1.
I got an email today that said “Another Grizzly is dead, Melissa. The slaughter can’t contin…” In good fundraising fashion it used my name. I was supposed to click the unfinished subject line, read the rest, and make a donation. I did not. I only said somberly to myself, the list of dead is long.
2.
I started reading Matthew Perry’s memoir this week while I was awake in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back to sleep. That I finished it last night tells you one thing, and that I have learned that he couldn’t sleep either, for similar reasons, tells you another. I am also learning how little we know about others, even when we think we know a lot. We latch onto one small thing they say and make it everything about them, though it comprises less than 1% of who they are. We miss, literally, almost all of them. It makes me picture this:
3.
I am also reading Elizabeth Warren’s 2016 book This Is Our Fight, because I was wandering through stuff stores with a friend last weekend and for some reason it was outward facing, and her hands are on her hips in the cover photo. At first I passed it by, saying to myself, I should read one of her books. I passed it again before smelling some candles that made my nose burn, and then again on my last sweep through the array of novelties. And I grabbed it because I suddenly felt like I was supposed to read that book… 👀
4.
The week prior, I was reading a book by Dr. Ann Ulanov, a Jungian Analyst, and who was also my professor when I was in seminary. One particularly windy day I walked into class frazzled and when she asked me what was up, I said “I feel like the wind is punching me in the face!” She said, “It is punching you in the face.” That was 2011. In 2023, I found myself wandering around the San Francisco Public Library during my lunch break looking for something to read. I had zero ideas. Then I thought “I wonder what Ulanov books they have in here!” I ran up to the third floor. I didn’t expect them to have any. They had one: Attacked by Poison Ivy. It is about her struggles with a lifelong, life threatening, ivy allergy, and how our emotional responses to these external factors/illnesses, combined with the old, old traumas we carry (knowingly or, usually, unknowingly), impact our level of suffering and our ability to heal. And I suddenly and completely understood why she said what she said to me about the wind. It wasn’t just to validate me. It was to suggest I ask myself, “why is it punching me in the face?” Took me 12 years to realize that I ought to ask.
5.
At the end of Matthew Perry’s memoir, he spends a chapter talking about the person he is now (at the time of writing), the person he was always meant to become. This person is loving, kind, hopeful; caring of others, wanting to help. A person who feels gratitude, compassion, love. A person who centers others and wants to love others through their struggles, and help them get to the other side. A person who has experienced miracles, and who is always keeping one eye on the horizon for the next. Perry called himself a seeker, of spiritual experience. In seminary, we read a lot of mystics—Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, even Dr. Ulanov herself*. They all wrote books, the mystics, who are also themselves, both seekers and experiencers of spiritual experience. I argued in a paper once, that for those of us who are seekers (who don’t, naturally, just have a constant spiritual connection, but rather, must work hard for it), who are blessed with fleeting moments of intense spiritual encounters, we write about the experiences as a way to get them back, because we know just how hard they are to come by. We know that, like Perry describing the person he has become, through the dark nights of his soul, it could all go away in a moment. We write who we are, which is also a wish, hope and aspiration that we can keep on being this person. We write who we are especially in the moments when we are most acutely aware of that person slipping away—so that maybe, for just a little longer, or until at least the encroaching darkness passes, we can hold on, keep becoming the person we were always meant to become.
Dr. Ulanov disagreed.
6.
I wrote an 80 page proposal this month and learned a lot in the process about what it’s going to take to transition everything with an engine or motor—e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g.—to electric. Every time I see, smell, or hear a gas-powered engine, all I can think now is: sooner than you think that will be electric. The future is going to smell better, and be so quiet.
7.
I kept hearing these bops on the radio for years—years!—and I never knew who was singing them. Recently, I decided to look it up. Bought a bunch of “albums” and I guess I’m a Swiftie now. Then I watched Miss Americana, and refer to 2. above.
8.
I am 37th on the waitlist at the public library to read one of 48 copies of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky. The book is about how all of our actions and thoughts are in some way predetermined. I can’t wait to read it. I was raised Catholic. We are taught to believe that human beings have free will (to explain, of course, why there is evil in the world: God is good, humans choose evil). But we are also taught that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and eternal. So, even though you haven’t decided what you are going to do yet, God already knows. Which begs the question, if the answer is already out there, is this really a choice? And someone says, yes, it is still a choice because even though God knows, God is not going to interfere, or tell you what to do. Again though, if the maps are already made (God has seen the map!), there’s really only one choice you’d ever make, the one written on the map, which is not a choice at all, only your destination. The creators of Everything Everywhere All At Once realized sooner than I did that the only possible condition under which both of these Catholic concepts (free will and an omnipotent God) can be true simultaneously, is infinite multiverses.
9.
What, then, is it up to us to—possible for us to—control? Wars? Hate? Poverty? Climate Change? Everything that is broken, has been broken by humans. So, everything that is broken can be healed by humans. Right? I, personally, can’t stop climate change. All I know is that, I, as a human, have been given two gifts: a life, and empathy. When I live that life, I will encounter “the other”—be it tree, partner, doggo, friend, bird, coworker or stranger. And in every one of those encounters, I have the choice to use that other gift, empathy, to love them, unconditionally. Or not.
10.
A simple example of 9. in action: Me getting into the elevator late for work, about to miss the MUNI, and suddenly today is the day the elevator is going to make 7 stops on the way down to the ground floor, to pick up 100 different people. Impatience and anger at these people—these people!—making me late, rises in me. So instead of making passive aggressive irritation noises and body movements, I stand still, and whenever any one of them leaves the elevator, I tell them “have a great rest of your day.” And I mean it.
Does that stop a war? Poverty? Hate? Climate change? No. But in 50 years or a hundred years from now, if the seeds of love and compassion have been sewn and sewn and sewn…?
—MBF
*Dr. Ulanov would never call herself a mystic, however, a good friend of mine from seminary and I always used to joke that one day we’d walk into her office and find her levitating.
Melissa. This is beautiful. I'm so glad I read it today, at exactly this moment. And I'm so glad you're my friend. And I am so grateful for your beautiful, beautiful brain.
Love this thoughtful exploration of living on this planet in this lifetime:)