Leaving Winter's Cocoon

There are days I feel the presence and consolation of God’s protection, and days I don’t. The sinister variants are still out there. But it’s unseasonably warm here in Minnesota--that season when everything is tossed up in the air: brilliant and warm one day, a snowy blizzard the next. I feel vulnerable, a little afraid, a little hesitant about leaving my winter’s cocoon. I am not quite sure I can meet the demands of a life more exposed.

Intervention

A neighbor spotted a bald eagle cruising through our city neighborhood. It picked off a squirrel from her front yard. We’d best look out for our cats and dogs, she admonished.

It was warm and sunny outside—70 degrees—a rare gem of a day in a Minnesota fall, so it was a double loss for my cat Skippy, that I had to bring him inside. I could see too clearly the dark weight of the plunging eagle, its talons pressing into his soft flanks, then lifting him up to the sky.

F. says it’s just nature—the eagle has to eat. But it’s my nature to intervene—nestle the baby bird in a bed of cotton, run the injured bunny to the rehab clinic.

It makes me think of the coronavirus: is it some part of the natural order? Is it culling the human population, as a pack of wolves culls a herd of deer, removing its sick and old? Maybe. But where’s God? Why doesn’t He intervene, as I would, to protect us from the worst?

I’d like a miracle please. I’d like the virus to disappear. For all the people of the world to fall to their knees in stunned gratitude, rise again with a deeper humility.

I try to slough off the virulence floating in the air—the virus, and also the lies, the conspiracy rumors, the simmering violence. Hold fast to my belief in goodness.

Suddenly I see my own smallness, a fleck of skin bobbing on the ocean’s surface. To die is nothing--just a release into the gentle rocking of the waves.

Covid and PTSD

I’ve been struggling mightily with depression. Someone has suggested medical marijuana, which sounds like fun.

Is it addictive? I don't know. What are the effects of long-term use? I don't know. Will it give me the munchies? Make me too sleepy to drive? I don't know. But I’m intrigued.

I feel for all those out there with PTSD, depression, and anxiety--like me. Covid has created a perfect emotional storm: I feel trapped, isolated, afraid, and powerless, with no end in sight--exactly how I felt in my childhood home.

I’ve been stable for several years on a cocktail of three anti-depressants, but I hate being on these medications. Whenever I try to get off them, though, I grow weepy and self-loathing. Still, I don’t trust them. After a few years, the positive effects peter out, and I have to switch to something new. Plus, though they keep me from plunging into the abyss, they don’t keep me from hovering directly above it.

At some point I decided that, though I had to keep taking the medications, I would not rely on them. With the external focus and structure provided by teaching, the day-time solitude I could count on for working out my emotional knots, and therapy a few times a month, that strategy worked. But the pandemic has upset that delicate balance. I am no longer teaching, my son does not need me in the same way, we’re all home all day every day, there are no cafes I can escape to when I need to get away.

Life events can pile up. The struggle can become too much for myself alone. I see now why I went on meds in the first place, and why I may have to raise the dosage yet again. It takes a certain humility to admit this. An admission of powerlessness. An openness to the intervention of a power greater than myself. A new med, a new 12-step group, a medical-grade mood-altering weed. A miracle cure, for Covid and me.

Sick and Tired

I haven't posted in almost three weeks.  I'm mired in depression.  Too many losses all at once.

The latest stats for Covid in Minnesota show a daily infection rate higher than it's ever been before. We are now worse off than when we started the lockdown in March. I am furious at our national "leader" who has minimized this crisis, and at those who have followed his lead--young people who are selfish and believe themselves invincible, "mature" people who prefer to believe in their own prejudices rather than scientific facts.  I've never felt so strong an urge to simple leave--go anywhere where covid is not, where people and governments are behaving sanely and humanely.  I feel literally betrayed by our government and the prevailing culture of selfishness, greed, and racism.  

My PTSD is kicking up.  The same sense of betrayal I felt at the hands of my mother, who failed in her primal duty to protect and nurture me, and instead used me to meet her own emotional needs.  This is the ultimate abandonment--what psychologist Peter Walker calls the "abandonment depression," that white fog now swirling at the center of myself.  I sometimes think of it as the"failure to thrive."  I think of those un-nurtured Romanian babies, and those baby monkeys, motherless, who cling desperately to a metal form draped with a towel. Without a mother's attention, her physical touch, the babies grow listless, stop eating, and die. 

I've lost a beloved brother-in-law.  I've lost most of my own mothering role, having finally released Max to the direction of his own inner spirit.  I feel listless, directionless. Without the work of managing his life to anchor me, what is the point of me now?

