Climate Disruption – Patricia Wild

“That’s What Art Does, Right?”

While still dark, the Garbage to Garden driver arrives in front of our house; the truck’s rattling wakes me up. Quietly, very quietly, the driver disposes of our sodden, green-plastic bag of compost and leaves a neatly-folded new bag tucked around our compost bucket handle before, slowly and respectfully, pulling away from the curb.

Three-quarters asleep and still under the weight of the existential dread I wake up with these days, I think: “This is why those of us who are warm and cozy and safe in our beds think everything’s okay. We tell ourselves that climate disruption isn’t happening because: look! We’re doing our part and, look! How smoothly, how gracefully that swap-out just happened! Seamless! Efficient! All is well.”

But it isn’t.

Three-quarters asleep I was reminded of that old, old “New Yorker” cartoon of a NYC garbageman who, I all-these-years-later realize, was probably drawn as a man of color, who stands at the end of a dark, Manhattan alley, grinning maniacally, as he prepares to heave the heavy, metal garbage can he clutches across the alley; another warm and cozy and safe in bed’s [purposely loud, evil] version of another unseen worker’s toil in the dark. And a racist depiction—if I’m remembering correctly—the “New Yorker” would abjure today.

Earlier that evening, I’d talked with friends about visiting the Cape Cod Art Museum’s current exhibit featuring Bob Staake, brilliant, whimsical illustrator, sculptor, children’s book author, et al. And “New Yorker” covers artist. Because they’re friends I could share my overwhelming joy to see Staake’s “New Yorker” cover when Obama had been elected. “I remember how incredibly hopeful I’d felt when I pulled that issue out of my mailbox,” I told them. “And,” I sternly instructed, “I do not want to go there about how I feel about this country now, okay? I just want to remember that moment. That joy, hope, sense of possibility. That’s what art does, right?”

Three-quarters asleep, I again remembered that precious moment. That glowing Lincoln memorial; its quiet, watery reflection; that O of YOrker as moon, as Light, as that Light that has never been overcome by the darkness.

Thank you, Bob Staake.

Just There!

One morning years ago, wearily trudging down the basement stairs carrying yet another overflowing basket of dirty clothes, I distinctly heard a woman screaming, “Endless, endless, endless!” Was it my mother’s voice? Or my own? Wading through the mound of waiting laundry in front of the washing machine, I suddenly realized it didn’t matter which one of us had lost it. One of us understood something basic, fundamental, unequivocal: laundry happens. Deal.

“Galloping charlie,” a seemingly benign, scalloped green leaf just there, coyly nestled in my backyard grass, happens, too. (It’s really “creeping charlie” but such a formidable foe deserves a more imposing name, right?)

My endless, ill-fated battle with GC began in late April, early May, when my husband, recovering from open-heart surgery and still unable to garden (He’s fine, now), pointed out that what I’d thought a lovely, purple flower was actually a weed—and taking over our backyard. Oh.

Purple? One of my faves? Well-played, GC. First round: Yours.

So I began to pull up those lovely flowers. A newbie gardener, I actually believed that if I devoted enough time and energy, our backyard would eventually look like a tiny golf course. [Okay, seasoned gardeners. I hear you snicker. And those of you questioning this absurd goal?You’re right! I’ve clearly lost my mind.]

In my defense: Two things happened as I began. (Well, if you count all the rain we’ve had, making weeding that much more pleasurable, three.) One, I discovered the indescribable joy of battling an inventive, just-wants-to-propagate weed. Because, yes, it creeps. It creates an amazing network to spread, thrive, survive. After a while, my eager fingers learned what was grass and what wasn’t, what to sift through, and what to carefully follow, strand by strand, and then to gently, oh so gently tug up, twist to possibly engage even more strands, as I pulled. If I’m thorough enough, patient enough, gentle enough, a great, honkin,’ multi-tentacled weed emerges.

And if I’m not? Another GC win.

But that’s the take-away, right? GC’s inevitability. That Serenity Prayer’s acceptance thing. Which, as I sift, tug, twist, and lift, I contemplate again and again. And as another quiet weeding afternoon progresses, the relentless sun glaring on the other side of my house, immersed in this literally-in-the-weeds-spiritual practice, I am able to consider climate devastation’s inevitability. [There. I’ve admitted that. Let’s move on.]

