A little wind to travel

Cotton fluff was blowing through our yard yesterday and today.  At first, it looked like snow, then a wisp of cloud.  I grabbed a bit of it.  It’s lovely really, a wisp of nothing with a few seeds embedded, like stars in the milky way, stars scattered across a milky web.

This time of year all living things are propagating.  The cottonwood trees in our area are Black or Western Cottonwoods and they scatter their seeds willynilly.  Their distribution agent is a cotton fiber embedded with the green seeds.

They are not the only living things scattering their seed.  Birds are building nests and laying eggs.  Flower seeds scattered in fertile soil are shedding their coats and quivering into green life.  I’m shedding my coat but, I am not laying eggs.  My eggs are old. My interest in the process, however, will never die.

I participate in spring because I must.  I am not compelled or forced to by some outside element.  I am compelled by an elemental need like cotton seeds need cotton.

I will not create new life, but I will help it along.  I will watch and wonder and rejoice as each living thing reproduces itself.  Each organism is a little different, each time bringing change (evolution) and excitement into the world.

We are faced with a novel virus this year.  It has brought furor and dread.  It too is hoping to replicate itself.  I hope we can control it, but all living things want to live and so our task will be difficult.  This virus is canny, cunning.  Just like the cotton, it floats and travels in air and seeds itself wherever it lands.  Like much of the natural world, it is an opportunist and cares not a whit about other life forms.

But, back to cottonwoods.  I present a bit of fluff I captured.

It only needs a little wind to travel.

Is that Love?

I didn’t always know I loved him.  I knew he wanted more of me than I was willing to give.

The subway stop near Lafayette Street.  I would walk from my office and he would walk from his. I would walk down the stairs and see him on the platform in his tan trench coat his face turned to watch for me.  His face would light up and my face would light up at the sight of his face lighting up.

Is that love, I asked myself.  Is that love?

Is that just two lightening bugs flashing each other?  Is that two souls who’ve known each other forever, connecting?

Forty years later, we are trapped in our home a world away from subways and Greek food on the corner and tan trench coats.  I garden and putter in my pajamas, he sits and elevates his foot as he has been told not to walk.

He doesn’t look at me, not the way he used to.  We pass each other in the hall on the way to the bathroom.  He asks me what’s for lunch. He’s hooked on the coronavirus news, listening and yelling at the TV.  I’m in my head working on various projects or reading.

Just occasionally, we’ll look up, he’ll say something funny, I’ll do something funny, we’ll do a little verbal sparring and the sparks will fly.

Is that love, do you think?  Is that love?

 

Bearing the truth

Some of us do better at this than others.  Some bear the truth gracefully, with care, with perspective, with humility.  Others bear the truth as if it’s their right to burden all of us, like their pain should be our pain.

Bearing the truth right now is not easy.  It means bending your knees and taking the weight however you can and just keep on keeping on.

I know how easy it is to go dark.  I know that there can be a certain pleasure in pain, in calling out “it’s the end of the world.”  But move beyond your dystopian nightmares, your zombie apocalypse and get your head above water.

Find a way, a path through this morass. You don’t need to be stupid, acting as if all is normal on our planet now, neither do you have to work yourself so hard just to be able to sleep at night, or drink or drug yourself into oblivion.

Find your way.  Do it for you, your community, your family.  See clearly and keep moving if not gladly than at least stubbornly.  We don’t know where this is leading.

I just happened to think in light of the above, how I used to move heavy pieces of furniture when I had no help.  I’d slide it, end over end it.  I’d get a rock to create a fulcrum, use a crowbar as a lever and flip it.  The heavier the burden, the more my brain engaged in the task.

Humans—we love challenges and this virus is a challenge to scientists who need to figure out a cure, to citizens who need to grapple with their impatience, their pain, and futility.

My recommendation:  take a crowbar to your attitude.  Flip it.  Slide, move it somehow. Rearrange your brain and and move on.

I love this pictogram.  It shows our soul in balance and a strategy of coping with stress.  Find your fulcrum, your center, your core beliefs.  Plant them firmly at the point at which they can do the most good and push against the darkness.  Do it daily.  Push back.  You’ll get better at it with practice.  I promise.

