Scary Stuff

Notes from October

Yesterday was Halloween. It’s harder and harder to celebrate a silly holiday about ghosts and death as the world gets scarier.

A friend recently asked me to give her a reality check. “Does it make sense to feel as afraid as I do?” I had to say that it made sense to me. I also encouraged her to learn to feel the difference between fear and moral outrage. Fear is a rational response to threats. Moral outrage is a feeling of hatred and disgust when justice is lost and common decency outraged. It’s an emotion that evolved as an alternative to violence, but authoritarians and advertisers exploit it to make money and gain power.

Moral outrage is the drug we’re addicted to, a flood of satisfaction that leads us to break up with our friends because they didn’t adopt the new tribal meme. I told my friend to be aware of messages that are dividing her from other people. The best thing to do in scary times is cultivate solidarity with those who are different from yourself, find the common ground, work toward solutions that help a little bit, rather than trying to solve everything.

The clocks changed in Ireland last week. It’s getting dark, so I write, walk the dog, make the fire, read a book, and stay off my phone.

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I don’t email you every time I post in substack because I imagine that would be annoying. Here’s what I posted since the last time.

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Publicity opportunities like the radio interview have been super fun. Selling books is very, very hard to do, and best done like cultivating friendships, hand-to-hand. I’ll be coming back to Santa Cruz in next March. If you would like to help me in the meantime, posting a review somewhere, or considering it for your book club could really help. I feel very uncomfortable asking for that, so forgive me.

My friend Jon Varese had an essay published in The Atlantic, “ChatGPT Resurrected my Dead Father.” Essays like this are why I subscribe to that magazine instead of the enraging New York Times. I encourage you to give it a try. I hope to read more from him, so if you read it, post a comment about it and they might give him more work.

At the beginning of the month, Manchan Magnan died. Today is his “month’s mind” and scatting of ashes, taking place at Uisneach, a sacred site in the middle of the island. I couldn’t get there, so I’m thinking of him right now. If you want to learn about what Ireland offers the rest of the world, start with his books Thirty-Two Words for Field and Listen to the Land Speak. His television programs were my favorite. Recently he did one about holy wells, and another about turf. There’s a podcast called Irish Almanac that’s wonderful. Years ago he did a series called No Berla about his adventures trying to live normal life speaking only Irish.

We’re so lucky his funeral was streamed, a beautiful ritual of farewell and celebration. He said he didn’t fear death, and in her eulogy his wife said he’s now a spirit guide for herself and so many. Me included, I suppose, although I don’t usually go in for spirit guides. Which is the best thing about holidays that draw focus to the world of the dead. Our friends are gone, and not gone. Someday we will join them and the memory of ourselves will guide the living. Nothing to be frightened of.