world behind our faces. “Camera back on me…” (But what part…) And so when the world continues on in its usual way, regardless of our designs and unmoved by our aspirations, we cry foul.

Or we make elaborate mythologies featuring mighty and terrible versions of us who will favor us with eternally granted wishes if we but follow their rules. Which are our rules. Or at least the rules of those who rule. And we weave karma and merit and ineffable punishment into those myths. Those deities who look like us (and especially resemble those of us who would rule) are jealous gods with standards. They rule in a closed system with zero-sum justice and no externalities, never mind other agency. They say that you will obey and be redeemed or you will disobey and be banished to eternal suffering. Or at least bound to a very long round of repeatedly being a bug for your indiscretions. And those who obey (the rules that they invented and then inserted into the mouths of the gods they would be, but for biology) are favored both in eternity and in this world. Those who obey the ineffable rules — that they made — and who do not offend karmic balance — as defined in their own fashion — are those who get to have nice things. Circular rationalizing of inequality is a favorite tool of mankind.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because those seemingly good people must actually be bad. The (g)odds are not in their favor… or the other way round. I can never remember.

In these stories, the ruling humans are always the protagonists and all else is background to be manipulated or ignored. And we tell these stories all the time, so much so that we’ve forgotten that these are just stories, not even very good stories, not even metaphorically accurate stories. So when things like hurricanes come barreling into our self-satisfaction, we stand utterly agape, uncomprehending children facing the immutable fact of self-decentralization for the first time. Always for the first time. Because always, we go right back to believing in our primacy. (Look at what we name ourselves…)

We talk of ways to save the world, or at least save ourselves and those bits of the world that please us. We never seem to understand that the world is, first of all, rather larger and more involved than our stories, and, secondly, not in need of salvation. The world is fully capable of self-remediation. The world actually is a self-sustaining system. It is also rather closed and karmic, at least from the perspective of tiny humans. Cause flows into effect and into cause and into effect and so on, with no wasted heat escaping into the ether. There is no ether… that being another human tale.

When we microbial beings cause the planet indigestion, the planet will do things to ease the heartburn. This is not necessarily intention, though it’s also not not. Being that we feel that we have emergent mind — or will or soul or spirit or whatever ineffable name is fashionable — from the sum of this entangled system that we call a body, the planet might feel similarly. Or at least behave similarly. It doesn’t take an actual mind to have mindfulness. We do it all the time; why not Earth. So the Earth might be trying, in a sense, to rid itself of this infection of human bugs. But I believe it’s more that there are causes — increased energy and decreased stability in the atmosphere — and there are effects — hurricanes. Or there are causes — humans spewing out harmful waste — and effects — humans being harmed.

When we see the egalitarian damage of a hurricane, the veil of our stories is torn apart. Why do bad things happen to good people? Meaning, why is this harm happening to those who are supposed to be favored in this human order? Some of us start to question the stories. Maybe most of us do now. But those who make the rules and the stories have quite a lot invested in their inventions. So they squawk all the louder when the rents reveal reality. There are always extenuating — and ineffable — circumstances. It’s not us. It’s certainly not just the natural order of the planet.

Have you noticed the number of non-dominant faces in the hurricane stories we produce? Yes, people who live with fewer resources are more likely to be affected and to be more deeply affected — less to lose can mean having nothing after loss — but it also might be showing the hand of the storyteller. Because not every Houston home without power this week has non-dominant inhabitants, and that fact must absolutely be hidden to maintain the storyline. We are not shown the counter-factuals, just those stories that fit the dominant narrative. Yes, there was a hurricane. It is a terrible natural disaster. But we favored few are above it. Pity those others who are not among the elect and who have suffered the consequences of their state.

This is essential to the narrative. It is the narrative. When good things happen, the faces we see are wealthy, well-groomed elites. When bad things happen, then, and only then, do we see the unwashed masses. Now, there is indeed a correlation between bad things happening and the average life of the unwashed, while the elites do get to have all the good stuff. That’s how the system is designed — by the elites. But think about all the events that do not show artificial preference for elites. Wildfires, earthquakes, tidal waves, e-coli infections, COVID… In all of those stories, we see the masses suffering and the cherry-picked, unaffected elites grimly nodding at the unfairness of life. (Note to news producers: the camera is picking up your schadenfreude… we can see those Mona Lisa smiles.)

