Mimesis
Waking Up on October 7, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
From six hundred miles away,
the smoke arrives to fill the air here
and I wake to the scent of burning,
wake to the haze of what was once
tree and weed and home and flesh.
I cannot fathom the stories that enter me
with every breath.
Let the ears do what the nose does—
be sensitive to stories beyond this room,
beyond this canyon, this region, this nation.
There are so many ways we burn.
I want to listen beyond words,
listen the way the heart can
only when its walls are down.
I want to listen to the world
the way the nose takes in the news
of the distant Bighorn Mountains,
how it wakes me up and scrapes me out,
lighting a fire in me, wildly aware
of how vast the world is,
filled with terror and courage.
I can make the world so small sometimes,
hearing only the story of me.
But today on the wind,
I can't not know how connected we are.
Though it isn't easy, though it frightens me,
this is how I want to listen.
There’s a word in yoga, Maya, that sounds like a name, and in the myth stories is often personified. Maya is the word for illusion. Imagine this like a veil that covers the eyes of the heart, making humans believe that all that is false and fleeting, all the changing tides of opinions, desires, every physical state even, is the most real thing. Yet, the teaching goes, the veil separates us from the truth. These veils that Maya place are illusory and keep us separated from what is real and true always.
I thought of this over the week when I discovered my 15-year-old son’s Instagram feed full of a variety of political posts. When I questioned him on his choices, he calmly explained, “I’m following things about both sides. I want to know the truth.”
In his words, I couldn’t help but wonder, how is this online world, curated to make him, and me, believe a particular story; curated to manipulate information so that an endless flow of opinion is presented as truth, forming a veil over our eyes and ears that keeps us seeing and hearing so much daily illusion? Illusions that say again and again, we are separate; we are an “us” and a “them;” we are enemies; we can stand against one another and survive; we can wage war against each other and discover in the end one clear winner. Feels like pretty shaky ground.
One writer I follow, Nadia Bolz-Weber, recently wrote this:
The heated rhetoric in the US right now, meaning ‘they are all raciest who hate women’ and ‘they are all marxists who hate America,’ is cranked up and I find it exhausting and I’m sick to death of how everything we read online (no matter your affiliation) is meant to make us feel righteous and make millions of other Americans look ridiculous. But the reason I find it exhausting isn’t because I am so much more evolved than everyone who falls for it, its because I KEEP FALLING FOR IT.
Oh boy. Maybe that’s why I’m so exhausted by it, too. How am I missing out on a bigger truth, making the world far too small, and forgetting how connected we are?