One person gave voice to a desire. Another person said YES. Several more people came along. Because of one strong, powerful, beautiful young woman, we gathered under a fall sky and found connection to the earth and to each other.
It just takes one.
Heavy
That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying
I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,
as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,
was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry
but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?
Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?
How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe
also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?
–Mary Oliver
Blue Oak
A meadow ends where all the perpendiculars of a leafy brown
river throw themselves up towards blue. The fruits are olive
and ocher. Sprays of dark leaves shiver and splash with
sun. Lightning scars show where the main, once shaped
by flames, was not lost but reduced to fine fists, oak tissue
under sheets of earth, sleeping through the storm and
teeth of quick-heat. Here it is: the world utterly lovely
despite the anguish, despite endless battles. Meanwhile,
you have slipped away to yours. My phone is still again. I
could call back. I could babble about this testimony to
resilience, bent limbs and great elbows of trunk leaning against
granite in gestures of pondering and reconciliation. I
could share the looping and fluttering of flycatchers, grasses
fresh with fog-drip and shade, pressed flat where a fox
recently turned doglike circles round and round before
settling in. I could hold up my phone. among the workings of
xylem and phloem so you could hear the rustling, the liquid flow
scooping minutes out of the heart’s rocky sloping, terrain
and flowing on as only a river can. Or I could stand still and listen.
–Maya Khosla
The world is on fire: right now the Western U.S, Canada, Italy, Turkey, Greece. Where else? It’s possible that Finland is still burning, that the fires of Siberia continue to smother the North Pole with wildfire smoke not seen there, in recorded history, until now. While wildfires burn, ice and frozen ground melts. We cannot be sure, as temperatures continue to climb, that the Arctic tundra will remain permanently frozen year round. And now the air currents over the Atlantic Ocean, including the Gulf Stream, may be shutting down. As these events unfold, it is increasingly difficult to see them as isolated or to deny that we are experiencing their cascading, destabilizing effects in our own backyards.
It can feel almost unbearable to witness at times. Heavy.
So I take a deep breath, exhale, and do it again, each breath a form of resistance to the despair pushing to take residence in my heart. Breathing in: I am here. Breathing out: I am still here. Breathing in: The despair will not crush me. Breathing out: I will not abandon myself.
I take this resistance with me to the park where I find that you, my community, have brought me hope and joy. I see it in your children, smiles so radiant and pure they must contain the same powerful light that shines on us from even the most distant reaches of the universe. I see it in the way you kneel together under the low hanging branches of the cottonwood tree, tugging the blackberry canes nestled there as gently as your heads bow together in the task. I feel it when we gather to see the garter snake you found in the mulch pile and transported to our restoration area by wheel barrow, when we find our snake relation in your gentle pour of wood chips and watch their forked tongue slip from tiny mouth as they seek refuge in the small woody debris once again. I see hope and joy in the diligence with which you work: filling wheel barrel after wheel barrel of mulch with such good cheer and digging blackberry and knotweed with such forbearance, despite the heat, despite the pandemic, despite climate collapse, despite the challenges that surely touch your lives outside this space. Despite everything, you have shown up for me, for our community, for our watershed.
You are hope and joy. I am in awe of and inspired by you. I needed to be with you to see that I am hope and joy, too.
Thank you. For your gifts. For you.
The scratches on my arms remind me that I touch the world and the world touches me. Here, with you, is where I am meant to be. Thank you.
I wanted clear the entire area of Himalayan blackberry regrowth. I wanted to hold my Asian neighbors close, to keep them safe from vitriol and hate. I wanted to dismantle the system that murders black people at the hands of the state. I wanted to shore things up. I wanted to repair the cracks. I wanted to make everything beautiful.
I wanted to protect the salmon, tell them it was safe to come back, that there would be no stormwater runoff or hardened banks or dammed rivers to kill them upon their return. I wanted to reconnect the rivers to their floodplains, wildlife corridors to each other. I wanted to wrap my arms around an old growth tree and stand there forever. I wanted to give the land back to the indigenous people who have been here always. I wanted to keep the forests from being disappeared. I wanted to care, to tend, to mend. I wanted everyone to have enough and then some.
I wanted to do so much.
I did what I could instead.
Outside the warmth of the sun reaches my core, birdsong delights my ears, clouds—my heart sentries—drift in the sky. My child’s mouth hurts from the joy of the season’s first salmonberries. We needed to be outside to be feel what it is to be home.
Sometimes the digging and pulling and cutting
is not the medicine
but the space for feeling the pain
of living in a world barreling
toward the brink of what could be
mass extinction
or maybe something else
maybe something
generative and alive
that requires a complete surrender
to grieving
in order to be born.
Either way
the earth knows
how to hold our tears.
Nothing Wants to Suffer
by Danusha Laméris
after Linda Hogan
Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind
as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff
being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want
to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.
The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see
their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.
The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.
These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth
to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes,
made quickly, and without much suffering.
The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.
A table, the weight of years of argument.
We know this, though we forget.
Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.
Nor the worm, content in its windowless world
of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.
The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.
Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,
looking down at all of us— their offspring—
scattered so far beyond reach.
Little hands do important work. They find the smallest friends nestled in the soil and insist on safe haven for them. They stay present and persist and with determination dig roots longer than they are tall from dark, rich earth. They are filled with wisdom. I help, but work mostly to stay present to their journey. It’s an important one. And important for me to practice simply being alongside another–witnessing. Birds call to each other around us, clouds pass through a pale blue sky, robins engage in territorial dispute, a downy woodpecker stands sentinel. For some blissful moments that stretch to hours, it feels like we might just be all right.