I can tell myself that my role as a mother is to stand back and cheer him on, to point out his strengths and good choices and successes.  But it feels like so limited a role.  Some great chunk of myself has fallen away, and I'm left naked, weightless, ungrounded. 

I want to foster kittens, but can't, as Skippyjon just wouldn't tolerate having them in the house, and we really have nowhere to keep them separate from him.  I want to help little kids with reading, but how, when schools will be trying to keep kids and staff apart?  

This is hard. This is so hard.  And I'm sick of articles and spiritual gurus telling me what I should be "learning" from this disaster, how I should be "supporting my mental health."  I'm sick of our can-do culture, which offers no support for legitimate grief and fury.  I'm sick of doing it all myself, with a partner struggling with a new job, and little time to empathize with what I'm feeling.  I'm sick and tired, and for once, I'm going to let myself be where I am, for as long as it takes. 

.  

Don't Even Think About It

6/4/20

Two of my sister’s three daughters, Grace and Maria, started jobs at a summer camp in Tennessee in mid-May.  Within a week, they were sent home sick when they, along with 35 of the 70 campers and staff, tested positive for Covid.  The girls drove 13 hours to get back to my sister’s home in Virginia.  The other 68 traveled to homes scattered across the country.   

“Pretend they’re dead,” one doctor said.  He meant: zero contact while the two girls quarantined at my sister’s home.  Ellie drops food at their bedroom doors and picks up their bags of trash.

   

The youngest daughter, Maria, texts my sister throughout the day: “I’m sick of fruit and vegetables. Can’t you give me something else?” Both girls seem to be over the worst, but Maria suffers from the isolation.  She and my sister video chat often. This is the only way Ellie can see her daughter’s faces. 

Six Days Out from George Floyd's Murder

Six days out from George Floyd's murder, the police and national guard have the streets more under control--though not fully.  There are still black cars roaming around without license plates.  People are finding containers of gasoline stashed in their alleys and backyards. Someone is posting threatening letters to black families nearby.  People are hearing gunshots.  More copters, more sirens. 

I'm feeling some relief now that the violence seems to have moved away from the Midway area of University Avenue.  It makes me realize how much fear I was feeling.  Max and my husband have taken to locking the porch door as well as the front and back.  They're pulling the storm windows down over the screens.  Max has been staying up till 3 or 4 am to protect our home from thieves, no matter how much I try to reassure him.

The Twin Cities on Fire: Two Kinds of Despair

5/29/20

Yesterday, looters attacked the Target store four blocks from our home.  This is where I do most of my shopping.  They smashed windows at the GameStop where my son buys and sells his favorite video games.  They smashed windows at the Birchwood Café, where we go for vegetarian food; Gandhi Mahal, our favorite Indian restaurant; and Bole, the Ethiopian restaurant down the street.  They burned down the AutoZone store, and looted up and down University Avenue: the CVS, the liquor stores, pawn shops, banks, etc. etc.  The neighborhood pharmacy I’ve used for the past 30 years has been burned to the ground.  

The 3^rd precinct Mpls. Police Department building was stormed and set ablaze last night.  Hundreds of people, mostly young, celebrated in front of it with dancing, drinking, and fireworks.  Dark vans cruised up Grand Ave in St. Paul, stopping now and then to dump their passengers, who would break into stores, take whatever they could carry, hop back in the car, and travel to the next site.  Cars full of teenagers were speeding through our neighborhood, honking in jubilation.

This is my beautiful city.  I feel as if some part of myself has been attacked.

Covid: Body and Soul

In the time of Covid, with my body under threat, I've noticed a difference between the faith I think and the faith I feel.  I'm not sure I trust the head faith--the part that counts on a persistence of soul or spirit—to survive an actual threat to my existence.  I do trust my experience of nature: peace, presence, participation, union, order.  I trust the inevitability and rightness of my body dissipating into carbon and water, gases and ions, that will enter the soil and feed the plants.

My grandparents were farmers.  My grandfather grew sweetcorn, asparagus, apples, grapes, peaches, muskmelons.  He seldom spoke, but they say that birds would sit on his shoulder.  I think of him as a “green man,” connected intimately to the soil and the cycle of seasons.  Green things flourished under his care.  My grandmother took over the finances, monitored the stock market, stored up money that would help to support two more generations.  But my grandfather knew how to coax crops from the earth. 

