Patricia Wild

Quality Quality of Life

[“Wellness Ambassador,” RiteAid pharmacy]

Having just finished Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, heartily recommended, I’ve been giving that “what matters” some thought.

It’s been an excellent week to be asking this question: I’ve been out of town a lot lately so am looking at my home and my life with the eye of the returning traveler. And it’s one of those crunch times when too many important things must happen within a couple of days of one another. And I’ve been both sick and a little jet-lagged so am not really bringing my A game to my extra-long-because I’ve-been-out-out-town To Do list. So need to cull, prioritize. And, of course, the earthquake in Nepal and the headlines re Baltimore—and the headlines about those headlines—both weight heavy on my heart and ask me to look at my life, my choices from a larger, tragic perspective.

What matters? (And will be accessible as I age.) Here are my Top 4:

1. Silent worship/opening myself to Spirit. Dare I confess that only because I’d agreed to meet someone after mid-week worship at my Quaker meeting yesterday morning* did I find myself sitting in silence with handful of people? (I guess I do.) After about ten minutes I was asking myself, “How come I don’t come here every week?”

2. Spending dedicated, unobstructed, no-distractions time with the people I love. Duh.

3. Nature–even the urban version I see and hear through my kitchen window. The wind through my wind chimes, watching clouds or a sparrow at my bird feeder matter. They feed me.

4. Writing. If I am not working on/mulling/stewing over a writing project I get very, very crabby. (And, strangely, anxious, too. Not sure why that is). Good to know, right?

What would be Your Top 4?

* Don’t get the wrong idea; we did not discuss spiritual matters. But rather how to self-promote now that I’ve just finished a book. Hmmm.

“They are in the darkness that grows lighter”

[For Jean and Sylvia, two women I knew and admired, who died in the past month.]

This is the poem that inspired Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Breaths (and which I’m hearing in my head a lot lately.)

“Spirits”

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the sighs of the bush;
This is the ancestors breathing.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth;
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs,
In the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:
The dead are not dead.

Listen to things
More often than beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sighing:
This is the breathing of ancestors,
Who have not gone away
Who are not under earth
Who are not really dead.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in a woman’s breast,
In the wailing of a child,
And the burning of a log,
In the moaning rock,
In the weeping grasses,
In the forest and the home.
The dead are not dead.

Listen more often
To Things than to Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind to
The bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors breathing.

Each day they renew ancient bonds,
Ancient bonds that hold fast
Binding our lot to their law,
To the will of the spirits stronger than we
To the spell of our dead who are not really dead,
Whose covenant binds us to life,
Whose authority binds to their will,
The will of the spirits that stir
In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river,
The breathing of spirits
Who moan in the rocks and weep in the grasses.

Spirits inhabit
The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,
The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,
The water that runs and the water that sleeps:
Spirits much stronger than we,
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,
Of the dead who are not really gone,
Of the dead now no more in the earth.

Listen to Things
More often than Beings,
Hear the voice of fire,
Hear the voice of water.
Listen in the wind,
To the bush that is sobbing:
This is the ancestors, breathing.

—Birago Diop

My Hillary Conversion Experience

[Granddaughters; The Dinner Party, Brooklyn Museum]

They’re hard to put into words, these beyond words, transcendent moments, aren’t they? And sometimes happen when least expected or convenient. I clearly remember being both gobsmacked by Faure’s “Messe Base” on my car radio yet annoyed that I was on Mass. Ave. during rush hour. “I don’t want to be having this religious experience here and now,” I complained to the Universe, tears running down my cheeks. “I’m on my way to work. This isn’t a good time.” (Apparently the Universe had other plans.)

Yadda yadda yadda; back to Hillary. So there I was, a couple of days ago, in the “12 Items And Under” check-out line at the Market Basket. And in a hurry. And the young, check-out woman had apparently made a cash register mistake with the customer ahead of me so needed her (female, slightly older, also Spanish-speaking) supervisor to rectify the error—and, it annoyingly turned out, to receive some slow and patient on-the-job training as well.

Did I mention I was in a hurry? But before I could begin The Loud Sighing While Waiting Thing, I suddenly was gifted with: I am watching a young woman being coached by another woman so she can do her job better. So she can KEEP her job, maybe.

And suddenly I saw this scene both as a Yay, Sisterhood feminist and as if I were an impatient, self-important Anglo who just wanted to get the hell out of there. Yup. As a man. BUT this impatient man knew he now lived in the same, post-Hillary’s “I’m getting ready to . . . video reality. So he had to be patient. He had to remember that, sadly, the Market Basket is one of the very few “careers” available to many women. That one woman taking time to help another woman might very well have been about Survival. So he had to suck it up.

