April 14 2025
Dear All,
We’ve now had nearly four months of living with extreme uncertainty – here in the US, and in consequence, in many places across the world. What is it doing to us? Living life like a roller-coaster ride (confession: I have always hated roller-coasters and anything that throws me upside down) is not good for the human body in the long term. You could say, life has always been uncertain; yes, we don’t know the hour or the day of our death, as a bottom line. To some extent, we acclimatize; to some extent, if someone dumps us, we lose our job, nobody buys our novel or painting, we get ill, someone we loves dies, we cope. But when life is deliberately designed to throw us for a loop every morning, the human organism rebels. It’s the deliberateness of it, I think. Natural disaster can be terrible, but you can’t blame wind, water or fire. Being manipulated into chronic uncertainty is different. In the last four months, there have been shocks in the news every morning; will this happen, will that happen? Rumors run like wild-fire: will they do this, will they do that? Will I lose my Social Security, Medicare, job, retirement funds, right to stay in the country, will I be able to vote, get a vaccination, send my child safely to school? Of course, if you are an immigrant without the right papers – or even with them – it’s far worse. Chronic uncertainty becomes chronic terror.
In his important book “On Freedom” Timothy Snyder writes that freedom isn’t to be granted, piecemeal; it’s essential as a stable background to our lives. Freedom is a state of being, a knowledge that you can live your life as you see fit. Living without this throws us into chaos and brings up old fears from the past as well as terror of the future. It’s not a healthy way to live.
What to do? We protest, write to representatives, go on making art, try for stability in our personal lives. Patti Smith says she turns to music, and sings Dylan’s “Masters of War” song on her Substack. I turn to poetry, and reread – Rumi, of course, and Mary Oliver, that sanest of poets. I make soup, my husband fixes leaks in the roof, and in our back yard we watch two pigeons make a nest, the mother bird lay eggs in it and sit on them for a couple of weeks until they hatch, so that now there are two baby birds to be fed, who grow and will soon fly the nest. The processes of nature still go on.
These small events, these earthly things encourage me. Spring happens, flowers burst open against blue sky, rain allows everything green to flourish and shine. It’s all still there. And I try to shut out the rumors, the fear-mongering, the alarm bells, because they are doing my 83-year-old nervous system harm. But when a friend wept as he told me that a young Guatemalan man who does his garden was picked up by ICE and disappeared last week, leaving my friend to try to tell his fiancée, I wanted to cry with him. It is real and it is everywhere, among us, hurting us all.
We live in paradox, and in uncertainty. Human life has always been this way. I was born in the middle of World War 2, and remember sirens, bomb shelters, being evacuated, anxious adult voices. When so much is destroyed this suddenly and so many people are made to suffer, it’s like trying to get a foothold in an earthquake. We have to ground ourselves, we have to find a way. My parents did it, over six long years, and we can too.
Take care, and as Patti Smith says, drink lots of water while remembering those who can’t.
Affectionately, Ros