Ralph E. Melcher
For more than three years I haven’t known what to say.
It wasn’t that I was altogether silent or unengaged. I was in turn angry, hopeful, apprehensive, and disgusted as much as anyone. I passed along other people’s notes, wrote headlines for postings on Facebook and Twitter. What else could I add to the conversation? I’ve been part of a nation undergoing daily shock treatment by a madman who rivals any villain in any James Bond film. It feels to me like a battle to the death between my own hopes and visions and a parallel world of absolute insanity.
On top of this, since a month or two before the beginning of my 70th year and just in time for the pandemic, I became afflicted with a double carpal tunnel condition that would require the kind of ‘elective’ surgery that couldn’t be done until the plague emergency lifted a bit and which was a related precursor to the more serious cancer with which I’d be later diagnosed and which eventually brought my work life to a halt. Over time the condition worsened from mild to severe, and the numbness and pain in my fingers became continuous and exhausting, not to mention distracting.
The overall effect of chronic pain isn’t dissimilar to that of a pandemic. It compels me to turn inward. As the pain increased I found myself withdrawing somewhat from less than intimate relationships and from the outside world in general. As virtually every activity in mind and body became more of a labor I spent more of my time alone. I caught up on books I’d been reading, listened to podcasts and Zen lectures, contemplated my daily Tarot card and read Doctor Strange comic books (a source of strength and endurance).
It occurs to me that this is an incubation period. In mathematical terms it could be a ‘bifurcation point’ where our collective evolution takes an unexpected turn toward some new level of organization. This inescapably leads to some kind of world and life that’s clearly different from the one left behind. In times like these when forces accumulate against our forward momentum, and we’ve forgotten where and how to move, we have to learn to think sideways, around corners and into the curves.
Almost all of the conversations I hear in this time of restrictions and forced contemplation are voices yearning for movement in a new direction. We feel the need for damage repair as well as total renewal. We are faced with a world that finds itself in the rapids of a stream, having strayed past safe boundaries in our sleep. Now we face civilization’s apparent rush toward oblivion. Still the dream and our sleep hang on. We want to awake into some sort of normalcy, but normalcy eludes us every minute.
We are compelled to construct a new world.
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For now I offer these brief reflections and recollections for your entertainment or edification or perhaps even a seed of inspiration. More importantly, I invite you, who are staring into your screens, an opportunity to respond, connect, and maybe experience the seeds of whatever grows out of all this compost.
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