When I Think About The End of the World

I remember that love is why we are here

Writing in the Dark’s next 12-week seasonal intensive for embodied writing, The Visceral Self, starts soon. In honor of embodiment, I share this post from October.

When I think about the end of the world, I remember the movie Don’t Look Up, and how, when the comet was just minutes from ending all life on Earth, the people who’d been trying to stop it just kept eating their dinner—forks clanking on plates, dishes passed from hand to hand.

They just kept eating their dinner, and reminiscing about what they most loved about being alive, living in beat-up bodies on this beat-up planet, and being with each other in the splintered here and now.

It’s like Brian Doyle’s magnificent essay “Leap,” in which he writes, about the two people who leaped from the south tower hand in hand on 9/11:

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

When I think about love, the thing I remember most—that is, when I truly stop to consider what love actually is, and how to do it, because love is something we do, not something we feel, love is a verb, not a noun, love is an action, a decision, a willful forward movement—is Courtney Walsh’s poem, “Dear Human”:

When I think about what it means to be enough, what it means to be plenty, I think about sitting with my foster grandson Z, both of us thick and feverish with Covid, helping him put together his floor puzzle of the solar system. He pointed at Earth and said with joy, “That’s Mars!”

“See this red one, Z?” I said. “That’s Mars. And this beautiful blue and green one? That’s Earth. That’s where we live. Earth is our home.”

Z pondered this news while breathing heavily into his congested little lungs. Then said with great solemnity, “My house is on Earth!” He pointed to the planet that he, with great and concerted effort, had made whole by slowly fitting together pieces of cardboard, one difficult experiment at a time. “Your house is on Earth, too, Nana,” Z said, brown eyes flashing with sudden recognition. “Our houses are on Earth together. Yours and mine.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You and me, together on Earth.” I didn’t expect the tears that came with those words. It sounds so silly, crying over a floor puzzle of the solar system.

But I did cry.

Because Z—in all his wild energy and and sneezes and coughs and small, warm hands sticky with ketchup—is full love. No, is love. And love is why we are here, and if my writing, my art, and even this imperfect newsletter can contribute just one thing, let it be more love.

That’s it.

I wish that for all of us.

And I thank you for being in my universe. It would be nothing without you.

Love,
Jeannine

PS Please join us for The Visceral Self! I would love to explore embodied writing with you. Seasonal intensives are for paid subscribers, and you can upgrade your subscription anytime to participate.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

―Albert Einstein

If you or someone you know is walking the long path back to yourself after a painful childhood, then my memoir, The Part That Burns, might help light your way.