The Second Thing: So far, our neighbors have been mercifully quiet. (One exception: Memorial Day weekend, one family sang along to Brazilian music. Delightful!) Circling swallows, butterflies, relentless bees, a gentle breeze tinkling our wind chime, the delicious shade of our japanese maple my companions, I am.

I win.

“Hot Enough For Ya?”

Due to some fortuitous timing this week, a writing assignment arrived as if a prayed-for thunderstorm on a torrid summer day. What a gift! A new friend, Tom, drawn to the intersection of theater and truth-telling and brevity, encouraged me to write a five-minute play about climate change. (Tom’s helping to organize such a national festival.) So the same week when it’s this part of the world’s turn to endure a terrifying heat wave, I’ve been given the opportunity to write “Hot Enough For Ya?” (Believe it or not, this stringent attempt at truth-telling may be less than five minutes. Don’t blink!)

But here’s the thing: What most excites me is this: that generous gift. I was trying to explain why I’d felt so moved by this serendipity to a group of friends last night. “It was like the Universe was being kind, or my Muse showed up, or it was kind of like grace or . . . ” my voice trailed off.

A dear friend—whose childhood had been vastly different from mine—offered another version. “‘Krisha‘s mercy,’ it’s sometimes called.”

I love that!

Message Received

Every night for the past week or so, hours before dawn, a nearby robin begins to chirrup. And wakes me up. Now I’ve learned from countless dark-night-of-the-soul tossings and turnings that if I allow myself to think about anything negative, I will anxiously stew and stew and never fall back to sleep! So instead of focusing on how pissed I am to be awakened, I listen. With curiosity. “What do you want me to know ?” I sleepily ask that unseen, winged creature. For surely such relentless urgency deserves my attention, yes?

That his song is varied, complicated, intricate in my first half-awake discovery. Could it be that what I’m hearing is a sales pitch cum love song? An enthusiastic, juicy details, over-the-top description of his outstanding nest-building and sexual prowess? And when I hear a phrase repeated, it’s because, like any skilled sales person or lover, he’s sensed a theme, a riff, a woo he’s realizing has enormous appeal. So: repeat that bit. Of course!

But, dear robin, why this pre-dawn performance? Is it that the early bird gets the mate? Or are you, like my forsythia blooming two months early, thrown off kilter by climate change? Do you no longer know when dawn arrives? Are you, like all creatures great and small victimized by my species, deserving of my deepest compassion? Or does your pre-dawn performance mean something else?

I do know this: You, singing from a nearby branch or nest, and I, warm and dry in my luxuriant bed, both occupy the same tiny plot of land. You and I are neighbors. You’re relentlessly, emphatically here!

And that’s what you want me to know.

Lean Back, (Lean In)

Who shows up for a climate justice demonstration in Boston’s Back Bay on a Friday afternoon? Its organizers,* students, and old people—like the elderly protestor whose excellent sign said it all: “A fossil for a fossil free future.”

In a critically important time when aging White activists like me are being reminded, again and again, to listen, heed, support, and get out of the way of Indigenous, People of Color and White young people, Friday’s demonstration showed me what “Lean Back”** actually looks like. (Spoiler alert: pretty damned amazing!) A day of action nationally, Boston’s demonstration targeted two financial institutions, Liberty Mutual and JPMorgan Chase. For, as Fossil Free Future, who’d organized these nationwide demonstrations declares: “Climate finance is climate justice.”

Taking the T downtown, a trip I hadn’t taken in almost two years, required “beginner’s mind” and proved an excellent spiritual practice for leaning back. To discover that, Wait! What? Lechmere’s tracks are gone? To walk past the desolate, empty storefronts on once-thriving Boylston Street? To march past Wait! What? skyscapers that have mushroomed throughout downtown Boston seemingly overnight? I experienced my hometown as if for the first time.

The demonstration began in front of Liberty Mutual and then became a march; organizers, BIPOC, young people go first. Shepherded and protected by much-appreciated marshalls, we fossils chanted and sang and chatted as we all walked from Back Bay through the Theater District to our final destination, Downtown Crossing.

It was here, in front of a Chase branch, when I was eldered by an organizer young enough to be my granddaughter. Two middle-aged White women standing next to me suddenly threw themselves onto the ground; “Join us,” they invited me. Oh, I thought. We play dead at demonstrations, now? Okay. And so I joined them on the pavement.

