I am not alone in occasionally feeling sucker punched by the universe. My mind and my body register mishaps both locally and globally, as if I might be the nerve on which the world’s sensations ping. There is a thin scrim between me and other living creatures, and I feel the grief and the misery and the shock and the fear, and once every blue moon, a glimmer of hope or of happiness.
While many people seem like imperturbable bumper cars on an unchanging track, I know I am more of a grass blade quivering in a field. And I long for connection with others just as tender and as touched as myself. While I am tempted to launch into a badly sung version of “Somewhere” from “West Side Story,” I will instead imagine a chamber of affection and recuperation, a network of the sensitive where the sensitive can just be, can feel and can rest without worry or molestation.
Let the busy world, the hares with the carapaces of tortoises, hurry on. The rest of us who are easily swept away by compassion can find peace with each other, security in knowing we will temporarily not be assaulted or afflicted by a world blunted to indifference and to injustice.
Let us grow strong and healthy among green, thriving things, among sun and wings, flight and mystery, climbing and sinking as if we were luminescent insects or stars both freshly born and lasting through the ages.
