Musings – Page 4 – the Dig and Flow

This Year’s Work

The biggest tree in our woods has split apart, and it is squashing its neighbors. Its trunk crosses our uphill trail, so I walk underneath it, trusting those smaller trees to keep it from falling on me. These neighboring trees must be strong, might be suffering, and bend low under the intrusion of the tree that should have held itself upright—it had soaked up the resources and grown large enough.

This summer, we found the keeled-over bitternut hickory tree while hiking. Sam shimmied up the angled trunk, and Andrew followed, scheming about the chainsaw acrobatics required to deal with it. A tree that has fallen, but still hovers at least partly in the air, is known to foresters as a widowmaker. Liberating the smaller trees from the weight of this giant will be risky work, as it often is when tackling a bully.

Later, Andrew hiked out with his chainsaw and trimmed the tree’s branches, making all but the final, riskiest cuts (to my relief). But the tree remains. I stare at it, wondering about the work ahead of us. What personal risk will any of us take to lift some weight from the shoulders of others?

I think of the tree as Stella and I play a board game in which we are engineering ants. The game is cooperative—we win or lose together—requiring us to build gadgets to get past obstacles and free other ants. At the piranha river, I am thinking of a boat or plane, but Stella decides to drain the river and walk across. Faced with the giant spider, I am lifting the rope to suggest tying it up, when Stella whispers, “Let’s make the spider very sleepy.” As we tiptoe past the “snoring” spider, I thrill at her solutions that never occur to me. Together, we win the game.

Although the obstacles are huge, and the little guys are trapped under the big guys, Stella reminds me about creativity and cooperation. Our work on the farm this year—if we do it well—will foster different thinking and working together.

This year, some things will need to be dismantled. One corner of our side barn is caving dangerously, so we will take it apart—saving the beautiful and useful pieces, then gouge out its cracked concrete floor. This work seems easier than dismantling the hatred that appeared as swastikas painted all over a nearby town, hatred given permission by the guy we’ll inaugurate as president in 17 days, a man comfortably crushing his neighbors with his entire weight.

This year promises some risky work. I’m finding hope in creativity and cooperation, readiness to dismantle big obstacles or to devise new ways around them. In my better moments, I trust that the strength of compassion is greater than the power of oppression. When we take down the side barn, the farm will be safer, and the pieces will build other beautiful structures. When we figure out how to remove the broken, heavy tree, its neighbors can be free to straighten and thrive.

To Stay Awake

Sometimes I need help talking less and listening more, so the laryngitis could be a good thing. Anyway, the thought boosts the morale that sags on my drive to work. When I arrive, my coworkers do not recognize my voice when I speak to them from behind, with my alto turned into a hoarse bass. Throughout the day, I am quieter than usual.

“Listening is a hugely powerful form of attention,” says Krista Tippett, who interviews people about the meaning of life on public radio. Twice this weekend, I lie on the floor with a person and their large, sweet dog, who dies as my fingers push a syringe plunger. One dog afloat in fluid that fills his chest and abdomen, but wagging his tail. The other dog paralyzed from the neck down. Their eyes are the same, showing only concern for their sobbing people.

I place my palms on the dog’s quiet thighs, unable to leave, unable to even whisper. I press my stethoscope to his ribs to hear the silence. In this moment, listening does not feel powerful, but I am the one with the stethoscope, not with my heart gone still on the floor. This is what power means. In vet school, the top cardiologist told us the most important part of the stethoscope is between the earpieces. Our ears, our minds. Now I know that my heart lives there too.

The day is long and full of broken dogs and cats. I leave in darkness. To stay awake and focused while driving, I bring a hunk of crusty French baguette leftover from someone’s lunch. I take small bites and chew slowly, so it lasts the whole way home. The way it weirdly lingers between my teeth longer than any bite of anything reminds me of communion from years ago. I involuntarily think, “This is my body, broken.” And I get weepy.

“Compassion,” Krista Tippett says, “is not necessarily about agreeing with somebody else, and it’s not necessarily about liking them. It is making a choice to honor their humanity.”

It’s a complicated world, though, and I don’t know how to honor humanity beyond each person I meet, each dog on the floor. And I feel, achingly, that we need big, wide compassion these days. I chew on things to stay woke, in the sense of maintaining an awareness of the world around us, to keep informed of things that are changing and things that refuse to change.

Despite the aching, I will pay attention. When my voice is ragged, when I hold power, I will try to listen. But I will also stay awake, so that I will be ready to speak.

