How do the finches know? The feeders can be empty for days, even weeks, but very soon after I fill them the whole gang arrives. They squabble and pick through the seed, throwing off whatever they deem imperfect for their purposes. The juncos come then and pick up those leavings in the snow. Chickadees nose in when they can. But still, how do the finches know? Among the very earliest casualties of open conflict is the absolute necessity of the perception and consideration of complexity. Our perverse insistence on defining our differences by dividing ourselves into smaller and smaller compartments has really only made us more unwilling to see the intrinsic value of our mutual individuation and how necessary and interconnected and interdependent it is in the vast and incalculable ways that individuation must be seen to preserve it as a key to our survival as a society and a species. What will it take to transform our urge to separate into a stronger impulse to reach across or smash the false boundaries we’ve created in order to work together to invent, invigorate and implement a new vision? A next generation of cell phones?
Once when we were camping, we were chased naked into the night by noises we thought came from a moose coming closer and closer to our tent. We were sure we could be trampled. Now I think it might just as well have been a porcupine, but the fun in remembering and telling the tale keeps us convinced that it was, indeed, a moose. What is this welcome but dramatic change, as I grow older, that causes me to weep so easily? Alan walked into the coffee shop and saw Hector, a man with whom he had a brief sexual assignation some time before. Hector was holding the hand of a woman and talking intimately, closely. This made Alan smile, even though both he and Hector avoided eye contact. We ignore huge and increasingly available archeological evidence to the contrary when, as new wars loom and whole populations are subjected to cataclysmic deaths, dismemberment, and homelessness, we insist that war is a historical human imperative, never to be extinguished. For the majority of my life I have worked in organizations dominated by women. I have come to the conclusion that power, for women, may indeed be expressed differently than it is by men in male dominated organizations, but can be equally and as stubbornly toxic. Much of this goes beyond how patriarchy is expressed in female led and dominated groups. The complexity, overlapping pressures, and snares inherent to this analysis are dense and deep and deserve analyses. “I need you to love me” Kelly said “But what does that mean?” Phil said, preoccupied with his phone. “It means love... Love!” Kelly tried to take his hand. “Just a minute. I have to take this” and Phil started to type out a text. Just then the suicide bomber walked into the shop and pulled the cord.
I am on a bit of an unrealistic quest to find a dependable, honest, and healthy younger man who is willing to act as a kind of combination sherpa/apprentice. He would accompany me on overnight backpacking and hiking day trips (as I have aged, I have become more skittish about taking these trips alone, but don’t want to give them up just yet); be interested, learn about, and help me in my garden/s. Someone with their own creative temperament, projects, and goals would be ideal. Remuneration according to nature and difficulty of specific tasks would be agreed upon. Contact me if interested or with leads. This would be a non-exclusive partnership based on shared knowledge, conversation, and work. I haven’t been out on my snowshoes in five years. Deep snows come more rarely and do not build over the season as they have in the past. I heard a report that the snow and ice levels in my part of the world have declined precipitously in those same years. Younger people have no memory of the long, big snow, winters we once regularly had. How will coming generations be able to understand this loss? How will they refrain from its normalization? Clara walked through the museum. She was stopped by a Winslow Homer painting. Five children, all holding hands, no more than seven or eight years old, wound through the gallery. Their teacher followed them. They came to the same picture. The teacher crouched and asked, quietly “what do you see?” A little dark- haired girl pointed “Those ladies are drowning”. Then Clara cried. It is hard to grasp all that will be left undone when I die. I’m not talking about a will or even any of the seemingly perpetually unfinished interpersonal detritus. There were things in the world I thought would be resolved, finished, played out, done with.
A friend is concerned about his impact on his adult daughter while she was growing up. He wants to spare her from any ongoing unfolding hurt and inner conflict his childrearing might have catalyzed. He is quite emotional about this. I wonder out loud “Isn’t everyone’s life at least partially about grappling with the legacy of their parents’ child rearing abilities and inabilities? Certainly, you struggle with the manner in which your parents raised you.” One of class segregation’s primary goals in society is to afford the chief benefactors of that society’s design a way to de-familiarize and detach themselves from the dehumanization and suffering their class privilege unleashes and perpetuates on the other classes. Over the years so many loons have introduced themselves to me. Do they know they are in danger from others like me and our technology? Are they aware of their decreasing numbers? They seem so familiar. Do they pass over lakes they used to occupy and remember? How can it be a surprise that capitalism as a way to solve the problems it has created is proving to be an utter failure? What are the dynamics at play in a civilization that creates and vociferously protects an inability to conceive of and invent new ways to conduct itself in order to save itself? What blocks this basic intellectual and creative process from activation? I recently heard a radio show in which a gay man expressed at length his ongoing dismay, anger, and deeply injured feelings because his mother, who has an increasing level of dementia, present since he first came out to her, is unable to remember he is gay. How disturbing.
I sometimes consider that my passion for water, of being in water, swimming, diving, etc., has to do with my horoscope, which apparently has a complete dearth of water signs. I don’t believe in these things, but I do consider them. Casey says “I am going to the market, is there anything you want me to pick up” Marsha, from the other room, yells “Tampons and feta cheese” A UPS truck stops in front of the house. The UPS driver trots to the door with a box. It is large but not heavy. Marsha and Casey open it together. It is a small globe. Casey is upset “You know we can’t afford any more globes” and he walks out of the house. Marsha closes her eyes, spins the globe, and stops it with her index finger which has landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She thinks about whales and radiation. I have read many times that crows recognize people’s faces. So now, when the crows caw at me anytime I leave the house or take the recycling to the curb, I greet them loudly and they often shout back. Do my neighbors think I’m crazy? Who knows? Why do children expect that parental love should automatically be demonstrated through a complete acceptance of every aspect of their children’s lives? Certainly, children seem to feel it is their right to criticize their parents’ choices. Does that mean they do not love? When the wind blows in off the lake do the leaves it moves wish to fly? Do they realize as they flash and sputter and dream of flying in the wind that letting go means death?
One would think that having witnessed many deaths firsthand would make one more accepting of the whole idea. To the contrary… and for some, it even makes lying down terrifying. Minerva danced and danced. The guitars and horns shout and strum. She will not go home tonight but she doesn’t know where she will sleep. She is content to dance. Soon a blazing blue fire springs from her hair. The whole room chants and prays. They think it is the coming of a female Christ. They have been mistaken all these years. Luminescent in the inky night, she looks as if she will fly. The band is silenced by awe. A single mocking bird sings. Over and over it sings. Outside, it is dark and silent over the village. War is a gift given to the kings and queens by the other kings and queens. Is it unavoidable? Is it an unavoidable part of the human catastrophe? The kings and queens believe that. But our genes revolt and songs never lie. Something in the shadow’s shadow says no... and the first wind gives us those songs. I will not vote for old men. I will not vote for young men. I will witness the end of the republic and all its mercies and devils. Or I shall die before this inevitability arises and the waters rise up in revolt and sweep us all away. Many migrations will return. Their countless hooves pressing our memory into dirt. What is the weight of imagination? How many gold birds speak out of our history of ruin? Do we still have time to listen to the societies of markets and cooperative understanding? There. Deep in the dirt. Lays the answer. Will we be allowed to find it? I dream I am no longer interested in sex. It involves too much interpersonal drama and I want to talk about important things and feel intimately accompanied not aroused and then sleepy and sated. Why do they still want me? Many of our forefathers and mothers were convinced that the future would be better for their children. Even the ones lynched and the descendants of the genocides. How do we come to terms with their sacrifices, their abiding hopes, now that our world is eroding before our eyes? Explain in twenty or less characters while you teach yourself how to forget how to give each other simple directions. The documents in cursive are no longer legible. Figure it out anyway.
Coyotes often come to me when I walk in the woods. One crossed my path in the flood plain along a fast and clear little river where arbutus twines over the ground and blooms very early in the spring. I crossed over a spring-fed creek that in turn fed the river. The coyote crossed the trail in front of me, saw me, stopped a moment, looked at me in disbelief, and moved on. Another coyote appeared to be waiting for me along the barrens on the rocky scrapes at the top of a ridge that juts into Lake Superior. That coyote watched me for a time and moved away, full of the grasshoppers that were plentiful on that hot stony ridge. The ones that whirred away from every step as I approached the summit where the coyote waited. I saw his scat. It had pieces of grasshopper in it. What was the message in this? There is always a message. Do you have enough water? Will the boats take your children? Can you still hear the whine of depleted uranium cluster bombs? How much did you pay? Will you still dream forever of home? What will happen when the land is rendered useless, poison? At the basis of our increasing disconnect, our swelling loneliness, is a blindness to the ways we have invented to communicate that have instead bricked us into compartments we cannot escape. The new wars speed across places they render useless faster than we can be heard crying out “STOP! ...STOP!” Appeals to the humanity of those who profit from inhumanity is an exercise in ignorance, futility, a fool’s errand. While we traverse periods of time when believe in nothing else, we still manage to believe in the beauty of this place. We go out to find comfort, away from the inestimable cruelties instigated by our co-inhabiters, inventing repeated retreats into the chill, virtually untranslatable, secret voices of the low wetlands and high passes with their winged meadows, the cedar thickets and the music of brooks that we recall out of the depths of involuntary electron recall running in our blood and genes. It is a difficult world, isn’t it? Still, we mourn and protest having to leave it.