Progress is Painful

Breaking New Ground

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Wendell Berry

          There is a least one moment in every day when I don’t know what to do or which way to go. Listening to the news has become torture, and so I know that important things are happening. As hard as it is to follow the path we’re on, and know where this is all going, I feel in my bones that we are making progress. Real progress is never made without chaos ushering it in. And, boy, do we ever have chaos!

          Any time real, systematic, and global change is moving forward, there is a backlash in the opposite direction. So, in the middle of a pandemic, when our very best scientific minds are telling us we need to do at least the minimum to keep the spread down, people are going about their lives, meeting and greeting without masks and social distancing. Half the world denies there is a pandemic even though the count of cases is now almost 9-million, and the deaths are close to half a million.

          In the middle of that, we are embroiled in racial and political divisions, which are necessary and over-due. But every day, our heads are spinning like that poor girl’s in The Exorcist. People are exhausted and physically and mentally in pain from all the tension we have been living through for months, and some of us have been living through for centuries. These are the labor pains required to birth a new reality.

          We are on the road. We are thrashing the bushes to brake a new trail. We are hammering out shelters and soliciting help from unexpected sources. This is new territory, and since we are all here sharing this one planet, perhaps we will come out of it in the same place, as one people. Here are some wise words for the trek from Wendell Berry:

“Be like a fox,

Who makes more tracks than necessary,

Some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.”

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane