Becoming the Mountain

By Jessica Shepherd

January, with its short days and cold weather, invites introspection. This year, a pause to reflect seems warranted as we brace for Trump’s return to office.

My husband Hal and I have upped our mediation practice as a way of coping. We now meditate for 30 minutes each morning to a Jonathan Kobat-Zinn (JKZ) recording that asks us to imagine we are a mountain, steadfast amid the rain and snow and the passing of seasons. Or a lake, held by the land, reflecting clouds as they race overhead.

According to JKZ, the goal of meditation is “to fall awake… to be as present as possible for the unfolding of your life, which is what mindfulness is all about.”

Another way we cope is by engaging with our community. We invite the neighbors over for breakfast and call friends instead of texting. We serve on boards supporting causes we believe in, walk in solidarity during the Women’s Day march, and donate what we can. I volunteer each Monday at our local food pantry, literally rubbing elbows with people on both sides of this divide and from all walks of life. Hal donates his time drafting mining appeals for the Native villages he works with.

Those efforts feel both productive and like never enough. One could spend all their time pushing for change, equality, and compassion and still feel as if they’re running themselves into a brick wall over and over.

In her book “How to Do Nothing – Resisting the Attention Economy,” Jenny Odell’s premise is that we live in an attention economy manipulated by billionaire social media moguls like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. “If the alt-right is betting on inattention and a knee-jerk reaction that spreads like wildfire, they’ve won that bet several times.”

She suggests that civil disobedience takes the form of turning away to focus instead on moments of “doing nothing.” These moments are “neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.” Doing “nothing” offers a window into a deeper, more nuanced engagement with the physical world, while creating “little gaps of solitude and silence in which we might eventually find something to say.”

Per JKZ, the idea behind meditation is to wake up, fully experience the here and now, and practice “as if our very life depends on it because it does.” This seems to fit well with the concept of being “woke” to social injustice. But taken a step further, “woke” to our collective lives here and now instead of asleep and dreaming of a past when America was “great.” But great for whom?

The goal then is to make way for those moments of wokeness in hopes that, if we string enough of them together, we will have a reservoir of resolve when we most need it, clear-eyed and level-headed. Not as easily manipulated by the political machine (left and right) who “foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves.” (Odell)

This constant bombardment wears us down so that we either tune out (hence the low turnout of young voters) or leaves us addicted to the “arms race of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think” (Odell again). This agitated, exhausted kind of response has splintered us. Instead of unifying as liberals, we are more apt to focus on the faction that best defines our personal concerns, whether it’s the cost of eggs, mass deportation, Black profiling, or drilling in the Arctic. What we fail to recognize is how fracturing doesn’t serve us; it serves them.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for inaction. I’m advocating for strategic engagement based on well-considered collaborations with both sides of this political chasm. If we take a step back to breathe and consider the options available to us, we might, collectively, develop a new, more hopeful vision for our future. Breaking free means withdrawing our attention from the shock and awe newsfeed and investing that attention where we might actually do some good.

We will create the world we envision. If we foresee a dystopia where the ultra-rich rule from their armed Mar-a-Largos while the rest of us scrabble over the dwindling resources of a sullied planet, that’s the future we will manifest. But if we focus on all that unites us, all that we, collectively, want for our children and our planet, we could rewrite the script. I can’t say I’m hopeful, but I’m not giving up.

Sunrise - Photo by Jessica Shepherd

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Here, in this moment, I am learning to fall awake. I am awed by the fiery sunrise below a waning moon. Aware of the pop and hiss of the fire in the woodstove that warms this room. Attentive to the soft sigh of our dog Arlie as he sleeps alongside his brother Tavish on the couch behind me.

“Falling awake, falling into ourselves.

Reclaiming ourselves. Body, mind, heart, soul, spirit.

Outside of time.

Only this moment. This breath.

This being human.

This being alive.”

~ JKZ