State of the Savage: Spring 2020

Oh to be on an island of health, wealth, and splendor, a world away from this pandemic.

This year has suddenly become incredibly trying on so many levels: Emotional, financial, mental. I doubt any of us will come through this ordeal unscathed, at the very least adjacently, or forget this time of global house arrest. We’re losing a lot of people unjustly and unfairly, and my heart goes out to the affected and the to-be affected. There’s no use in spinning loss. It just has to be faced, felt, and folded in.

When times become dark, the wise don’t sit in the gloom. This is not the message from mass media and pop news who feed off triggering our fear, panic, and anxiety responses with sensational headlines and reporting. Several years ago, as my self-enforced hermitage progressed, I initiated a news-media fast because I began to see how the news diverted me from the inner paths I was walking. It was then I began paying attention to my mental diet and became very picky about what news and media I consumed and where it was “grown.”

Back then, just a few years ago, I was living through a personal dark time. In the novel I wrote during this period, a mystical land exists locked beneath perpetually overcast skies. The folk there have never seen the sun. The obviousness of the metaphor is striking to me now, but I was completely oblivious at the time of writing to the simple truth that this land was me. One of the novel’s important points is that in dark times we must make light. It feels almost inappropriate, but the alternative, to wallow in the darkness, is to lose yourself.

I hear people pining for “the ways things used to be” just a month ago. I get it. I’m looking forward to a great many things I can’t do now that I only leave my house once a week. It feels like we’re missing an opportunity to ask a really important question: Is the way things used to be the way things ought to be?

When was the last time the world was forced to alter its routines, to turn off auto-pilot, to come to see what’s crucial? The opportunity we have is immense, and before the critics come in to remind me people are dying — yes, exactly, that is why we have to make light.

To do that we have to find the parts in ourselves that shine. It took me eight years of wearing sweatpants, countless bone-shivering nights of homesickness, and a dozen pilgrimages to Scotland to catch the scent on the wind. It hinged on a moment in Glen Clova when the mountains were so beautiful in the autumn snow that tears stood in my eyes. I realized then that the world is a mirror into myself. I saw beauty in the mountains; others may not have. So it follows there must be beauty in me. And like the melting of winter the form of things began to take shape.

For now, we are all armchair travelers. But there are vast, often uncharted landscapes inside each of us calling to the explorer willing to sacrifice the familiar. We are all here now, forced to sacrifice a way of life that may be all we have ever known. Do not pine for the lost familiar. The familiar can be remade.

Make light in the darkness. And wash your hands.