This essay originally appeared in Writing It Real August 2006. The question I was exploring is still one many of us ask when we consider the world’s situation: Where is our writing in all this? How should it matter?

Every time I open my computer, I look at the upper right-hand corner of the screen to type in what I am searching for and avoid looking at the left-hand area with its news images of death and destruction. When I listen to radio news or watch news on television, I feel too stunned for tears, too shocked for heartache. How is it possible, though, that I deflect the images of children wounded and killed in every country at war, of soldiers who are the sons of women raping “enemy” woman, of people walking by the bombed out areas of once thriving villages and cities in Iraq, in Lebanon and Israel?

I even manage not to cry at the front-page headline about a psychopath killing one woman and wounding five others in the offices of the Jewish Federation in the city where I raised my children. That is, until I view a young man sobbing in a courtroom during sentencing for killing his friend in a game they played attempting to strangle one another to the point of passing out. I cry with the sobbing man. In what shadow place does trust live now that it engenders such behavior?

His image is still with me when Britain announces it’s arrested over 20 terrorists just before they were going to deploy a plot to blow up US airliners en route from London. I can’t avoid reports of airport security teams scrambling to take liquids and gels out of carry-on luggage since the terrorists were planning to make explosives from them while on board. I let the image of tired travelers neutralize the horror of images of planes exploding midair and remember my son-in-law is traveling by plane this day. I call my daughter to find out how he’s doing and learn that he left very early in the morning, before directives about how to deal with a new threat. When we hang up, I look at the yellow blossoming rhododendrons I purchased to plant along the perimeter of a forested ravine behind my house. I leave them in the dry soil of the pots they came in. I do not have energy to plant them.

Instead, I sit and read an interview with Marion Woodman in the August 2006 The Sun Magazine. This issue, with her name on the cover, caught my eye because years ago, I read her book Leaving My Father’s House, and I like the humor in the interview’s title, “Men are From Earth, And So Are Women.” In the article, the author James Kullander, introduces Woodman by quoting from her early book Conscious Femininity, in which she discusses her work with Carl Jung’s colleague E.A. Bennet: “I, who was so smart and rational, couldn’t feel anything. He would just sit there and feel for me until I got the message. Tears would start to run down my face, not because I was sad, but because…I was picking up my own feeling from him.”

I begin thinking more about my own odd ability to usually not feel the devastation being brought home to me at every turn. I hear the voice of my mother’s 85-year-old friend telling me how desperate she is because the people who live in their retirement building don’t mention any of what is going on in the world. I think, right, my neighbors all get the daily paper delivered to their homes and take them inside. When we talk about what we’ve read, though, we mention only temporary bridge closures for repairs or increased ferry fares, anything but the horrifying news.

I go back to reading the article and find the interviewer discussing the state of the world with Woodman:

Kullander: …What do you see happening right now in analysis, and in the world?

Woodman: Chaos. The fear of real living, of giving up power….

Kullander:  You’ve spoken about a new consciousness emerging. Is this related to the chaos you are talking about?

Woodman: Yes, the new consciousness is emerging in a fiery birth, which explains all this chaos within and without. All the selfishness and judgment, the religious posturing that says, “Anyone who doesn’t believe exactly the way I do and have the same God that do is inferior to me”–all of that is dying a violent death…??…things are likely to get worse before they get better. The dominant, destructive patriarchal and matriarchal forces in the world are not going to give up easily.??…I am working on a book about what I call the “death mother,” which is the archetype that is now at the center of our world. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I think it’s true. When we become possessed by the death-mother archetype, we feel an unconscious longing for death. It’s different from Jung’s “negative mother,” which hits us in the mind with criticism and shames us into self-rejection. The death mother hits us in the body. We feel stung, paralyzed. We give up in despair. Our body is turned to stone, and we abandon who we are.

“I am running into this everywhere I go: a loss of hope among people of all ages,” Woodman says.

She continues:

In his book Four Quartets T.S. Eliot writes that faith and love and hope are all in the waiting. But we don’t know what to hope for, because we don’t know what to love; we don’t; know what to have faith in, because we don’t know what to wait for.”

Woodman is referring to part three of Eliot’s second quartet, “East Coker”:

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing,

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without

love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.

Eliot wrote thisin Londonduring World War II. He was familiar with the Underground trains stopping for long periods of time while bombs fell. He knew about not knowing what one would find on the surface streets. Have we turned to stone, I wonder, into the same rubble we see on our television screens as the polarized of the world battle it out? ??How can I hold the silence differently than a stone?

“Sound, if you like, is a transformation of breath. The word is the breath of God. We have forgotten the metaphorical language, or we don’t understand it, and as a result, we’ve forgotten how to be human,” Woodman contends.

I think about metaphor allowing us to breathe in a world suffocating in its choices of death and destruction. I start to write to discover metaphors I might use to examine my body sensations when terrible news arrives rather than hurry to distract myself from them:

Hearing about the shootings in Seattle, I feel sickened and chilled like I do when coming down with a fever; I feel like I did the day I saw the World Trade Center towers falling. I feel like I did as a child learning cars don’t always stay in their lanes. I write to a friend who I think might have known some of the women. She writes back that her close friend was a close friend of the woman who died. When I think of the women suddenly vulnerable in the quarters where they worked, I think of a nest I uncovered with a bird’s eggs inside. It was no longer protected when I cut tall grasses away from the lowest limbs of a pine tree. My neighbor told me she saw my cat swipe the nest down.

A dark cat prowls this earth, and we are all as vulnerable as if we were nestlings housed on the lowest limbs of a tree.

Now that I have found a metaphor that stirs me, I stop writing and look at the rock garden I planted on the bank beside my driveway. Under the August sun, I see the top leaves of low-growing plants brown from dryness, but I know that when the rain returns in winter, I can trim away this year’s spent growth, and green leaves will take over. I know the seeds so recently blown from their pods will sprout. ??Life has its way with death, I think and remember, that is my training, what I learned saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for my grandparents, my son, and my father. Though the prayer contains no reference to death, it is what Jewish mourners say and it states acceptance of Divine judgment when a person could become bitter and reject God.

I get the container of coffee grounds I’ve kept from brewing this week’s morning coffee and sprinkle the moist dark matter around my acid-loving blueberries and rosemary. I do not know why the world is the way it is. I do not know what I might possibly tell the grieving families of the dead and injured women, the war victims, the young man strangled, the strangler. But just as with the other losses, I must make something grow, turn this burning into something that nourishes life.

Everything depends on this. I gather the rhododendrons and find them places on a ridge under cedar trees. I plant them. “L’chaim,” I say as robustly as I can, “To life. One for the women wounded and killed, one for the young man strangled and his strangler, one for the saved plane loads, and all for the hundreds killed in the Middle East.” ??I offer this prayer, “May I come to view your blossoms in spring time and may peace be at the heart of the season. Amen.”