The Myth of Power
Today, on my 51st birthday, I sat on a damp surf log where the land meets the sea and thought about power. Waves crashed emphatically against the shoreline, against rock invisibly eroding from the force of time and weather, then retreated backward. The sun momentarily burned a hole through the January Oregon coastal cloud cover, then itself retreated as mist rolled westward from the coastal highland.
Power, as defined by Merriam Webster’s online dictionary, can be a noun, a verb, and an adjective. Its meanings can range from the possession of control and authority to an order of angels charged with the movements of celestial bodies. It can be both a source of energy and a supply of energy, a motivator and a magnifier. A measure, or a means, of operation.
Power can be used to elevate us to the highest ideals of humanity. It can move mountains, propell spacecraft, inspire great works of art. Power can also turn on itself; it can be used destroy cities, dreams, lives. Power has mythological proportions.
The ocean boomed and hissed; it reminded me that it has its own ideas about power. It’s not by accident that the Greeks considered Poseidon Earth Shaker one of their most powerful gods.
How often do we — do I — just assume a strand of sand, that lane of the highway forward, the career path, a new relationship, whatever — is navigable on anything other than our own terms? There is nothing like a literal surge of water to remind us of such fallacies, such illusions.
Powerless momentarily to move forward, or south, I sat. I thought about gravitational pull, the influence of the moon on our planet, our oceans, my own body aging as the pull of years and weathering time increases. I thought of having the good fortune being gainfully employed with a 23-year career that affords little luxuries like taking the day off and a weekend coastal getaway — but also felt confused about where to go next, work-wise. I thought of my two children, almost adults now; the words of ‘Sara’ from Bob Dylan’s album Desire seemed to fit the empty beach and the recollection that I was last here years ago, when I was married.
Power ascends. Power declines. Power returns. Sometimes the power just goes…out.
I thought, suddenly and reluctantly, about civil unrest in our country, the horrific riot and occupation of our nation’s Capital a week ago and the aftermath. The upcoming change of administration, my relief of what hopefully will be a peaceful transfer of power, the fear that perhaps it will not. The waves crashing further offshore, breaking against hidden underwater shoals, evoked images I can’t unsee of thousands of enraged Americans swarming, rioting, simultaneously disempowered by a changing America and egged on by a cult-like figure drunk on his own punch and devilishly adept at wielding his power through words and persuasion.
Reflections at the Devil’s Punchbowl, indeed.
Forced into stillness, I scanned the wrack line. It snaked across the strand, dotted occasionally with microplastics I hadn’t initially noticed. Their presence, their smallness, the insidious damage they cause through bioaccumulation in animals, to biodegrade with slowness that tracks more closely to geologic than human time, became unavoidable. The paradox is that microplastic colors can be eye-catching and their size deceptive; it’s easy to overlook them, and that combined with their ubiquity — like pockets of ignorance, bigotry, or even hate that are out of sight until suddenly they mass — is a frightful power. Several species of seabirds mistake them for food, ingest them, and are slowly poisoned. I picked up a few pieces, determined to make a difference.
With every step, more seemed to appear.
Suddenly I felt powerless and melancholy. It reminded me how in less than a year a virus approximately 70–90 nanometers in size upended life as we know it for over 7.8. billion humans. Hundreds of thousands have died in our country alone, in a nation that prides itself on being one of the most powerful on the planet. And yet here we are, nearly a year later.
The promise of a vaccine that might reverse our course, and the magnitude of the logistical organization and the shift in collective thinking will take willpower, and time, to persevere and move toward restoration to some level of normalcy. Maybe more time than we want. Time itself is power; over time things can fester, deteriorate, break down. But things, and ideas, and movements can also change, in time. They can even gain momentum, and in doing so, increase in power.
Ebb and flow, ebb and flow. Power hard, power soft. Kinetic energy, potential energy.
The Pacific Ocean surged forward, then retreated, surged again, retreated, its rhythms oblivious to me, my thoughts and cares, our collective experiences of joy, anguish, suffering, fear, anger, hope.
In an iconic Game of Thrones scene, Petr Baelish, a member of the King’s Small Council, threatens Cercei Lannister, the Kings’ wife, with revealing an explosive secret that will ruin her. “Knowledge is power,” the Master of Coin says, smirking. The Queen then commands her guard to sieze Baelish and cut his throat, then countermands the order at the last moment. “Power…is power” Lannister says to a shaken Baelish. In the end, it turns out, both are right.
Hard power. Soft power. Power through violence, crashing waves, storms. Swords, batons, lawlessness, mobs, flagpoles as weapons. Power through peace, information exchange. Forming shields, human or otherwise, laws, flags. Oaths sworn to protect and defend. Votes.
A soft wind whispers through the evergreens in the hills above. The mist rolls down and blankets the treeline. For a moment I cannot hear my ears ringing.
