#SundayFishSketch Should Not Have Given Me Angst, Except It Did

“Government is simply the biggest corporation, with the sole monopoly on violence.”- Elon Musk

As an artist, I usually get pretty excited about the Twitter Sunday Fish Sketch, a creative and fun way to participate with a great community of artists, scientists, and general fish and fishing enthusiasts. However, this week it took off for me in an altogether strange direction. The artist creative prompt was the following: 

May 1st is #InternationalWorkersDay and I think we should sketch some hard working fishes for our #sundayfishsketch #fishytheme. What’s your idea of a hard working fish? A nest builder, a waterfall climber, a long-distance migrator? You be the judge! #sciart #fishyfriday 

So Saturday night found me going to bed pretty thoughtfully contemplative of what I could draw. Perhaps a salmon who migrates lots of miles to spawn? Or a fish that builds extensive or intricate nests? How about one that works elaborate mating rituals to work his love into a frenzy of passion? My dreams and a good night sleep would decide.

Instead, I woke at 2 am in the morning in existential sweat. It is now May 1st. May Day. A day that many think about as a day to celebrate springtime or as an international day honoring the workers of the world. But for me it only sparked existential angst, no actually I felt in my core a sickening terror, of the reality of death and destruction and the craziness that is man’s inherent desire to find any path to destroy itself. I even dared to wake the wife to tell her what was happening and to risk poking that sleep-loving bear believe me it was bad what I was experiencing.

Because I am old enough to remember (yes, I am in my 7th decade of existence) that in the former Soviet Union (The old U.S.S.R. or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), May Day was an occasion to honor Soviet workers' contributions with giant parades in Red Square. Televised on all the networks evening news on the TV.  Those giant parades prominently featured the U.S.S.R.’s intercontinental ballistic missiles that Khrushchev promised he would be dropping on our heads any moment now. We practiced surviving these nuclear blasts sheltered by our somehow indestructible school desks, or the bomb shelters found in places like the library.

I had begun to believe the world had put those days behind us and then along comes the conflict in the Ukraine and all that passion to talk tough and use the “N” word is everywhere. I guess that makes me pretty stupid to believe that people don’t really want to destroy the entire planet over some disputed land or resources, and even more so that we are ok to fund a war but not push to negotiate a peaceful end. Wouldn’t billions be better off putting to solve through peaceful approaches?

However I don’t like it, Mr. Musk is pretty spot on when he reminds us that the governments “have the sole monopoly on violence” and seem to be unwilling to let go of feeling the need to use on the people.

So writing this is helping me to process how broken this world remains but I went ahead and did a drawing to try to calm the anxiety of the day. I chose to draw a sturgeon. A survivor over time. An aged dweller of the water it resides in. It gave food to us humans with its flesh and as caviar. And I am told some of the best caviar came from areas of the old U.S.S.R., now threatened to be obliterated.

Here is my drawing, done on an old dictionary page, where sturgeon are described.

Inner Space of Beauty

“The easiest way to observe your past thinking is to look at what is present in your life today. Whatever it may be is a certain indicator of where you're thinking has been.” 

-- Joan Gattuso from her book “The Lotus Still Blooms"

As I read the above-quoted passage, I was moved to look around the inside of our house, specifically the living room. From where I was sitting reading, I visually examined the environment that the wife and I have presently surrounded ourselves with. I should note here that the wife and I generally choose together what we populate our home with, be they decorative items or the color palettes of the rooms. What struck me immediately was the earth-tone colors and organic elements that are represented literally everywhere. 

We have brought Mother Nature's artifacts into our habitat. Pictures on the walls depict leaves, trees, and landscapes. A favorite picture is of a woman dining, hair blowing in a sea breeze amongst the backdrop of gently rolling waves of the ocean in the Horizon. Earthen pottery resides on the shelves, among leather-bound books. Dried grasses and cattails harvested in fields and ditch sides, and collections of bird feathers randomly found in our travels are tucked here and there. We even have a wing feather from an osprey that I picked up off the surface of a lake. This came about as I witnessed this raptor snag a fish from the water's surface while fishing from my kayak. As this magnificent hunter rose into the sky, shaking and sloshing off the lake water, fish in its talons, a single wing feather separated from the bird. The memory of how that single feather fluttered and spiraled down to rest on the still surface of the lake feet from where I was paddling is vividly recalled when I see it now currently standing in the “jar of feathers.”

Plants, both artificial, dried, and living, are nurtured (or dusted) inside our home. A few small carvings and sculptures of birds, fish, and other wildlife are also set among the shelves, reminding us of the joy we both get from the natural world. We have a few decorative birdhouses in our rooms, serving no purpose for raising young feathered friends, but pleasing our souls in some mysterious yet significant way.

So what does all this mean? To me, it shows that my preset, my inner nature, is all about the interactions of life, moments in time, and experiential experiences that have left some mark on me, especially in what brings safety, security, and emotional comfort to my existence. My surroundings feel like a warm blanket of past memories, as well as possible themes of future adventures. When I sit with this thought and am present and mindful of what I am feeling, I am more hopeful about what has been given to me in the past moments I have walked, and the memories yet to make that are ahead of me, whatever those may be. 

I would challenge you, dear reader, to pause where you might be at, mindfully look at what presently surrounds you, and observe how what you see that speaks from the past dwells among you in positive and enriching ways, and might just predict beauty, joy, and astonishment in your life that lies ahead of you.

Paying Attention to What Matters

  “If you are paying attention to the world you see a lot of pain.” — Mary Pipher

I came across Mary Pipher’s words quoted above while reading her book, “Letters to a Young Therapist.” I felt compelled to share those words with the wife because they struck a chord with me with how I was feeling after a day of counseling people, as well as just the particular noise being generated by the world that was ringing and running around in my head.

She responded in an unexpected way, as I was predicting she would just agree with me and recognize possibly feeling the same. 

“But there’s a lot of good in the world too,” she said. 

Huh. That was surprisingly and staggeringly unexpected.

And she was right, there is a lot of good. 

However, I had been focused on the pain of the moment, looking at the distressed conditions of a very complex and confusing world, as well as the interpersonal relationships that had taken place during my day. I inwardly was feeling both damaged and vulnerable while both relating and gravitating to all my negative emotions. The wife’s simple, yet alternative viewpoint, was just what I needed to help me find a new and alternative understanding about what I was feeling, how what I was feeling would eventually make me stronger and more resilient, and guide me to feel encouraged to undertake to live a more meaningful life, despite seeing so much pain.

The wife’s viewpoint rightly destabilized me for a moment, but that was the thing I needed most at that very time. Destabilization offered me to recognize the normal anxiety of being a human being in a raucous and often crazy-seeming society, to be able to use the comparison of my thoughts and feelings (which are most often not true when challenged) to better understand the suffering that surrounded me and how I could move through it without being overwhelmed by it. 

It helps me to remind myself that life, which can be compared to suffering (In the Buddhist tradition where the First Noble Truth is that “Life is suffering”), is like waves of the ocean that come in and touch us as we move along in life, sometimes gently washing barely over our feet, other times breaking with hostile force against our whole being and knocking us flat to the sand. But, those waves of suffering and hardship always leave what they have touched to return to the vast ocean of the world leaving us the opportunity to grow.

Being touched by suffering is normal, but it is our choice as to how we suffer from its touch.