You Are Not an Employee

So here we arrive in the third wave of the pandemic and frankly, it’s not good. And yet, as ever, we go on, because the alternative is not optimal.

In the beforetimes, I often thought of this quotation by Hélène Cixous:

“We who are bits of sun, drops of ocean, atoms of the god, and who so often forget this, or are unaware of it, and so we take ourselves to be employees. We who forget we could also be as luminous, as light, as the swallow that crosses the summit of the incomparable hill Fuji, so intensely radiant.....”

If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter you’ve seen my “Portrait of Edmonton” photos. And you know about my various still life photo projects. (We don’t btw have a cat as you see in today’s images…this is a neighbourhood friend who drops in once in a while for a hello). More than anything else, these projects are what have saved me this past year. And it’s good to have a project where you get to call the shots, have the final say, and if anyone criticizes it, well, hey, whatevs. You are not an employee.

Oddly enough I also keep coming back to another post I wrote ages ago about the importance of sitting with things which references Star Trek Voyager and that great episode, “Emanations.” As I said then:

If you’re a STV fan, you probably know the episode, but suffice to say, something important happens, something that shakes up Harry Kim. And Janeway, the captain, after all is said and done, says this to him:

“I just want to give you a chance to reflect on what's happened. This may not make much sense to you now, a young man at the beginning of his career. But one of the things you'll learn as you move up the ranks and get a little older is that… you wish you had more time in your youth to really, absorb all the things that happened to you. It goes by so fast. It's so easy to become jaded, to treat the extraordinary like just another day at the office. But sometimes there are experiences which transcend all that. You've just had one, Mr. Kim, and I want you to live with it for a little while. Write about it, if you feel like it. Paint. Express yourself in some fashion. The bridge will still be there in two days.”

Thinking about this episode in terms of the entire last year also inspired me to once again pluck Care of the Soul from my bookshelf. In it Thomas Moore says, “Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.” Care of the soul is tending to the dark parts as well as the light. He asks us to imagine it as “an application of poetics to everyday life.” The opening sentence of the book is: “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is “loss of soul.” And, well, who hasn’t felt some loss of soul through this time?

How to care for one’s soul in the roaring 20s of the 21st century? I don’t know. Thomas Moore quotes a patient who had learned from a deep depression: “I will never again tell another person how to live. I can only talk to them of their mystery.”

Likewise, I can only advise you to take a minute, absorb all that has happened, the dark and the light moments. Find some space where you’re full aware that you’re not an employee, but rather luminous bits of the sun.

I can’t help but look for wisdom in the meanderings of the cat who shows up mysteriously to our back door, graces us with its presence, takes a moment to smell the flowers, and leaves without fanfare. That cat is nobody’s employee.

It’s been an extraordinary time, as Janeway told Harry Kim. It’s all happened so slowly and so quickly at once. And within the year of pandemic happenings we’ve all also experienced all the other things that life regularly throws at us. There have been funerals and weddings and babies and for some, the arrival of puppies. There has been depression and anger and exhaustion. The contradictions build up and the ethical ramifications are there but often put on hold. There is so much that we will have to deal with in the “after” of the pandemic. And that looms in front of us, too. In short, there is so much, and no wonder it’s possible that we lose track of our soul.

But you know, this really is an extraordinary time. Verily, this past year has not been another day at the office. All this to say, I hope you find some time to take things in on your own, in your own way.