How to be Good

Outside the bedroom window, surrounding trees are the ultimate counterpoint to a shattering despair. Ringing the perimeter of this place, not my home, these giants offer evidence of what can thrive. Heavy with dew, shimmering like hidden ghosts behind a curtain of mist, they whisper to me, laying in rumpled morning sheets, lost in a canyon of thought that is almost comprehension. I watch them and they watch me.

Trees are regal and beautiful and innately moved to rise, to reach towards life. They turn to each other; their breathing - the mechanical opposite of mine- offers life, open and blossom. They always create.

During a year of relentless trauma, I made almost no photos, I wrote only one new essay. I am recovering, staggering back to myself with no art, a broken heart, and two therapists whispering gently about CPTSD like the wind in trees. Trauma removes us from others, even ourselves, and while I have been a stranger to myself, it's been difficult to recognise inspiration. Towards the end of the year, I spent a few harrowing weeks convinced of many things; one was that I'd never make anything again.

I wish I could say I was undaunted, that I always behaved with grace and did and said the right thing, that I didn't fall apart.

But the truth is I did fall apart. I was little more than a list of words for a while, a few reminders written in simple language on my phone and around my house on Post-it notes, a string of breaths held together by a handful of people who love me, words that resisted memorisation but I repeated and over and over nonetheless: take your time, you have the right to exist, nothing is your fault, you are safe...

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of us today, in every living thing, in me and you and the trees and all the small creatures who live on the earth. We are vastly interconnected, our fates inseparable.

I'm starting to think about creating again, and one recent evening, I restarted an essay I'd given up on ( not this one ) and made dinner for the first time in months; I slept for hours and hours in a row and didn't have a nightmare. I did my best.

This is how I live, I think to myself: One day at a time.

Writing is a way to summon the self. It provides me with ways to make sense of my experience and to let go of the pain that lingers in my body. Hours spent in bed writing is a softening time with me. I write to discover who I am. I write what I know, my joys and suffering. A way to dissect the biodiversity of the self. I am full of trauma but also hope, and I have so much to learn.

I'm the kind of person who needs to test things in my mind against the hard surfaces of the world before venturing to claim they are genuine and real; before I decide the shape and meaning of things, I have to feel them. I am a person who takes things very seriously. I'm invested in making true for myself what Oscar Wilde once said: "I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me". I

You see, tragedy happened - a lot - and the details are hopeless and overwhelming, and communication is shut down and lost because my limbic system and prefrontal cortex and the living pumping organ where I keep all my benevolence - all of it was - until pretty recently - on fire.

2023 / 2025

My desire for beauty is a core, unchosen aspect of my identity. So much of how I live is an attempt to bring beauty closer to the bone, to make it alive. I want to be good even if there is no inevitable moral arc to the universe or our actions, even if no act on its own bends towards justice or healing. But still, I'm always trying to explain myself, do what is good, try to make everything that happens to me a lesson, try to find empathy. I imagine living as someone else; I imagine washing their dishes, folding their clothes fresh from the line, and brushing their hair. That is empathy, the re-enactment of a self. When we use empathy, we become the ghost of another, learning to walk the land as they walked it, to make their mistakes, to feel their joys. To hope some of their hopes and understand their way of understanding the world.

I need empathy to understand the year that happened to me.

I needed empathy from others to survive it.

Empathy is a fire we tend together.

2023

Janine Benyus, an American science writer and biomimicry innovator, says, "Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life", These words shine and I can think of no better truth in which to ground a future self.

Some thoughts about believing in my own fundamental goodness arise and evaporate like the mist among the trees. It would be better to think about my choices because goodness is not actually a fundamental element of the self, nor is it a rigid performance of social dogma. Goodness is the blossom of our choices when we make choices conducive to life. I lay very still and keep watching the trees, repeating this idea to myself:

Goodness is the blossom of our choices when we make choices conducive to life.

The trees move outside, full of sound and wind; among their numbers are many downed trees, pulled up by storms but still growing, their fallen branches green with life, their roots feeding other trees. If I do nothing else, I remind myself that I can take my time to feel differently and I can do my best. I can make choices that are conducive to life. I can choose with kindness; I can choose with hope.

Soon, I will feel gratitude for friends and lovers and even this pain of self-knowledge. Soon, I will be able to be grateful that I have the luxury of self-discovery. Already, I am stunned to be alive, mostly safe, soon I will feel greedy for more time to be myself.

The trees sigh, and I breathe through the rush of wanting love and connection. Breathe through the wondering How long? Breathe under a dome sky surrounded by growth and support, and soon, I will wonder how the world can be so beautiful for even one minute.

2025]

~

"Hope is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same as the conviction that something will turn out well or the same thing as optimism. It is a certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

~

From An Orientation of the Heart

Václav Havel