You are not tethered to darkness – and other advice on how to survive hard times

So, the news hasn’t been so good lately. You scroll through the headlines and they are all hard to fathom, hard to hope through. You’ve had professional setbacks, you’ve gotten bad news about your health and realized your mortality, you realized your human network isn’t quite as supportive as you’d hoped, the weather is exactly the kind you don’t like. You’ve tethered yourself to darkness. You’ve given up hope. What to do next?

Well, realize first you don’t have to drag all your bad news around you, like a heavy cast iron piece on a rope, all the time. Leave the cast iron piece at home. Untie the rope. This last long weekend I decided to do all the things I hadn’t gotten to do over the summer because I’d been too busy or too sick or too overcommitted or whatever. We went to La Conner, a lovely town known for its tulips and snow geese, and breezed around the river, poking into little shops and galleries. We went to Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo, where everything was in bloom, the cool wind off the water was fresh and clean despite the 80 degree heat, and we saw a tiny toddler tiger tumbling with its handler and a clouded leopard cub leaping into the arms of a zoo guide and a serval cub on a leash which was a strange sight indeed. We saw a litter of half-grown meerkats and watched the seals rise and fall from the water. Yesterday we went to downtown Seattle for art – an opening at Roq La Rue, the strange and wondrous little gallery of subversive pop art, to look at a carousel horse severed in half with miniature cities build inside each half, a painting of octopus mermaids and a little girl breaking the shell of an egg with the most interested look in her eyes. At Seattle Art Museum, we snuck in under the wire of the closing of the Japanese fashion exhibit, where one of my favorite Japanese artists, Aya Takano, had put her art all over Issey Miyake’s raincoat and boots. These were all things that were suddenly, clearly more important to do than anything else – more important than doctor appointments, or doing the laundry, or paying bills. If you feel like you are tethered to darkness, you have to remember what tethers you to light.

Last night I dreamed I was a writer who abandoned the earth in the last days to go live on the moon. My dream astronaut/scientist boyfriend and I (clutching a book I had written called “a new beginning,” which was also my boyfriend’s name in Chinese.)  I was going there with my boyfriend just to die, because we had given up on earth’s terrible problems, its radiation and plagues and war. Instead we are rescued by moon colonists who tell us in their new world stories are valuable. The devil is named “the destroyer of stories,” and mythology has become as imperative as science to the newborn human culture’s survival.

This morning I wrote three letters: one to my grandmother, one to a friend to whom I owed a birthday card and some chocolate, and a third, poems and a check to a contest. It felt good to do something concrete to put light into the world.

So, what am I talking about? How do you survive hard times? You don’t give up. You don’t forget the importance of story to your culture, to your own humanity. You remember the breeze off the water, the bright assault of blooming things and endangered tiger cubs. You send out messages of hope. You look at art that makes you dream about living on a terra-formed moon.