And Then It Is Dawn

So many objects in the night sky are shining and flickering that it’s hard for me to tell which ones are real. I mean real as in masses of gas and rock and energy sending their light from the deep past across space to my eyes. The satellites and airplanes are real too, but somehow they mean less to me than the stars.

A glow blankets the southern horizon from the direction of town—more human lights confusing my view of the stars. Maybe these unnatural lights disappoint me because the work of our brains seems better at causing damage than at fixing things. Even our complex, satellite-building minds can barely comprehend the scope of the trouble we’re bringing upon ourselves.

As always, I’ve been looking to the sky, a practice that lifts my chin and opens my chest. It is not, otherwise, a useful practice, so I am trying to level my chin and keep my hands busy. There are a hundred small tasks in every day. Pouring the milk, picking up a dropped toothbrush, turning the key, driving to the school. I deliver one-armed hugs over backpacks and release my kids with off-you-go waves when I want to stay on my knees pressing them in my arms.

I have been building weird things. My seven-year-old and I screwed together several pieces of wood from the burn pile and added carpet scraps to make a tall playground for our kitten. Crooked fence circles of various sizes encircle our tiny blueberry bushes, which I am determined to protect. In the barn, our chicken coop has new, gigantic roosts with long black locust branches staggered unevenly almost to the ceiling.

I have been building in these uncannily beautiful late fall days. At night, the moon has been strong—called a supermoon when it was full, but even more haunting to me in this past week. When waning, and this moon’s top appears scooped-out, as if the moon is hollow, but still powerful. In this moon’s glare, hunters are tempted to shoot early this morning as they watch deer wander nearby on the first morning of the hunting season, when the laws prohibit shooting before dawn.

And then it is dawn. As always, things seem a bit more real to me in the morning. It might have to do with what I can and cannot see. Out my kitchen window, I see chickens enjoying our garden soil and the sunlight touching treetops across the wetland.

From my window, I cannot see the swastikas freshly painting in public places or the faces of men who have amplified hatred as their life work being selected to advise our government. I cannot see tear gas pluming into the faces of Native people protecting our water or the rapid warming of our planet. But I know they are out there.

I also cannot see the thousands of people in the streets, people no longer standing by, people rushing to defend victims of hate crimes increasing across the country. I cannot see the networks of caring, thoughtful people building empathy and concern for each other and our planet. From here, I cannot see the small flowering cyclamen plant that I left at our local Planned Parenthood clinic last week or my phone calls to our representatives in Congress. But I know they are all out there, too.

And this evening out my window, there are three ducks, never apart, quacking in their busy way across the yard to their favorite puddle. Nothing will descend upon them unnoticed since they are always watching out for each other. There is one vocal, rangy barn cat who spent her whole previous life kept indoors, but now owns the place. She is nobody’s fool; she can take on any rat that causes us trouble.

And then it is dawn again, and all of the stars have fallen, are falling, and blanketing the ground in our first snow. Each strand of our fence netting carries the weight of the snow. Every branch bows to this unexpected beauty. The distant things seem near, and everything seems both imagined and real.

For Everyone Struggling to Breathe This Week

Driving a curving, ice-sleeted road near home, we slide. In our ‘93 Toyota Camry, my mom stays calm somehow and, from the passenger seat says something like, “We’re going in the ditch.” In the backseat, Stella and Sam stop their chatter. Abandoning brakes and thought and maybe breathing, I just keep steering. We glide like a slow boat—first to the left, then towards the right ditch, then undeniably into the left ditch. At the last minute I touch the brake, and in some astonishing wonder of physics, we gracefully turn 180 degrees and stop still, facing where we had started. Still on the road. Still a week to go before the election.

On Wednesday morning, November 9, the kids’ French toast burns when I run upstairs for I forget what. A charred smell takes over the kitchen, then drifts into the mudroom. There, it mingles with our farm boots and ends up smelling just like calf dehorning—seared flesh and burned hair mixed with wet shit. The smell seems to fit the day.

On Wednesday morning, the physical therapy room at ground level in our community’s small hospital steadily fills with white men. They are verbally thumping their chests at the women and the one person of color. “You seem really edgy this morning,” my PT tells me, and she hisses. Later, I walk over to the men and shake a hand and say, “Congratulations. I hope this change you’re excited about includes more kindness. I hope you can be kind.” I want to say more, but I’ve used my available breath. I walk away, gulping air.

