1.1 This human species breaks my heart, and I'm glad
This human species of ours…
Breaks my heart.
And why? Because of what I see when I look at the human story, past, present, and future…
1. Our prehistory
For most of our time on earth, in our hunter-gatherer tribes, we took very, very good care of each other. Something to celebrate. But the boundary between tribes was bloody. We considered other tribes a threat. We considered them less than us, less than human. So we gave ourselves permission to hate them and hurt them and even kill them. Thus the human world which had such a sweet center was dangerous and brutal.
2. Our recorded history
Whenever I read about our last three thousand years, or watch history videos on YouTube, what I see is mass abuse, mass exploitation, mass slavery, and mass suffering. Along with relentless warfare. It’s a consistent story of rulers, the few at the top, those with the most power, mistreating the great number of people at the bottom. And I so wish our story had been one of nurturance instead of abuse.
3. Our present day
Sure we’ve made some progress in the last century or two, but we haven’t put an end to mass exploitation and mass suffering. We haven’t transformed ourselves like we needed to. And now tens of millions of people are losing their minds and our politics is out-of-control crazy.
4. Our future
I look at the danger we’re in. I hear young people say, “We don’t get to have a future.” And I can’t stand it. It hurts to see how badly we’re doing. And to see that we’re on the verge of extinction. And doing so little about it. And I’m scared that we will not die with dignity, but that our ending will be apocalyptic with brutality. And with all my heart, I want better for us.
Typically people who suffer a broken heart want to get past it as quickly as they can. But it’s been decades now since I settled into heartbrokenness. It’s home. I’m not trying to leave it behind. In fact, I keep going deeper in because I’ve found unexpected blessings here that I would not want to do without.
The articles on this site are explorations of those blessings. I’m hoping they help heartbroken people find each other so we can spend time together in the special kind of intimacy that comes with shared sorrow.
There’s more coming by the end of December 2023.
