It’s been a rough December.

The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, rolled across us like the sudden rush of a tsunami; a torrent of violence that came without warning, choking off life indiscriminately and drowning hope and optimism in a black flood of bullets and rage.  The tolling bell of death — unfathomable death — for 26 innocents clanged and clashed with the swelling chorus of holiday festivity.

If you have experienced the death of someone close to you, you know the feeling of unreality that envelops you, even when the death was expected.  In the days that follow, you wonder how and why everyone else can carry on as if the world has not cleaved open, gushing pain and loss and depression, never to be the same again.  As if you alone have been transported to another universe of dark emptiness, though you can see the ordinary world as through one-way glass.  You can look out from your hidden chamber, but no one can see in.

It’s the black sheets of rain

Following me again.

Everywhere I go

Everywhere I’ve been

Following me again

With Newtown, it seemed the physics of death warped and mutated under the strain of the senselessness.  The lonely wormhole that engulfs the stricken and the grieving suddenly expanded outward encompassing all of us, paying no heed to kinship or geography.  We were all instantly lost in the strange and detached landscape of the parallel world.  How did we get here?  And how do we find our way home from this terrible place where children and teachers are shot in their classrooms?

Like many, I suppose, I cried and questioned and railed against those who would claim, incredibly, that the solution to the problem of ever-increasing gun violence is more guns.  My grief, however, compelled me to take up arms of a different sort: informed advocacy.  I read news accounts and op-eds and research pieces on gun violence in America.  I learned how other nations have responded to similar incidents and the staggering amount of avoidable gun-related death America has been willing to tolerate — all under the duress of a Second Amendment held hostage.  There is so much wrong with the way this issue has been framed.  So much misinformation and inability to look at Sandy Hook Elementary School and see the same horrific, tragic picture.  Where some see empty and pointless death directly traceable to the prevalence and accessibility of guns and ammunition, others see willing victims and willful defenselessness for lack of armed security.

The dialogue, to the extent there is even mutual communication and not just simultaneous yelling, is angry and bitter and exhausting.

It makes me angry.

I feel the toxins fill my bloodstream as I’m walking through the parking lot

Over and over and over and over and over and over

The clouds hanging over

Choking the life out of me

The motto seems to be

“We work in order to be free”

But then, as the anger slowly subsides and begins to recede into the ocean of everyday existence . . . . . . . . comes aspiration.  At least for me.

Confronted with horror and tragedy, I am propelled or compelled or repelled into aspirational longing.  Can’t we be better? Can’t we do better?  Is this the best a free society can offer its children and movie goers and holiday shoppers?  Kill or be killed?  Is there some amount or special type of freedom that comes with ready access to guns that is greater and more valuable than the lives taken away by them?

There has to be a better version of freedom than this, I think to myself, though I know I am trying to bridge a great cultural divide.  Still, I can’t stomach the approach that hands you another Big Gulp with a bag of chips and the t.v. remote and assures you that there is no reason to get up from your recliner because there is nothing to be done about these things.  Bad guys with guns can’t be stopped — except with more guns.

I wish for more than that.

Could you give me a wish if I tell you what I want?

Will the price be no object?

I wish for dreams of light

I live for wishing well surprise

I wish.  And I shop for Christmas presents.

I wish.  And I donate money to the Brady Campaign.

I wish.  And we write a check to my daughter’s public elementary school.  And thank her teachers and school administrators.  And I squeeze back the tears when I get to my car.

I wish for the world not to be broken for my children.  And I play Christmas music.

Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?

In the lane snow is glistening

A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight

Walking in a winter wonderland

And I think, as I listen and begin to hum as I strike through the items on my holiday list, that the pieces of a better world are already here, all around us.  We need only to pick them up and put them together:

Walking:  How easy it is to imagine the world full of “bad guys” who must be defended against when it is full of strangers and unknown places rushed by on freeways and flown over in airplanes.  When we don’t know the person who delivers our mail or the people who live more than three houses down the street or what life is really like in the “bad” parts of town our mental maps become plagued with dragons.

Beyond here be monsters.

But there is a cure for stranger anxiety: familiarity.  In our world filled with modern conveniences and efficiencies, however, familiarity isn’t a free gift with purchase.  We don’t have to know the mail carrier or even our neighbors.  Now that we have the means to quickly navigate through and around each other — to reach past those in our immediate neighborhood and only to those with whom we choose to interact  — we have become strangers.  Getting to know each other, it seems, now requires a deliberate act of specific intent as it is no longer a by product of  ordinary daily living.

Which is where the metaphor of walking comes in.

If you’ve ever traveled abroad or moved to a new city at some point in your life, you have traversed the path to familiarity that comes only from walking through your surroundings.  Indeed, the universal advice dispensed to Americans traveling to Paris or London or New York is to walk these cities in order to truly see them.  To know a place requires experiencing it from a human perspective — at a slower speed and at ground level.  To stand under the Eiffel Tower and look up or stand at the top of the Empire State and look down and out all all around.  Details emerge — sights, smells and sounds — that are blunted if not obliterated by the remoteness of jets or combustion engines or the internet.  Shops and parks and pathways invisible to speeding motorists and commuters gladly reveal themselves to pedestrians.

