Mirth
This is dedicated to
the skeleton of all life
cloaked by time
in story.
Ten Feet From Mirth
“For the first time in twenty-five years there is no small footstool next to the bed, on which to break one’s toes. The little dogs, first Jasper and then Bear, are gone. How neatening is loss, since it only takes away! One less mouth to feed, to walk, to bathe, to hold. One less sentient creature to cherish, to worry over, to feel for, to receive comfort from. And where is he, little Bear, the latest to leave us? We watch the white clouds carefully; sooner or later we will see him, sailing away in careless and beautiful serenity. Of what rich and ornate stuff the powerful and uncontainable gods invented the world, out of the rampant dust! The silky brant, the scarf of chiffon, the letter, the empty envelope, the black ducks, the old shoes, the little white dog fall away, fall away, and all the music of our lives is in them. The gods act as they act for what purpose we do not know, but this we do understand: the world could not be made without the swirl and whirlwind of our deepest attention and our cherishing. And if I mean the god of the sky, I mean also the god of the river -- not only the god of the gold-speckled cathedral but the lord of the green field, where people pause casually and snap each other’s pictures; where thrushes release their darkling songs; where little dogs bark and leap, their ears tossing, joyously, as they run toward us.” - Mary Oliver
This was Mary Oliver in Long Life, lain gracefully across the axis of love and loss.
“Bear is small and white with a curly tail. He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world,and to romp roughly with the big dogs. The brotherliness of the two, Ben and Bear, increases each year. They have their separate habits, their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries without letup if the other is missing. They both bark rapturously in support of each other. They both sneeze to express pleasure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment.
Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness; it is no real change.”
And this was Mary Oliver, earlier in Long Life, playing intelligent witness to the truth of things closer to the earth than we.
Mary is an extoller of virtues many. Among them, she is the gifted artist of sight. And the joy such sight offers its practiced few - even in the dark - is virtue.
We live, you and I, about ten feet from mirth. When something delightful happens, that is more than the morning cup of coffee, but less than, maybe, the birth of a baby, which is unscripted and brings more than a smile but less than a laugh to our face, we feel fleet, my ears perk to yours, we offer thanks to a glint of falling light through our eyes.
We live, you and I, about ten feet from mirth.
Our culture, in just inside of a few decades, has trained us to convert every moment into points - content or critique and paid promotion. Like invisible ink, mirth is written, but illegible in this light. Mirth doesn’t announce itself, it doesn’t earn applause, cannot be scripted or captured in a jar like a lightning bug, nor does it serve a purpose much beyond itself.
Yet it is not naïve. Mirth is the opposite of sorrow. It is that which sorrow protects.
Mirth is the rapturous meadow, wild and untidy, so richly alive that we run through it on a blaze of desire, upon fleet feet, with throats open, arms in the air, squealing, with delight.
But when the meadow turns gray and thick with mist, we look out with wonder - we do not step in. “When will it lift?” we ask. Grief, heavy like the fog of forgotten dreams, lingers. It lies upon our bodies like a blanket - more cold than warm, and so enveloping still. Through time, we are delivered to a weighty other-world which becomes its own home. So we forget the meadow. And call ourselves unlucky.
But the sun does return. And one day, after many bright days beheld behind a window, we are lucky again. And we remember.
We remember that our instinct for pleasure is not unserious. That it is the kin of our belonging. That it is the sister of all true things and the mother of our dignity. A leap is not for spectacle or display - it is resonance. Like the squeal, it belongs to the body-family of joy.
When grief has been walked all the way home, we return to a pleasure-dome, and beat our winged feet against the dirt unfettering flight.
If dignity is life’s native dress - the auric garment of self-respect and rooted in belonging - it is also the taproot of the great oak of reverence. Then irony, grief’s own disease, is the drought that cracks the soil; the snap that breaks branch from trunk of tree.
Mirth is what lives beneath the shade and sway of the oak in our meadow with a picnic basket and lemonade. Or what does not.
