The Many Writings of

I haven't written much since September 11th, but I've been doing a lot of thinking. And traveling. And singing.

At first the traveling was terrifying and it felt rather unnatural and scary to be singing, or doing anything even vaguely celebratory in the aftermath of the attack that left us all permanently scarred. I realized, though, that making music was the absolute best thing I could be doing, that singing was going to help to heal me, heal our audiences, mend my tattered spirit and most importantly, feed that guttering flame of goodness that felt so faint, so nearly extinguished.

What can we do, what can I do to insure the continuing existence of good in an environment so dominated by fear, hate, aggression and intolerance? How can we survive spiritually in a time of war? When everyone is buying gas masks, rubber suits and bottled water and dreaming up worst-case scenarios for our collective fate, what are the possibilities for joy?

Ok, first things first. How can you consider joy if you're walking into walls? How to cope with the destabilization of our life style, the new and unwelcome feeling of constant vulnerability, the persistent, ugly ostinato underlying our daily lives, punching out the disheartening message that someone out there is out to destroy us?

For one thing, get rid, forever, of the idea of 'getting back to normal'. That will only torture you, piss you off and send you into an impossible maze of doublethink. There is no getting back. We have to move ahead and redefine normal. Things aren't going to be the same again, ever. Actually we are just catching up with 'what is'. We've been bludgeoned into reality, and nobody likes it much. I don't, but it's easier to accept it if I'm not continually pining for what was, because what was, wasn't. It was the product of our own massive denial about what's been going on outside and inside our own borders. So as much as it hurts, let it go.

Have you seen the bumper sticker (that inexhaustible source of folk wisdom) that mentions 'random acts of kindness'? They have to stop being random. In the week or two following the attack, New Yorkers were deeply and consciously kind to each other. As the city has settled into the next stages of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, that kindness has attenuated somewhat, but it is still a palpable thing in Manhattan. As individuals we have a very small and limited sphere of effectiveness in our actions, but collectively speaking, conscious kindness will help feed that flame of goodness. Doing kind things on purpose will help to offset the horrible counterweight of intentional malice with which we are beset. It helps to bridge the gap between individuals, grown deeper by the pervading fear sewn by terrorism. The ultimate triumph of terror is the isolation of individuals from each other, each cocooned in fear and paranoia.

They don't have to be big things, these acts of intentional kindness. Few of us can sit down and write out a six-figure check to the Red Cross. It's not for me to say what those acts may constitute for you, but you know the feeling in your heart when you stretch yourself even a small amount for someone else unasked. A word, a touch, whatever it is for you, magnified by thousands and millions, can insure that the force of good remains alive.

Make music. Make love. Make lasagna. Celebrate life in some way every day. Life is a fragile miracle and each day is precious, made all the more so as it is continually threatened.

Another thing you can do for yourself is to consciously limit your television news intake. I felt, in the week following the attack, as though I'd been gangbanged by the media. I thought that, if I were living in a primitive, non-technological society and I saw something horrific, I would see it but once. It would be burned into my brain and I'd remember it for the rest of my life. The awful moments of the planes slamming into the World Trade Center, the explosions, people on fire, plummeting through the air, the ultimate collapse of the towers were replayed hundreds, maybe thousands of times; full-screen, insets, dissolves, stills, fades, backgrounds. Each and every time I saw those images, I could feel myself in that strange paroxysm of sadness, grief and horror. And I couldn't break away. We were all victims battered, day after day, with absolute awfulness. It was the emotional equivalent of being sucker-punched again and again and being unable to duck. Now, with each new case of anthrax, each nugget of anything having anything to do with our 'new war', the news media continue to prey upon and stoke our fears. At moments I feel that, although I survived the physical attack on America, I may not survive the attack of the media pundits, their dire prognostications, useless conjecture and sensationalism.

I still feel the need to know what's going on, but once I have separated the information from the chaff of intrinsic hype so beloved of the media, I try to get on with my life. The boundary between hard news and fear-inducing idiocy has become nearly indistinguishable. Fear is a great paralyzer, and anything even approaching normal functioning is disrupted by constant fear. I am most emphatically not saying that it's better not to know what is going on, but reactive, fear-driven thinking is not living, and I adamantly refuse to stop living. There are two basic movements in the life force, expansion and contraction. It's one of those simple binary processes. You are either expanding into life or contracting into death, and the choice between the two is yours. If we are to do more than just survive, if we are to flourish and even once again find joy, the choice is obvious.

To all of you my deepest love and respect
bear