And yet we go on
Yesterday I saw a bee walking along the ground with its wings out, and I wondered if I was seeing a victim of Colony Collapse Disorder. A few years ago I’d lost my conviction that we were having an apocalypse. These days it seems that much more immediate. Are the alarms only ringing now, or are they always going off and we just tune the signal in and out?
Yesterday we got a letter telling us that we’d have to move out of our duplex, a no-cause termination. All we got out of them on a phone call was the word “schedule”, as in, two weeks’ extra notice “doesn’t fit with their schedule”, so we’re guessing it may be that they want to develop the place up and rent it out for more money. Reasonable enough in this market. Reasonable, but it bites.
I went out for a coffee to take home for dinner — having flailed the other day and broken the coffeepot — and the neighborhood was beautiful, the play of a thousand shades of green over the streets, dusk light making shadows through the leaves — and I smiled and tipped the woman in the coffee shop, and paid attention to the place I love, the restaurants I’d want to go to before I leave, the changes since I left for China last year.
Was it worth all that rent I sent home for what turns out to be my last two months in this spot? I don’t know. What’s money worth? It’s part of the world of imaginary things. The world walls are thin this week. A battle against the Daleks makes more sense than finances. They’re both games of symbol and abstraction, and it’s hard to say which one is more strongly anchored to reason.
On the block ajdacent to mine, I saw a small sign on a post in someone’s garden: “My America Doesn’t Torture.” I had to grin. It tells me so much about the world right now — about Portland people, and just people — that we’re willing to make that leap, to believe better of the future and the world enough to call it ours.
In China, the assumption that other people have reasons for what they do kept me anchored. Everyone: governments who follow vile policies, landlords who make no exceptions for loyal four-year tenants who always pay the rent on time, health-care organizations that don’t actually care for health — everyone. They all want something; they’re all trying to get it, sometimes the wrong way, but you’ve done that too.
And I don’t know what will come tomorrow or next month or next year, but right now it’s enough to know that we keep on living despite the unreliability of the world and the people in it. It’s the same old battle, the creative chaos of humankind against entropy, the fight to create something new and lasting in a universe where generally things are running down. We are who we are because we stand up and fight.