Many of us are feeling mounting anguish as we see what is happening to our world. Those of us in the United States witness our government separating, criminalizing, and incarcerating families who are desperately seeking asylum at our southern border. We witness corruption, confusion, and lies at the highest levels of our government. We join people around the world in witnessing—and experiencing—climate and economic chaos as well as warfare. We see and feel enormous suffering all around us!
As we witness this suffering, we feel the pain of it all. It may seem unbearable and we turn away in apparent apathy. “I can’t deal with this and I have my own challenges to deal with, so I’ll tune this out and look away.” Or perhaps we go into panic: “Got to do something about this right now! But I don’t know what to do!”
Joanna Macy offers the image of walking along a path with a deep ditch on either side: one is apathy, the other panic. Our fear of pain drives us into one or the other and we fall off the path of resilience and right action. Apathy and panic–and social hysteria–are closely related and can trigger and reinforce each other. To stay on the path, we learn to accept the pain as evidence of our deep caring for life—and the Work That Reconnects helps us do that.
The articles and poems in this issue of Deep Times guide us in that direction.
