Charlie Brown North Star and Charnel Grounds
In a writing, I pictured us as a bunch of kids at an elementary school playground, and one kid (Lucy to me, Charlie Brown fits)
Lucy Asks with a snicker, whatcha looking at? Charlie Brown just gazing into the sky says, I’m trying to find my North Star.
Linus comes along and says, you mean Cynosure- a dog’s tail becomes our North Star.
cy·no·sure
ˈsīnəˌSHo͝o(ə)r
noun
noun: cynosure; plural noun: cynosures
from Greek kunosoura ‘dog’s tail’ (also ‘Ursa Minor’), from kuōn, kun- ‘dog’ + oura ‘tail.’ The term originally denoted the constellation Ursa Minor, or the star Polaris that it contains, long used as a guide by navigators.
Charlie Brown in his exasperated way says Good Grief, Linus.
I came upon a story pasted in my book Parables and Peanuts, given to me by my wife 52 years ago, where a person has the grown-up Charlie Brown having married Marci and is the psychologist at a practice called “Good Grief Counseling.”
Good Grief counseling. North Stars what are we looking at? What is our North Star? Scientists tell us that even that polar object is not so fixed, as the universe is expanding at light speed. The earth and the people in it are seeking some sure ground, but there really is none. We are like the Peanuts characters, children in the playgrounds of life. But our play and our journey are much more serious. And lasting. While there is little or no reason for optimism, being a realist does not make me a fatalist. I just cannot drink and sing “ let’s break out the booze” or “those were the days, my friend” all the time. Something keeps me going, and like the guitar man, “I just have to find another place to play.”
So, my good grief counseling word is this: “Grief is good. It is work that keeps me grounded with all the sorrow and pain that is happening in my family and yours. Deconstruction, saying goodbye to some old paradigms or scaffoldings that we thought were holding up our lives must be torn down. We will never see the beauty of rebuilding until we find out the new ways of saying hello to now. Be it rising seas, starving people, or raging pandemics, while we may not see the way out, even though we are living in a charnel ground existence.
Things like climate change and pandemics are hyperobjects, “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”Morton explains that since we are living with overwhelming problems, we are living in a charnel ground. From my perspective, I recall the local First Americans had sacred charnel grounds, where people were placed on lifted platforms after they died. While we may not identify with such a place, Roshi Joan Halifax states:” We don’t have to go to Tibet or into a war zone to practice (compassion) in a charnel ground. The charnel ground is a metaphor for any environment where suffering is present — a Japanese hospital, a school room, a violent home, a mental institution, a homeless shelter, a refugee camp. Even a space of privilege, like the corporate boardroom or Wall Street trading floor, can be a charnel ground. Really, any place that is tainted by fear, depression, anger, despair, disrespect, or deceit is a charnel ground — including our own mind.”
Thomas Morton, Hyperobjects; Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2013, http://www.upress.umn.edu/
Roshi Joan Halifax, Compassion in the Charnel Ground, August 1, 2017, by Roshi Joan Halifax on August 1, 2017, in Bearing Witness, G.R.A.C.E., General, News, Roshi Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge, Upaya’s Blog, https://www.upaya.org/2017/08/compassion-in-the-charnel-ground-by-roshi-joan-halifax/
Accessed January 21, 2022.
Good Grief Counseling is more than admitting our pain, we are then led by the way of the North Star to stand with the folk in the war zones, the death areas, the places of horror and loss, to be courageously compassionate. GG counseling leads us to wail and howl to hold one another in these days when fathers kill their children and themselves in a church. Yes, and to realize we are living in a time where hyperobjects are challenging and overcoming many traditional ways of living and thinking.
Good Grief Counseling acts in the community. Making the steps to know one’s neighbors can be unsettling. My wife was walking with a neighbor that we have hosted neighborhood BBQs. My wife said something about learning about the true history of the United States, the treatment of Blacks. The neighbor moved to an aggressive body language, lecturing how we do not need to look back, that she herself grew up poor and the treatment of people of color is not her problem. Whew, what an unexpected outcome. It took a few days to come to some regret and ask to go forward. Needless to say, my wife is a little unwilling to enter into a meaningful conversation with the neighbor. And when I saw a neighbor going crazy and being taken down in my front yard by the local police, several with guns and an automatic rifle. I could have given up, pulled my shades, but somehow I had the courage to tell my neighbor to stop struggling, to let the police take him in cuffs away. Yet, I did not, I asked if the neighbor’s wife was home. She later came to my house and told me she had been lying about hiding money from her husband. She was a bit shocked when I said, “good, that was the right thing to do.” Living with a crazy alcoholic husband takes dexterity in that relationship. Good grief counseling in the neighborhood means loving the lesbian lady, hospitality to the Brazilian and Aberjenian couple, receiving help from the lonely man who loves to help, and for me being the old guy on the block trying not to talk to much.
Good grief counseling helps others know that when they feel totally overwhelmed and need someone to validate their fears, I take the time to say, “yes you have every reason to be overwhelmed, you are living in the time where hyperobjects are taking over the world.”
Good grief, Linus the North Star is the object that gives us direction. The point of light that gives us some sense of peace in the darkening sky. The North Star is that one point of light in the world where we all live in the charnel ground, where we might die or live in this place with courageous compassion.
