The Vulnerability of the Void
on creativity, courage, connection, and climate change
I think maybe if smartphones didn’t exist, I would have done more by now to put myself “out there” in service of my values out of sheer necessity of connecting to the world.
The unoccupied mind searches for something to do, engage with: some expression of itself. Absent a phone to roll over to, turn on, and scroll through every morning until fifteen or forty-five minutes fly by and I need to scramble to get ready for work, or to flop onto the couch with each night until bedtime, maybe I would have been forced to put my mental energy into being more productive and creative with my twenties.
Maybe, absent a digital archive of photos of myself that I can scroll through to feel instantly-looked-at, seen, sometimes-beautiful, but at-least-real, in a perhaps-artificial-and-masturbatory but still-deeply, immediately-comforting way, I would have done the slow, uncomfortable work of forging my inner realness into written words to be read by the outside world, like sculpting a human form out of the mush of clay.
Writing can, in its most pleasurable iteration, feel like the breaking of a dam: pent up energy gushing, flowing beautifully into spaces it needed to reach. But for so much of my twenties, staring at a page or screen to try to do this thing that my insides ache to do, to express things rumbling to be expressed, felt like sitting in front of a huge, shapeless chunk of marble. The prospect of chipping bit by bit until some shape emerged, and the realization that the process itself was necessary to even figure out what I was trying to make, because I had a warm, wonderful feeling inside of me but not a concept of how the feeling could manifest materially, felt staggering. How on earth could Michelangelo have ever created David? was my feeling. It is impossible.
The birth of something material, precise, and technically perfect out of spiritual, emotional, existential space is the role, and often the frustration, of art. How unfair it feels to brim with pleasure when I hear a song, and then to try to play the song myself and hear how amateur and embarrassing it sounds — or to pulse with joy and sensuality, but become clouded by anxiety when I try to write. Translating the inner world to the outer world in a way that does justice to the inner world’s beauty is a fine art and a technical science.
Such a translation is also, I think, what climate change asks of us. Global warming is a scientific challenge with a spiritual truth unexpressed at its core. We have given our planet earth a fever, poised to become a runaway fever with no turning back, because we fail to live in balance with the very-finely-tuned ecological system of life from which we ourselves were born; in failing to respond adequately, we turn away from the parts of ourselves that sing “I’m alive! See me! Take care of me!”; that ache for connection and community; that grieve when we see animals and other humans suffer or die.
Global warming is the ultimate reminder that we are all in this together. We fail to fine-tune our economy to adhere to this fundamental truth to our collective peril. Many appear to have accepted that it’s ok if life on earth ends anyway, because, whatever. The blue, fevered marble we live on is too big and too misshapen, and we’re not Michelangelos.
The fact is that we can be Michelangelo to this blue marble of a home. Unceasingly astonishing is the fact that we have the technical expertise and know-how — not as individuals, of course, but collectively. The science is there to understand the problem; the technology is there to transition to clean energy, to plant trees to create photosynthesis, to clean the oceans, to provide high-quality reproductive access, to draw greenhouse gases back out of the atmosphere, etc, etc. Yes, the solutions are massive and overwhelming and possible long shots, but they are there, and we have to start somewhere. Even if we fail, isn’t it better to go out reconnecting to what’s deep and real than drowning out fear with tv and scrolling?
Every bit of life that exists stems from some primitive clump of cells, an unrecognizable iteration of itself: proof that through sustained, tiny efforts, the impossible becomes real. All of our bodies are born from murky, etherial space stubbornly refusing not to keep pushing itself into physical form. Yet, I’ve felt terrified to begin writing at all for the feeling that I don’t already know exactly what to say. And we continue not to act on the climate because we feel too comfortable or too scared or too small.
While we, the people, *do* care about global warming, the institutions of the rich and powerful — business and government, finance and technology — have afforded us the instruments to create technical, material, fine-tuned solutions without the motive to enact them. Even the democratic debate barely addressed them. And thus, those with power to make big changes do not act, and those who can only make small changes feel powerless to act. The sense that we are divine beings worthy of saving cannot come from institutions. It can come from us. It wants to. It must.
We live by the rules of an economy whereby if a person or an animal has an interiority, that inner world is valuable to the degree that it can be capitalized on. But defying this system to adequately fix our home’s fever requires radical connection of inner, deep-down truths with the outer world. In harnessing our own aliveness, we fight for life itself: for love and art and sex and laughing and weddings and dancing and music and flowers and babies and days at the beach and eating and drinking and cuddling and seeing the stars in the sky and being afraid and facing fears and striving to improve ourselves and failing and trying again, for beholding the mystery of it all and for feeling the hope of each new morning. All of the gifts that life bestows on us; all of the things that feed our souls.
The space where we create a sustainable future cannot only be dark and angry and punitive, making us want to retreat back into our phones until doomsday. Only with generative, connective space will we have the sustained motivation to do what needs to be done.
The other day, after dying my hair and putting on some lipstick, one beer deep and listening to music, I looked in the mirror and felt straight-up BEAUTIFUL. I looked truly gorgeous to myself, and it was such a rush to really believe that I was this thing I’ve spent so much of life chasing. But I realized, just when I felt so good, that what I wanted more than anything was to share the feeling: to make other people feel that way about themselves. The real magic is when we realize that we are are so much more beautiful and powerful than we knew.
We have a responsibility to wield our power for our planet, each other, and ourselves: this moment asks this of us. It is immensely scary and hard to forge uncertainty into structure — whether this means facing climate change or writing into the void of the internet. A lot of me would rather roll over and scroll through the safe world of my digital avatar. But it is infinitely better — and imperative — to reconnect to how divine and special it is to be alive at this moment when we humans are big and smart enough to have created a massive problem that only we can solve. This gorgeous blue marble needs us to wake up and remember how gorgeous we are, too.
