I think about healing a lot. I suppose all cancer patients do. My next door neighbor, who is a devout Roman Catholic, always tells me to say affirmations, visualize healing, and order the cancer to leave my body. I obey; it can’t hurt.
Especially after my last surgery, which was one month ago, I’ve longed for healing. It’s been a terribly difficult recovery. I was on the verge of despair the first week or so. But yesterday, I had a good workout at the gym and enjoyed my cappuccino at Tierra Mia. At last! Halleleujah!
During the worst of my suffering I recalled a sentiment of Maya Angelou: “No matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.” I knew that to be true, even though “tomorrow” seemed an eternity away. Caroline Myss, a self-help author, observed, “The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.” And yes, silencing the mind is perhaps the hardest thing for a human to do. All the monkey brain wants to do is scamper, worry and flit.
Yet healing finally has come to me, after thirty long, frequently unendurable days. But what of Oakland? It’s peculiar, or maybe ironic, that we’re both in dire need of healing. Me, for an injured body, battered by repeated invasive surgeries. Oakland (if I can stretch the analogy) by repeated assaults of crime, incompetent leadership, political ideologies so twisted they’re almost obscene, and everyday assaults on our decency that seem too vast for government to address, much less halt.
Time can heal physical wounds, which mostly clear up as the body’s magical reparative processes set to work. But cities do not have automatic reparative processes. A wounded body, like mine, slowly repairs itself, blood cell by blood cell, skin cell by skin cell, until the new one is almost as good as the old. But what process governs healing in a city? Time alone won’t do it. If we, the people, do nothing, time will not be on our side. Inertia will rule, and with it the echoes of failed governance. It takes an active intervention to heal a city’s politics. That intervention is the intelligence of the people, and their will and determination that the future will be better than the past.
But nothing in life requires a city to heal. Cities collapse: ancient Rome, Carthage, Persepolis, modern Detroit. We don’t know yet if Oakland is to be among the cities that collapse, never to recover. It may be that a millennium from now some archeologist stumbles across the ruins of, say, Oakland City Center and says, “From the evidence there once was a great city here.” But no one will care, except, maybe, some doctoral student doing her dissertation on the final stages of the American empire.
We here, today, care. Oakland must heal because, well, it’s our home. Just as I myself must heal because, well, that is my hope and determination and I love life. We both must heal. In my physical case silencing the mind is a good thing because the mind is a great big distraction, and worrying, which I tend to do, does not hasten the healing process. In Oakland’s case, it’s the opposite: we must not silence the mind, because through the active mind’s ability to reason, we can diagnose the illness Oakland currently suffers from and, having understood the cause, come up with solutions.
Enjoy the weekend. Stay safe. Patronize our local businesses. And please don’t vote for Barbara Lee. Nothing personal; she’s just not right for the job.
Steve Heimoff