Patricia Wild

“The Wish For Water”

Yesterday at the park I got into a conversation with a young mother who didn’t know what day of the week it was. “I’m on maternity leave,” she explained. “All days are the same right now.”

I’m having a confusing summer, too. For despite one glorious vacation and two more planned, I feel as though I’ve been working non-stop for months! And ‘though it’s summertime the livin’ ain’t easy; even at peak moments my joy’s been, well, muted.

Why? At first I attributed these stirred-up feelings—or lack thereof—to three challenging, out-of-my-comfort-zone projects coming up for me this fall—and my perfectly logical anxiety! Deeper reflection, however, reveals a deeper truth: this has been the first summer I’ve truly experienced global warming. Up close and personal.

Record temperatures, a drought, weird weather patterns affecting crops like New England’s peaches; reducing fossil fuel emissions has never been more urgent for me.

But, wait! Have I allowed myself to truly listen to, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “the sounds of the Earth crying”? No. Have I really addressed my despair? Named it? Let it have the time and attention it requires? No. Have I allowed myself to consider the millions already experiencing the havoc and upheaval and disruption due to climate change? No.

But I must.

As I write this the smell of basil, soon to be transformed into pesto, wafts from the kitchen; it’s a summer smell. Somerville’s goldfinches feast on the city’s sunflower crop this week; those finches’ bright, sweet call is a summer sound. Like it does every August, our planet’s about to cycle through the Perseid meteor shower.

Summer still happens, however parched or broiled. May I/ may we find strength and joy in its eternal rhythms.

California Hills In August
I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion.
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain—
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

by Dana Gioia

“it’s always ourselves we find in the sea”

[Cairns, Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia]

maggie and milly and molly and may
E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962*

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

* Thank you, Kip Harris, for including this poem in your “Artist Statement” at your current exhibition at the Jo Beale Gallery. (I love your work!)

First Responder

[Subway Eldering on the Red Line; June, 2016]

This past weekend on retreat in New Hampshire I swam, I picked blueberries, I read—and kept my SmartPhone off. Guess what happened? Unplugged from the wider world was just fine. Delicious. But not being accessible should something happen to My Loved One—I am her health care proxy—was not.

No crisis. She’s fine; I was not needed. My anxiety was around both my failure to have arranged a back-up while out of town (Ooops) but, also, my realization of how central my sense of responsibility for my Loved One has become. (Oh!)

Ironically, this realization came on a weekend spent acknowledging my overweening* sense of responsibility. (I know !?) A sweltering weekend back home, every time I cooled myself off in the velvet-feeling lake or felt refreshed by a gentle breeze a part of me scolded: I have no right to enjoy this! I should be organizing around climate action. As if I were solely responsible for fighting global warming! Overweening, much? Absolutely.

But as I have noted before, being with Loved One and accompanying her in any small way I can during her final journey is sacred work. Holy. So I want to Be There in the fullest sense of those simple words.

[I willI be away next week; please check out my next post on August 2nd]

Overweening: ” Arrogant. Overbearing. Immoderate.”

Wallowing In It

[Peace Cranes in the Trash; Cambridge, MA, July, 2016]

When I was younger, I believed my activism to be fueled by (righteous) anger. Racism, injustice, violence infuriated me; seething, I did stuff. I showed up, grateful for my rage. My anger kept me going.

Unlike many of my fellow Quakers, I’d grown up in a family where it was okay to be angry. Sadness, however, was stronger discouraged. “Don’t wallow in it,” I was repeatedly scolded when brought low. At an early age I learned how to efficiently acknowledge my sorrow and move on.

Implicit in this childhood training was fear: if you stay in that sadness you will get stuck in it. (For me, the word ‘wallow” conjures mud or some other thick, viscous substance.) Be careful.

Friday night, in a called meeting for worship at Beacon Hill Friends Meeting around the violence and horror of last week, surrounded by like-minded people, I let myself stay in my grief. I felt safe to wallow. And realized—not for the first time— that sadness opens up an unlimited source of guidance and compassion within me. I reconnect with interconnectedness. I pray for victims’ families and friends and loved ones. I stay with, I hold their pain. I pray for my brothers and sisters of color. I pray for our earnest young people who have inherited this broken, far-from-enlightened world. I begin (ain’t there, yet) to consider the perpetrators of violence and hatred with sadness; as fellow wallowers in this broken world, just as trapped, just as stuck, just as dehumanized by oppression and greed and selfishness as their victims.

So, this week, the words of Bayard Rustin are really speaking to me:

Loving your enemy is manifest in putting your arms not around the man but around the social situation, to take power from those who misuse it at which point they can become human too.

Sacred

[Cave Hill Cemetery. Louisville, KY]

My Loved One, ninety-three and struggling with dementia, wanted to talk about her memorial service. Again. So I described a scenario she’d stipulated countless times before. Since what I described were her own wishes repeated back to her, she listened, she smiled; she approved. But then, suddenly, her face fell: “Where will I be?” she wondered.

