The human tide

I don’t know half of what I need to know in this world.  Not half, not a quarter, not an eighth, not a 1/quintillian.

It’s a puzzlement.  Tragedy doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom.  Sometimes it brings only dullness, apathy, anomie.

We love to read books where the heroine/hero overcomes all odds.  Oprah and many others have made their livings off those rich droppings.

Nobody wants to read a story or hear a story about those travelers who didn’t make it;  the boat people who drowned, the folks who died and whose bones are lost in the vastness of our southern deserts.  All are walking to be saved and many more will be lost then saved.

Their families will remember them for a time.  Their friends.

Their stories need to be told but they are not uplifting.  These stories are sobering.  They are a contrapuntal note to the triumph over adversity theme.

I am following a story on National Geographic.  It’s called “Out of Eden Walk.”  This man is walking from the oldest human fossil site in Ehiopia to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina.    It’s really interesting and you can follow him online.  He started in 2013 and it will take him seven years.  Oh, and he is walking just like our ancestors did.
Why am I mentioning this to you?  Well, because it takes me out of the pain of the present day.

We are a wandering species.  Not just because of climate change, wars, and search for something better/different.  We are walkers and sailors and fliers.  We are goers.  We are running to or running from.

As Paul Salopek walks across the scalding desert of Ethiopia, through hostile territory under the control of crazy  rebels fighting for their piece of the action, he runs into surprising generosity and warmth from people who have nothing but share it.  He and his team:  two camels and two guides, encounter burial sites of folks who couldn’t make the whole journey.  Rock mounds and circles inscribe the place of their death. The desert is a graveyard as well as a road out.  I suppose death is a road out as well.

I cannot rationalize death from natural causes( famine, age, disease, misadventure) or man-made means.  Religion, philosophy, history are poor solace for the destruction of so many.  It makes me angry and want to get up on my high horse, but what will that accomplish.  I was angry when my sister was killed in a car accident,  and I am angry when people seeking a better life get lost in the deserts south of our borders and die.  I am angry on a personal level and on a global level.  Human life is cruel.  If you don’t win the lottery, you don’t get to live.  If you’re unlucky, oh well.   Ofttimes, the virtuous, the good, the valuable, lose.

If you go way out on the fucking rim of the known universe and look back at these lost souls, you can see them as more of the same since Australopithecus picked his weary bones up off some desert floor somewhere and went looking for his salvation.

But, then, of course, you need to see yourself in historical terms, don’t you?  You have to say, well, I made it this far, maybe my ancestors will make it farther.

Who says that except someone with nothing else to lose?  They are the disappeared.  They are the detritus of a global movement of souls.  I know there is nothing new about what I write this morning.  Seems like I woke up with an ache.  It is an ache that should not ever go away.  It is an ache for all our ancestors and us and those that will come after.

God rest those souls.  God rest and keep them.

Accretion

Do you know what an accretion is?  I have a few wandering around my house.  I imagine they started out as grains of sand.

Over time they acquire additional layers.  Layer upon layer they build.  Over time, they become the size of a marble, then, the size of an acorn and so on and so on.

They accrete, they gather, they build.

Humans are like that.  Humans accrete.  The kernel they began as becomes something else as they go through the years.  They shape and are shaped by the environment they dwell in.

Human beings are accretions and I am so glad they are.  For, who would wish to be a kernel their whole life.  Who would be a blob of nothing, a bit of dust, a snippet?

Our beginnings are humble.  We are bits of dust and grit, of two chains of DNA wrapping around each other, and then becoming something else.  Something undreamt of, something unplanned for, something unique.

Oh, I know, he’s got your eyes, or your hair, or your hands, but no.  This is a unique being;  complex and layered.  Covered over again and again, the germ of the person becomes a unique human being.

Walk out, step out, you brave new thing, you being that has never been seen on the face of the earth.

Step out and become the one you were meant to be.  Totally haphazard, and yet a being made from others, becoming other and then making others.

Miraculous, a gift from God, from Mother Nature, from the wonderful interplay of nature, nurture and something else.  The universe is a genius cook.  Whip us up a savior.

Here is a small accretion given to me by Ellen Gedney, my neighbor, now gone.  It came from Whiskey Creek and if I had the wherewithal to crack it open, you would see the layers inside.  I prize this bit of history, both because of who gave it to me and what it represents.

Isn’t it lovely?  It looks like some planet you might see through a telescope, wandering around the universe.

 

I don’t want to write I do want to write I don’t want to write I do want to write

This is an argument I am having in my head right now.  I just wanted you to know that I struggle some mornings.  Struggle mightily.

