After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move. - I Go Among Trees, Wendell Berry
In the first few weeks of 2025, when unleashed hell ignited a polarized American political fury, I dreamt of Abraham Lincoln.
I dreamt it was 1864. During that year, the Civil War raged, and people died.
Lincoln wrote the famous and eloquent Bixby letter in November of that year — facing unfathomable challenges in a reelection year. The Civil War was in year three, and many in the North remained conflicted about the war and its human cost.
With thousands dead, political opponents argued that the government mismanaged the war and insisted on peace negotiations.
Lincoln, as a known habit, put the Bixby letter into a drawer and waited. Historians theorized he thought the letter showed a weakness and that it might affect his reelection or even affect the outcome of the war.
Yet, Lincoln pursued the freedom of pause, of allowing his thoughts to simmer with resilient emotional intelligence. He also refused to use the letter for political gain.
In early 1865, after his reelection and General Robert E. Lee's surrender of his Northern Virginia Army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln removed the letter from his desk drawer and mailed it.
The letter, of course, demonstrated an eloquence of an empathetic President, who, despite the fury of a Civil War, the death of his own son in that war, and relentless political upheaval, penned a handwritten letter to a mother mourning her children killed in a war.
Lincoln navigated his entire life through non-attachment. The war and the young mother’s sorrow affected him, but he didn’t attach to the emotions.
I dreamt of that letter, a letter written in an awful time, a letter that reminded me of a compassionate President who captured the sorrow of a nation at war, who selflessly comforted a woman he never met.
We don’t have that now.
Over sixty people died in a plane crash recently, seared into pieces — teenagers and babies and mothers and fathers tumbled into the icy Potomac River — yet a pitiful representation of the United States showed no compassion or sorrow for those that died.
There was no Bixby Letter.
Yet this essay is not about politics or one side or another. It’s about the Bixby letter as a construct of what a leader — and a nation — should be. And what we will be, again.
There will be no Bixby Letters in the next four years, but we have each other. We must cradle our convictions resolutely and be mindful that we are not alone in our disbelief and anger — and those emotions must remain disembodied.
I want to remind you of solitude.
Listen.
The Osprey's chirp across a preserve.
The great pines whisper ceaselessly.
A gecko tiptoes up a sun-warmed window.
A forlorn bullfrog in an abandoned pond rasps for a mate, and he sings night and day.
A hound dog sprawls in the sun and exhales in bliss as a samara spins from an ancient oak and settles near his nose.
A stark red cardinal high in a pine tree serenades the forest.
A spider begins her task of cocooning a wasp in her nest. Silk has sound if you listen.
Squirrels dart from branches like children in an endless game of tag.
And the sky remains a quiescent blue, and it will be so tomorrow, and molecules shift and morph and create in a ceaseless universe that is still our solitude.
In this horrific time, what remains true is attachment to bitterness, anger, and judgement causes suffering, in both our health and to others.
It’s a troublesome thing to accomplish, but is best remedied in the concepts of the Buddhist theory of anātman/anattā (no-self).
In its essence, attaching to things that are and will constantly change is fruitless. Non-attachment recognizes experience — emotions, physical manifestations, judgments — as impermanent.
Our experiences change with time and never stay the same, and the more we recognize the illusion of permanence, of our expectations on outcome, the less we suffer.
That said, it doesn’t make our current world order any easier to accept.
What can we do?
The Japanese concepts of yutori and ikigai follow the same Buddhist principles. The concepts of yutori — creating space, breath, and solitude in our lives — and finding our ikigai (purpose) are now more vital than any other moment in our history.
Creating yutori involves non-attachment in our everyday experience. As Robert Greene writes in the 48 Laws of Power, “Observe with as much detachment as possible, finding time and space to be alone. When you detach, and when you promise to yourself that you will be happy regardless, you will be happy with what you have and what you don’t.”
It’s an awful time, and I dreamt of Lincoln.
That must mean something.
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