As you may know, correcting someone with dementia is almost never the best approach. But what to say? Especially since My Loved One does not believe in the Hereafter? I prayed for Divine Assistance.

And something came to me, something based on the fact that she and I had also talked, many times, about how she can still feel her husband’s presence—although he died is 2010.

“Hovering,” I was led to say. “That’s where you’ll be. And you’ll be whispering in my ear.”

She smiled again.

I’ve been having sacred conversations with my Loved One.

Thank you, Joanna Macy:

Comic Book Store Window, Park Slope/Brooklyn, NY; June, 2016]

“When you make peace with uncertainty, you find a kind of liberation. You are freed from bracing yourself against every piece of bad news, and from constantly having to work up a sense of hopefulness in order to act—which can be exhausting. There’s a certain equanimity and moral economy that comes when you are not constantly computing your chance of success. The enterprise is vast, there is no way to judge the effects of this or that individual effort—or the extent to which it makes any difference at all. Once we acknowledge this, we can enjoy the challenge and the adventure. Then we can see that it is a privilege to be alive now is this Great Turning, when all the wisdom and courage ever harvested can be put to use.”

(from World As Lover World As Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal, p.143, 2007)

Primary Source

[My Life as Spiral Notebooks; My Journals]

This summer, I am pretending to be the Jane Goodall of swallows. I sit on my deck sipping iced coffee and watch their silver underbellies dart and circle above me. I note swallows’ different altitudes on different mornings and hypothesize why. I note clouds, weather, what’s in bloom in my back yard. I plan to make meaning of what I watch.

But, you say, why don’t you simply go online, go to the library? You could read what the real Jane Goodalls of swallows have already observed; everything you don’t understand, all swallows’ peculiarities and behaviors will be nicely explained for you!

Yes, I know. Not seeking others’ info is the whole idea! Imbedded in that “I plan to make meaning” statement are a whole bunch of adverbs. Like “Haphazardly.” Like “Randomly.” Like “Sketchily.” Like “definitely not Type A-ishly.” And, most important, “Reverently.” (And let me just note how indulgent it was to write out that string of adverbs—which I tend to avoid because they are considered the sign of a second-rate writer.)

What liberation to let my own eyes and ears—and heart—be my primary source!

The Healing Sound of Water

[Fragment, Tingley Fountain, Louisville, KY]

Sunday, overpowered by “despair at the world”* and yearning for quiet and beauty and solitude, I walked to Cave Hill Cemetery—where Muhammad Ali had been buried two days before. And what better place to silently hold in the Light the Orlando victims and their families and the LGBT community and my delusional country than beneath an ancient tree.

So I did. I sat beneath many such trees. And found comfort in both their bounteous shade (it was a tropically hot) and, unlike Berry’s wild peace, to discover unexpected joy in each tree’s scripted, humanly designed, eye-pleasing placement. Such man-made beauty allowed me to acknowledge “that of God in everyone.” What a gift!

Of course, given that the Louisville cemetery had just become the final resting place for one of the world’s most famous people, its 296 acres pulsed with energy as car after car, from shiny, tinted-glass SUVs to beat-up wheezers, drove up and down winding, tree-lined roads to pay their respects. And when I was finally ready to once again be in community, I joined the throngs.

Muhammad Ali’s remains are buried on the side of a steep, shaded hill overlooking the cemetery’s scattering gardens and a small lake, once the site of a natural spring, which now boosts an ever-gushing fountain. So if you wish to make a pilgrimage to that extraordinary man’s burial location you can, after visiting the site, walk down the hill to sit on a bench—and be comforted by the healing sound of water.

*The Peace of Wild Things
BY WENDELL BERRY
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Is There A Theme, Here?

[Broken Mirror on Sidewalk Self-Portrait, 2016]

A getting-to-know-you lunch with a yoga classmate, Muhammad Ali’s death, my 50th college reunion, a late-afternoon lobbying session (with other, WAY more informed people) to discuss an upcoming energy bill with my state rep; is there a theme, here? (besides the fact that I’ve simply noted some highlights of this past week?)

Why, yes, there is!

Let’s put it this way: at my Wheelock College reunion Saturday, someone asked a group of about thirty Class of ’66 members who’d read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. Most of us had.

Being mortal/growing old: for me, Ali’s death has proved a telling benchmark, a very real, very concrete measurement marking how vastly different the young me of the mid-sixties, who’d regarded Cassius Clay/ Muhammad Ali with fear and scorn and, yes, confusion, and the seventy-one-year-old me who marvels at, celebrates his witness* against racism and oppression and war!

So, yeah, I’m no longer pre-intimation of mortality. I’m mortal.

