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.

Lilacs

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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.

What Will Get Me Through

Yesterday, walking outside alone, I breathed in the sweet scent of cedar shavings.  Noticed the soft touch of sun on my cheek.  The stillness of the neighborhood, the whipping call of a cardinal high in a tree, a chickadee's three-note whistle.

These are the things that will get me through this sad and desperate time.  Not hopeful words, not falsely-optimistic projections, not the belief that God will protect me from tragedy and death, not imagining the things I'll do when this is over.  Not even a belief that some part of me will persist after death.

Just the body reveling in nature.  Just being here now.

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.

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.

Gratitude

I was walking home on a cold crisp February morning in Minnesota, about 16 degrees, the ground still covered in snow.  As I rounded the corner a half block from home, I caught the sound of a wind chime, swinging from a tree in our neighbor’s backyard.  It was blowing gently, each long tine tapping the others, speaking the deep, minor notes of an old church bell.  Then the sound lifted, no longer originating from the actual chimes but now the voice of the wind itself speaking a gentle reminder: go to whatever church you know, worship what or whom you can, remember gratitude for all your beloveds (my husband, my son) and for the long privilege of living, here, on earth.

Fracking

A treatise on fracking arrived in the mail.  Of all the environmental injustices today, this one bothers me at a personal level.  The Pennsylvannia coal fields, the exposed layers of shale and slate I could see in the old river basin near where I grew up, are ripe for it.  I think of the Blue Ridge mountains, the sassafras trees, the waterfalls, Laurel Run creek and the Schuylkill River practically in my backyard.  Miners blowing off the tops of mountains in the Appalachians.  An injury as personal to myself as my mother cutting down the centuries-old oak tree in our front yard.

We are born of place.  The place we grew up in is our psychic home, and to destroy it is to destroy our own foundation.   

When I woke up this morning, I was thinking about Native Americans, how we drove them from the natural lands of their birth and culture.  Imagine being lifted up and dropped in Antarctica.  How bewildered you would be, how desperate to simply survive.  How people—friends, family, neighbors, ourselves--would die from inexperience, the absence of cultural practices designed over centuries to keep them alive.  Or if that’s too extreme, imagine a rural village in China, the Namibian desert.  Alien, the opposite of home.

We’re driving ourselves into an alien environment.  One for which we have no tricks or practices or beliefs to keep us alive.  One in which there is no relief on or off the dusty reservation.

Artists see further ahead than the rest of us.  This is the future that writers like Richard Powers (The Overstory) and William Vollmann (The Dying Grass) and Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered) are already imagining.  We’d best pay attention.

Re-claiming the Sacredness of Earth

Just finished reading two of Richard Powers’ books, The Overstory and The Echo Maker.  I feel cracked open and gutted.  I yearn for the trees, for nature, for some sort of connection I’ve forgotten about. Ecology is “the study of home,” and I’ve forgotten where my home is.  I knew it once, without knowing I knew it.  Nature is my truest experience of God.  I’ve forgotten to live according to that knowledge. I‘ve forgotten to "love this beautiful land,” the phrase Chief Seattle uttered that once brought me to tears. 

 

My intellect inserts itself, questioning my certainty and longing.  I choose to resist it for this moment, to believe what I believe at the place deepest in my gut: that we are all connected, part of one vast living thing. That the world is mythic, and the psyche operates in symbols and drives stronger than reason. To put my faith in intellect alone is a mistake.  The aboriginal people of the world had it right: the sacredness of earth, the immanence of the gods.  And we mocked them, called them childlike and uncivilized.  

Without earth, we are going to die.  It’s that simple.  Without understanding that we and nature are one fabric—and we the newest members of this 4 billion years of creation—we are already dead.  We are sinners, egotistical in our belief that we are special, that we are in control. Forgetting we are a single finger on the body of God.

We’re destroying our home/we’ve destroyed our home.  We have to stop/we will be stopped.  That’s the knife’s edge we’re teetering on, pretending not to see. 

The Place Where I Used To Work

Where is it? my 18-year-old son wanted to know.  A community college I thought he would like. 

It’s up north, past the place where I used to work.

My throat closed as I heard myself say it: Used to.

The grief rolls over me in waves.  Grief over the loss of my work as a teacher, the place where I worked, the people I worked with.  The looming loss of my brother-in-law to cancer.  The looming loss of my son.  The loss of youth, of multi-potentiality, of energy, of the belief in perfectibility.  The loss of hope that the past will ever be redeemed.  The belief that anyone other than myself is responsible for my failure and limitations and unhappiness.