Yup. Hillary, someone savvy enough to have green-lighted that clever bit o’ branding video, is running for Prez. It is a brave new world. A world in which, maybe, it could be okay for one woman to coach another woman in public.

Maybe. (Conversion moments aren’t necessarily predictive.)

“They Are Our Kids”

[19th Century Young Girl’s Grave, El Campo Santo, San Diego, CA, soon after Dia de Muertos, 2014]

Don’t get me wrong: I love my daughters, I love my grandchildren. I loved sitting in my Quaker meeting this morning watching Meeting children happily search for Easter eggs outside. I love Christmas, I love birthdays, I love making any child happy by buying just the right gift.

Here’s what I don’t love: The disparity between children like my grandchildren and those happy children I watched this morning and the poor children of this country. As a recent “New Yorker” article put it: The American dream is in crisis, [Robert Putnam, author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis] argues, because Americans used to care about other people’s kids and now they only care about their own kids. But, he writes, “America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.”

Here’s what deeply moves me: That on October 31, 2014, someone placed those plastic necklaces and those two dolls on the grave pictured above. A Mexican-American child decorated that child’s grave for Dia de Muertos, I’m guessing. She swept the dirt, she arranged those bricks as best she could, she threw away—God knows what that child discovered in that gritty, surrounded-by-bars-and restaurants cemetery in the heart of San Diego’s Old Town. That generous child is very likely one of those “poor kids” Putnam wrote about.

My kid. Our kid.

The Words Beneath the Words

I’ve been thinking about the words beneath the words. About how sometimes what is not spoken aloud is, “I’m sad.” or “I’m scared.” or “If you knew my backstory, you’d understand me so much better! Forgive me. But I can’t/won’t tell you why I am the way I am. Although I wish with all my heart that I could.”

And I’ve been thinking about something a dear Friend, Cathy Whitmire, once told me: “Everyone’s doing the best they can.” ( I immediately replied, “No, they’re NOT!”) But I am slowly coming to believe she was right. Slowly.

forgiving my father

lucille clifton

  it is friday. we have come

 to the paying of the bills.

all week you have stood in my dreams

 like a ghost, asking for more time

but today is payday, payday old man;

my mother’s hand opens in her early grave

and i hold it out like a good daughter.

there is no more time for you. there will

 never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher

 old liar. i wish you were rich so i could take it all

and give the lady what she was due

 but you were the only son of a needy father,

the father of a needy son;

you gave her all you had

 which was nothing. you have already given her

 all you had.

you are the pocket that was going to open

and come up empty any friday.

you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine.

 daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man

what am i doing here collecting?

you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes

and no accounting will open them up.

“Things Fall Apart”*

[Ohio River derelict boatyard, Louisville KY]

Yesterday, gorgeous, sunny, and warm, my two and a-half-year-old grand-daughter and I strolled the neighborhood, stopping at a small park, once a vacant lot, the next street over. (Full disclosure: I was one of the many neighbors who maintained that open space until the city assumed responsibility for its landscaping and maintenance.) She and I quickly dis-covered that over the winter, countless dog owners had let their pets loose to do their business in the snow; melting snow revealed layers and layers and piles and piles of dog shit. An unbelievable quantity. Trust me.

After my initial outrage, after wondering if I could enlist the abutting neighbors to help patrol or take pictures of the miscreants (owners not dogs), after considering calling the head of Parks and Open Space and loudly demand he lock the park entrance—(until what, Patricia? Those horrible dog owners agree to clean up their dogs’ mess? C’mon!); in other words after lots of indignant, First Word Problem stewing, I realized I had a spiritual challenge—literally—in my own back yard.

Here’s how far I’ve gotten (and it’s not very far): Although we are neighbors, I don’t live in the same neighborhood as those dog owners. We see ourselves and how we interact with this neighborhood in profoundly different ways. And although all of us live now, right now, those dog owners and I have a major difference about time. About the relationship between the here and now (and the expedient) and, yes, what comes next. Like spring. When the snow will melt. And how present action has consequences! Always. And, finally, what does it mean that I live in a neighborhood with people who don’t believe their actions have consequences? Whose centre is themselves?

Like I said: not very far.

*”Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is a line from “The Second Coming” by Yeats

“I believe she’s amazing!”*

[Science Center bike rack; Harvard University]

Sunday morning, on my usual route to my Quaker meeting for a 9:00 meeting, my path crossed with a woman in her late forties, her lipstick carefully applied—I love that even with losing an hour’s sleep/Daylight Saving Time she took time for some personal care—about to enter Harvard’s Science Center. (Usually at that time of day, Asian, college-aged students head towards the entrance.)

