STRETCH YOUR SPIRIT - STAY SANE

Pride goeth before the fall.

Volodymyr Buhayenko was a different kind of doctor; he paid attention to the spirit as well as the body, and he often prescribed “stretches.” He told one patient to burst into song on the subway, which she did. Doing it banished fear and maybe some cowardice, she thought. He challenged me to go into a 7-11 and ask the guy at the counter where the 7-11 was. I couldn’t do it. I was too proud. I still think of his assignment, and still haven’t done it.

Recently, I heard a report about a group that had spent a week homeless in Washington DC. They slept (or not) on cardboard on the sidewalk, with rats sniffing their feet, chiggers biting their ankles, either begging or getting their food from soup kitchens. This stretched the spirits of all who participated; for example, at one point, they were in a ceremonial circle, and a little boy named Sebastian ran into the middle joyfully waving his hands. The person telling us about this said his heart has stretched to daily include Sebastian…who remains homeless.

Over the last few days; ICE agents threw onto the floor a woman distraught at the arrest of her husband; other ICE agents threw journalists out of an elevator so roughly that one was taken to the hospital. Stretching my sympathies beyond that one scene, I thought of the ICE agents’ wives and children, who must be subject to the same rabid behavior. They live with a man who may beat or even kill them, and many are somehow trapped there, just as Americans have been trapped (or have trapped ourselves) into tolerating systematic, sadistic cruelty. We are all subject to the wrath of men who pride themselves in a crooked masculinity. (The goal and purpose of female ICE agents is a mystery to me.)

Our present national atmosphere has stretched my sensibilities, as I, a White woman, realize that now all Americans are living in a world that Black Americans have lived in for centuries, subject to random arrest, beatings, killings, deprived of due process, vilified, and mistreated. The songs the Black culture created in order to survive and prevail, no matter how long it took, are still inspiring: “Hold on,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “We Shall Overcome.” I’m waiting for a new protest song, but I think we’re so stunned that our creativity hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet. I’m trying to think of one myself; after all, I’m a writer and have penned quite a few lyrics, but nothing it coming to me. The spirit of the movement is new.

Volodymyr’s assignments were designed to cultivate humility. If millennia of plays and stories and songs are true, humility brings down even the most powerful in the end. Not to say there isn’t a lot of sacrifice needed to get there, but pride does go before a fall, and the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

See how Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed it:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.