Isn’t life a struggle sometimes?  It’s hard to get out of bed.  Projects last only so long.  Housecleaning must come to an end.  The dishes are done.  The house is dusted and the flowers watered.

Busy work.  Busy work can consume your days.  Full, but not satisfied.  So what is this hunger that is always there?

Meaning.  Meaning beyond the mundane.

I feel somehow out of the loop.  Actually I am out of the loop.  I’ve never been overfond of being in the loop, but I miss a sense of purpose.  A sense of purpose that is personal, meaningful to me if not to others.

I emptied my storage unit.  I got rid of a lot of accumulated dreck that I’ve been hauling around for years.  So after accumulation, what?  The core that’s left is relationships, isn’t it?

I don’t have a relationship to God.  Some do, and find great solace.

I ran into a woman I haven’t seen for years at the Rotary Auction.  (Talk about accumulation.)

She looked sere, scorched and diminished and dried up.  I almost howled at the sight of her.  I do not know her particular story.  I know she is married to an unpleasant man and for many years has sought meaning/redemption in the Catholic Church.

Did the Church sear her skin and render the fat?  What happened?   She’s the cicada but instead of taking flight after she sheds her skin she’s the skin itself left behind.  Perhaps she’s already flown.

I felt a profound sadness after I saw her in the midst of all this plenty, this acquisition, this joy in finding the one small object of one’s desire.  Children, babies, teenagers jostling and laughing too loudly, young families trying to outfit their homes, middle aged folks looking for a prize, and old folks looking for I don’t know what?

And her.  The accumulation over, perhaps.  Whatever she thought she wanted, acquired;  whatever she thought she needed, gotten and now abandoned.   She looked like an abandoned house—the furniture sold, the voices silent, empty, gone.

The shell left, bent.  In the midst of plenty, nothing, gone.

 

 

Clouds

I know that there are scientific explanations about why clouds are shaped the way they are.  They may have flat bottoms, they may billow out like sails across the sky.  Clouds can be wispy and threadbare, or full bodied rising up like cities on the plains.  Dimpling and churning, a quick brush stroke or a bold matte statement, clouds showcase our universe.

Each of these cloud types have names and explanations attached.  I appreciate that.  I am not anti-science, but this morning in my garden, I thought of other things.

The clouds separate me from the vastness up above my head.  There is a universe out there and we are only one small part of it.  The clouds are a divertissement from an understanding of how small we are and fragile and bloated by our own self-importance.

Clouds are beautiful and fanciful and a bit like a frothy movie which can divert you for awhile. Clouds keep us tucked up safe in our beds. They can also spawn tornadoes, and  drowning rain, that wash away whole towns.  Clouds are the backdrop for our angels and the source of our destruction.

Sheesh—all I was doing was hanging out in the garden my head tipped back looking at the sheets of transparent clouds that blew by and now I’m contemplating the apocalypse.

I guess I’ve “looked at clouds from both sides now.”

 

Dickybird

My brother John who is a nudgy little bastard responded to my post about the Jeanbird saying, “What about a dickybird?”

Pretty funny, I thought, and then it hit me.  What would a Dickbird look like?  My Dad’s name was Dick so it certainly would have piercing blue eyes, long legs (a wader perhaps), a shock of white hair, and a booming chirp.  Well, not a chirp exactly, a bellow.

A sharp intrusive beak perfect for skewering, and a rather elegant look while flying.  When resting, the dickbird sinks into himself looking like an old guy in a trenchcoat about to flash you.

So John, that about does it on my end.

The Little Red Hen Redux

I had one of those wonderful massages today—it transported me.  Where?  To an awareness of how I treat my body as an unequal partner in this life.  My head plans stuff that my body, I don’t know, I just expect my body to cooperate.  As if I am a golem, a creature created from clay, a big hulky being who I drag along on my schemes.

I expect compliance.  I expect my body to follow my will.

How Catholic of me.  How Western of me.  How like my Mom.

I found a 9 foot tall bookcase.  I wrestled into the Camry (poor Mona), drove it home and pushed it up the stairs on my back.  WTF.  Double WTF.  I was so proud of myself.  I did it myself and I remember thinking, God, if I’d asked Robin he would have said—“it will never fit, you must be out of your mind.”

But, it fits, it’s great.  It’s just what I wanted.

But, my body.  My poor old body.  You know there are times when I like to be the little red hen —

“I’ll do it myself, and she did.”  But there are other times—one day out, two days out, when I think—“gosh I have to slow down.  I have to ask for help.  that was foolhardy.”

I am tired of treating my body like an extension of my mind.  I am of one piece.  What’s good for some of me has to be good for all of me.