When Will We Cry?

War News (1900) by Louisa Starr Canziani (1845-1909) Leighton House Museum / Public Domain.

Dear Friends, Seekers, Imaginers,

I woke up this morning from a restless sleep with these words on my lips: When will we cry? Not “I” but “we.”

The cadence of the line is from a poem written in 1938 by the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht which I’ve quoted before: In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing / about the dark times. “A Dark Age is a culture’s dead end,” wrote Jane Jacobs in 2004 in her book, Dark Age Ahead. Are we at the end of an epoch in a dying culture, or as some believe, at the beginning of a Golden Age?

When will we cry? Are we too numb to cry? Isn’t it time we cried out in a mournful communal wail? I feel unexpressed grief haunting our days. Do you also feel it?

This is not a political statement. It’s a recognition of how we are being affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the great troubles that stalk the planet. With all the dying species and the wars and the degradation of the planet, lamentations are in order. But what form might they take?

I’ve begun to wonder—haven’t you?—if we’ve become a species blind to our self-destructive tendencies and our capacity and willingness to do harm. “Why Do We Harm Each Other?” is something I’ve written about before.  Are we now normalizing it? Our stance toward the rest of the sentient universe is increasingly and unceasingly violent and selfish.

We know the digital age has reconfigured our experience of intimacy. We have become a population beset by loneliness. My inbox is filled with online offers from wisdom teachers, gurus, politicos, activists, and other writers inviting me into chat groups or Substack groups or offering courses for the health of body, soul, and spirit. Mea culpa. It’s not lost on me that you found this letter in your inbox today with my own plaintive plea!

We are, I think, trying to connect. We are trying to feel resonance with each other in a digitalized, siloed, monetized, impersonal world. And because we’re wired for intimacy, for the touch and smell of another, we suffer without that contact. Screen friendship, online romances just won’t do. (Now there are bots programmed to love us. A heartbreakingly beautiful novel on the subject is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.)

I recall an essay in The Practice of the Wild, a book by the late poet Gary Snyder, in which he wrote, “The occasion of singers, musicians, storytellers, mask makers, and dancers joining together is the flower of daily life.” When we come together as musicians, dancers, and storytellers, we celebrate each other and the environment. Why does the thought of heading down to the village green to dance around the Maypole seem so outdated now? As do other rituals that have helped us bond and survive, rituals like the oral tradition of passing generational wisdom by telling stories around a fire, or the honoring of phases of the moon with their poetic names: Strawberry Moon, Harvest Moon, Hunter’s Moon. Haven’t we lost something by the absence of these bonding rituals and evocative traditions?

I share all this in the spirit of joining hands in deep collective inquiry. How do we live now? What’s gone missing from our lives? Where can we find simple joys? How and when will we grieve? How will we make it through?

Tell me, how do you answer these questions?

Writing is one way I cope. Writing is a way of gathering what I know, giving it language, and discovering something I didn’t know I knew in the process. Some of you who are writers are probably nodding your heads in agreement. When we say the muse is with us, we are expressing our openness to information and guidance from the unconscious mind. We are open to mystery. And this process isn’t just applicable to writers; I’ve watched my scientifically trained, uber rational guy over many years. His process of discovery is very similar.

At this very moment, I’m working on an essay called “Writing as Self-Enchantment.” It’s a subject I enjoy returning to. I’m very excited to let you know that this essay will appear in my newest book, coming out in 2026 from Chiron Publishers, a premier press for depth psychologists and Jungian analysts. (I’m neither a therapist nor an analyst but a writer who has been profoundly influenced by the work of Carl Jung and archetypal psychology.)

This new book came together very quickly and feels like it has good juju and helpful spirits ushering it into the world. The title is Wild Freedom: The Princess Who Found Her Name and will also contain an original fairytale I wrote, plus commentary essays on my writing by four acclaimed Jungian analysts. Viviane Silvera, the artist and filmmaker of See Memory, will do the illustrations. It’s an honor to be so well regarded by these distinguished contributors. One of my aspirations for this book is to reintroduce fairytales as relevant stories that depict psychological patterns still active in our post-modern minds, something Walt Disney intuited way back in 1937 when he produced his hugely successful movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

If you are interested in a Jungian perspective on our current political situation in this country, I highly recommend Dr. Tom Singer’s Substack on cultural complexes. I had the good fortune of interviewing him twice earlier this year. See “How Do Personal and Cultural Complexes Differ?” and “When World Events Invade Our Dreams.”

In closing, I want to get back to joy, which seems essentially different from happiness. Doesn’t joy bubble up, sometimes without a direct reason, from the inside, from our depths, while happiness relates to externals, to things that we have or don’t have that influence our lives? How do you understand the difference?

Tell me, is it helpful to talk about these things? You can reach me by replying to this email or at dale@dalemkushner.com.

As always, with care and gratitude for your presence in my life,

Dale