Now, maybe that woman is an employee in the Center—but on that glorious, warm, and sunny International Women’s Day, I chose to believe she’s what’s awkwardly known as a “non-traditional student,” i.e. older! I chose to believe that wherever’s she’s from, she is a leader, she’s well-known, respected. I believe she had been chosen to come to Harvard to rub shoulders with other amazing people before returning to wherever she’s from to do more amazing things! (Okay, so maybe the sunshine and warmth had a little something to do with my conviction?)

But, oh, my brothers and sisters, I need to believe this.

* Here’s the link to my personal favorite flash mob: “I believe she’s amazing.” Enjoy!

Asterisked (It’s complicated)

Saturday I went to a rally in Boston in support of Cape Wind*, a proposed wind farm that would lie off the coast of Cape Cod and is, once again, threatened. For fourteen years, this sustainable-energy project has been fought by a) the fossil fuel industry** b) wealthy, Cape Cod home-owners concerned about aesthetics*** c) Bird lovers **** d) the Cape and Nantucket Sound islands’ Wampanoag tribe. ***** Twenty-six lawsuits! Not to mention that an offshore wind farm has never before been built in this country ****** so that, although several top politicians, including President Obama******* and former Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, have been in favor of the project, the actual implementation process, even without repeated, obstructive lawsuits, has been complicated by its steep learning curve. And, finally, some say Cape Wind was a lousy deal from the get-go. That took the wind out of my sails! (Temporarily)

Know something, though? If there will be more pro-Cape Wind rallies, I’ll show up. Even though I have deep concerns about its shaky business practices. Because, know what? Sometimes, even when you do know all about those pesky, complicated/complicating asterisks, sometimes you have to just show up in support of a very simple and uncomplicated and non-asterisked idea. Like Peace. Like Justice. Like Truth. Like, in this case, supporting renewable energy. Sometimes you just have to show up.

* My late father, a Republican and a long-time, loyal employee of the General Electric Company, the world’s biggest nuclear equipment supplier, was nevertheless a huge supporter of Cape Wind. (He was also a sailor and a thrifty Yankee who, no doubt, saw the value of harnessing free, just-going-to-waste wind power.) So I went in his honor, too.

** Especially one of the Koch brothers, who also happens to own several homes on the Cape.

*** Like the late Teddy Kennedy

**** Yet Mass Audubon has endorsed the project.

***** Who claim they need an unobstructed view of Nantucket Sound to welcome the morning sun. Yet their land on Martha’s Vineyard does not face Nantucket Sound. So while, in principle, I am in sympathy with this Native American tribe, whose name, indeed, means greeting the morning sun, that I also know they’re trying to open a casino I find confusing!

****** Meanwhile, while all the Cape Wind dithering goes on, another wind farm off the coast of nearby Rhode Island has recently been approved!

******* The same week as Boston’s Cape Wind rally, President Obama vetoed the Keystone XL Pipeline, definitely NOT a renewable energy project, and so made climate change history by saying “No! Keep fossil fuel in the ground. Unburned.”

Climate change

[A Greyhound lost in a snowstorm; February, 2015]

Yesterday afternoon I took the #77 bus from Arlington center to Harvard Square, sitting on one of the front seats reserved for the elderly (I qualify.) Seated so close to the young, pretty driver, I got to watch her negotiate Massachusetts Avenue traffic and curb-side snowbanks that might impede her passengers’ getting on and getting off. I’d give her work performance an unqualified A+.

I also got to watch her interactions; how she welcomed passengers as if the bus were her own living room, how polite she was, how solicitous, how she created a climate of respect and kindness in that grubby, enclosed, metal, moving space. I noticed how, over and over, people responded to her warmth with surprise at first and then with gratitude, and how almost everyone getting off thanked her! After thanking her, myself, I exited reluctantly, not at all eager to rejoin the jostling, distracted and self-absorbed crowds.

The day before I had been at Suffolk County Superior Courthouse to support a friend—but wasn’t clear what time his case had been scheduled or which courtroom. But when I stepped inside a courtroom to see two older women—clerical/administrative workers I’m guessing by their clothing—in an otherwise empty courtroom, I sensed my search, in a multi-story building filled with tanned, briefcase-wielding lawyers and those caught up or lost in our nightmarish criminal justice system, had ended. Surely these women will help me, I thought. Sure enough, they stopped what they were doing to consult a computer which, once I’d supplied the right keywords, revealed where I was supposed to be and when.

And, yes, I thanked them, too.

