Words are bound to go wrong. They’re a bunch of little double-edged daggers that slice six ways to Sunday and always offend somebody. Often now every word feels to me like a lit match over at least a spoonful of gunpowder. And who am I to wield them at all -- a kind of toymaker with a poor memory for the hard details of the world.
But sometimes the need to speak has the soul thrashing in the night. Sometimes it feels like a duty to witness, even if one’s words are just a useless kind of itching powder. Silence has so often surrounded screaming atrocities. And we are awash in atrocities. Ukraine. And Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, abuses in Brazil and the Philippines, Haiti, and… Unspeakable anguish slathered on with our trowel. Lie face down and cry for our species.
The burning point of Ukraine: grievous suffering I cannot imagine, shot through with human tenacity and heroism I cannot imagine summoning. A blue and yellow morning star above the apocalypse.
History writes in blood that authoritarian strongmen produce lies and brutality and death. Betrayal. That lust for personal gain and more more more power twists toward madness. That people only hoping to build lives day to day drown in tsunamis driven by the inflamed egos of tyrants. It is a murderous crime and always will be, everywhere.
As Russian protesters are dragged to prison for their courage, Putin has shrunk himself to a vicious seed of destruction that will live only in infamy. I hear the World Wars breathing in the shadows.
So how in heaven do we navigate our little boats piled with hope.
Meantime, in my country, our facts have cracked like the melting Arctic and floated off in opposite directions. We stand on our broken ice and shriek at each other because our truths no longer line up and how will they ever.
Yet it seems we must all of us keep tossing the tiny flowers of our personal effort on the waters. We must do it even as the world burns, and perhaps beyond reach of this moment we will glimpse sanctuary. A swan among the lilies.
