Dogs Howl.
A pink twilight speaks of rain.
The ground, dear one,
Is always shaking.
My wife’s sister and our niece were the first to join us a decade ago, moving to town four blocks northwest of us. It turns out she and her daughter were an advanced guard; over the last six months our family clan has continued gathering. First my daughter, her husband and our granddaughter moved into a house six blocks southeast. That happened in December. Last week, my father took up residence in a cute apartment five blocks northwest, around the corner from my sister-in-law.
Like social animals of any kind, sensitive to the environment and wired for survival, people can sense uncertainty and threat, even when the perceived nature of such threat is clouded or indistinct. Like penguins sensing bad weather, drawn together against frigid wind, families are gathering, families like mine.
Change is in the air in America, and along with it uncertainty in great measure. I’m not talking apocalypse, though there are those who lean in that direction. There are some who say apocalypse has already happened, and has happened many times before. And there are others yet again who think apocalypse is happening right now. Ask the whales, they say.
I am talking about various signs of trouble, most of them the direct result of human activity or the effect of natural impacts acting upon it. Take note: a Gulf of Mexico deep oil well blowout, volcanoes in Iceland stranding air travelers across Europe, stock trading glitches that drop the Dow Jones 1,000 points in one hour, leaking nuclear reactor water contaminating the below-ground aquifer in upstate New York, endocrine disrupting chemicals like BPA lining commercial canned goods – something is happening. We can feel it, but as Jesse Colin Young sang years ago, “What it is, is not exactly clear.”
What is clear is that a family that was spread apart, anywhere from 250 to 2,500 miles, has gathered in one little town rather suddenly. We cross paths constantly, wander in and out of each others’ homes and lives in ways that simply weren’t possible before. My granddaughter is surrounded by love spanning four generations; in my father’s childhood such a situation was not unusual, but today it is a rarity. An explicit interdependence has arisen.
There are challenges in such interdependence, of course. Boundaries are moving and changing; privacy is not what it was. But a particular kind of security is also arising. We are no longer separated ones or twos or threes, but have each other to lean on. Think penguins.
When life is easy – jobs plentiful, health fine, money in the bank – being alone in ones or twos can work out alright. But life is not so easy right now. Something is brewing, and it’s not all good. The world is in serious trouble and just as my immediate family has drawn together, so must we as the larger family of society accept the reality of our interdependence, draw together, be kind and supportive.
Like the fiercest gales or blizzards, all the terrible storms of human folly eventually blow themselves out, and together we pick up the pieces, care for each other and clean up the mess. This is the only way a good human society has ever succeeded.
