Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self

By Trebbe Johnson

When grief and anxiety beat us down, the struggle to cope can feel like it's crushing us even more. To meet big challenges we need to develop fierce consciousness. In her new book Trebbe Johns

• Language: English
• Publisher: Calliope Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798218343651

Book preview

Fierce Consciousness:

Surviving the Sorrows

of Earth and Self

Also by Trebbe Johnson

You’ve Made the Earth More Beautiful!

Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth’s Broken Places

101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty

The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved

Fierce Consciousness:

Surviving the Sorrows

of Earth and Self

Trebbe Johnson

Ithaca, New York

Fierce Consciousness: Surviving the Sorrows of Earth and Self

Copyright © 2023 by Trebbe Johnson

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form—mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system—without permission in writing from the author except for use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9798218343651

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2023

For

Eli Gardner

Gideon Hewitt

Isaiah Gardner

Augustus (Gus) Greenberg

May you find and make beauty every day.

​… bright power, dark peace;

​Fierce consciousness joined with final

​Disinterestedness;

​Life with calm death; the falcon’s 

​Realist eyes and act

​Married to the massive 

​Mysticism of stone…

​Robinson Jeffers, from Rock and Hawk

CONTENTS

Prologue: You are Sisyphus. Now What?

I. SINK

1. Refuse to disbelieve

2. Drop into the well of grief.

3. Stop making sense.

4. Evolve mourning…

5. Resist the temptation to suffer alone.

6. Abandon hope.

II. PUNCH

7. Punch through the avalanche.

8. Dare.

9. Do it because only you can.

10. Release the old reality.

11. Sing through the darkest night.

12. Fight the angel—and let her win.

III. SEEK

13. Open up to the possibility of mystery.

14. Look for where the smiling ends.

15. Bear responsibility. Don’t collapse under it.

16. Imagine the end of the world—but not the end of the story.

17. Explore what you think you already know.

18. Be on the lookout for your next teacher.

IV. RECEIVE

19. Hold the feathers of grief and joy.

20. Redefine nature.

21. Let beauty seduce you.

22. Transcend downward.

23. Open up to the marvel of others.

24. Play.

25. Inquire into the mystery of objects coming alive.

26. Bear witness.

27. Go home.

V. GIVE

28. Say goodbye to a glacier.

29. Make beauty behavioral.

30. Donate patience.

31. Get dirty.

32. Volunteer for Earth Hospice

33. Claim your superpower.

34. Do it though no one notices.

35. Imagine Sisyphus happy.

NOTES            

About the Author

PROLOGUE

You are Sisyphus. Now What?

You are Sisyphus, and so am I. You’re worried sick, tired out, scared for the world and scared for your own small part of the world, which is the only part you have any control over, except sometimes you feel you have absolutely no control over anything. You are heaving an enormous boulder up a mountain with no guarantee that it’s going to stay put, even if you manage to settle it up there at the summit. Truth be told, there are times when you think there might not even be a summit, that life will be nothing but an endless march through despair from this point on. Yet what can you do? You keep going. You push. You push because your life depends on it.

In Greek myth, Sisyphus was a whistleblower. He informed a man that he’d seen the king of the gods, unmistakable even though he was at that moment disguised as an eagle, in the act of abducting the man’s daughter. Zeus learned about Sisyphus’ indiscretion and punished that mortal man by exiling him to the Underworld, where he had to roll a rock up a mountain, only to watch it tumble back down to the bottom as soon as he’d settled it on the peak. This was to be his single task for all eternity. There was no escaping it, no work-arounds, no hope, no possible rescue from a more sympathetic Olympian deity.

You are Sisyphus. You live in a world scourged by a lethal virus, the rise of extreme nationalism and racism, and a planetary ecosystem that can no longer support its billion beautiful species, including your own human species, the way it used to do. As if that weren’t so unreasonably hard a task to manage, you’re also bearing your own personal griefs, whether that means joblessness, a scary medical diagnosis, unhappy kids, rejection, addiction, debt, abuse in the home or on the job. The list is endless, and it shifts in ways you can’t anticipate and can’t adequately respond to. Now what? How will you get through this? How will any of us get through all this? And yet, like Sisyphus, we do. As Albert Camus wrote at the end of his essay about the myth, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, for at every moment of his existence he confronts his rocklike reality and throws his whole weight behind it.

The United States was in the sixth month of the coronavirus pandemic when my husband died. Andy had had bladder cancer for about seven years, but as far as his doctor had assured us just three months before, it was manageable, non-invasive, and non-aggressive. In July his health started to decline. He lost his appetite and tired easily. On August 4 I took him to the hospital emergency room. For three days the doctors hid their knowledge behind their professional gazes, reporting that they needed the pathology report before they could tell us anything. Finally, a palliative care doctor let us know that the cancer had spread to his liver and stomach and he didn’t have much time left. Andy died in a hospice facility five days later.