I am saddened when I see Pagans throwing up these tropes. Especially the bits about manifesting your own happiness, by which seems to be meant wealth and eternal attractiveness (both defined in the narrowest sense). We, of all the existing life-ways, ought to be ready to toss the Chosen Few myths on the compost heap. We know we are not the center of the world. The world is the center of the world and we are a tiny part of it, dependent upon it, bound to it, and wholly created through its beautifully intricate processes. A pagan is of the land… not of the human artifice. When the land suffers, we suffer. All of us. When the land decides to rid itself of infection… it is not a judgement. It is a result. When good things happen to us, it is similarly no reflection of our worth. Sometimes good things happen…

But really, we should recognize that good and bad are defined by our stories to a large extent. Good and bad are relative. What we name bad is what we don’t like or what causes us dis-ease. And there is some merit in that… while endings and entropy are inevitable, suffering is not essential to life and really should be avoided and alleviated. Suffering also tends not to have good effects elsewhere. A squirrel dying slowly by the side of the road after an encounter with a car is experiencing pain and confusion and rage that are completely unwarranted by any benefit to someone else. A squirrel killed by a predator does have a few seconds of pain — though the mark of an effective predator is the prey’s instant and unheralded death — but the squirrel’s brief pain is followed by the predator’s nourishment. Suffering tends to be like this, but not much else is so objectively bad.

Notably, it is not the death that is bad. Death is a relief and a release with or without suffering. Endings are always so. Because every ending is a beginning in this system of the world. It is all a recycling flow.

And that is where our stories harm us most — and where, I think, pagans really ought to know better. Elites and their invented rules and deities proclaim that there are no good ends. Endings mean the loss of me, this wonderful centrality in the universe, and that cannot be borne. The universe would, naturally, implode. So, under their rules, we live denying that there is a world beyond us, denying that we are rooted in time and place, denying our ephemerality and fragile transience. Rather than see the magnificent elegance in this flow from I into infinity, we call it evil, and we make up stories to escape it, at least in our minds. (Which are what part of us…)

When we live under these rules and stories, we do not live fully. We endure much. We bow to the rule and the ruler — because we believe we have more time. We believe that we get more than this existence, whether suffering or elite. We gamble on an afterlife and throw the true one to the discard pile.

We pagans, those who hold the land’s embodied wisdom, the wisdom of growth and decay, the wisdom of cycles, should know that we are this body only once. Whatever might happen after me, it is not me because me is dependent upon this experiential living body. However, whatever happens while I am this body, is me, everywhere connected and interpenetrating everything. That’s the uncanny thing about flow. It is both a boundary — I will stop existing as such — and a perpetuity — all of me is part of all of everything and will continue to be so for as long as everything exists. But those boundaries are real. I may be everywhere always, but things will only be organized in this particular state of me-ness for a short time. And that time should not be wasted on the rule of elites. It certainly shouldn’t spout off stories in support of that rule.

I don’t spout. Or, I do… I guess this stream of consciousness rambling is nothing but spouting… but I don’t repeat the elite stories. Bad things happen, good things happen, it all happens to all and sundry. There is no merit in happening. Mostly I believe that if you cause harm, harm exists, and eventually you are going to feel it, because there is no outside, over there to absorb the harm and isolate you from it. You are connected and subordinated to the world. And eventually, your house is going to be flooded and lose power if you continue to do things that cause hurricane levels of instability.

Pay no mind to the news… it is spouting, and only the dominant narrative. I wonder if bad things ever happened before we started telling ourselves these stories of our special centrality. But also remember that objectively bad things are going to happen now that, through these stories of our disconnection and distinction, we’ve racked up a boatload of harmful causes on this finite and interconnected planet.