Rigamarole

I like to take the long way to collect the paper in the morning.  I don’t have a big garden in the side yard but, in spring it is my baby.  I love to watch things gradually open up, fill out, and flower,

The other morning was a beaut.  Buttery sunshine flooded the side yard. The birds were awake, doing their birdy thing, eating at the feeders, bathing in a shallow bowl of water set up just for them.

Da da da daaaa.  Something had been here before I got up:  my soon to flower roses munched to the quick.  Similarly the geraniums, pink and purple were reduced to bare stalks.  The heuchera, my espaliered apple tree, the columbine, the fuchsia flowers and the geum flowers, nipped.  And did I mention my special columbine, babied, talked to,  anticipated, ground into the ground, stepped on in order to get to the apple tree.

Gone was my coronavirus garden, planted in hope, nurtured with excess energy, fertilized with compost and seaweed elixir.  Gone.

Fuck you deer.   May you burn in a fiery hell.  May your children and your children’s children wither on the vine.  May you rue the day you stepped inside my garden and took that first bite.  Like Adam and Eve, you have foraged in the Garden and eaten the forbidden fruit.

That seems overly cruel.  A bit overdone.  They are, after all, simply doing what deer do and I, in my impotence, am simply doing what I do—cussing them out.  But nature needs must and gardeners needs must and it’s all just a rigamarole.

Rigamarole:  mid 18th century: apparently an alteration of ragman roll, originally denoting a legal document recording a list of offenses.

I think that’s an accurate description of the deer what done me wrong;  a list of offenses.  In fairness, we have also done deer wrong.  We build in their habitats, we run into them with cars and trucks, we shoot them for fun and venison.  I get that.

But all I did is plant a garden.  Go pick on someone else.

Nature Studies

Robin is lying on the futon, and I am sitting in the rocker next to an open window onto our garden.  Birdsong is wild.  A lot of hook-ups going on.

Rob:  That’s not really a song.”

Me:  Who are you to criticize their song?

Rob:  It’s just noise—-tweet, tweet, tweet—no melody.

Me:  You don’t need a melody —its a bird.  Not all birds have pretty songs.  They’re not singing for you.

Rob:  I bet he’s trying to woo her, but he’s fake.

Me:  What?

Rob:…I have a beautiful nest—Come with me.

But really he lives with his parents and hasn’t worked for months…

Me:  Aah, so he’s spinning a line

Rob:  Yup—that’s why the song is flat.

Abiding

Abide. Where do you go for solace when you’re alone?  Where do you go for succor?  Where do you go?  When you can’t go out, you go in.

What’s in? Who is in?  Where is in?

I just got an image of a very open flower, the seat of sweetness, the ground on which you can act in corona time, a play for one character.

I know during great upheavals, that stage is loaded with characters—all the actors in your life vying for attention, for mention, angling to be heard within the melee. All those voices that we have taken in and not let out.  All the voices:  loving, blaming, angry, maddened, cajoling and malign.  All those voices but only one voice can bring you reconciliation.

The Divine One.  You.  You, who have listened to this noise mistaking it for yourself.  You, who have fought and lost and sometimes won against the voices that try to drown you in hate and self-pity and weakness.

Go onto that open ground and sit.

Listen to your own voice under the cacophony.  Quit fighting.  Quit arguing.  Listen to the sound of your heart and your breath.  Listen.

…a stream of running water, birdsong, breath, my body creaking, my chair rocking.  My dog scratching and sighing.  Me sighing.

There is resistance.  Resistance that feels like guilt and anger and victimhood.  Who am I that I get to let down?  I must fight this.  If not me than who, blah, blah blah.

Let go.  Release and let go.

I’m tired.  I’m tired of staying up.  I feel it in my shoulders and neck.  If there were a peg big enough and strong enough, I could hang myself up. But I will let the ground support me.  I will let the ground surround and hold me and I will let down and breathe.

I am the ox who declines his yoke.  Oh, I’m tired.  I have been a first responder my whole life.  Time to drop this.  Just a bit.  Just for a while.