Nearby a dark green spruce, older by decades than I am, leaned precariously inland like a woody Leaning Tower of Pisa, its roots exposed by slides that could have occurred yesterday, or over the course of a century. I wondered if the tree was somehow, in its own way, aware that its power to stay upright was slipping, and if so if it was able to send signals to its roots to grip the soil ever tighter, to sustain or even extend its grip, hang on just a bit longer. I wondered if I was projecting my own insecurities into it.
These days, in the depths of winter, waking up day after day in a pandemic-dominated world that feels both arhythmic and a blur of rinse-repeat, arise-muddle through — sleep, my middle-agedness expressed unavoidably by an out-of-shoulder ache, inability to keep up with my password lists or the dishes or bafflement over the sudden popularity of apps like Tik Tok, I feel my own power eroding, my roots exposed.
The rawness of it scares me sometimes.
The power of positive thinking and setting intentions still works wonders; so does, inversely, the thought that the world is passing you by. And that maybe, like that tree or a boarded-up store front on Highway 101 that used to be someone’s dream, your best days are past.
After awhile, dancing too long in your own pity party gets boring. If I’ve learned anything in a half-century it’s that the stories we can tell ourselves over and over again can etch into myth and take on their own reality if we let them. Including feeling like a victim. The knocks and dents and scrapes and scars I carry make me no different and have not made my life harder than the life that spruce, or any other human being. The striated sandstone cliff is still powerful, beautiful, and elegant even as it erodes by degrees from air and sea and water. There is a power in accepting that transformation, whether its within rock or our own lives, is part of the natural order. And embracing change.
I walked back to the small house I’m staying at with my son for the weekend. A county sheriff’s car rolls by — the officer gives me a wave and I wave back. It serves as a reminder. As a white man who grew up the child of teachers in a close-knit neighborhood and community with good schools and a safe water supply and so many other gifts I took for granted, my experience and my challenges are in some ways nothing compared with the experiences of families like my neighbors where parents have to work two or more jobs to make ends meet, where classes are overcrowded. Or countries that they fled. Or parents that have to have ‘The Talk’ with their sons and daughters. Or grit their teeth at casual or outright racism. Because their skin is brown. Because they weren’t born into advantage. Because they have had power used against them for centuries, often violently.
I’m red-headed, which meant I was burnt by the sun frequently as a child of the ’70s when sunscreen meant Coppertone SPF-4. Still am. It didn’t matter today, because it was overcast, and it’s the Oregon Coast. Fair skin exerts a power I wasn’t willing to fully acknowledge until last year, when collective waves of frustration and anger broke across the nation.
I had always wanted darker skin because I thought would protect me. After George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were killed because of that darker skin and what they looked like and where they lived, after the marches, the protests, the clashes with police, the backlash, being teargassed by my own police department, I wasn’t so sure anymore. In America and elsewhere, having too much melanin can get you hurt, or killed, in manners more insidious and corrosive –and suddenly — than the radiation of a star 93,000,000 away. And by forces closer to home. Often — not always, but too often done by people who look like me. Who have a power I have, or at least the power to think differently. Or both.
The sonic ocean sounds receded as I retreated inland. There’s something strange, reassuring but strange — and humbling — to know that just because you’ve left something behind that is so large and mighty that next to it you own insignificance is exponentially magnified, its power still remains intact. Like an ocean. Like a democracy. Like loving someone even if they’re not here on Earth with us anymore. Or if they are. Like the belief that sometimes it’s ok to just be ok with the foreknowledge that, as my musical Muses The Avett Brothers sing, we only get so many days.
I was thinking about my daughter at home with my kitty cat Archie, my on-again, off-again complicated relationship with God, and reconnecting with my son for lunch when I saw the tiny book library alongside the road. I always love approaching them: there’s a bit of a mystery about what’s inside that fuses with my profound appreciation for the talent and generosity of those that build them, and stack them with books.
Books, with their words, their works, their ideas, their…craft, are to me perhaps some of the most beautiful, profoundly powerful gifts humanity has given itself over the ages. This tiny library was a washed cobalt blue, the same color of its parent house. The door had a window and a slender, crystalline handle.
I suddenly thought of the line Ollivander spoke when Harry Potter sought his first wand in The Chamber of Secrets.“The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter…it’s not always clear why.” Maybe because I believe that books, like ideas, like a movement of people, like ocean waves, packed grains of sand, a tree that can withstand storms, our love of friends and family, our country, ourselves if we just allow it to happen without judgement or conditions, have a special magic to them and a way of finding their way into our lives like moments of epiphany.
And magic, a word that itself is also a noun, verb, and an adjective a noun, a verb, and an adjective, is by definition “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.” If there is more remarkable and transformative derivative of power than magic, I’m not sure what it is. Maybe love. Maybe hope. Those might work.
I opened the door and scanned the library’s contents.
And there, as if put there by someone, or maybe something so mysterious and wonderful and powerful that being 51 at the coast at this time in this place is all that ever mattered…
There was The Power of Myth by Joseph Campell. Waiting for me, as if by chance. As if by destiny.
As if all it took was to just believe in anyone, or anything.
Like magic. Like the power of love.