Yet walking and the walking mindset yield more than just navigational insights and greater topographical detail.  It also facilitates and yields contemplation.  Walking through and around and amongst each other and our shared communities engages all of your senses and that nearly always engages your brain.  You’ll see something that reminds you of something else and make a connection.  Or you will encounter something you have never encountered before and wonder about it:  what is it?  has it always been here?  why is it here?  You will see the same elderly neighbor walking his dog at the same hour and wave and say hello, and perhaps get to know him.  Walking and its speedier cousin running allow for both better engagement with your environment and a chance to reflect upon it.

Yes.  More walking, I think.  We need to get out and walk or otherwise directly engage with our own towns and neighborhoods and give our minds a chance to see and wander and reflect, and in the process come to know ourselves and each other better.

In a . . .

Winter:  I struggle with winter every year.  The steady encroachment of cold and dark feels like the advancing Russian army, surrounding my personal village and slowly choking-off supply lines.  Provisions must be laid and forays carefully planned.  Survival basics like shelter and fuel and heat take on greater importance.  Where once the long, languorous days of summer accommodated scant or no footwear and haphazard wanderings from one place to another, now comes swift falling curtains of darkness and biting cold that will not easily forgive a body for a forgotten hat or poor navigation or shoddy shoes.  Food is begging to be hot and beds layered with blankets of down, the better to fortify you for the next day’s siege.

But I do not wish to banish winter.  Though I shiver and huddle and plan excursions to tropical latitudes, I don’t fail to appreciate the benefits of endurance.  The unrelenting harshness and ubiquity of a northern winter (at least what global warming hasn’t yet melted away) cannot be bargained away or set to record on your DVR to watch later at a time more suitable to your schedule.  There is nothing that can be ordered on Amazon.com and delivered to your doorstep that changes the reality outside your front door.  Winter trumps all.

It forces adjustment and adaptation.

For example, because it is no longer warm and light and inviting in the evening hours and I cannot abide running in cold, dark iciness or on a treadmill, I am forced to suspend my love of outdoor running and trade it in for indoor yoga classes or weekend snowshoeing or skiing.  And yet, it is because the river of my life has hit the rock of winter and must be diverted one way or another that other experiences are enabled.  If left to my own devices, I would likely never have chosen to have annual long, dark, cold winters, but because it is not up to me and I am forced to adapt and endure, I have experienced the joy of the woods after new-fallen snow, the enveloping and irresistible quiet of a blanketed forest and the childish exuberance that comes with making the first tracks:

We need winter.  In our on-demand world we need to occasionally bend and yield and be forced to change in order to learn that we can endure — and be better for it.

Wonder:  Wonder, it seems to me, is an often used but poorly understood concept.  We describe books and movies and food as “wonderful” by which we really mean “great” or “really good” or “super yummy!”  But wonder is rare.  To ask and question and be open to surprising outcomes is a state of mind that needs to be cultivated.  To me, wonder is engaged imagination spurred by awe or admiration or the unknown.  It is the desire to open an intellectual door to possibility without fixed expectations or an engineered outcome.  Too often, it seems, we rush and disregard and fail to wonder.  An America with a greater common capacity for wonder might ask questions like:

I wonder what the Curiosity Rover will discover on Mars?

I wonder what the long-term impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will be?

I wonder what it is like to be a woman in Afghanistan?

I wonder how it feels to be gay in America?

I wonder what would happen if we had fewer guns?

Land:  I know the song lyric is “wonderland” but I wanted to break apart the concept of land.  Not in the metes and bounds and soil sense, but in the sense of place.  In the Woody Guthrie sense of “this land is your land, this land is my land.”  Of coming from or belonging somewhere.  Because in the end, what we all want is a place where we belong; a land of our own (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf.)  A place we can live our lives and pursue our happiness and, so long as we play nicely with others, not be persecuted or victimized or discriminated against — or incur a disproportionate risk of being shot — for doing so. For some people, their land is the remote wilderness of Wyoming, for others it is the human kaleidoscope that is New York City.  The idea of America was that many different lands could exist in one place; that the umbrella of freedom was big enough, accommodating enough, to include an infinite number and variety of those seeking its shelter and protection.

I wish we could realize that ambitious idea.

I wish we could become a land where you can be gay or straight, black or white, male or female, religious or atheist, introverted or extroverted, liberal or conservative, American League or National League — and still belong.

There’s a price to pay for a wish to come true

Trade a small piece of your life

Roots in the soil, uprooting the soil

Mountain high, the mountain high

Black Sheets Of Rain - Version 2

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© Vincent Kelly 2012

Black Sheets Of Rain

-… — -…   — — ..- .-.. -..   -… .-.. .- -.-. -.-   … …. . . – …   — ..-.   .-. .- .. -.

© Vincent Kelly 2012

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