Posting Little; Has The World Become Too Much?

The frequency of my posts to Northwest Ruminations has slowed; six so far this year but mainly innocuous stuff – a word game, a photo collection, a winter poem, an accolade to a tire company. “Why is that?” as Rachel Maddow might ask? Why do I find it hard to address consequential matters, personal or civic?

Am I jaded?  Perhaps I am grown old.  Actually, jaded and aged are connected for jaded is to have seen too much, to be over-exposed; emotions blunted by repetition, too much become too familiar.

And my world is becoming too much.  Of my six spheres of connection (i.e., self, mate, clan, tribe, world, and spirit) half are barely bearable.

1. My self is getting more tippy, though I still ski, crew, sculpt; am still curious and concerned.
2. My stable mate still centers my life.
3. My clan is a mixed bag of busy and well and unwell.  A sister will undergo major, scary surgery Wednesday in far-off Annapolis while I wrestle here at home with tribal discord.  I worry at what kind of world my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are about to encounter.
4. Our tribe is fraught, more fraught than since 1968.  The board over which I supposedly preside is in turmoil; I stand accused by one provocateur of the arrogance of unconscious white privilege and of being overtly prejudiced.  My community is soiled by homeless encampments but unwilling to pay the price of cleansing, healing and prevention.  My nation is polarized, and the center fails.  My party has come to believe that “progressive” means catering to popular delusions about free health care and free university educations, about the ease of taxing wealth, about abolishing private health insurance; promising that anyone wanting one could have a federal job; prating about abolishing the electoral college or re-packing the Supreme Court – promises from the left as empty and demagogic as those from the right made by He-who-shall-not-be-named.  I watch my tribe with “the enormous condescension” of a jaded dilettante. Thanks be for my friends, a healthy and steady source of sanity and support.
5. The greater world?  Already too, too much and becoming more so day by day: democratic republicanism under siege; crude nationalism on the rise; autocrats abounding; the EU coming undone.  An arms race looms.  Nukes proliferate. Climate promises catastrophe -- and delivers. Species go extinct. While we of the west dither. 

Perhaps that is why it’s been hard to blog, to confront provocative thought.  I must gird myself; I must un-jade.  As Berne’ Brown urges, I must begin to “dare greatly” in my little voice of Northwest Ruminations

      6. In the sixth sphere, the sphere of the spirit, I am at ease though increasingly fatalistic. Ven, que  sera; I am ready.