The Dog Walk at the End of the World
Sustaining Life So We Can Sustain Care
My fiancé’s been gone a lot recently on back-to-back business trips (there it is, folks, the most 1950s-housewife opening line you’ll ever see in this newsletter), which means that our normally divided dog walking duty has fallen primarily to me. Our dog is one of the ones who, if she were capable, would commit arson just for the entertainment value. When she’s bored, nothing and nobody is safe, so we spend an unreasonable part of our lives making sure she is bored as infrequently as possible - out of love for her, sure, but maybe more so for our own self-preservation. This means, among other things, as many daily walks as possible, no matter the weather conditions. We walk shortly after sunrise and late at night and at all kinds of points in between, even when the air is that bitter, biting cold that New England air can be.
Sometimes, I dread the walks: it’s too early, or too late, or I’m too cold or tired. I’ve just woken up and inhaled the daily death tolls, or settled onto the couch after dinner to watch videos of wreckage. I’m halfway through an online conversation with a Zionist I’ve never met. This isn’t the time to put on three more layers and be pulled around the neighborhood.
But actually, it is, and so off we go every time.
My dog, intent on the smells of frost and the tracks of other neighborhood creatures, doesn’t know anything about most things: she doesn’t know about the Middle East, or the internet. She doesn’t know she’s Jewish, matrilineally-speaking. She doesn’t know Thanksgiving is coming, doesn’t know how many weapons we just sent Israel, doesn’t know how connected all of those pieces are to the same web. She knows the ground, the season, the smell of leaf and stick, the excitement of seeing one of her neighbor friends.
Walking with her, every time, becomes a slow, long exhale for me. We are here in the present together, six feet on the ground, two bodies moving through cold November air. She stops to examine a hole in the ground, so I do too. She gets thrilled by a falling acorn, so I do too. For these brief moments, it’s just the two of us in quiet company with the earth.
We are currently witnessing the most horrific time in my lived memory, and we are being begged not to look away. And so we do not look away, because we can’t. Because we owe it to our fellow human beings to bear witness, to see them. But it is hard. We know people have it so much harder, so it feels wrong to acknowledge our own pain and grief, but most of the closest people in my life are hurting deeply and feeling this in an enormous, physical way. We want to look away, and a lot of forces around us are encouraging us to do exactly that. How do we keep going?
Clinical psychologist Dr. Saliha Afridi wrote recently that when her youngest daughter came to her and asked, “Mama, it hurts too much when I think about Palestine. Should I try to stop thinking about it and feeling it?”, she responded this way:
“Your heart is a muscle. If you want to have a strong heart, you cannot shut down or hide from the difficult feelings. You don’t get a strong heart by protecting your heart. You get a strong heart by ‘lifting’ these painful and difficult feelings. Just like at the gym, you can’t go in lifting 100 pounds of grief and sorrow, it will injure you and leave you no good for anyone…at first you will only be able to handle 10 pounds of grief and sorrow. But keep showing up, keep feeling…keep breaking…every time your heart breaks, it strengthens.”
I want to be able to hold what I need to hold to stay committed to justice. I want it for my community members, too. I don’t want us to burn out and break because we don’t feel like we can do anything but suffer. I want us to feel joy and let it remind us how much everyone in the world deserves to feel it too. I want us to walk through the cold November air and take moments completely away from the world, and I want us to remember that being able to take a moment away from suffering should be a universally accessible ability.
I think it’s okay to take breaks, not in the name of weakness or defeat, but in the name of sustaining and strengthening ourselves. That way, we’ll be able to lift and hold more for longer. And I believe it’s that type of sustained, nourished empathy and righteous anger that will make a better world.
What to Eat: I’m going to gear this towards my people in Seattle this time. A large number of Seattle-area restaurants are teaming up to raise money for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. There is something here for everyone, and quite a few of my personal favorites have made the list. To find out who is participating, click here.
On Repeat: I know I’m not special here… Unreal Unearth by Hozier. Good lord, what an album. It’s even based on Dante’s Inferno, for if you’re an absolute nerd like I am.