It comes down to that… Why do bad things happen to good people? Be-cause… and mostly because we’ve got bad and good confused by our self-centered stories.

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On a different note…

It has been a week since the rain started falling, and two days since the last rain fell, though it’s been so humid everything is wet. The fog rolls in at sunset and doesn’t lift until mid-morning. But there are signs of recovery. The mud is slowly being hauled off the roads, and most businesses are open again. One guy even went forward with his grand re-opening over the weekend.

His bike shop on Main Street was hit last year and he’d been struggling both because he lost inventory and because he lost foot traffic, as most of the businesses around him were closed for so long. So he had just moved his shop a block off Main into a building recently vacated by a gym, a perfect space for a bike shop. On Wednesday, he “just knew” that he would be flooded again. (He’s an Eeyore type.) But somehow, even though the street in front of his new building was a river as early as 5pm on Wednesday (and still has the most mud, whole speed-bumps of flood deposits), the sandbags kept the water out. So he scraped the mud off the front walk and opened his doors with a party.

Another sign of recovery: I got my first post-flood mail delivery last night. This means I also finally got all the newspapers that have been printed since Wednesday. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I got to do all the Sudoku puzzles and read all the comics. And the Moutaineers are playing some great baseball, so I got to catch up on that. However… you can only withstand so many pictures of devastation. Thursday’s front page photo was the home of my former boss… was being the operative word. It was a sucker punch…

One thing that is different this year and is not yet fixed: there seems to be some permanent damage to railroad crossings. There isn’t a crossing. No barricades, no lights. When a train approaches the intersection, it is now the done thing for a guy with a red flag to walk out into the oncoming traffic to stop cars so the train can cross. I don’t know whether this guy rides on the train or if there are many iterations of the guy, each at his own broken intersection. Either way, I would not want to be that guy! I hope for his (their?) sake that the crossing electronica is fixed soon… before someone runs him over. Or the train runs over a car. I just can’t see this going well.

And some recovery of a different kind is happening in the garden. Two weeks ago, I bought deer fencing (which is really just plastic bird netting, but who’s quibbling…). This has finally kept the hog and the squirrels out of my veg beds. I have squash trying to make up for lost time, lots of beans reaching for the sky, and carrots. I mean, really, carrots! Plural! This is amazing! The radish bed is still mayhem, but the melons I had planted in there might actually be alive, and the rapini has recovered so well I’ll be eating it soon. But tonight I managed to pull some slicing turnips out of that bed — smooth, white balls of butter with a mustard edge. To celebrate, I made a thing…

First, I hard-boiled a couple eggs. Then, I peeled and cubed four of the turnips, thinly sliced half a red onion, and chopped up a portobello mushroom. I sautéd the veg and mushroom in olive oil, adding grey salt, white pepper, marjoram and thyme right at the end of cooking. I toasted a thick slice of the latest stress-baking sourdough loaf. Then I cut a few thin slices of a locally-made gruyere (ish) and sliced up the boiled eggs. Putting the toast on a plate, I then added the egg slices, followed by the cooked veg, and topped with the cheese. It doesn’t look spectacular, so I didn’t take a photo to share. But imagine all those scents! My house still has a rich umami aroma. And it tasted perfect. Just the thing to cheer me up. Great food from my garden!

And here’s a photo that did work…

I planted these Culver’s roots last year and sort of forgot about them. This year, they are 4-5 feet tall and topped with pink candelabras. But the amazing thing about these plants is the insect life. There are bugs and wasps and bees, many of which I’ve never seen before, all over these flowers every time I walk past. The flowers are pretty, but the insects! My favorite is a large wasp that is iridescent black with a metallic sheen of electric blue. It’s gorgeous! The US Forest Service identification guide says it’s a blue mud wasp. What a boring name… but then they go on to say that this black beauty is a black widow spider killer, on top of being an important pollinator species throughout North America. And I’d never seen one in this garden until I planted Culver’s root. Now, there are dozens!

Begging the question… where were they before and what were they eating? Black widows? Makes one nervous about the damp, dark spaces in the jungle…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024