I am no stronger or weaker than anyone else.  I need to drop my load for a while and breathe.

Drop to the ground of peace.  The path of quiet.  The healing place.

After neck and shoulders is my chest where anguish lives.  It is soft and sorrowful.  When my neck loosens up and my shoulders drop, I feel the anguish.  Breathe.  It is also calm there.  It accepts what is happening, quits fighting and acknowledges this sorrowful lot which has covered our world. We have forgotten that all humans are vulnerable.  All living things are vulnerable.  Mother earth is vulnerable.  We all begin and we all end, so…take breaks and take breaths…

and keep on keeping on into this beautiful world.  Get moving.  Acknowledge the pain, stay with it for awhile.  Try not to wallow and then…move on, get going.

There are beautiful people (and there are so many of them).  We have .. forests, our wildlife, our dirt and flowers and rocks.  There is art and artists, books of prose and poetry, science and understanding our universe and how it all works and the whole deal, beautiful.

Get going.  Make the life you have right now worth living:  make time to love my husband, my family who I can only visit on facetime or zoom.  Get going digging in the dirt,  chasing down the slugs that eat my lettuce, chasing off the deer that eat my flowers, loving everything in sight because I grew it, I nurtured it, and they (the flowers, food) decided to work with me.

Cook new food following recipes, clean out old boxes, and revisit old memories, tell old  stories and make up some new ones: make time, make do.  Forgive who you need to (yourself included), and reach out to old friends. Visit your neighbor even if you don’t like them much.  Put up with their shit.  Lots of people put up with yours.

Breathe.  Go back to bed if you need to but remember to get up.  Laugh.  Laugh a lot.  Laugh until you cry, cry until you hiccup, then hold your breath and let it out.  Again.  And again.

Nothing lasts forever.

 

Hey Kitty, How bored are you?

I just joined two new groups:

1.  Botched Taxidermy
2.  Crap Wildlife Photography

I’ll keep you posted.

Shaking in my boots

The world is out of joint.  Disquiet.  Simmering, bubbling, boiling.  The witches have brewed up an ugly malodorous pot.  I am frightened this morning.  I am frightened despite the arrival of a beautiful baby girl in my friend’s family.  I am frightened despite the beautiful sunny day and the pleasure I have working in the garden with my husband and my dog (he doesn’t work, he digs holes).

I cannot get the image of armed men in the Michigan Statehouse out of my mind, or the state’s that are opening up prematurely.  Trump has successfully politicized the coronavirus.

You cannot open some of the country, allow some of the people to walk about without masks, to fly across the country.  We need to stay put, but, the impetus to move freely is so sacred to some people, so embedded in their DNA that no amount of SCIENCE will convince them.  It’s our godgiven right, they say, if god wants me to die now, he’ll let me get sick, the coronavirus is a pox on all our houses for living libertine lives.   I’m a free man in a free country.

These people are living in another time and place.  To them it’s the ranchers versus the farmers, the city dwellers versus the country folk.

This time seems to illuminate the enormous rift in American thinking.  We are chosen, we are special, we are free, we are independent, we are Amurikans.

Fiercely independent, we can make up our own minds:  the flat earthers, the no vaxers, 9/11, Sandy Hook.  As someone said, those are opinions, not facts, but hey, if that floats your boat then go for it.

That’s not free speech, that’s idiocy, that’s ignorance, that’s delusional.  I love the ACLU, I support the ACLU.  Everyone has a right to their own personal opinions.  But facts—if you don’t accept facts, than keep that to yourself.  Shut up.  You are a bullshit person, you are, again a quote, a “shit weasel.”

After this is all over, we better get back to educating our citizenry.  There are too many of them that have chosen their own facts.  They distort reality for themselves and others.  Somehow it’s in their best interests to do so.  But it is not in our collective interests to let them spread their vile shit.

Remember the phrase “the common good”.  For the common good, let us all turn to educating the country.  We are all free to believe what we wish as long as certain truths are solid.

If we’re all in this together, then, we better be together.