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.

The Doe, Myself

I had to get out of the city--away from covid, away from the gaze and innocent demands of my husband and Max.

I drove to the ARC retreat center, just an hour north of the Twin Cities. I checked in with the cook, then headed for the tiny cabin that would be my hermitage. The moment I stepped into the woods, I felt embraced by its dappled light and shade, the scent of pine. I filled my lungs for the first time in months. I sensed time beginning to slow, my needs becoming fewer and simpler.

A few hours later, I was walking through a grove of white pines when a shaft of late-afternoon light lit the rusty flank of a doe. She stopped and turned toward me. I held my breath. It was like coming upon an angel, or a citizen of some secretive tribe.  She gazed at me with both wariness and recognition, one people acknowledging another. For five minutes I watched as she stepped through the woods, lifting each leg high as if to navigate a treacherous patch of ground. She passed into the darkness, then back into the light, appearing and disappearing, like a holy flame.

The isolation was hard at first, and I read madly for hours so as not to face it—a novel from Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, Swedish crime noir at its best. It seemed an odd choice for what was meant to be a restorative retreat, but I found the clipped male voice soothing: concrete, laser-focused on a single crime, reasoning through a set of clues.

The main character Wallander was full of angst—exhausted, ill, fearing the cognitive declines of aging. He hid his diabetes, ashamed of it, and I understood, wrestling with my own diagnosis of “pre-diabetes.” I thought back over my own history of disordered eating, tracing it to the beginning, when at 14 I began to starve myself. And suddenly I burst into tears.

It was no good, I thought. My mother was not the innocuous “good” parent I’d idealized. She collapsed when I tried to come close, complained of depression and refused to take action, fell to pieces at any criticism. As a teen I had become her confidante, and in return, occupied the role of Golden Child: mature beyond my years, uncannily wise, and needing nothing. Starving. For the first time I saw deeply that I was loved not for myself, but for what I could give her. But I felt lighter.  Some heavy energy I’d been carrying peeled off and fell away, like the sour husk of the green walnuts that had littered our childhood yard.

I felt scarily naked, taking my first steps into the forest, wearing nothing but myself.

The Blue Garden

I come to the garden and sit on the bench in the shade. It’s quiet here. The lawn is deeply green. The garden froths with blossoms, magenta and blue and purple. The small tree behind me is blooming, and the air smells sweet. No rabbits visit today, just the occasional call of a jay, the liquid notes of a robin.

I hear a faint scraping of gravel and glance up. An older woman emerges from the other side of the wall that runs parallel to the bench. She wears sagging pants, a loose men's cotton shirt, a baseball cap over thin white hair that falls to her shoulders. She strikes me as unsteady, slightly bewildered--when she sees me, she glances away, then drops her eyes. 

I decide to head back home. But I’ve been wondering about the wall and what it means. Something to do with war? Lost soldiers? I notice a plaque facing away from me and go over to read it.

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.

Lilacs

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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.

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.

Parts of Self

A big chunk of me has slipped back into place unexpectedly.  I call it my nature girl.  Suddenly I’m appalled by fracking---especially in Pennsylvania.  And by the continents of discarded plastic, ghost ships cruising ominously across the ocean.  By the pellets of plastic lodged in the throats of seabirds and whales.  I don’t want to shout slogans or disrupt traffic or get arrested.  But I do want to write letters, post in my blog, watch what plastics I consume. 

This part of me went underground for the past 20 years.  It was the “biological imperative” that hijacked me, the compulsion to have a child. The cultural imperative for women.  But I wanted it, wanted to nurture another person into his or her genuine self: whole, authentic, happy.

Last night, Max’s face was bright with excitement over a new girl.  “She’s already beautiful,” he said. “If she puts on a little makeup, I won’t be able to look at anything else.”

Yet just the day before, he’d alarmed me and my husband and his teachers with a declaration of unhappiness and depression, completely uncharacteristic of him.