“Love’s austere and lonely offices”

[Lilacs under snow; February, 2015]

Today is Ash Wednesday. The Lenten season, forty lengthening days, begins. Today is a day to contemplate this precious “Pale Blue Dot” and where Mother Earth has been and where she is headed on her yearly journey around the Sun. Today is a day to consider Light.

Today I contemplate my fellow travelers on our Pale Blue Dot journey, we who live on this particular patch of the Northern Hemisphere, we of, basically, the same longitude and latitude—and the same distance and at the same tilt from the Sun. My fellow travelers and I await those lengthening days with keen anticipation.

As I contemplate my (increasingly exhausted and often cranky) Red Sox Nation compatriots, I remind myself: we don’t live in a war zone. We don’t live in Syria where 3.7 million of us (!), are now homeless. We don’t live in lawless and betrayed-by-its-own government northern Nigeria; we are not daily terrorized by Boko Haram.

No. I can say with certainty that my neighbors and I have heat and electricity and running water. Our supermarket receives daily deliveries—although trucks squeezing in and out of its snowbound parking lot tie up traffic for blocks.

And yet, despite how relatively benign this regional hardship is, small, communal, civic/civil acts touch me as though we truly were collectively under attack. Like when people shovel a path to a fire hydrant. Or when an exhausted, cranky stranger nevertheless steps to one side to let me pass as we both negotiate a narrow, snowbanked path. (And when I next encounter a stranger approaching another narrow path it’s my turn to step aside.)

Those Winter Sundays By Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

It Will Always BE This Way

[Backyard signpost, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, 2014]

“Are you all right?” out-of-town friends and family anxiously ask as my tiny part of the world shivers and shudders under the weight of seventy-two inches of snow!

Yes. We have heat and light and plenty of shovels and a tenant who’s shouldered more than his share of the digging-out. We can walk to a supermarket half a block a way; the post office and the bank and the library and our Quaker meeting are conveniently near by. We’re fine. So far.

Here’s what is unsettling: that the extra time it now takes to get dressed to go outside, and the need, several times a day, to dig out/shovel, and the slow, laborious slogging through canyons of snow and mincing cautiously over ice, and canceled meetings because there’s no place for anyone to park, and being told more storms are expected in the next couple of days; it feels as if, from now on, my life will always be this way. This harsh and dramatic reality is reality! In perpetuity.

One huge reason? Much as I try, much as I know that the days will get longer and that spring will come, I cannot imagine the snow melting. There’s so, so much of it! And that profound lack of imagination brings with it a peace as deep and as silent as the snow.

That seventh bee sting

[Side-yard path formerly used as a shortcut until the homeowners erected that fence]

Last night in the moonlight I shoveled a path from my kitchen door to a birdfeeder hanging from a wrought-iron hook attached to our deck railing. And then, beneath the quiet magic of an almost full moon, Jupiter beside it, I filled the feeder with the best birdseed Target sells so, first thing this morning, my neighborhood’s sparrows and juncoes and house finches and cardinals and blue jays and, yes, pesky squirrels (when I’m not keeping watch), could have breakfast.

After the first blizzard dumped two feet of snow, I’d waded through my backyard’s drifts and climbed up the snow-covered steps to the deck and shoveled the first, such path. But after our second storm and another foot or so, the snow was just too deep to wade through, again. Opening the kitchen door with all that new snow drifted against it? It would only open an inch or so. So I gave up.

Yesterday had been a hard day; I’m going to respect the privacy of a family member and just leave it at that. And just getting around, going about my usual, day-to-day life in a densely populated community under more than three feet of snow? Very challenging, very tiring. (Thank God the Patriots won or folks would be even more cranky!)

So, worn out and blue, I’d opted to lie on the couch under a thick quilt and read.

But then, something pulled me off the couch and into a kitchen drawer to find, yes! A metal, broad-bladed spatula, i.e. a tiny shovel. “I can dig a bit at a time until I can get the door to open wide enough to get a shovel out there,” I reasoned. And I did, scooping the “shoveled” snow into a bowl and dumping it into the sink.

There’s a theory concerning poverty that says that being poor, being oppressed, is like being stung multiple times by bees. A stung person can handle the first two or three stings, can treat the pain, but when the numbers climb—let’s say that sixth bee sting—he or she just gives up. Endures. Tries to ignore painful reality.

And some say that this is true—but not a universal phenomenon. One article I read discussed empowerment as a variable, for example.

First acknowledging that in a very deep way I will never know what it means to be poor and oppressed, I wish to simply acknowledge the power of moonlight. And grace. (Which is all to say, mystery, right?) I do not completely understand what compelled me to do something I, exhausted and depressed, had given up on but am so very, very grateful I could.

So are all the sparrows and juncoes and . . .