Truth and Lies for Living at the Time of COVID

The author Kate Bowler has stage 4 colon cancer.  She’s written a book called “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.”  She stresses our inability to acknowledge that sometimes life just sucks: that suffering does not ennoble us, that death is difficult and frightening and lonely and sometimes humiliating; that cruelty rains on the innocent as well as the wicked; that we can’t “believe” or “visualize” our way out of the tragedies that will befall us.

These are also the lessons of COVID.   They are stark, unyielding, uncomfortable, unpopular.  Religion has few answers.  There is no fairness or justice or mercy or rationale or protection or escape.  Even the idea of an afterlife has no comfort for us now.

After a lifetime of struggling with childhood abuse and its aftereffects, I've concluded that no God could have wanted or planned such suffering.  At the same time, no God prevented it, and no God saved me from it.

If I Die

I’m 64 and a half, with a wonky thyroid, and I wonder how vulnerable that makes me when it comes to COVID.  I can’t isolate myself forever.  If I get it, there’s a chance I could die.  I want to look that possibility in the face.  If I knew I was going to die, what would I want to leave behind?

I would need to leave comfort and courage for my beloveds.  I would need to leave them all of my love.  I would feel terribly sad at what I would lose, but know I’d received so much more just by being here, alive on earth.  That just lately I had stepped fully into myself, and it was worth it, every painful step of the way. That I’d had a good life, that I had learned so much. That I didn’t know what was coming next, but I wasn’t afraid.  That I felt surrounded by love. That I would be with them whenever they cried out to me; that I would hear them, and I would answer.  That love is a viscous liquid, the fabric that undergirds the universe: the trees and flowers and rocks and sky.  That what we call “reality” is malleable, that it bends the same way that light and time and space bend.  That one poke anywhere sets all things to trembling.  That when I’m gone, love will be everywhere.  

Coronavirus Makes Me Mad

A corona is typically a pretty thing: a crown, a halo.  Something that confers authority or holiness or innocence.

So the name coronavirus does not seem at all fitting.  This virus is a rampaging predator. Its only function is to take over the cells of its host (meaning us), seize the machinery, and churn out millions of copies of itself, each of which goes on to do the same.

What is the point of this life-form, God, I ask you? Does it do a single good thing?

I'm disgusted with the lack of planning and foresight that went into the evolution of this organism.  Today, God, I don't like you, not at all.

Tools for the Pandemic: Nurture Others, Nurture Yourself

Yesterday I felt a squeezing in my chest. I had to get out of the house. I took off for a little patch of woods and fields tucked between suburban developments, not far from where we live. It was disappointing. The trees were bare and the trail was icy and muddy. Plus I got lost. I hung my mittens on a wooden sign while I opened Google maps, trying to figure out where I was. When I took off in a different direction, I left my mittens behind.

I found my way back to my car and then took a hike around Como Lake. Somewhere in the middle of all this my fear started to abate. Just the physical motion helped, and especially nature itself--its order, its acceptance of what is, its silence, speaking of safety and peace.

I realized a few things: one, I had to surround myself with the things that nourish me: nature, meditation, writing, music, family, friends. When I got back home, I put in my earphones and lost myself in the Bach Chaconne and Yo Yo Ma for a while. Then I grooved to two of my favorite pieces of pop: Bruno Mars “Uptown Funk” and Shakira’s “This Time for Africa (Waka Waka).” I ended up dancing around the house while my two guys were out chasing down a pasta machine (another story!).

I felt so much better. And the other thing I realized is that I must turn my focus from myself, ask myself what I can give to my community to help us all through this frightening time. The minute I chose to act as if we were all in this together--all part of a single, loving entity--it felt viscerally true. Even if my physical body died of this terrible virus, I felt, love itself would continue—I would simply merge with what is already at the deepest center of myself.

Today I feel so grateful for the sun outside my window, the sounds of birds, the stillness of the neighborhood. For the presence of all three of my beloveds here at home (I had thought they would drive me crazy). For this chance to stop running and striving and trying to entertain myself with distractions. For this time to remember who we really are.

O Corona: A Little Argument With Mortality

Here’s what I figured out a few days ago:

There are probably a million things that could potentially kill me: heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer, car crash, terrorist attack, lunatic with a gun, carbon monoxide poisoning, the coronavirus, t flu, ALS, etc. etc.

Only one thing will actually kill me.

That means that 99.9999___ % of things will not kill me. (This alone is strangely comforting.)

Also, I don’t know which thing will kill me, and I can’t protect myself from everything.

