'Once upon a time' is a place we can find again

"Where is the good news?" my son asked the other day, the kind of simple question that can only come from a child. Obvious, sensical, trusting. He still believes in our essential goodness and still wants to know about humanity's small kindnesses and large achievements. We had been talking about doomscrolling on the way to school, our very modern addiction to pain and suffering. "People want to know what's happening in the world — sometimes," I had explained, unable to stop myself from adding the caveat, admitting my repulsion at current events. My children wanted to know if there were other happenings, not sad or scary things but thrilling and heartwarming news. "It's there, but you have to look for it," I said. I found myself heeding my own advice later that day. I discovered, inexplicably, sites devoted to good news and positive stories. I scanned them greedily. And that's how I learned that the bison are back. More than 150 years after the last wild one was spotted in the United States, a small herd of six — three females, three males — was reintroduced in Illinois, reclaiming their place on the prairie they had once roamed, millions-strong. "We have stories that begin with: 'Back in the times when all things spoke,'" Santee Sioux elder Robert Wapahi told reporters gathered to watch the bison's release on a cold January day. He said the phrase was the native version of "once upon a time." It seems that to go forward now, we must go back; Back to the time when all things spoke, when all things were connected. We are separated now and it's killing us, slowly in some places and quickly in others. But we can always go back to what has worked for us before, when humans faced danger. Six years before the last wild bison was seen on the prairie, a man stood on a battlefield in Pennsylvania and delivered a humble speech. "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," he said. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." Just a few months earlier than that, thousands of men had died on that battlefield, testing which side of that proposition our country would come down on. We had declared on July 4, 1776, that the truths of mankind's natural equality were self-evident, but they were not then and never have been, self-effectuating. Humans have had cause, again and again, to revisit old debates. We fight the same wars, wars that determine who we will be. Each time, we choose a side or one is chosen for us. The winning side in our civil war had fought to protect the unity of our country, deciding that in some matters, we could not agree to disagree. One of the earliest tales in the Bible is of a murder, the motive jealousy, Cain grasping, vicious in his need to be more, better, greater than his brother, Abel. All the evils are ancient, but familial enmity is the oldest. The closer we are, the more we hate each other. Israeli and Palestinian, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Cain and Abel. Last year, Elon Musk said that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy," but there is no surfeit of empathy anywhere I look now. The good news, though, is that we can always go back. To untie the Gordian knot of life, we simplify. We cut through the excesses that have tangled themselves around us and we get to the honest core of what works. Family. Friends. Quiet. Nature. Rest. In Voltaire's novella "Candide," the hero goes through all manner of adventures seeking enlightenment and answers to life's mysteries. In the end, he decides, "il fault cultivar notre jardin" — we must cultivate our garden. The big actions fail, in other words. To succeed, stay in your own garden. Plant little things that grow and tend to them as best as you know how. I'm starting by filling my head with good news, news that reminds me that it's always possible to go back to once upon a time. It turns out you can even bring the bison back to the prairie, if you only try. And I'll tend to my little growing things, as best as I know how. They still believe in kindness and empathy and good news and because I believe in my little ones, they help me believe in all of that, too. To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.