How to (not) Read the News Now

on staying in the world and retreating-in-place

Dec 05, 2024

Welcome to Be Where You Are. I’m a poet, essayist & writing teacher, and I teach writing workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic. My most recent book is the poetry collection, The Falls—you can find more info on Instagram or my website. If you enjoy this newsletter, if you look forward to it in your inbox, please consider paying a few dollars a month for a subscription to help me keep this work going. And, if you can’t pay anything, please share it with someone that you think might need it! 🩵

I don’t know how to cope with the news. I’ve been asking my friends about their strategies—many have deleted news and social media apps, are taking digital fasts, and saying things like, “I can’t be as in the know as I used to be for my mental health, but I still want to know what’s going on.”

Leading up to the 2016 election, I was so steeped in the news that it started to affect my health. That was the first time I articulated that I needed to “retreat” in some way—that the amount of time I spent engaging with the news must be far smaller than the time I spent engaging in person in my real life. After the election, I didn’t have a framework for how to approach the news or social media apps. I only knew I had to limit both because they often made me feel physically ill.

I set simple rules then:

to not go online in the mornings until after I’d read and journaled a bit, ideally not until I was at work
to delete my news apps and only read the news on my desktop browser and try to keep it quick
to not talk politics after 8 pm so I could sleep

I often failed. But just the existence of these rules and my flawed attempts helped me.

Sometimes I imagine leaving the digital world altogether—just pulling my head into its shell and waiting until the storm passes. Focusing only on what I can control and leaving everyone and everything outside me to figure things out.

a close up of a turtle on the ground — Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash

But the digital world, despite its horrors, is my primary way of learning what’s going on beyond my own orbit. It’s where I learn new things and connect with friends, so we can try to help in the “real” world. It’s also a tool shaped for media outlets that want to make money, to control the narrative, to keep readers and viewers engaged no matter what.

Given all of this, I’ve been asking myself: how can I engage with the news and the digital world so that I can be aware and help, while also staying healthy enough to actually help—especially given that there is so much suffering that we cannot address or process fully?

My instinct to retreat into my shell is at odds with what I know in my gut—that solidarity with the suffering of others creates compassion. And, without compassion, we are lost. Like, really lost.

Without compassion, we’re just floating around on little islands of indifference, gazing across the waters at gauzy, distant figures that seem to be a different species from ourselves.

It’s always been a challenge to process the news or to engage in the world, but the last year or so has been particularly awful. Some days, taking the long view helps me. I think of this Muriel Rukeyser poem:

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
—Muriel Rukeyser, from The Speed of Darkness (Vintage Books, 1968)

Rukeyser published this poem in 1968, after the first two world wars, late in the US civil rights movement, in the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, the Tet Offensive raged in Vietnam, and Nixon won the presidency. I love how she names “devices” as a general term, so that we can read our own specific devices into this poem, as conduits for the news’ “careless stories” and “attempts to sell products to the unseen.”

The speaker reaches out to her friends to commiserate, to connect, then “slowly” writes her poems. The poem turns toward hope as the speaker is “reminded of those men and women, / Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, / Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.”

Subtly, the poem shifts from “I” to “we,” and this is where it really sings: “We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, / To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile / Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, / Ourselves with ourselves.” What a powerful evocation of the struggle to stay awake and aware when the world is too much to bear.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know I struggle with phone addiction. With phone addiction invariably comes news. When Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing was published in 2019, it helped me greatly, not only by challenging my relationship to my phone and digital media, but also by giving me a framework for stepping back to consider the larger matrix that I live in. It helped me see that I have more power than I thought. The last few pages of her chapter on “The Impossibility of Retreat” are so starred and underlined you can tell I was like Zach Galifianakis in that famous Hangover scene while reading.

Odell writes, “We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back, where we are needed. In Contemplation in a World of Action, [Thomas] Merton holds out the possibility that we might be capable of these movements entirely within our own minds. Following that lead, I will suggest something else in place of the language of retreat or exile. It is a simple disjuncture that I’ll call ‘standing apart.’ To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left…Standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal” (62).

