Where Is Our Consolation?

Will These Wounds Ever Heal?

The Covid frequency is synonymous with the removal of all consolation.

The Christ frequency is the presence of all consolation.

Lately, I’m given this word “frequency” as my only way of describing anything.

“Atheism is a frequency,” I wrote on a notepad the other day.

I’d spent some time with somebody who probably would not identify as such, expressly, but when I came home I felt a kind of sorrow. And that was the line that came into my mind.

I can remember vividly how I felt at the age of six, when my mother vanished for somewhere between 7 and 10 months. Not because she abandoned us but because she was shipped to Sweden for hospitalization, to stabilize against soul pain, (and self-medication.) I’m finally learning to use my own words for these things.

I was seized, at the time, by a spirit of inconsolability, exacerbated by a total void of information about where she was, or even if she was alive. (Another story for another time.) The feeling made my run around like a frantic dog, looking for any adult who could possibly put me out of my misery, tell me the truth. My father’s producers said things like: “She’s resting,” or" “She’s on vacation,” which made me fixate on the possibility she was in Haiti on a beach, since that was her favorite country.

Once I ran down the spiral staircase and went into a tumble, getting a concussion, trying to get downstairs to ask if she had called while I slept. (She had tried, apparently, it’s all very inexplicable. Roy Cohn was involved. My father didn’t have a cruel bone in him. And so forth. Still, this is what happened.)

When she returned, she appeared as a mirage before us, and at first (for a few seconds) we were not sure if she was real.

A child feels this way of they lose sight of their parent, never mind the actual parent actually vanishing, when they are small.

And this morning I felt: “Yes, that’s the frequency of Covid. One is functionally inconsolable.”

How did they do it?

How do we transcend it?

Faith is my only answer.

Yesterday, my computer crashed, and Doug accompanied me to the Apple store, where they fixed it, thankfully. It was snowing. I’d been worrying about never seeing any deer. But lately, he was spotting them.

“Look, animals!” He said. And on the field to my right, was a family of deer.

Relief.

On the way home I told Doug we need to think about what we say, and imagine that whatever we say we bring about, by our words.

“Let’s speak forth what we would want, if we dared,” I said. (New Age co-opted this Biblical concept.)

In the beginning was the word.

“Can you think of anything you want?” I asked. Doug got a look on his face like:

“Oh this is not the right answer.”

“What is it?” I said.

He was quiet. Finally he answered.

“Can you believe all I can think of is that I want a balloon?”

I burst out laughing.

”Only you, Doug,” I said, smiling, and resisted the urge to bully him into wanting bigger things in life.

“Red?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Did you lose a balloon, as a child?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

I love the question: “What are you thinking?” but not everybody does.

“What are you thinking?” Doug asked.

“I’m thinking now I have to get you a red balloon,” I said.

And all night I had a feeling of wanting to give back to Doug something he lost, not necessarily a balloon, but thousands of impressions he’d gleaned from this life, that his thoughts were not right. His oddness, something he must conceal. And I mean oddness with great affection.

I invite all of us to think of something we want, the way a child does, and say it out loud, or write it out loud.

I want to be kind. And I want to be able to focus.

And keep something.

I don’t want to be right; Not anymore.