“Get up!” I was immediately commanded. “You’re part of a large group! Why are you drawing attention to just yourselves? I don’t think so,” the organizer declared before stomping off.

Lean back, Patricia.

*This event was organized by a coalition of Indigenous, youth, and climate groups, including the Native American Indian Center of Boston, United American Indians of New England, Indigenous Environmental Network, MA Youth Climate Coalition, Boston Latin School YouthCAN, XR Youth Boston, Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, Sunrise Boston, Climate Finance Action, 350 Massachusetts, Climate Courage, Massachusetts Teachers Association Climate Action Network, Our Climate, Future Coalition, Tufts Climate Action, Rainforest Action Network and more.

** Advice sometimes given to groups: “If you’ve been speaking a lot, consider leaning back. If you’ve been quiet a lot, consider leaning in.”

Egret

[This is an excerpt from my new meta novel, Missing Reels, currently looking for a home:]

Egret, she starts to write on a new blank page.

(Lozen knows the basics: red-tailed hawk, swallowtail, sagebrush, cottonwood, eucalyptus. Sometimes, hidden and sheltered under her favorite willow, she will say these words aloud. She will practice speaking.)

But as she crosses that T her hand—she’s left handed—cramps. Again. Why? And she’d so much wanted to write about that wading, elegant, snowy creature today!

That’s not quite it. What she’d wanted to write about is how she’s noticed she only writes about the Reserve flora and fauna she knows the names of.

(And she sees herself—Lenore back then—at ten, at twelve, in khaki shorts and a madras, short-sleeved shirt and white sneakers, a New England field guide and jacknife in her pocket, roaming the woods and shoreline of Walden Pond. Alone. Content.)

But, most important, she’d wanted to write about how this name-knowing confuses her. About how she would much prefer to watch and listen and be patient and curious and reverent and when she sees something, she will name it. Based on her observations. White, stalking-fish bird.

But also about how insulting language like that is like the cowboys-and-Indians movies she’d grown up with; Tonto and the rest of them, those Hollywood versions of indigenous peoples, how they spoke the same pidgin language she might employ for a creature she’s noticed but can’t name: Tiny bird never alone.

(It’s called a bushtit. Psaltriparus minimus. Had Lozen known where to look, she might have also added something like . . and builds a nest that looks like a sock.)

She wonders if naming something is asserting dominion over it. She wonders if knowing the name of something gives her power over it; that naming might be simply another version of oppression. And why then, perhaps, she doesn’t just go ahead and steal a California field guide from the library; learn the damned names?

But even in the heat, this dry, dry LA heat, her hand refuses to uncoil. So, drowsy and, yes, content, she watches how that egret lifts one leg, then the other; how it wades. How it fishes. How it survives.

Excerpt 1: Strands

[Since I am both proud of what I am currently working on and, apparently, unable to do more than one thing at a time, here is an excerpt from a new book I’m working on: Strands]

Sometimes Nature lies beyond my backyard but still close to home. On my masked walks through Somerville these days, hungry for a glimpse of Turtle Island green, I’ve begun to notice inexplicably tall pine trees towering over the two or three-story frame houses beside them, their needled branches filling what little remains of an eighth-of-an-acre city plot. They’re all over the city!

Why weren’t these giants cut down years ago? How have these magnificent trees survived in, until very recently, a working-class city where landscaping often meant a postage-stamp-sized concrete yard dotted by one or two joint-compound buckets filled with plastic flowers? (To be fair, when the city was still called Slummerville, some ‘ville residents, many of them Italian or Portuguese, tended grape arbors and compact gardens, often terraced to make best use of their small size; some residents scrupulously cared for two or three fruit trees. And if not priced out of the homes where they’d raised their children and grown these crops, some still do.)

Had these pine trees survived because they look like giant Christmas trees and were therefore considered holy? Are they still here because they don’t require leaf-raking or the yearly ritual of unclogging the gutters? Do they remain because, for generations, the human occupants of those tiny plots have loved to fall asleep, windows open, and listen to the sound of wind soughing through their branches? Just as humans have loved hearing that soothing sound since Skywoman fell out of the sky and Jesus walked this precious Earth?