So. The worst thing in my life had happened, the thing I had been dreading. The thing I had tried to prepare myself for ever since I fell in love with that creative, sexy, sweet and brilliant man. I was alone. An hour after he died, after I had called his three grown children and a few friends and packed up all our things, I walked out of the hospice building on a hot summer’s midnight to be greeted by katydids singing in the trees all around me. The beauty of their voices shot right into me. I put down my bags and just listened in amazement. That song plucked me up for one full moment and then dropped me hard back down on the pavement, bruised with gratitude. Beauty and sorrow, joy and ugliness co-exist. I had known it since I was a little girl and now, at the worst time of my life, that truth grabbed and shook me again. Many people assume that sorrow and beauty are enemies, but they aren’t. In fact, you could say they’re lovers. They exhibit their own radiance most fully when their partner is on stage. When you make friends with one, you get its wild soulmate as well.

In the midst of suffering, it is possible to be seized by inexplicable joy. The feeling is different from happiness, which lilts you along and makes you feel content. Joy doesn’t have a lot of staying power, but it has amazing loft. So startling is this joy, so apparently out of place that its sudden arrival can seem like sacrilege. How could it be possible for me to radiate under such circumstances? demands your inner moralist. Surely something is wrong with you. Have you, in fact, lost your mind? Perhaps your reaction is to tamp down such an apparently unreasonable elation, deeming it utterly inappropriate, perhaps even immoral. It is true that such joy is radical. It is outrageous, startling, ridiculous. It has no precedent. It is illogical. It is a life-saver.

We all have ways of coping with grief and loss. Sometimes we react by finding someone or something to blame and then devoting ourselves to anger or revenge. At times our inclination is to stay busy, shove our sorrow into a closet and tell ourselves and others that we’re coping just fine. Or we become helpless, incapable of acting on our own behalf and demanding that someone else, please, anyone, pick up the pieces of our lives. Or we tell ourselves we don't have to worry, that everything will be all right in the end, because God or science or Gaia herself will take care of the problem. There is another way. It is possible to find and even generate joy and meaning and a sense of purpose in the midst of sorrow. No matter what has knocked us down or how long we’ve been there, we can not only survive but thrive. Flattened by grief, we can yet be pierced by beauty, wonder, and delight. These gifts come unpredictably, on their own time table, not necessarily when we think we need them. They transcend categories. They are sneaky and whimsical like elves. They arrive in the form of an act of kindness from a stranger at the gas pump or the scent of a rose on the worst day of your life. Such darts of beauty are as abrupt and undeviating as raptor birds. They swoop down, sweep you up, spirit you away. Yes, they’ll drop you down again, and you’ll know the problem you’ve been facing hasn’t changed. But you’ll be different. You’ll know that life plows on and soars on, even though you seem to be stuck. You’ll know that, even in the depths of your sorrow, you can be reached by the extraordinary, and that, if you pay attention, you will surely be plucked up again. As poets and sages throughout the ages, from Rumi to Leonard Cohen, have reminded us, it’s only when a vessel is cracked that the light gets through.

Discovering how to exist alongside beauty means not only seeing or hearing it, but also becoming possessed of a new impulse to give it away. This inclination, this outward manifestation of the innermost self doesn’t happen all at once. It moves, in fact, in a way that’s just the opposite of beauty’s fleet, unerring arrow. An impulse to reach beyond yourself to gently touch some aspect of the world may feel at first like an odd little impulse you’re tempted to brush away. Walk past the campaign sign touting the candidate you can’t stand in order to bring flowers to a neighbor whose partner has just died? Let a friend or colleague know about some trait of theirs that you really admire? Pause as you stride down a city sidewalk to touch the trunk of a slender, flowering tree? A little tug within you urges, Go on! But another, repellant force frets: What would people think? Maybe some other time, not now. Yet saying Yes to that little tug usually calls forth not frowns or snide laughter, but absolute indifference on the part of witnesses, pleasure from the recipient, and an emboldening boost of joy for you, the giver.

I have experienced the deaths of several loved ones, dangerous alcoholism in my family and in myself, and a personal variation on the kinds of disappointments we all suffer because we happen to have been born as human beings with dreams. For decades I’ve been grieving the demise of nature and the declining health of Planet Earth and practicing something I call radical joy to find and create beauty in broken places.. Throughout the worst of times, I have been periodically seized by bursts of awe and astonishment. I wrote this book to share what I’ve learned about surviving—and even transforming—grief and loss, a process that requires a kind of fierce consciousness. Fierce consciousness is the expectation—unfailingly met—that extraordinary beauty will burst into dark places at any moment, but that to receive it, one has to keep the antennae of perception wide open. The teachers who passed their wisdom on to me were not the kind at whose feet you sit for years, trying to absorb their wisdom and feeling stupid for not getting it. My teachers imparted their lessons quickly, sometimes in just a few seconds and often without words. They were katydids, a glimpse of ocean, a stranger in a subway, a line from a TV show, and grief itself. Without fierce consciousness I would have missed their profound teachings.

