Dead Weight

Have you ever injured a toenail and watched it turn black and blue and purple with all the blood congealed beneath?  The nail starts to calcify, get more rigid.   Eventually it starts to feel loose and then finally is hanging on by a smaller and smaller piece.

These days I feel the overculture hanging on like a bruised up toenail.

I wake up in the morning and I can’t believe it's still there. Throughout the day I walk about, limping a bit but managing.  Trying to watch out for it even though I know it has no energy and life of its own.  It is still connected to me.  I still need it in some way my body knows but my brain can’t quite comprehend. Inevitably at some point it snags on something and I feel the pain scream through my system.

I have to call an insurance company, I get a recorded message with a phone tree and eventually it just hangs up on me without ever offering me a human voice or giving me an answer to my question.  I feel a little more dry and this makes sense - the old system is binary and desiccated, antagonistic and materialistic.  It is extractive.  

I look in the eyes of people I don’t even know and I know they have their own experience of this bruised up hangnail.  They have some basic life need and they make a call and listen to a robot and get hung up on. Their water bill was abnormally high and so they tried to find their account online but got locked out of their devices 5 times trying to reset their passwords and so gave up.  I see the exhaustion of this blackened, dead shell hanging on as they try to go about their survival routines and I have more care and compassion for them than ever before. 

But just this week I felt something new - just the hint of it but it was real I am sure.  The naked pearlescent little snailshell of a new nail beneath. 

And I find more and more I catch little glimpses of her.  My neighbor offers me fresh eggs.  A crow brings me an instant coffee packet in exchange for a month of sunflower seeds (and more recently some cheesy poofs).  A stranger picks up trash on the street. The long branches of the fir tree in the park are suddenly flush with new growth at her tips (like…new fir tree fingernails?).  I breathe deeply. I remember that my breath is an emission of carbon dioxide that feeds this tree and so I breathe out more intentionally in her direction. 

This is the new toenail I think we are growing, friends.  Interconnection. Empathy.  A nervous system that recognizes each other.  It's not all the way here yet - it comes and goes.  We all still sometimes need to retreat into the protection of an old dead shell. 

But the gift that comes from acknowledging death is that we are forced to remember that it is always accompanied by new life.  Maybe not for us, maybe not without suffering, and maybe not soon, but new life of any sort is worth pausing for with awe.

Any new life offers possibility.

Because we all know how the toenail story ends: eventually it just falls off.  And when it does, it returns to being a part of a composting process that is way older than patriarchy, capitalism, or white supremacy.