II. The Style of Our Story Through Time
”The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible. Answers are no part of it; rather, it is the opinions, the rhapsodic persuasions, the engrafted logics, the clues that are to the mind of the reader the possible keys to his own self-quarrels, his own predicament. This is the crux of Emerson, who does not advance straight ahead but wanders to all sides of an issue; who delivers suggestions with a kindly gesture - who opens doors and tells us to look at things for ourselves. The one thing he is adamant about is that we should look - we must look - for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the cow.”
This was Mary Oliver in Long Life, the good student of the great Emerson.
Narrative Wholeness
We are living through a scene on the great stage of human life where we are mourning our very own story. In this chapter, our plot has frayed, and without it, all sense of meaning is despaired of.
Open Curtain - Narrator Speaks: In the absence of a coherent, life-affirming and life-directing story, the collective unconscious has drifted toward narrative dystopia - not merely as despair, but as a sort of bleak dress rehearsal.
Its rehearsal is for how it grieves the loss of what it once held sacred - and how, in that grief, when it becomes lucky again - remember what permits it delightful flight. Leap!
Why Dystopia Dominates Now
The Mourning of Narrative Wholeness
The Collapse of Shared Meaning
We live today in a void of unifying cosmology.
Religion has splintered, governments have betrayed honor, and the myth of progress feels increasingly hollow.
Our future, once imagined with awe, is now contacted with dread.
In the absence of unifying, life-affirming story, dystopia has become a grim and magnetic default.
It is scripture of the dark art, which infects us with our own fears, sipped mistakenly as tonic, and incarnates the very things we wish to cure.
It sounds like this:
“We have gone too far.”
“We cannot return.”
“Beauty is naïve.”
“Control is inevitable.”
“We are powerless.”
“Why bother?
Death Drive as Entertainment - The Neuroscience of Dystopia
When overwhelmed with unprocessed grief, the psyche turns to reenactment, compulsively replaying what it does not have the fine motor ability to stop. This is the hippocampus dysregulated. This is PTSD.
The recent onslaught of dystopian films offer us the illusion of control: we watch our fears unfold from the safety of a soft seat, scripting the ending of ourselves to feel less helpless.
To pre-author our collapse feeds an illusion that such control will soften the blow of its arrival.
It is the opposite of creative vision.
This is trauma art at the scale of collective dream.
An Old Boundary - The Hays Code
To understand how we arrived in this era of collapse-as-entertainment - unmitigated, aestheticized, and oddly enchanting - it helps to look back to an old boundary: The Hays Code.
Officially known as the Motion Picture Production Code, The Hays Code was introduced in the 1930s as a self-governing moral framework for American cinema. Many find watching old movies truly relaxing in a manner that modern entertainment has never been. It’s no coincidence.
Old movies were, every one of them, held within warm cultural scaffold - defined by not only what could be shown on screen (sex, violence, crime, grief) - but how those arcs were directed to resolve. The Hays Code did not ban transgression but it did insist on its processing.
Every story, no matter how dark, was compelled to land. Structure was sanctified, as was the magnitude of consequence. Always and only, without surrender, there was preparation, departure, revelation, and return.
This era of cinema was crowned classic vis-á-vis the Hays Code because it functioned along a regulated collective amygdala-hippocampus axis.
When a culture can hold grief, the purity of its memory pardons its impulse to replay it.
Memory, when sequenced with attunement, beauty and resolution, becomes rationality. It lives in the past, and in peace. This is the hippocampus in harmony with the amygdala.
This is integration.
The films of the Hays Code era offered audiences not denial of its hardship, but its containment. Stories had to resolve, not to enforce moralism, but simply to conclude.
This was memory consolidation at scale: rupture followed by restitution; rift followed by repair.
Our nervous systems recognize this sequence, so they soften.
This era was not a dream, but a collective REM cycle rendered in celluloid.
When the Hays Code was dismantled in the late 1960s, it was replaced with the modern rating system and a new creative era blossomed.