Ergo, I might as well relax. I can’t control the method and timing of my death, so I might as well turn it over to God/HP/fate.

When I do turn it over to God, I feel safer. I also feel less alone. I have the sense that love will follow me anywhere, even through the passage we call death.

Stage 4 Cancer: Why I Love My Brother-In-Law

People tell my 67-year-old brother-in-law Joe that he look like Captain Kangaroo, the star of that old kids’ show on TV: Joe has a little white mustache and straight white hair that looks like someone used a bowl to shape it. You can still see the outlines of a solid, stocky body, though his skin hangs more loosely now because of medication he has to take. 

He is in the hospital now with kidney problems, complications of stage 4 cancer.  Will he die soon?  I don’t know.  The complications are becoming intolerable.  Helplessness must be anathema to this man who has stood like a rock at the center of our family.  It’s bad enough to think of those who will mourn him most: his son and daughter, his wife.  Even more so to think of the bewildered grandkids who will lose their beloved Pop-Pop.  Though he doesn’t show it, Joe must be confused and frightened.  He did not expect his world to come crashing down so soon.

I want you to know who Joe is, so I'll tell you some of things he does:

--Dresses up like a pirate to go trick or treating with the grandkids.

--Hangs 100 lottery scratch cards from the ceiling in his heated garage, where we hang out over Christmas. Stuffs the envelopes with ones, fives, twenties, and one $50 bill.  Whoever wins a round of bingo gets to pull one down.  This continues until every single one of them is taken.

--Set up his own kitchen in what used to be an attached garage, complete with large warming trays, griddles, and multiple crockpots.  Cooks Christmas dinner. Makes breakfast for out-of-towners like us, whatever you want: pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs.  Has the coffee brewing long before we get up.  We call it Joe's Cafe.

--Calmly wraps up his hand after a machine cuts off his thumb.  Says, “I guess I better go to the hospital.” Does the same thing later when another machine slices off the tips of four fingers.  Never blames the guys who hit the wrong buttons.

--On New Years Eve, show up at the neighbors in diapers and a sash. Period.

--Builds an apartment over a second, detached garage.  Leaves it unlocked and tells the neighborhood kids they can go up there if they’re locked out of their homes.

--Tells on occasional off-color joke that make me blush.

--Pushes a $100 bill into my hand just before I head into the airport.

--Plays jokes on the doctors and nurses.  Hold up his left hand, which is missing a thumb and the tips of four fingers.  It’s covered in ketchup.  Laughs at their alarm.  Plays this trick on new hires at the machine shop as well. One of them faints.

--Complains that his elderly mother-in-law pounces on him with a to-do list whenever he walks in the door; but keeps going over once a week to do whatever needs doing.  

--Has learned to anticipate my sister’s immediate reaction to any proposed change: “Absolutely not.” (I’m the same way.)  It used to drive him crazy but now he just chuckles about it.

--Wins damn near every card or board game we ever play.

--Goes to work every day no matter how bad the cancer makes him feel.  Falls asleep at his desk.  His sister is the boss and loves him too much to kick him out.  The guys he supervises do too.

--As the oldest child in his family of origin, took care of his six brothers and sisters.  Instinctively handles kids with firmness and respect.

--Never reads, is horrible at spelling.  Not educated beyond high school.  Voted for Trump.  Dislikes immigrants because a family of them trashed the apartment he rents out.  Would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it.

--Married my sister when she was 19 and weighed about 95 pounds.  When they danced the jitterbug, he’d throw her up in the air and swing her down between his legs. 

--When I first met him, I was the classic over-achieving, straight-A student and thought he wasn’t very smart.  Now I see how incredibly smart and talented he is.  He can build anything, fix anything, cook anything, out-play everyone at any game. 

--Puts bottled water and oranges in the fridge when we stay in the apartment over the garage.  Turns the heat up before we get there. Buys our favorite pretzels. 

--Opens his home to me and my family after I had been estranged from the family for 15 years.  Helps me open my wounded heart.  I thank him for the fact that I’ve come to love him.  

Joe, even when you're gone, our hearts will be full of you.  We’ll keep the lines from heaven open, in case you ever need to talk.

Choosing Faith

When I left the community college and started writing this memoir, my attention turned inward. I stayed at home most of the time, reading, writing, and lying around. I seldom exercised or saw friends. But just a week or so ago it was as if someone hit the On switch. As if I suddenly poked my head out of a hole (much like Punxatawny Phil) and looked around. I felt a need to move back into the world. Signed up for fitness classes at the Y and contemplated tutoring a kid or two.

