“From the place where we are right

flowers will never grow

in the spring.

The place where we are right

is hard and trampled

like a yard.

But doubt and loves

dig up the world

like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place

where the ruined

house once stood.”

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote the above words. Whenever I read them, I think of Bernie and his frequent comments to me, especially if we were arguing about something. “And you know that, right?” he would say. Or: Always? Never? Repeating words I used to bolster my assertions that he always did that, or never did that.

But the poet’s similes—like a mole digging up the world, or a plow—take me someplace way more concrete, the counterplay between abstract ideas, values and principles and the “surface of the earth,” as Orwell described: the big wild turkeys pecking at birdseeds on a stump of a large, downed oak tree, white carnations on a window sill smiling bashfully behind a Hewlett Packard printer.

I can get all riled up by what is going on in the world—the war in Iran, the oppression of people of color here and especially immigrants, the corruption at the top, the hubris of a Pete Hegseth and the visibly blatant flexing of financial and political muscle by the wealthy. The power of the rich, and the riches of the powerful.

I used to think that the way to challenge my opinions and ideas was to read up on conservative or populist columnists, perhaps steal an occasional look at Fox News, identify people who see things way differently from me and dialogue.

But you know what I find most challenges my deeply-held ideas? I’m almost embarrassed to tell you: Tracking the finches outside as they get more yellow, making a non-gluten dessert for dinner at a friend’s home, pulling the now-empty trash barrel down a still snowy driveway, hanging the laundry lines back up after they were blown down during our difficult winter. In short, the things of the world.

Orwell described his time fighting Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War: “‘A man appears from the fascist side ‘half-dressed and … holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him … I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at Fascists; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a Fascist, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.’”

Those words echoed in me when certain newspapers highlighted a rash on the right side of Donald Trump’s throat, their headlines blaring loudly but vaguely that something is medically wrong with him. Having gone through allergic reactions of all kinds, knowing how unpleasant they can be and how they keep you up at nights, I found myself feeling sorry for him. That moment he was a man like me, suffering from some kind of unpretty rash that you want to scratch but know you shouldn’t. All his billions couldn’t save him from that, just like they won’t save him from getting sick, older, and finally death. Like me.

How easy it is to get lost in the realm of ideas and spirituality, to voice some emotional but abstract resistance to something happening far away. How satisfying to hear others do the same and join the liberal chorus.

It’s hard to bear the tension that exists among different aspects of the same thing. I just finished browning some ground beef to be mixed with dogfood. It makes the dogs happy, it makes me feel good. And even as I bought that locally-raised meat in the local co-op, I can’t ignore the necessary butchery that provides the dogs with this tasty treat.

It’s not just logical. By now I’m aware that even the smallest compunction, the tiniest scruple, leaves scars in consciousness. Every single thing has life and death built in, and the tension of that is so hard for me to hold that occasionally I’ll sway to one direction or another because, like so many, I’d like to find something that’s just good, or just bad, and say: That’s it!

But that’s not this earth that we’ve inherited, that’s not this life. As the poet wrote, doubt digs up the soil like a mole, a plow, and at that point the earth is no longer smooth and glittering in sunlight. Instead it becomes the real earth, full of worms deep underground and snow turning to mud. Love reveals details of who died so that we could live, who whispers in stolen homes, who and what loves life at least as much as I do yet labors in sweatshops to produce a black sweater with white hearts that I enjoy wearing.

I have searched far and wide, and can’t find the words that reconcile such incompatibilities. There are words and phrases that arch over them and in which I can take shelter, like life-and-death or impermanence or no-self—how many of us rush towards those spiritual expressions because it’s so hard to live with the world as it is—but they’re not the real deal. Just as real, just as “spiritual,” is the rash on aging Donald Trump’s body, the immigrant mother you want to help after her husband was taken by ICE, and just as real are many Latino immigrants’ macho principles against not just abortion but also contraception, or even women plopping down the money in supermarket counters. It should be the men who pay, the men who have the money (even when the women work).

Einstein spent the latter part of his life searching for one over-arching explanation or equation to describe the universe, and spiritual pioneers similarly look for something to explain the incompatibilities, the loves and the hates of this one life. And neither he nor we find them.

“Go in fear of abstraction,” Ezra Pound said.

And poet Anne Carson wrote:

“In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.

On the day He was to create justice

God got involved in making a dragonfly.”

Can you blame Him? Dragonflies, in all their exquisite complexity, are way easier to create than justice.