Much was gained! Psychological nuance, narrative daring, and permission to touch the shadow came to light. But something slipped. Within the fold of the Hays Code lies the remains of a shared cosmology - our expectation that our stories, even hard ones, would cohere toward meaning in a wider moral arc which we endeavored to realize in our lives beyond the screen.
Bereft of our tether to probity, our stories drifted. Imperceptibly, we moved from vision to voyeurism, then from parable to simulation, and from heroic arc to psychic projection.
Trauma decontextualized in a person may seem like personality.
Trauma decontextualized in a family may seem like tradition.
Trauma decontextualized in a civilization may seem like culture.
III. We Saw and We Believed
Offered below is an incomplete but illustrative constellation of how the braid of our mythos has loosened across decades.
These films mark turning points in our collective imagination: the shift from narrative wholeness to narrative grief, and from mythic reckoning to stylized despair.
❖ Foundational Dystopias (50+ years ago): Morality Tales in Allegory
These films warned rather than reenacted. They still reserved some measure of ethical compass, offering redemption, resistance, or moral tension.
• Metropolis (1927) — An early myth of class-based collapse with clear social warnings and a redemptive arc.
• Planet of the Apes (1968) — A cautionary twist: humanity as its own downfall, but still shaped around curiosity, awe, and consequence.
• Soylent Green (1973) — Dystopia rooted in overpopulation and resource depletion; grotesque, but tethered to social commentary.
❖ Cynical Tech and Moral Fog (20–40 years ago): Spectacle with a Thread of Despair
This era introduced ambiguity, glamorized violence, and began normalizing systemic collapse, while still revering character-driven stakes.
• Blade Runner (1982) — Haunting, aesthetic, ambiguous. A beautiful grief film disguised as cyberpunk.
• RoboCop (1987) — Brutality wrapped in satire, showing the corporatization of justice and body.
• The Matrix (1999) — A philosophical fable: freedom vs illusion. But still, the protagonist wakes up. The hero’s journey completes.
❖ The Turn of the Century (2000–2015): Aestheticized Collapse and Fragmented Morality
Dystopia becomes sleek, stylized, and intimate here. Redemption arcs remain, but erosion begins: the camera zooms on the wound more than its cure.
• Children of Men (2006) — Beauty and grief tightly braided. A rare film that shows dystopia as mourning, not just spectacle.
• The Hunger Games (2012–2015) — Gladiator dystopia for teenagers; trauma dressed as agency.
• Her (2013) — The loneliness of connection in a digitized world. Emotional displacement, narrated gently.
❖ Contemporary Collapse (2015–Present): No Exit, No Hero, No Hope
Now, dystopia is the baseline. Not warning, but standard. Films no longer argue whether collapse is coming, they offer a particular flavor of its pain. And there are many.
• Black Mirror (TV, 2011–2019) — Psychological violation as entertainment. No repair. No redemption.
• Joker (2019) — A portrait of collapse from within. Trauma as character. The arc is a descent.
• The Menu (2022) — Post-elite nihilism; satire turned spiritual starvation.
• Don’t Look Up (2021) — Satire of a dying planet, stripped of myth or meaning, only absurdity.
• Civil War (2024) — Aestheticized chaos, no catharsis, no moral stakes. Only bodies in motion and camera in hand.
• The Creator (2023) — High-budget spectacle, techno-human grief with less philosophy, more aesthetic lament.
• Poor Things (2023) — Hays Code annihilation. Sex, autonomy, grotesque reclamation—but no grounding. We watch with no compass.
• 2073 (2024) — A hybrid docu-drama that functions as a future warning. Surveillance, authoritarianism, climate collapse all looped together—no narrative rescue offered.
• Ash (2025) — Psychedelic sci-fi horror aboard a station of neurosis and amnesia; paranoia without redemption.
• The Blue Trail (2025) — Dystopia through displacement: eldering in isolation, only brittle hope in the Amazonian wilderness.