We all are. Which is why I went to lunch with that yoga classmate, a delightful woman who usually places her mat next to mine. The classmate who used to put her mat there (and who often said she and I should get together but when it came time to actually set up a date . . . ) died. Tragically. And why I, ever-mindful of the urgency of addressing climate change, showed up at a 4:30 meeting to discuss an energy bill. Because who else can show up during working hours? Activists and pensioners!

*In Quakerese: to stand up, to show up, to speak out about, to get arrested for some injustice you’ve been moved (“led”) to protest.

Rewriting the Past

[ a (Defiled) “This Changes Everything” poster, Somerville Ave, 2016]

Years ago at an anti-war demonstration—Vietnam, this time—poet Allen Ginsburg made a startling announcement from the podium: “If the United States government can illegally declare this war,” he shouted, ” I can declare that it’s over! Yes! I declare that this illegal, horrible war is over! Bring the troops home! Peace at last!” And the crowd cheered and wept and hugged and released balloons (it was the 60s; we brought balloons to demonstrations back then.)

I cheered and wept and hugged, too. And for four or five seconds I celebrated Ginsburg’s fantasy. I believed it. More important, that brilliant poet had given me, had offered all of us a brief, delicious taste of What Might Be. Could Be. He’d allowed us to experience how it felt, ever so briefly, to live in a country not at war. Imbedded in that contrived moment was an incentive: “Your heart lifted, sang just now? And you were filled with hope? Nice, right? Then keep on keepin’ on. Keep protesting.” So we did.

Sometimes, these days, as my Loved One remembers less and less and my actual childhood is being rewritten to resemble a fairy tale: “. . . and they all lived happily ever after,” I don’t correct her. Just as I don’t correct her when she confuses times or names or other pesky facts. I don’t remind her that, actually, our relationship was “fraught,” as my father would say. No, instead, like that balloon-releasing moment of unadulterated joy, I briefly savor a childhood that never happened but is filled with love—the same love I now see in my Loved One’s eyes. And, like Ginsburg’s “peace,” possible.

(I guess it’s true: it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.)

Sawing away Making God-Awful Noises

[Trondheim, Norway]

“Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along,” says E.M. Forster. It’s that “public performance” that most moves me. The sad, cold, hard fact is that sometimes, while we saw away making god-awful noises we’re on stage, in rhinestones or tux, a horrible disappointment to our audience and ourselves. Flop sweat soaking our evening wear, grimly we work through our repertoire. No one claps.

( I can still remember the first time I was in a high school play how, after months of rehearsal in a large and empty and drafty auditorium, that at our first performance I’d walked on stage to feel all those bodies’ warmth—and to hear their rustling anticipation/impatience.)

But what if we brought tolerance into that auditorium with us? What if we took our seats as if at an ongoing Suzuki recital? What if we whispered, “Wow! Last time he/she played that last bit he/she was much, much worse! What an improvement!” What if we cheered and clapped without ceasing.

We could note our own improvement, too. What if we whispered to ourselves as we strode onstage, our hands already sweaty: “I’m learning this as I go along.” And forgave ourselves for not being Perfect.

“Stay There!”

Overheard at the Union Square farmers’ market: A young man loudly whined; the young woman beside him muttered “Stay there.” As if to say, “Stay in your petulance! Listen to yourself! Take whatever time you need to remember that you’re a white, American male—the most privileged creature on this planet—and hear how you sound like a spoiled three-year old!”

That woman’s verbal eye-roll* reminds me of an oft-quoted Quaker story:

There is a widely told, entirely apocryphal, story that at one time George Fox and William Penn met. At this meeting William Penn expressed concern over wearing a sword (a standard part of dress for people of Penn’s station), and how this was not in keeping with Quaker beliefs. George Fox responded, “Wear it as long as thou canst.” Later, according to the story, Penn again met Fox, but this time without the sword. Penn then said, “I have taken thy advice; I wore it as long as I could.” Though this story is entirely unfounded, it serves as an instructive parable about Penn’s Quaker beliefs. (From Brief History of William Penn)

Of course, Penn’s individual sword-wearing-until-he’d internalized-Quaker-beliefs is one thing; the hatred, the racism, the violence we’re witnessing as countless white Americans act out in this time of incredible and radical and inevitable transition—and possibility—is truly terrifying! Right now, staying there is scary.

(And sad. I get that. I understand the sadness beneath the violence.)

And, given climate change, none of us have much time to ponder, to contemplate, to leisurely make peace with that sword. (Talk about incredible and radical and inevitable!) So let’s get to it. Now. Let’s do whatever’s needed, with love and with compassion and grace—whine, acknowledge our shame, our guilt, mourn, grieve, make reparations, accept; whatever—so we can embrace that Big Change that’s gonna come.

Together.

*Thanks, Anna

PS: One day later, I’m not comfortable with what I’ve said, here. There’s too much more that needs to be said. So, Dear Readers, please consider the words above as a Work in Progress.

To be continued (and prayed over) . . .