constellations #94: keeping your heart open

Hi again.

I’ve had this tab open on my laptop for weeks, maybe months. It’s a YouTube video, called “Staying Open to Suffering | Ram Dass.” For weeks I left the tab open but didn’t watch it. I don’t know where I first found the video; honestly, my only relationship to Ram Dass’s work is merely to have heard his name mentioned by women who seem better-adjusted, in a spiritual sense, than I. (If your experience is something like that, allow me to tell you that he was a spiritual teacher and writer and psychologist. In the 1960s and ’70s he helped popularize psychedelic drugs and what some might call New Age spirituality. His most famous book is called Be Here Now, which helped introduce Western audiences to the idea of mindfulness. Here is a nice interview with him from near the end of his life.) 

So I don’t know where I found this video but I know why I was attracted to it: because I thought it might help me. The title “Staying Open to Suffering” might make you think that it’s advice for someone who has hardened their heart to the pain of the world, and you’d be right; that is, in a sense, what it focuses on. But that doesn’t quite capture my predicament, or what drew me to this video, I think. I don’t feel that I’ve hardened my heart to suffering, but I do find that I can let myself get immobilized by all of it, especially lately: needless mass death in Gaza, police brutality against student protesters, climate catastrophe, factory farming, attacks on reproductive healthcare and trans rights, the callousness with which this country treats migrants and the disdain with which it treats addicts — do you need me to keep going? And perhaps I feel most overwhelmed, most driven to hopelessness, by the way that I am implicated in all of it. My tax dollars, my consumption, my choices, my silence. It’s despair-inducing, and it conspires to make me wonder whether I will be able, ever, to lead an ethical life, one of which I am genuinely proud. I’m still not sure. “What does it mean to live and abide in a world like this?” the writer Charlotte Shane recently put it. “Does it have meaning at all?” 

It’s so helpful to me to hear other people asking these questions, even without answers. (And although I am not a person of faith, I do know that these are questions with which religious traditions contend with some regularity — I think that is also what Charlotte is getting at in her essay.) I guess all of this is why I kept this tab open all these weeks, waiting for a moment — the right moment? — to actually watch it.

Turns out it’s a short video, and in no way sanctimonious. Once I finally watched it this week, I found myself returning to it every day — not least of all because I thought I might want to write about it here. But now that I’m here, what is there for me to say that isn’t better said in there by Ram Dass? Here is what struck me most: He says that staying open to suffering — being attuned to it, without being overtaken by it — is “like keeping your heart open in hell.” I keep repeating that phrase to myself day after day. (I am writing this to you, if you can believe it, from the waiting room at jury duty; it seems apt.) And yet it is possible, he says, to let this feeling drive us to action, for it to fuel us to keep reaching outside ourselves — rather than getting pulled into navel-gazing about despair. (That’s what I’m wont to do.) We can tell ourselves this: I don’t understand it, but I’ll do what I can. And my heart is going to break again and again and again. And here I am. And maybe that is not enough to answer all my questions. But for the moment it has helped.

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Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Mating by Norman Rush; the zine Drug Music; Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway and Orfeo Ed Euridice at the Met Opera; I Saw The TV Glow and its marvelous soundtrack (a new Frances Quinlan song; my heart rejoices!); a really delightful picnic in Prospect Park to celebrate my birthday; Rosie Tucker live at Baby’s; Waxahatchee live in Brooklyn and in St. Petersburg; relatedly, several marvelous days in St. Pete during which, due to the presence of two perfect and adorable toddlers, my screen time decreased by a genuinely life-changing percentage; this beautiful essay about Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, an album I think will be on repeat in my house all summer; the blossoming of my beloved cactus (the sheer number of flowers this time was honestly beyond my wildest dreams); the tofu-fried-tofu sandwich at Superiority Burger; a ride on the Coney Island Cyclone and the resulting exorbitant souvenir photo

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This time last year I was: drinking Diet Coke; and before that, daydreaming and thinking about self-respect

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Thanks for reading. Here’s to keeping your heart open in hell, this month and onward.

xo,
M