How can we can live with the death of the Earth, especially knowing that we have caused it? What water can we eat or drink that is pure, not laced with chemicals or clotted with invisible pieces of plastic? How can we educate and comfort our children and grandchildren, that they can help themselves and others live with what a world of greed and acquisitiveness and the refusal to say enough have wrought? What festivals or practices of atonement, of gratitude, of consolation, shall we have to invent? How can we care for the places we love and care for ourselves in the process, when those places have been leveled by fire, flood, or extreme wind? How can we be open, always, to the song of katydids?

The dire problems facing every one of us planetary citizens in the twenty-first century demand a new kind of heroism. We need to dedicate ourselves to authenticity, courage, and compassion as we face these great challenges, personal and global. We need to claim different kinds of superpowers. No longer can we be lone rangers galloping away from our bold deeds into remote hideaways. No longer can we define the existence of others by what they wear or the color of their skin or what we assume about their gender or know about their politics. No longer can we assume that only humans are entitled to thrive to their fullest extent. We need to be braver and we need to pay more attention to the allurements of the world. We need to nourish our inner lives and embolden our outer lives. And we need all the tools we can get.

This book contains some simple tools for how to live, not just through the hard times themselves, but any day. It offers actions and ways to think about those actions that give them meaning and relevance. The five sections—Sink, Punch, Seek, Receive, and Give—plot a path for dealing with challenge. It begins with acknowledging a bad situation (Sink), but refusing to be overrun by it (Punch). Seek offers suggestions for opening up to inspiration and even delight when you’re stuck in the muck of life and feel like there’s no way out. Receive explores some of the many simple opportunities for opening up to wonder, even in the throes of enormous grief and turmoil. Give shows the power of reaching outward in spontaneous, seemingly minor ways that can change the trajectory of a whole day. After you’ve read the book all the way through, you can open it at random now and then, read a chapter, and see where it leads you.

Fierce consciousness is about braiding attitude, actions, and attention together into a single strong and colorful strand. It’s about co-existing with ourselves, others, and the world around us in a way that becomes part of life, into and through the hard times, and that can inspire us, inform us, and make us bigger people, capable of actions we never thought possible—and often weren’t possible until we ourselves enacted them. It’s about facing the doubt and chaos and fear of what we’re living through without tearing each other apart or falling into such gloom that we want to give up. Finally, it’s about how, even in the most unlikely of circumstances, it is possible to live through hard times with integrity, while giving and receiving abundant beauty, meaning, and joy.

I. SINK

There’s no getting around it. Grief will not be ignored or bargained with. The only way to live with grief is to drop down into its dark, dank, grimy lair and wrestle with it. And by wrestling I don’t mean trying to shove it to the back of your mind or reason with it or whip yourself into asserting that things could be worse. I mean being willing to face the bleakness, the hopelessness, the utter agony of the thing. I mean kicking and screaming and getting pummeled by grief. In the intimate company of grief you wail. You feel like one more sob will yank the guts right out of your belly. It hurts, sometimes excruciatingly. But when you meet grief head-on, it usually overwhelms you only for a finite time. When you avoid grief, it lingers interminably. And eventually, you are released. The confrontation may need to happen again—in fact it probably will—but each time you will be released.

1. Refuse to disbelieve.

Yes, I thought. I put the book down on the study hall table and stared out the window at the winter trees in the school’s back yard. Yes. I understand this. I, too, know what it is to disbelieve and why it is the one thing I absolutely must not do.

Albert Camus’s novel La Peste (The Plague) opens as a lethal rat-borne disease begins to overtake a North African city. At first, most of the citizens refuse to admit that they are under threat. They assure themselves that the illness is nothing much to worry about and will soon pass. They disbelieved in the plague, Camus writes. They thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.[1]Eventually, as they watch their neighbors being carried out of their homes on stretchers, and as they peer down at their own fathers or wives or children, covered with boils and shaking with fever in their beds, they can no longer deny the truth. The government officials formally declare an epidemic and order the city gates locked. No one can get in or out. The plague settles—irrevocable, unyielding, indiscriminate. Along with plans and journeys, hope, too, gradually fades and, says Camus, nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

We were reading the novel in my advanced high school French class. At seventeen, I was sure that Camus had had someone just like me in mind as his ideal reader. I looked down at my Livre de Poche edition, with its cover of a spectral human figure staring down a hillside as rats race toward a stylized Middle Eastern city on the sea. Yes, I thought again, I know disbelief. I’d seen it in my own family, repeatedly. When my father got drunk, he got mean. He would find things to accuse my mother of and then, when he had fueled his sense of injustice with more gin, he started hitting her. By the age of eight I had trained myself to lie awake in bed, breath-bated and board-stiff, waiting for the shift in sounds—the gradual slurring of his words, the sudden rise in the volume of his reproach, a slap, her voice pleading, a smack, a thump, her cry, a thud. Then it was time to get out of bed and run downstairs to plead with him. When I couldn’t pull him away from her, I would run to the kitchen