I also started talking to God again. This long hibernation and inward search had brought me back to what I needed most—to feel reassured of something beyond the whirling turmoil of Trump, mass shootings, the climate crisis, wildfires, and now the global pandemic. I feel I must choose now at a deeper level, whether I will believe in the world that appears so cruel, so dangerous, so pointless—or one permeated with love, beauty, and meaning, offering a loving presence that can be trusted to accompany me through the severest troubles.

After-Life: What Will Persist

I used to believe that I would  persist after death as an individual, recognizable soul. Now I doubt it.  I think I'll persist instead as what the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls the continuation body --my impact on all those I’ve touched in ways big and small. 

It comforts me to believe I will persist in the memories of my son, perhaps speak to him in dreams.  That he will carry me inside him, a constant reminder that he is precious, he is loved.  

Bioluminescence

I want to talk about bioluminescence, the ability of lightning bugs and foxfire and medusas to make their own unearthly light.

In the photos, medusas float lazily under their pulsing umbrellas, transparent, shimmering, glowing white against the dark watery sky. I wanted to comment on this ethereal beauty, speculate about why God created things---creatures, sunsets, paintings--we perceive as beautiful. Why God gave us this capacity to respond with pleasure and appreciation to certain arrangements of light and color and sound.

I suppose it’s adaptive, as the evolutionary biologists would say. It draws us toward things—mates, for example—that would not otherwise compel us. But why sunsets? Crater lakes? Jellyfish?

For me, beauty is a reflection of God: a piece of music so precisely exquisite it makes me want to cry, the quiet of a still wilderness lake. Somehow my senses sharpen and the world looks painfully, breathtakingly sharp, as if it’s designed for beauty. Our real eyes--our soul eyes—are attuned to this level of beauty. I hunger for it. It makes me believe again in a possible god, the possible good will of the universe.

Sometimes fact punctures fantasy. One scolding observer tells me that in the typical images of medusae in their white filmy garments, they’re not bioluminescing at all, merely reflecting the flash of the camera. In fact, Aqueforia misteriosa does not, on its own, luminesce. Only when the scientist pokes at it does it activate its green-light-producing organelles, and those few only at the very edges of its pulsing umbrella.

Still. I’m a sucker for beauty--as are most of the biologists I know. They too are prone to experience rapture in the natural world, to rhapsodize about intricacy and beauty in a way that points toward God, not away. To your face they will pooh-pooh the notion of “intelligent design””—they see natural selection as an impersonal mechanism. But deep down they’re enthralled by the intelligence of the natural order, its transcendent motive or organizing principle—they just call it evolution.

Just Keep Moving

Fourteen years ago, I took myself off for a solo weekend retreat a few hours from home. It was the morning of my first full day. I was on my second bowl of granola, and my third cup of coffee, rocking, as I gazed out the front window of the cottage to a stand of birch and sugar maples. I was stretching out breakfast as long as I could, with no rules for the day, no expectations--and reveling in the time alone. I was desperate for a break from mothering my hyperactive 4-year-old son, from the terse and angry exchanges between myself and my husband.

I’d already read for several hours first thing in the morning, still in bed. So when I finally glanced up at the clock—close to noon—I felt a surge of energy. I got up, rinsed out the bowl and mug, and pulled on my down vest over a thick sweater. On the way out the door I grabbed a rain poncho and a ring of bells--to avoid finding myself face to face with a bear.

Outside, the air was cold. There were still patches of snow and the ground was muddy in spots, but the sky was sunny and blue. I walked down the gravel driveway to a paved country road. It was only about a quarter mile to where a snowmobile track would peel off to the right, the turn marked by a dead tree filled with sleeping opossums.

I’d gone in only a few miles when I came upon a small white wooden house with several ramshackle out-buildings, a cropped lawn. A rusty set of railroad tracks had been running in parallel with the snowmobile trail. I glanced further down the trail; would it be more of the same? I wanted the opposite of civilization. I felt my energy flag, my mood sink. I sighed deeply and turned back.

Soon I settled into a rhythm. The chatter in my head had finally eased. I kept my eyes on my feet, hyper-alert to what surrounded me—birds calling, leaves rustling, the fresh scent of cold air.

Suddenly, I left my body in a whoosh of energy. I expanded to encompass everything I could see. I saw my body below, just one participant in a perfect whole. The trees and bushes and grasses were not static but alive with a pure crackling energy; they bent toward me and flowed through me as I walked.

I received a message: all was well, all would remain well, as long as I kept moving.