What This Says:
Each step forward was a loosening - not only of censorship, but of cultural lucidity. Film once served the priestly roles of parable and exorcism. Now they reenact collapse without resolution. Trauma becomes unmitigated, unintegrated aesthetic for sale.
We used to watch ourselves learn.
Today we watch ourselves unravel.
“The problem is, one wants, both in life and in writing, a story. And the ferocious weathers are the perfect foundation; in all tempests we must do something. We must get somewhere - and so the story begins. Truly, the heart delights in it. Adversity, even tragedy, is cathartic, and a teacher. Challenge and personal valor are admired by us all. On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep.” - MaryOliver
This was Mary Oliver in Long Life in a chapter titled The Perfect Days.
What we consume as collapse is cinematic excess born of the boredom of numbness to need.
It is the fussy child not yet able to articulate its needs and has them anyway. We find ourselves, too, fussing inarticulately. In hunger. For narrative.
But no myth emerges without descent. And no descent resolves without grieving what came before it.
❖What Constitutes a Whole Narrative?
A narrative may be called whole when it fulfills three essential functions:
It grants ontological security, offering a sense of who we are, why we are here, and how we are meant to live.
It carries mythic depth, ethical coherence, and aesthetic continuity, so that life feels not only explicable, but beautiful.
It harmonizes the personal with the universal, uniting self, society, nature, and the sacred in chorus.
Narrative wholeness is atmospheric before it is conceptual.
Its sensate physicality scents the day. It is the air first. Then it is the architecture it breathes in, the rituals it keeps, and the songs it sings at cradle and grave.
All earlier epochs held continuous that story was not entertainment; it was entirely the edifice of existence.
❖Examples of (Relative) Wholeness:
Indigenous cosmologies prior to colonial disruption include pre-contact Polynesia, the pre-Columbian Andes, and pre-Enclosure Europe. Here, land, language, ancestry, and cosmos were the organizing principles around which all life revolved.
In Ancient Egypt, story, ritual, architecture, governance, and cosmology formed a single system where each pillar reinforced the others.
Classical Vedic India, pre-Socratic Greece, and periods of medieval Christendom (especially where monastic tradition met seasonal, pagan sun-worship), all reflected narrative consistency, though imperfectly. A shared grammar of meaning, moral instruction, and metaphysical wonder remains to this day, evident in their architecture, literature, ritual food, clothing, and song which we still travel to experience. This fashionable and unanimous impulse preserves two truths: it does not exist where we live and we recognize it as home.
These civilizations were not utopias. But the stories they lived within were total without being totalitarian.
They succeeded offering form to a multi-modal truth - grief and beauty, sacrifice and joy, the cycles of death and rebirth - are all part of a sweet pie from which we delight to taste and which no sensation it offers need be exiled.
As this was done at scale, each individual human life was nourished by its cohesion as derivative.
❖When Did the Collapse Begin?
Our great narratives did not vanish beneath the pull a single tide. They eroded in waves, each stroking the architecture of meaning, until solid rock became sand shed through fingers.
1492–1700s: The Colonial Rupture
Land, labor, and language were drawn from their native soils and repurposed for empire.
A European worldview - rational, hierarchical, and extractive - was carried to sea by ships, scripture,
spice and gunpowder.
Indigenous, place-bound cosmologies and non-verbal ritual were displaced by foreign maps and grammar bereft of form for nothing but the ineffable.
1750–1850: The Industrial & Enlightened Age of Severance
Myth was slowly divorced from fact; and spirit, once grafted to nature, was cast into the margins of science and semantics.
Forests became timber. Time was clocked. Labor slipped from artistry to wage.
The cosmos, once a living animacy, became a control mechanism absorbed by and partisan to religion.
1914–1945: The Age of Machine Death
The World Wars gave violence tools beyond human scale, making mortality impersonal.
“God is dead,” wrote Nietzsche, capturing not just a loss of faith, but a shift in the axis of meaning itself.