At one point, she calls this a “refusal-in-place.” I drew a thick box around that term and wrote it in my journal. I clung to this image.

The recent US election ramped up the need for me to revisit my old rules for myself, to return to this notion of “refusal-in-place.” For me, this is not just a political and philosophical question; it’s also a spiritual one. In the last few years, I’ve become passionate about meditation and contemplative practices in both Engaged Buddhism and Engaged contemplative Christianity. My path is interspiritual, and includes people from all faiths and perspectives, including agnostics and atheists.

In college, I started hiding my spiritual beliefs and questions in professional, literary spaces, when I realized that it was not seen as valid to believe in something beyond what we can see and prove empirically. But I’m tired of hiding this core part of myself for fear of how it might be misinterpreted or attacked. I’m also tired of seeing faith continually weaponized to harm others.

Retreat from the world, or “standing apart,” is a practice shared by those of all perspectives and occupations, particularly spiritual figures, writers, and artists. My own conception of retreat was first shaped in my college years, in a senior seminar on Medieval Women’s Literature. Professor Lynn Staley, a brilliant dynamo, made Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan, and Margery Kempe tangibly real to us across the centuries. It was the first time I read accounts of people who lived a life of contemplation set apart from the world. I read Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest book written by an English-speaking woman, and was riveted by this writer of vivid, poetic prose, who lived as an anchoress, tucked away in a tiny, spare room attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England. While severely ill, she received revelations of the passion of Christ, and formed a remarkable theology, arguing that God was both mother and father, and Jesus was her true mother, something dangerously at odds with the deeply patriarchal church teachings of her time.

Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich | Goodreads — Link to her book on Bookshop

Julian of Norwich’s life and writing made me think about the power of what we can see when we step away from our daily lives into another space—a space in which we shut out time’s usual demands and devote ourselves to mysteries and questions that require more of us. I also fell in love with the poetry of Rumí, a 13th century Sufi mystic poet from Persia who wrote poetry that transcended religious divisions and moved toward peace. Rumi practiced finding God in solitude while also being in the world.

Since then, I’ve been curious about those who retreat – and over time, that fascination has deepened around those who find a way to retreat while also acting in the world. There are a few key writers and teachers who offer wisdom that is helping me to construct a path forward; Thich Nhat Hahn is chief among them.

When Giants Meet — Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation — credit: Thich Nhat Hahn Foundation.org

In an interview, Thich Nhat Hahn said, “When bombs begin to fall on people, you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time. Meditation is about the awareness of what is going on-not only in your body and in your feelings, but all around you.” He then goes on to say, “You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing mindful breathing. You should not allow yourself to get lost in action. Action should be meditation at the same time.”1

What I love about Hahn’s approach is that it calls us to a hybrid way of being—a both/and of action and retreat intertwined and coexisting.

But how do we actually do this?

The list of people who have grappled with this question across time and culture—how to take action rooted in contemplation—is vast. This essay considers only a small fraction. My partner, Nico, studies the history of social movements in the US and India. We were talking about this question the other day and he mentioned Gandhi’s words the day before he was assassinated: “I shall not find peace by going to the Himalayas. I want to find peace in the midst of turmoil or I want to die in the turmoil. My Himalayas are here.”

Gandhi was working to prevent religious violence and to bring together people across all faiths; he could easily have left and meditated in the mountains and lived his final days in peace. Instead, he stayed.

Nico also shared that when John Lewis packed for the Freedom Rides, he brought three books with him—the Bible, a book about Gandhi, and one by Thomas Merton. I love imagining John Lewis drawing from and transforming this deep well of wisdom across time and tradition. It makes me wonder which passages Lewis starred or highlighted? Which verses or passages he had memorized as he faced violence and hatred with nonviolent action.