Twice a year, lakes turn upside-down. The well-defined gradations of light and temperature and living creatures break down, and everything mixes with everything else: protozoans, algae, bottom-dwelling scavengers, decomposing litter.  Dissolved oxygen and minerals intermingle throughout the water column, a fertile reshuffling of matter and nutrients.

Like the monarch in its chrysalis. Another potent soup.

The Lake Turns Over

As a graduate student in the summer of 1980, I spent five weeks at the Lake Itasca field biology station, where I meant to do an independent study of the alga Volvox. Under the microscope, Volvox is a beauty: a hollow, spinning sphere formed by a single layer of luminous green cells. Well, not completely hollow: parts of the outer skin fold inward and pinch off to form baby spheres, floating happily around inside the protective parent colony. A few of the babies already contain tiny spheres of their own. It’s like peering into a tiny galaxy, each green world giving birth to the next.

I was supposed to collect and analyze Volvox samples from one of the streams that fed the lake. But I was immature, easily distracted by the volleyball games and bike trips and bar outings. And by a tumultuous relationship that siphoned my attention. I let the project peter out.

I signed up for a limnology class instead. Before I cracked the textbook, I’d had no idea that a series of ecosystems existed beneath the calm surface of a lake, stratified by gradations in light penetration and temperature. Surface waters are lit and warm, supporting green algae and a host of creatures. Bottom waters are cold and dark, allowing the slow decay of dead plants and animals. But at a certain point in the spring and the fall, someone or something pushes the puree button. The lake becomes a whirling soup of chemical solutes and chlorophyll and mud and dead plants and animals, careless of their appropriate places. It’s as if God has thrown up his hands--“Do it again!”—like a delighted child.

Turning over is a natural effect of seasonal changes in a temperate climate, but to me it seemed as if the lake had simply decided, in some mysterious way, to bring light to darkness and darkness to light.

---------
There was a darker side to that summer. I was scared I was pregnant. My boyfriend was far away, visiting his brother in Hawaii, and I did not trust his love. One night after a long, tearful argument on the phone—at midnight, from an isolated bar four or five miles out from the field station—I emerged from the booth to find that everyone else had left. I didn’t have a car. I was too embarrassed to ask for help. So I started walking.

The night was cool and misty, partially lit by a pale moon. I would just follow the road back,
I thought. But it grew blacker under the trees.  A doe crashed out of the forest and leaped across the road in front of me. A paranoia surfaced. Who else might be out here, on his way to the bar? When I saw headlights approaching, I jumped into the forest and hid behind bushes. After it passed, I walked as fast as I could, breathing puffs of mist in and out, in and out. Time itself faltered, so that it seemed as if I’d be on this road forever.

I was scared I would miss the turnoff, but I didn’t, and eventually I slipped into
the cabin bunk-bed, my heart thumping.

The next day, my classmates and I piled into the boat, nets and jars and secchi
discs in hand. We moved out into deeper water. We had to complete our careful
measurements today, before the lake did indeed turn over.

Subnivium: A Poem

My teen-aged son is taking a creative writing course.  He brings home an excerpt from Richard Hugo’s Triggering Towns, about the nature of poetry, how the lines first drape themselves on a something concrete and then deepen or expand beyond the initial subject.

My son thinks this assignment will be easy. Now he’s on a deadline: it’s nine o’clock and the assignment has to be turned in by midnight. I want to help but now I too feel crunched for time.

I can’t help you, I tell him. It’s up to you.

Nevertheless, I read the excerpt, enjoy its crisp remarks on the writing of poetry.

The next morning, I’m flipping through the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, a popular Minnesota DNR publication. A sidebar title catches my eye: Subnivium.

I read the sidebar, and feel prompted to write.  Here’s what comes out.  I think it has something to do with climate change, among other things.


Subnivium: "Under Snow"

—A seasonal refuge between snowpack and ground)



This is a temporary refuge

for small soft mammals, relaxed in their busy tunnels,


unaware of the keen red fox plunging black feet first

into the white powder--emerging with a snack

wriggling between its long teeth--


Meanwhile, our clattering cars spew gray blankets

of exhaust, too hot for the season;

ice crystals unhitch their clasped hands

and tunnels collapse.


The vole crouches, naked and ridiculous,

eyes locked on a vast shadow cruising across the sky.