The bright light of progress flickered, as its long shadow came newly into view.
1960s–1980s: The Postmodern Fracture
Overarching truths were declared suspect as concord gave way to critique as currency.
Symbols loosened from their mooring unable to anchor truth as sole dispositor. Meaning became fluid, and often fleeting.
From the gap grew magnetizing consumerism, offering identity through transaction rather than belonging.
We did not fall so much as drift. In the drift, we forgot our hunger while our need for sustenance deepened.
“But even paradise must have rules. I do not know whether or not these rules were engendered in the beginning by divine deftness or by chance. I rather think chance was the origin - though perhaps the chance was offered divinely - for the rules are neither nice nor neat; simply workable, and therefore, in the quest for life rather than no-life, sublime. Every vitality must have a mechanism that recommends it to existence - what seems like ornamentation or phantasm is pure utility. It comes from an engine of mist and electricity that may be playful, and must be assertive. And also, against the odds of endurance in the great-shouldered sea, prolific.” -Mary Oliver
This was Mary Oliver, in Long Life, exploring flow.
❖The Peak and The Valley
In our lived lives, two singular events turned the wheel lock on the canal bridging narrative coherence to fragmentation. These events formed the pole tethering each end of a quivering flag waving out the world we once inhabited and staking the interregnum within we now stretch.
The Moon Landing (1969): A Planetary Halo
Joy reveals its quality in how deftly it expands not only ourselves, but also those beside us. When a whole world looked skyward and saw itself in the shimmer of a bootprint on lunar dust through a television screen, a species were refracted in glittering transparent light.
What would the world be like if we never had this moment?
It was more than science and more than American. And it dutifully adhered to the ancient arc: preparation, departure, revelation, and return.
Apollo 11 carried the glare of imagination and faith in shared endeavor on a golden chariot beyond the blue earth into black space enchanting the planet to which its likeness was beamed back.
It was the last moment in history the entire world breathed in - through screens, yes, but devoid of irony - in perspicacious wonder.
We saw and we believed.
September 11th (2001): The Valley of the Shadow
Terror reveals its magnitude in how swiftly it paralyzes not only our bodies, but our bonds. The voltage of lunar wonder short circuited into scream and rupture on September 11th, plunging us down into a underworld beyond old dreams where the sky now betrayed our trust.
Fallen with the towers was safe exceptionalism - that one land conveyed enchanted exponential possibility while the idle doomed play out all the wars of time. A myth born of oceans, borders, and distance shattered one fine morning in fire, ash, falling bodies and plate glass.
A fracture at the scale of the moon landing’s unity, with all explanation despaired of, yielded grief compounded by fear seizing the plot of manifest dreams.
The paralysis of ideology, suspicion, and surveillance, shown through the very screens that once saw us touch the divine, now transmits trauma on loop by instant replay.
We saw and we believed.
IV. DAWN’S DARK DRESS
“There is a rumor of total welcome among the fronts of the winter morning. Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine. Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within. The field I am looking at is perhaps twenty acres altogether, long and broad. The sun has not yet risen but is sending its first showers over the mountains. A kind of rehearsal, a slant light with even a golden cast. I do not exaggerate. The light touches every blade of frozen grass, which then burns as a particular as well as part of the general view. The still upright weeds have become wands, encased in a temporary shirt of ice and light. Neither does this first light miss the opportunity of the small pond, or the grounds of pine trees. And now: enough of silver, behold the pink, even a vague, unsurpassable flush of pale green.” - Mary Oliver
This is Mary Oliver, in Long Life, at dawn worship, for which she was known.
While the drama of the tempest sends our hearts aflutter again and again, still they know to honor the relief of peace.
How do we return to the glory of the moon landing, we wonder? There is a way. The path is grief.
Critique is high music - it has a beat. But grief is low and slow - its sound is not and no less music. It asks something more enduring than opinion - it bids our surrender.
Our contemporary tick is fluent in deconstruction. We know how to name the systems that failed us, and how to condemn the traitors.
