American bombers dump tons of food packages on Afghanistan. Someone thought it wise to include soda crackers, which pulverize on impact. Hungry Afghans puzzle over how to dine on jam, peanut butter and dust.

I watch the Avalanche thrash the Canucks 4-1. Goalie Cloutier lets in some softies, but at least Morrison is on a scoring roll.

At Regina’s airport a traveller is detained and threatened with criminal charges for denying that his cell phone is a bomb – it seems that merely uttering the b-word in public is now taboo.

Nursing a beer in a Granville Island bar, I watch an aquabus dart to and fro across False Creek. Tourists pose for photos. Rats frolic on the rocks.

Adrienne Clarkson Presents: War. Ms. Clarkson, robed in what looks like an embroidered bedsheet, reminds me from the TV that she is commander-in-chief of Canada’s armed forces. She beams at the troops she is sending into battle.

A gusty evening by English Bay. I straddle a log and look up, way up, at a fish-kite swimming through an amber sky.

This is the texture of my days since September 11 – a crazy-quilt of the mundane, the absurd and the horrific. Back and forth my attention jerks between tranquil Vancouver and slaughterhouse Kandahar until the edges smear. There are moments when I can scarcely see the North Shore mountains for the headlines.

At Ground Zero hijacked planes ploughed into buildings, spraying rubble and flesh. They also smashed into the psychic architecture within every head in the West, crumbling the assumptions that scaffold our daily lives. The twin towers of safety and certainty smoulder in ruins. A survey (presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in October) found that over half of us often feel "overwhelmed" by stress nowadays. The number one stressor: "world events". Our self-concepts are Ground Zeroes too.

How to cope in a world unpinned? First, it can help simply to admit that we’re afraid, and to spot the guises of fear. Like a pet that senses its master is upset, the more primitive regions of the brain can’t grasp the details of the situation. This pet-brain evolved in the Old Stone Age, and registers every threat as a cave-bear or sabre-toothed tiger, cranking open valves that dose the bloodstream with hormones of dread. Body and mind shift gears, bracing to fight or flee.

One of fear’s facets is vigilance. If we never feel secure, we can never relax our guard. As you stroll along Robson Street the pet-brain prowls the savanna, scanning for a flicking tail in the grass. Perhaps you find that you need more personal space (for escape routes). Maybe you turn on the radio each hour to catch the latest reports, in case something is headed our way. We’re jumpy, mistrustful, tense. Our muscles knot unconsciously as the pet-brain readies us to hurl a spear or scamper up a tree. Emotions are amplified, lest we miss a warning. This constant low-grade arousal is exhausting. Tempers fray, along with immune systems.

We seek shelter from the danger in a warm, safe place – the pet-brain craves a cave with a toasty bonfire and a sizzling haunch of mammoth. For haven’s sake, maybe you’ve been impelled to attend church more, or to lose yourself in sitcoms, or to chase comfort in the loins of spouse or stranger. Or maybe even these soothers aren’t enough; and the world goes flat and you go numb as the mind frantically burrows toward oblivion.

We also attempt to heal hurt with reruns. The pet-brain replays the infernal images on the screen of consciousness, trying to wear out the fear. Eventually the trauma is spliced into memory and becomes another episode in your life-movie. But meanwhile your dreams are invaded by screaming jet engines, a lurch of mad speed, sudden walls full of windows full of faces full of eyes.

Wounded by monstrosity, we each react with a unique mix of scanning, avoiding and replaying. That’s why the one-size-fits-all approach to coping – "you need to talk about it; you have to let it out" – can do more harm than good. If human beings were fizzy drinks, then popping the cap and spewing would indeed ease the pressure of being shaken up. But we’re not. Trying to force our own defenses down can make the alarm clang even louder. Instead it makes sense to comprehend our angst and respect it. Then we can start to soften it. How? With beauty.

Fear and beauty might seem unrelated, but there is a secret link. Our trauma-triggered vigilance both sharpens and shrinks awareness. We are sensitized to menace, but blinded to beauty. By paying attention to beautiful things we can hush that barking hindbrain and our distress will gently wane. Let’s come back to our senses. Within all five, at each moment, there is something wondrous to behold.

We can start with breathing. Maybe we can detect the slight change in temperature between inbreath and outbreath. If we rest our attention on the breath for awhile, we might discern faint fragrances – damp cedar, sea-breeze tang. With practice we can find that every breath bears subtle, exquisite treasures. And the same discovery awaits us as we visit each sense.

This isn’t navel-gazing escapism. These sensations are more real than any pomaded talking head. And they connect us with the only reality big enough to balance the sprawling vileness of current events: the vast majesty of the cosmos itself. Neither is this passivity. Spurred by terror, our actions are panicked and clumsy. But a mind grounded in beauty can act justly and lovingly. I hope so. I’m counting on it.

There may be comfort in knowing that a lot of our ancestors felt the way we feel. In the mid-1300s the Black Plague (caused by one of the microbes the Centers for Disease Control has issued a terrorist alert about) tore through western Europe. One in every four people were wracked with agonizing sores and dropped dead. Nothing could stop it. No safety, no certainty. Some tried to hide; some turned to prayer; others partied like it was 1399 (or 2001). They felt like we do, in spades.

And when I read the lines penned by the prophet-poet W.B. Yeats in 1920, I sense that he felt like we do too:

Peter and Lloyd and Dan and Wolf could streamline their newscasts if they would just lead with W.B.’s poem. "And, in other news…"

Stretched out by the fireplace, I listen to the sarabande from Bach’s cello suite in C minor, over and over. It is perfect sadness, this music. Hours of tears etch my face, drops copper in the flamelight.

President Dubya, captain of Team Civilization, offers to reporters his nuanced analysis of the enemy: "Mr. bin Laden is, ah, a man… who is an evil man!" On Saddam Hussein: "He’s, ah… an evil man!"

Beyond my window a stellar’s jay perches, an improbable peanut clasped in its beak.

-------- Leonard George