Silver Linings, Inner Gold

Michael Meade's The Light Inside Dark Times (2009)- Excerpt
 (This man is gentle and brilliant. Better to listen.)

You know how there's the saying, "There is good news and bad news?" I just couldn't think of any good news. So, I was thinking about the bad news and the poll that came out a few days ago said that 42% of Americans now believe, because Americans are always believing. Now, other people in the world by the way, don't believe anything. They know shit, ya know? Turns out if you know things you don't have to believe everything.

But 42% of Americans now believe that the recession is already becoming a depression and it will last a minimum of three years. And I thought of that as kind of an accomplishment. For Americans. To have that much capacity to imagine things going down for awhile. I thought of it possibly as a maturing. Of course depression is the most popular emotional condition in America. You watch all those advertisements on TV for designer antidepressant drugs. We've been in a depression psychologically for a long time.

So, there's two big dangers when it gets heavy and dark and troublesome. One is naivete which tends to deny what is going on and the other is cynicism which tries to outguess what is going on. I think these are two dangers and I would like to talk about avoiding them. For instance, I was in the local bank the other day talking to the woman at the counter about how I live on this little island and the island has already been hit by the recession. Small communities get hit real fast because they have limited resources. And I was talking about that and she said, "Well, every cloud has a silver lining." And I turned to her and said, "Really? And that's actually not true. That's not even the original statement."

So I looked up where that statement comes from since it's always bothered me. First of all, it's not an old proverb. Second of all, it's a complete misphrasing of what John Milton wrote in 1634. And if anyone knows the work of John Milton, he's not one to be promoting silver linings. Here's what he actually wrote, "Was I deceived or did a sable cloud turn forth her silver lining on the night?" So you see it is a question. Was I deceived or was the silver actually there? The storm clouds were real but the silver lining was in question. So how did it become "every cloud has a silver lining?"The person who changed it is interesting. It was P.T. Barnum. The guy who said, "there is a sucker born every minute" and he also said, "every cloud has a silver lining."

So two of the ways of being a sucker these days are to be naive or to be cynical. Every cloud has a silver lining? A nuclear cloud does not have a silver lining. Some of these clouds drop acid raid. They do not have silver linings. Naivete and cynicism you could say are opposite ends of a defense against difficulty. They are both moves that deny the soul.

Naivete denies the soul's intrigue with trouble. It's wonder about death. And cynicism pretends to be deep but it misses the soul's centrality. Does that make sense? I don't know I just say things. If they're helpful use them, if not you know. Just go to the sideshow.

What I want to suggest is don't become cynical. Because cynicism is a Greek word: kyôn. And it refers to a dog that keeps chewing on a bone even though the marrow is long gone. So cynics chew at empty bones. Get no nourishment out of the bad facts. The idea is to find a way between, which I'm calling soul-making. Another way to think about it is to be creative. Was it William Blake who said, "The only legitimate outcome of conflict is creativity?" Conflicts come to us to make us creative. No automatic silver lining but the opportunity to mine the conflict and the trouble for something valuable. Part of what we're struggling with, is a culture that's been pulled apart several different ways. It's gotten to be so extreme now that everyone has to feel it. What does that have to do with the soul?  The soul is the secret connection between things and when things begin to fall apart personally or collectively it's the soul that instinctively knows where to reconnect.

I wouldn't be expecting things to smooth out pretty soon. So if you think we're in for a bumpy ride... [probably wise]. And culture which is supposed to hold people and cultivate them- if it's coming apart then people begin to feel that. We feel that as a deep anxiety. One of the necessary things in those conditions is to be able to find one's own soulful center. When the culture has lost it's center, all the more reason for a person to need their own center. Soul centers us. Soul has to do with circular, cyclical movements. Whenever we're near the soul, we're near the center of our selves. Most spiritual practices and most of the arts are actually intended to center a person, so one of the ways to respond to the increasing trouble and the darkness that's spreading is to find probable ways to center oneself. For example, if you think of pottery centered in the middle of the wheel and you can see how much that art or craft is actually a centering of the person. To tell you the truth, painting, dance requires you to find your center. Playing music properly means your breath has to move through your center. All those things are really there not just as options in the community college curriculum. They are there to cause us to center ourselves and they become all the more pertinent when times get difficult.

You could also say that is part of the job of all people now, because the problem has spread throughout the world. It is to attempt the reconciliation of our unreconciled world. A reconciliation that brings culture and nature into more balance. A recognition that brings the poor and the rich into more balance. There's an attempt from underneath to reconcile things as we attempt to go through what I call the end of an era and the beginning of an era.

Michael Meade's Nonprofit- Mosaic Voices