Metamorphosis

The monarch butterfly is the classic symbol of transformation. But there’s more to the story than what we’ve been told. First, the caterpillar doesn’t just hang itself upside down and wait for metamorphosis to begin. It hangs, but curls its head upward, wriggles, heaves, pulsates with fierce muscular contractions. Its outer skin peels away from the newly forming shell of the chrysalis, like the spirit peeling off from a dying body.

Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar literally digests itself. It dissolves into a soup of its component molecules and atoms. Then, says the old story, it miraculously rearranges those disparate atoms into a newborn, fully functioning butterfly.

The reality isn’t quite so simple. Long before the caterpillar glues itself upside down to a twig, it begins life inside an egg. It’s already equipped with the information that will guide its later restructuring, stored in clusters of cells called “imaginal discs.” I love this term. It refers to the “imago,” the final, adult form in the life cycle of certain insects. But the term also suggests “imagination,” that capacity to envision something that does not yet exist.

These imaginal discs do not succumb to the soup—they persist through it and feed on it to sustain rapid and prolific cell replication. Each disc develops into a specific organ or structure, and these link to form the new butterfly body. Even more amazing: the new butterfly “remembers” its past. Scientists have designed experiments in which they teach a caterpillar an aversion to a specific stimulus—for example, attaching a mild electrical shock to the color red. They are able to demonstrate that the newly formed butterfly retains that aversion—that some parts of the caterpillar’s neural network appear to persist through the soup.

I like the idea of the persistence of memory. It’s reassuring, when I’m in the soup. I hope I too have tucked away imaginal discs, capable of building a self that does not yet exist, yet holds the memory of its former life.

The Knowable World

At 14, I thought I was on the cusp of something.  In a quest for perfection, I took up ballet. I quit eating and fell to 95 pounds.  Snapped a flag in color guard, sang in the chorus, made a best friend.  I was planning on medical school--loved to trace the blue, latex-filled veins, the ropy nerves of the tomcat frozen in the midst of a mortal yowl.  I loved the soft swish of mesentery tearing from muscle.  It was comforting to name the cranial nerves, the bones, even their holes and ridges.  The tests were meant to be hard, but I aced them easily.

In 1969, my biology class traveled by bus to a marine wildlife refuge off the Jersey coast.  About the refuge I have only a vague impression: reeds, heat, sand, and salt, the raw croaking of seagulls. In the paper we had to write, I made what felt like a risky confession: “The best part was lying on the boardwalk in the sun.”  Mr. Matt returned the paper marked with a big red A, and a comment next to my confession: “As good a reason as any!” I felt relieved but also uneasy: Did I believe him? 

Now I rest on the boardwalk like a limpet, waiting for the sun to seep through me.  I’ve closed up shop on the children, the teaching, the giving to others.  The barnacles of time and age are weighing on me.  I’m not sure I believe in Darwin anymore, the simple mechanics of natural selection, the knowable world.

Tides

In the late 70s, I spent a month in coastal Maine with my then-boyfriend, a charismatic drifter.  We spent half our time in his VW bus and half in an apartment with no running water: The relationship was unstable, stormy.  

But the image that sticks is my first glimpse of the tide pools off the Atlantic coast, in their fascinating profusion of color and form and motion: the gently-waving tentacles of anemones, marauding blue mussels, the shout of carmine and orange and fluorescent yellow lichens, the opening and closing of tiny mouths.  Starfish, sea urchins, periwinkle snails, anemones, barnacles, limpets—even the names were lush and evocative. I was struck by the ephemerality of this living world: when the tide went out, this miniature world went gray and shuttered and lifeless; when the tide came in, it burst into riotous life.

I wish to be fearless and prolific, crackling with creative energy.  Instead, I sit here lumpen, gray, and shuttered, stuttering from one sentence to the next.  I wait for the tide to come in, for a clear picture to emerge.