Today I’m grateful again for technology, for the access it gives me to teachers around the world. From the Mindful Life Program just across the mountains in Carbondale, which during the Time of the Virus might as well be in Australia, to Catherine Ingram who actually is in Australia, to Stephan Pende Wormland in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a host of other interviews and lessons from meditation teachers to top chefs to health experts.

As anyone knows who explores the world online, you can find out everything about anything whether it’s true or not, so I’m also grateful for education and discernment, which allow me to make healthy choices about what I turn my attention to. After a weekend in retreat, I spent the day catching up on housework while listening to these teachers, including Catherine’s latest In the Deep podcast titled “People Can Be Disappointing.” Each episode includes a short talk, followed by questions from participants, and Catherine’s responses to them. This one felt particularly relevant to me today.

From relationship disappointments to global disappointments, each question resonated with my own experience at some point in recent months. At one point, she discussed the conspiracy theories rampant in the US these days as coping strategies. “There’s some kind of psychological twisting going on in their being… they’re not stupid people necessarily but they believe things that are absolutely bonkers, and huge numbers of them are believing these things…” She speculates on some possible reasons.

And it struck me then that everyday wonders have ceased to engage these people; they’ve cut their milk teeth on high-tension drama in entertainments that celebrate killing and perversions: just look at the content of TV’s top dramas in recent decades; look at the goals of most video games; look at the stimulus-driven ambitions of advertisers. Is it any wonder that people believe they live in these conspiracy theories? By believing, they no longer need to envy contestants on Reality TV, for they have entered their own Reality Show. Like The Truman Show, but backwards. Instead of living in a ‘perfect world,’ the people who believe QAnon and the like are choosing to believe the sickest, most depraved, terrifying fantasies about Others, specifically about people like me, and other good neighbors and decent legislators and even now our current President.

It’s dumbfounding. Why choose to spend your fleeting time on this planet, your one precious life, thinking unthinkable thoughts, when you can find much more engaging entertainment in the miracles of this infinitely wondrous planet with your own senses by opening them to the beauty of nature? Catherine is right: there is too much of something or not enough in the broken souls who let themselves be deluded by outrageous, grotesque imaginings; but it’s not entirely their fault. A materialist culture which has lost its connection to the wild world, Nature, the wisdom in impermanence, and filled that void by streaming the darkest make-believe of human imaginings into our eyes, ears, and minds with traumatizing entertainments, has conditioned many people, Americans in particular, to need ever more shocking stimulation to feel alive.

So the very technology for which I’m grateful today, for giving me access to living humans with great insight and wisdom, is the same technology that allows malevolent delusions to collect enough followers to assume a false alternative reality, because “so many people are living within the shared lie,” as Catherine says. Are there antidotes to these poisonous effluents on a societal level?

We’ll know more later. Give me the silent wonder of a gentle snowfall any day. Give me the miracles in my own back yard, the surprise of an underground burrow, the vast perspective of a starry night, the impossible fragility of a bee’s neck. These are the true realities I choose to pay attention to, to believe in. I am the hoof of the doe, stepping into the stream; moments ripple round me. In the time of long light, I see god in green shadows, and the wheatgrass whispers ‘yes.’