You may be thinking: you’re talking about Thich Nhat Hahn and Gandhi and John Lewis here. What about me, toiling along in my smaller sphere, how am I supposed to use these examples to “find peace in the midst of [my] turmoil?”

I think we can distill their epic contexts to our own everyday spheres, perhaps, by imagining ourselves as that unassuming turtle I mentioned earlier (stay with me), with the ability to retreat into our shells while staying in the world. And, to consider how we might retreat in ways that amplify our power.

When I’m retreating well, it looks like me taking a walk and noticing the plants around me (so wildly different here than what I’m used to in Western PA), or closing my laptop and opening my book. It looks like me sitting on my couch after the kids go to school and meditating first before I dive into work or email or the news, breathing into the tense parts of my body.

It looks like me being present for our Sunday night family ritual of stopping whatever we’re doing and driving to the beach for a while as the sun sets. Saying goodbye to the day with our feet pressing into the cold sand.

my actual family in the most magical Sunday night light

I might be in my shell but I’m connecting to warmth and presence. I’m generating energy rather than draining it. I’m becoming more openhearted, more alive once I do stick my head back out into the world.

Still, I often retreat in ways that are not so healthy. Spiraling out in my shell about the latest headline to a story I didn’t even read, and instead of reaching out to a friend or talking it out with Nico, just hunching over my laptop to workworkwork, or muttering as I wash the dishes.

Why retreat if it’s so hard to do it well? Why not simply gather one’s courage in the midst of the action?

Perhaps, when we do not retreat and contemplate in some way, we are continually awash in a muddled river of words and images we cannot process, and thus we act from a more shallow place. Perhaps, we cannot see the world clearly when we don’t have any kind of distance, even just the distance of stepping back a few feet, whether in reality or in our own minds (a la Odell and Merton).

As Odell and Hahn and Merton and Gandhi and Lewis (etc etc) show us, retreating-in-place can look like staying where we are, but constructing our own terms for doing so.

Here are my newly revised still-rough rules for retreating-in-place:

Don’t go online first thing in the morning. Read something off-screen and journal first.
Keep news & social media apps off my phone (only read the news on my laptop; keep it quick)
Read news & social media later in the morning/the middle of the day when I have more time/space to process it with someone else (and not only stew in my head about it)
Breathe and notice how I’m feeling in my body as I read —check in with myself—is my chest tight? Do I feel tense? (still very much working on this)
If I’m feeling tense, tight, hot, get outta there and do something off-screen
Don’t talk politics after 8 pm so I can sleep (thanks to Nico for this one)

I hesitate to share my own rules because for me, these are only part of the puzzle. My answer to this question is not a productivity hack. It’s the micro piece of the messy, overarching framework that helps me not retreat into spiraling in my shell and call it a day.

We each need to develop our own practices for retreating and engaging, and continually revisit them, maybe even within the same hour or day, so we can stay aware and awake in our time. This time in which we are being called to act with compassion, not passivity.

I think staying engaged while retreating has to do with community and being grounded in oneself while also connecting to others. It’s the heart of how Rukeyser ends her poem: “To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, / To let go the means, to wake.”

Further, I’d argue that the motivation to do this at all has to do comes from that most gauzy, ethereal, but tougher than nails force: love. Love for this life with all its beauty and suffering, and love for our neighbors, which brings to mind Thomas Merton’s famous epiphany on a street in Louisville, Kentucky.

In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he writes, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special word, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.”2

We need some solitude, even if just moments, to cut out the noise so we can hear ourselves think, so we can hear a deeper, wiser voice. We need space enough to strengthen our own roots and help them grow so that we can respond with thought and care and not just react to whatever comes.

Perhaps retreating-in-place might help us fashion our own armor for when we log in again. Perhaps it will help us return to the love that is mighty enough to cut through the indifference always waiting in the wings. So we might keep returning to the world that needs us.

I’d love to know: what do you make of this? What resonates or not, and what rules or strategies are helping you these days?

Be Where You Are

How to (not) Read the News Now

on staying in the world and retreating-in-place

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

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