Returning to your first question in crisis
Hi all, season two of The Wise Unknown launched Monday and, as I re-listened, I was sort of stunned by how crucial an antidote this conversation is for this exact moment of national crisis.
My friends and I are huddled in the corner of dinner parties, and winding our way around Eucalyptus covered hills, trying to figure out what this moment is calling for us to do. We’re talking about the broligarchy and how it feels kind of impossible to be a creative person and not have some aspect of your income traceable back to misguided, White dude billionaires. We’re talking about attention and how the conversation around it is so crucial, but also largely missing the intersection of care (I did appreciate the Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes conversation, but so wished a big sister figure was in the mix saying, “Okay guys, we know you’re both brilliant. Now let’s land this plane into the country of real listener’s real lives.”) In our group texts we’re trading resources about how to protect our gender non-comforming kids and our friends who work for the federal government, our elders dependent on Medicaid and our immigrant collaborators. We’re paying attention to our bodies—the way they both want to mobilize and also want to pause and grok what the hell is happening right now so as not to let our finite lives become defined by reaction to depraved bullshit.
We’re looking around and asking, on a deep sociological level:
What is really going on here?
Well, that’s what
, the “wise unknown” of this episode is constantly asking, too. She’s a writer, a mother, an old soul growing younger all the time, and she is hell bent on telling the truth about how the world really is—not how we wish it were or how it was.Her insistence on asking the first question she ever asked forever reminds me of an essay I once wrote when I was a columnist at On Being. Here’s an excerpt:
When Dorothy Day was a little girl, she witnessed the world around her reduced to rubble by an earthquake. It was 1906. Fifty thousand refugees fled from San Francisco by boat and were welcomed in various spots along the east bay by welcoming strangers, and were fed, clothed, and comforted. Day wrote of the formative experience:
“While the crisis lasted, people loved each other. It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity. It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in times of stress, unjudgingly in pity and love.”
In other words, at just eight years old, Day asked, Why can’t people always care for one another unconditionally? It’s a question she continued to ask in various forms for the rest of her life — cofounding the Catholic Worker Movement and its many Houses of Hospitality, and becoming a radical legend in the process.
Hearing about Day’s first, big question got me wondering about my own. What is the question that I asked as a little girl and have never stopped asking? How has asking that question defined, even if unconsciously, the choices I’ve made, the things I’ve created, the legacy I will leave behind?
Read the rest here.
My first question, as I understand it now, is very related to Janine’s:
How can we wake up from our delusions?
Delusions of perfection. Delusions of saviorism. The delusion of the American Dream. The delusions of supremacy and safety. The delusion of self-sufficiency.
I want to chip away at all the delusions until I am left broken and luminous, soft and surprised, fierce and playful. Maybe that’s part of what this podcast is all about for me—getting to have the conversations underneath the conversations, without pre-conceived frames or promotional objectives, no “big ideas” or soundbites. I just want to talk about what actually matters in life. I’m increasingly aware of how fast it all goes, how finite it all is. We don’t have time to waste on delusions.
Which is also to say we don’t have time to waste on delusion peddlers—not just our 47th president, but anyone who is too sure that they’ve got the exact formula for success, happiness, transcendence, prosperity, anyone too in love with how smart they sound, anyone who doesn’t prioritize the smallest, grandest assignment there is in this life—treating those around them with dignity and tenderness.
Take a listen. Tell us what you think. Subscribe, like, review. Tell a friend. Subscribe to
’ Substack. Let’s slay all the delusions one exquisite question, one raw conversation, at a time.Okay lay it on us in comments: What is your first question? And are you asking it now in this time of national crisis?
I haven't had a chance to listen to the episode just yet, but as I read your question: How can we wake up from our delusions? I was immediately reminded of Vanessa Andreotti's work. I'm presently leading a deep, slow, rearranging group read of her delusion decomposing book Hospicing Modernity. It might be part of what you're looking for.
Well, I never knew about my first crisis until my Mother shared with me (in my sixties) that they (she and my father) thought they were going to lose me from starvation just after birth. Later among my father's notes, he referred to this as "Robert's near-death experience." I was a painfully shy child, fearful. So the question "am I safe?" or "will my basic needs be met?" seems like an honest return to my "first question in crisis." It would have been nice to know this growing up as that question has dominated my stance towards the world. And, I imagine my parents believed they were protecting me. To get to my delusions, I must slow down, pause, and take a deep look at the narratives I keep telling myself. That was a provocative (in the best sense) prompt. And I remember fondly your writing and presence at On Being. And Dorothy Day is a hero of mine as well. Talk about how to be in the world!