It's the end of the world & I'm calm AF

Schrödinger's cat meets Buddha

Hey fam,

Tuesday was the first day of spring, and thank Goddess, it was a five-alarm sunny day in Juneau, Alaska's cold rainforest. Our soggy, sad hearts needed it, too.

On Monday, I took my kids to the Capitol to line the halls in red along with hundreds of others wearing “red for ed,” as in education.

“O-ver-ride! O-ver-ride!” we chanted as lawmakers, many of whom also wore red, walked into the chamber to vote on whether or not to override the governor’s veto of the base student allocation (BSA) increase.

First, double negatives are confusing. Second, our schools really needed the bipartisan-passed budget boost the governor just vetoed. Without it, we would lose around fifty teaching positions and close two big schools.

“This is how democracy works, kids!” I said. But this wasn’t their first rodeo. Look at this kidactivist. Doesn’t he look like a seasoned pro?

screen grab from video by Alaska Current

See, he already has the skeptical look down!

The whole experience left me feeling very emotional.

An hour later, the vote to save Alaskan schools failed by one, thanks to our bully governor who promised to sabotage funding and run challengers against any R who voted against him.

As a result of the failed vote, our wee capital city, pop. 31,405, must eliminate 47.5 certified teaching positions next year, close one high school and one middle school, and likely cut programs like art and music. 

💩 💩 🥪 🥪

Then, this Gallup report came out about how the U.S. is markedly less happy than last year, and young people are sadder than ever due to climate change, social inequities, and political polarization. This depressing Atlantic article discusses how the smartphone era is remapping our children’s brains in new, terrible ways. A new climate report shows that global warming thresholds are not just being surpassed but blowing off the charts. (Is it just me, or does it seem like there’s less ozone this year?) A recent symposium in my hometown underscored threats from nuclear tensions in the Arctic, and we haven't even mentioned AI, inflation, Gaza, and lasting academic and social-emotional (and, in my case, financial) effects from the pandemic. 

Fear is not my go-to flex, but doesn’t it seem like everything is just horrible?!

Or maybe I just read too much news?!!

Or maybe I’m gaslighting myself?!!!

Ugh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

💩 💩💩 💩💩 💩 🥪 🥪 🥪 🥪 🥪 🥪

It seems like a lot out there wants to muck us up. How are we supposed to keep our hearts open in the face of so much existential threat?

In Welcoming the Unwelcome, Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön suggests that we keep our hearts and minds open, befriend our monsters, and find the “cool emptiness” that doesn’t seek to attribute meaning to everything.

“When we stop fighting the groundlessness of freedom from imputed meaning, emptiness becomes an experience of awe, of the infinite, of limitless space.”

—Pema Chödrön

The Tlingit of Lingít Aani, a.k.a. Juneau, used the expression “slack tide” to describe such a feeling. Slack tide is the liminal time between tides when the tide is neither ebbing nor flooding. It’s an opportunity to find peace and acceptance in the temporary, a time of uncertainty and flux. The only certainty is knowing that the tide eventually will turn. Because it always does!

Lingít Aaní translates to “Land of the Tides” and has the third-most extreme tide in the world.

My husband, a third-generation Alaskan fisherman, says that you must wait for slack tide to haul in your fishing gear, lest you “fight the tide.” Rolling with this metaphor, we should cultivate inner slack tide before any intensive undertaking, like, say, teaching a class of 45 sixth graders because we lost 47.5 teaching positions.

When I was married to a Venezuelan surfer, I admired his knack for remaining calm in a perpetual state of instability. We met in Costa Rica, where we lived at the time. He taught me to make chocolate alfajor cookies to sell.

Sometimes, we struggled to pay rent. Sometimes, he took out “loans” with less-than-savory characters. Sometimes, he borrowed a Glock-9 and chased after what was owed to him. Often, he drove recklessly, passing cars on blind corners, faithful that we would somehow be okay.

Perhaps he was buoyed by the magic of parents who were Afro-Venezuelan witches. Not actual witches in the English term, but practitioners of local folklore and occult magic. 

Outside his hometown in Venezuela, there is a mountain where the witches convene. Isabel Allende was living in Venezuela when she wrote The House of the Spirits, my favorite book as a child and first introduction to magical realism.

One time, my ex-husband’s dog in Costa Rica got very sick. When not even the doctors could figure out what was wrong, he called his mother in Venezuela, who instructed him to make a necklace of lemons and tie it around the dog’s neck. He did, and the next day, the dog on death’s door was jumping about like a puppy.

Another time, someone stole his downhill mountain bike. He called his mom, she made some incantations, and the next day, the bike was back in the garage.

Daniel Pinchbeck says that the discovery of nonlocality demonstrates that possibility is more real than actuality. Possibility, or potentia, transcends time and space, whereas actuality (the material) is merely ephemeral. This follows Eastern philosophy, mysticism, Indigenous thought, and quantum physics. 

I often wondered if this connection to the spirit realm or potentia (a metaphysical scientifically-proven concept I discussed in a recent post) was how my ex-husband could detach from the material world and drift in a constant state of slack tide. It was as if he hovered above the heaviness of the material world, giving away his money to a needy friend, selling his only surfboard, and leaving his sandals on the beach, faithful that another pair would somehow end up in his lap.

Perhaps he knew, as Pinchbeck states, “the universe is fundamentally constructed out of consciousness rather than matter.” 

be like Taylor

Suleika Jaouad, a journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia at age 22. She navigates uncertainty by approaching each day as if it were her first, leading with curiosity, inquiry, and exploration and seeking out moments of play.

Pema Chödrön suggests seeing birth and death in every moment. When we see events as passable memories—nothing is fixed or solid—we can return to that feeling of calm. So, a school's death is the birth of a new one, and one day, all of this will seem like ancient history.

The truth is, I am still fearful. I lied when I said I was chill AF.

I wish I had the faith that another pair of sandals would appear if I left them on the beach. Or that if I’m hungry, someone will magically feed me.

My pessimism may be attributed to growing up without neighbors in an individualist culture, but I know there is magic, energy, and consciousness that is unseeable, unknowable, and ununderstood. Rather than resist uncertainty, I should approach it with calm, curiosity, and perspective. Energy is eternal, and possibility is more real than material. Or, as Shalom Auslander puts it, be more like a question mark and less like a period.

Y’all, I’m trying.

What do you think? What are your suggestions for navigating uncertainty? You guys always have the best ideas. Sound off in the comments!

I want to leave you with this beauty my friend Layli wrote: “I honor you, and all of me for not running away from all of this, for choosing to stay Awake and alive, cry when our hearts break and build community to hold one another up to the Light.”

Thank you for being here, open-hearted people.

Xo,

Summer

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