But we are unpracticed in the descent down the circular stairs of sorrow where their shattered hearts lay in wait of liberation. So, without the skill of descent, we struggle to rise with anything to hold.
Grief is not a backward glance; it is a rite. And like all rites, it must be earned. It is an alchemy that transforms the ash of regret into lush ground.
But alchemy demands time, ceremony, and companionship. It is the morning silver which without warning beholds the flush of color returned again to our crown.
What We’ve Lost Without Grief:
Our past has been either glorified or condemned, but it is has rarely been consolidated. Because we have forgotten how.
Sorrow, when unwelcomed, hardens. Its patina glitters with irony, which deflects - fracture writ large - and descends into a spectacle of performance instead of the glow of truth.
In the absence of welcome into the lap of an attuned other, the sorrow of the psyche, much like a child in tantrum, projects it’s pain outward not as provocation but as plea.
It becomes cynicism, numbness, and burnout. It becomes the flat affect of a soul too long without flight.
And without metabolizing what was lost, the keys to the door of promised paradise are withheld. Not because we are unworthy, but because we have not yet done the work necessary to bear its might.
Our work is to remember.
Our work is to remember that every crying child, no matter how wild, longs only to be gathered, and that all is not lost if even one of us can open arms and rock chaos gently to peace.
To pass through grief is to be taken by a current and humbled by it.
We are carried and tumbled.
Worn down we are delivered, entirely whole, home to a new and wider shore.
To pass through grief is compulsory but not involuntary.
It asks things of us.
And we must choose to answer.
What Grief Requires - Four Acts of Restoration:
• To honor its name, we must confess our love for what we lost.
To grieve is first to remember, with all of our affection. Even imperfect structures once held beauty. Reverence is not regression; it is the soul’s way of honoring what mattered - what was ballast to tender existence.
• To live beyond betrayal, we must cut the thorn from our chest, and tend the hollow space.
Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is releasing the tether binding our identity to the wound. Forgiveness is not the gallantry of excuse, but the knight of freedom delivering victimhood to triumph through the brush of time.
• To redeem reverence, we must emerge bare-faced and still risk being seen.
To begin again with sincerity is a radical act. Iron-y is a silver shield protecting us from disappointment. But a shield does not discriminate. It blocks everything good, too. The work of grief opens us only to truth. It invites us to honor its gravity or to deadened ourselves to it. We must choose. The gift is that we can.
• To be held again, we must be willing to drink from a shared cup.
Grief is unendurable alone. Its thirst is quenched in the company of truly tender presence. Restoration is not a solo performance. Its purpose is to return us to the circle where the soul remembers the reality of its belonging.
V. Belonging
Each loss we endure deepens the channel through which the tide of life swims. As we learn to befriend sorrow and yield to its gravity, we grow more spacious in our ability to bear a floating grace.
It is only if we refuse to stand in the presence of sorrow that it slips beneath us, pulling us down like an undertow, drowning us by force to that which we refuse to yield.
How do we sift through the shards of a broken culture, of fragmented psyches, and find our way back to what Francis Weller calls “our original undividedness and the freedom it bestows, right there in the suffocating fear itself”?
Wendell Berry names the road: “It all turns on affection,” he says.
So after a long exile, we are returned to the sky of mirth.
How we nourish this tendency toward ascent may be the most noble work of all long lives.
It is one unbroken act of remembering, gathering ourselves, again and again, into the truth of things as they are. And once we have gathered ourselves, the act of gathering the one beside us.
We rescue from treason the downcast one - the orphaned, the castaway brother or sister - to frame a hero not at war but after - and not exalted, only smiling at rest, in his meadow with company.
He pours lemonade into a glass lifted from its neighborhood in a lucky basket. It winks in the light. And it is filled with ice. In the canopy of the great oak, he sees his own open hand reflected.
He will weave no longer a spotted life of shred and patches, but he will live with a divine unity.
He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of his heart.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