On Wednesday night, a petite, fierce musician on a blue-lit stage presses her eyes. Her whole career has been poetry music that amplifies voices of people nobody hears, trying to sing towards change. Tonight, she speaks to us in uncharacteristic understatement.

“Tell us how you really feel,” someone yells from the darkened audience.

“I’m really trying to play it straight here,” Ani DiFranco says.

“Go off the rails,” someone yells.

She laughs, but mutedly, like it’s a little hard to get enough oxygen for a big open laugh.

Later she stands without her guitar, just a poem from years ago, saying,

“I sing sometimes like my life is at stake, ‘cause you’re only as loud as the noises you make. I’m learning to laugh as hard as I can listen, ‘cause silence is violence in women and poor people. If more people were screaming then I could relax, but a good brain ain’t diddley if you don’t have the facts…We live in a breakable, takeable world, an ever available possible world,”

and her words will ferment in my head for days.

On Thursday night, after the kids are asleep, I sit down, then stand up, walk to the kitchen, then back to the sofa. I suck my teeth and turn on my phone and turn it off. Discarding all other media, I look for books, but can’t settle. I pick up The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz and open it to Chapter Three and read that fermentation is transformative action. “‘Mixed cultures are the rule in nature,’” and I digest this, slowly.

Here is a process that utilizes—demands—diversity and produces energy without oxygen. It works in dark places. It smells powerful and makes tangy, amazing things. From it emerge sauerkraut, kimchi, chutney, miso, tempeh, dilly beans, and a hundred other pickles. We get yogurt, kefir, kombucha, and just plain vinegar. Without it, we would miss wines, meads, ciders, beers. Mixed cultures. Transformation.

For everyone struggling to breathe this week, maybe this stench is something burned and inedible, and maybe it is something beginning to ferment. Something that will make the invisible visible, that will bubble and rise, that will feed us.

startamovement — Also this week at physical therapy

Going to Seed

October. We have not turned on the heat, and the picnic table sits steadfast in the yard as if it is still September. In this lingering warmth, we are stealing time from winter. We fool ourselves by delaying things at the beginning of a long haul, the way we wouldn’t eat the good snacks or trade drivers in the first few miles of a ten-hour road trip. The next season could be a long haul.

Or maybe I am borrowing back time from summer—time lost in my concussion fog—now that I have energy. I grab the long-handled lops and flail into the pasture to clear around our young poplar trees, leveling goldenrod, burdock, and some thorny black locust sprouts mostly taller than my head. Sometimes I just swing the lops like a sword-wielding samurai to whack down the thinner weeds. Mostly I scissor through, taking ridiculously precise bites with the tool’s small, curved mouth.

It’s really too late for this work, since these weeds have gone to seed. Everything seems to be doing that these days.

Thorny problems have grown up among us while we looked away. We find ourselves not-so-suddenly in a thicket of hateful stuff, which has already formed seeds and begun to scatter them. Painful barbed sticks have resprouted from deeply rooted stumps like the black locust trees. Even as we try to address this current tangle of racism, misogyny, fear, and hatred of others, the seeds of next year’s struggles have been sown.

November. And now it is November 4. We tick off the days until election, wanting relief from uncertainty. Wanting the world to go back to before the election insanity began. It seemed quieter then, and now everybody is raw. We are hurting the way an infected blister hurts, just after it bursts open

And I realize that nothing is over in four days; November 9 is simply a beginning. No matter who arrives in the White House, the people we need to live with are all around us. We have cracked open many new and old conversations in the past year. We are talking about truth, safety, love, hatred, the basics that define our country, and if democracy will survive. Right now these conversations are wounds, but maybe we can begin to heal if we take care of each other.

Everyone I talk with thinks everyone else is going to seed—getting out of hand, taking over, choking out the good, threatening this place itself. Once again, our differences scare us.

I am weeding again, and I notice that when all kinds of plants have gone to seed, some hope can grow out of it. The milkweed carries pods loaded with seeds, each one equipped with a tuft of down to lift it on the breeze. Next year’s milkweed will feed Monarch butterflies on their improbably long travels. Clover grows where we never planted it, fixing nitrogen from the air and into the soil, making it more fertile.

Let’s live in these conversations—this weedy, seedy place. Let’s talk and listen about all our despair and hope. Let’s breathe this same, fine November air together. For now, to help me keep breathing, please tell me your stories of kindness and love—seeds that can grow good things in the long haul. We all need each other and our stories in the days ahead.