Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty

Week 12: in which we ask the question that seems unanswerable

Beautiful Magicians,

How do magicians move through a world aflame with violence? Without becoming incinerated? Or so numb, we just look the other way.

This is a question I have pondered for years.

Decades. Starting with my uber-catholic dictatorial family, complete with sexual predator. My solution at the time was to run away. Making a clean break was necessary and fleeing across the country did provide some space to try to figure out who I was, and what I believed, and how I wanted to live. But eventually, I realized there wasn’t enough room in the world to run away from everyone and everything that frightened me. And, besides, no matter where I ran, there I was.

During my divorce, which devolved rapidly into a life-threatening situation, I kept coming back to a question I could never quite answer:

How do I stop fighting with someone who won’t stop fighting?

• I tried fighting back using his tactics of lawsuits. That got me nowhere. I took my ex-husband to court 12 times trying to get the judge to see the physical and emotional danger our son was in. Twelve times the judge scolded me, not my ex, me.
• In my final attempt, I brought the judge a box of weapons found in his father’s house. The judge ruled for the father and threatened me with contempt of court if one more tear fell on my cheek.
• I tried letting things go, letting things unfold as they would. That left my son alone, vulnerable, and terrified.
• I tried nonviolence. Maybe I didn’t really understand what nonviolence was, but no matter what I did, it didn’t stop the attacks.

Day after day, I turned to my journal, asking in deep soul writing: How do I stop fighting with someone who won’t stop fighting?

I never found an answer. I wish I could tell you I did. Because if I had, I would share this magical formula with you and with everyone in our violent world right now. And we would all do it. And the violence would stop.

I sense this question is universal.

It isn’t just me in a bitter divorce. Or me struggling to extricate myself from a theocratic upbringing. It’s us. All of us. In this moment, when uber-patriarchal theocratic governments are inflicting pain and suffering everywhere around the world. In the US in ICE detention camps. And in Gaza. And Ukraine. And Iran and Lebanon and Africa. And. And. And.

So, would you join me in asking this question?

Maybe if we do it together, someone will stumble upon a viable answer. I don’t think the question as I asked it during my divorce quite fits our moment. That’s too small. Instead of asking how do I—one person—stop fighting, maybe we ask how do we get our violent countries to stop fighting?

Talk about a big question.

With this stewing in my mind all week, I stumbled upon a couple quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin that landed rather hard in my heart. Maybe they explain why I never found an answer to my question.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes:

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

OK, this depresses me. I want to answer the unanswerable. If I don’t, if we don’t, how do the predators ever stop? And yet, I have to acknowledge her next quote as true:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

What a paradoxical statement! What makes life possible is living in uncertainty. But, gee, isn’t that obvious. No one knows what will happen tomorrow. Not just on the world stage, but in our own lives. Health can change in a heartbeat. I know three people who received life-threatening diagnoses this week. And weather. Look at the floods in Hawaii.

It’s true, we live in uncertainty.

When Covid and quarantine arrived out of the blue, I interviewed Estelle Frankel whose book The Wisdom of Not Knowing explores this very topic. Her subtitle, Discover a Life of Wonder by Embracing Uncertainty, gave me hope then, and perhaps a dollop of hope now. Rereading it, I found this quote which didn’t feel that important five years ago, but sure speaks to me now:

“Human beings are wired with both a need for safety and security and for novelty and adventure. When our needs for safety and security become too dominant, we will seek to preserve the status quo at all costs…In its extreme, our impulse to seek security and certainty forms the basis of all forms and expressions of idolatry—both spiritual and psychological.”

Hmm, idolatry.

That’s not a word I hear bandied about by pundits describing our world aflame with wars. I kept reading. Estelle writes:

“The biblical metaphor for clinging to certainty, fixating on the past, and trying to control everything is idolatry.”

I can clearly see that the Thug in Chief and his minions are all idolators. Idolators of power, of violence, of money, of the cult, and certainly of the cult leader.

So I ask myself: What’s the opposite of idolatry?

Ursula answers that question in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia:

“We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

Reading this quote, I immediately visualize Renee Good waving an empty hand at the Border Patrol guy as she says, “I’m not mad at you,” seconds before he shoots her. And Alex Pretti reaching down with empty hands to pick up a woman who ICE just shoved to the ground, moments before he, too, is murdered.

It matters that the people of Minneapolis were officially nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize this week for their nonviolent resistance to federal immigration enforcement.

The people of Minneapolis. Not a government entity. The People.

So that’s my answer.

To the unanswerable question. How do I stop fighting? How do we stop fighting?

We reach out our hands.

Photo by McKenna Phillips Unsplash

That’s the real magic. That’s what magicians do. We see pain, we see fear, we see suffering, and we reach out our hands.

I’m reaching out mine. I hope you reach out yours.

Life is Fragile, Handle with Reverence.
And open hands.

Janet

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