“Fewer birds sing just a loud,” Veronica, a young woman from my Meeting offered at a recent, Zoom meeting for worship as she’d sat outside, in her own tiny backyard. In her message, sparrows and crows, maybe a pigeon or two audible in the background, I heard so much: I heard her pain at nature’s diminishment. I heard her joy to be in worship in citified nature. I heard her celebrate robust Aliveness; I heard her radical acceptance of what is here, available, now. As is.

Butter-knifing

Here I am, once again, “circling Fort Knox with a butter knife trying to figure out how to get in.”* I know I want to write about loss, about sorrow, and about how, for most of my life, I’ve let anger mask sadness. I want to write about the grief of climate change. I want to write about my mother’s family, its secrets, its tragedies; about transgenerational trauma. I want to write about my moment-to-moment grief and horror to be white and affluent at a time when the ravages of income disparity and systemic racism and growing fascism are more and more real, obvious.

Yikes.

Meanwhile, as I circle, sadness, grief, loss happen. Terrifying headlines reporting another environmental disaster happen. Someone pisses me off happens—and I, self-conscious “apprentice” that I am, try to access the sadness underlying my anger. (And it’s not as hard as I thought.) Meanwhile, I feel all the heartbreaking Feels that I get to do this work at the same time the People Of Color all around me struggle. Meanwhile, I buy myself a copy of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller so I can physically interact with his every word, every paragraph, write in the margins.

Here’s a bit I’ve already starred and underlined and <3-ed (heart-ed):

An apprenticeship with sorrow requires a hands-on encounter in which we are invited to work with the materials of grief, its leaden weight, and the particular demands of melancholy. We can feel it already, just in these few sentences, that this apprenticeship leads us below ground, into the hallway of shadows and forgotten ancestors. Here we find the scattered shards of unattended grief, the pieces of unwept loss, and the shavings of old wounds swept into the corner.

Meanwhile, like someone in recovery, I’m making amends.

Ann Patchett said this—at a writers’ conference I’d attended—about trying to figure out how to begin a novel.

Two Toucans Touching

Sometimes I exchange books with a dear friend. Sometimes I’ll notice intriguing titles or descriptives in a box of give-aways on the sidewalk and grab a book or two. Sometimes my grandchildren tell me I should read the YA they’ve just finished. However randomly books show up in my reading queue, it is not random that I’ve just read two post-apocalyptic novels* back to back. Sadly, given the dire time we live in, such subject matter makes perfect sense.

Towards the end of one of those recent reads—no, I won’t say which one—a grandchild asks his grandmother, “Did you ever see an elephant?” That child’s wistful question much on my mind and in my heart, on Black Friday I visited the San Diego Zoo.

I saw elephants. I spent considerable time in the Reptile House—which I’d always avoided. Like a pilgrim I walked from habitat to habitat—as zoos go, San Diego’s is pretty spectacular—giving thanks for all creatures great and small.

And, dear Reader, I was not alone. For there were times, in one of the aviaries, for example, where the (probably endangered) birds from distant countries were so close, so accessible, so magnificent that zoo-visitors were noticeably hushed. Reverent. Grateful. Grieving.

How do we live into such grief and loss? That question, dear Reader, haunts me.

*The Bone Clocks and The Fifth Wave

Freshly Brilliant

There have been many times over the past month as I either prepared for or recovered from both eyes’ cataract surgery, when I simply sat. Sunblocked, broad-brim hatted, adequately hydrated, I just sat. Earlier in the month I silently mourned for someone; when—Oh Joy!—I learned he was still alive, I gave thanks. Over and over. Sometimes, as my post-surgery vision improved, I marveled at a world now scrubbed clean. (Some shades of blue, like the color of my gas stove’s flame, remain startlingly, astonishingly amazing!) Sometimes, bright light still hurting, I’d wear my “Ray Charles” glasses and, seemingly impaired or disabled or something-not-quite-right-about me, was blissfully ignored as city life swirled around me. Sometimes, sitting on my back deck, I flexed my new long-distance post-cataract lenses to more fully observe a dutiful catbird feed its squawking fledgling or squirrels playing tag. Bumblebees and white butterflies—and at least one monarch—dart over freshly-brilliant-to-my eyes zinnias and black-eyed susan’s. A strand of spider web bending in the soft breeze. I watched clouds from my hammock. Swallows. Con-trails.

One day, my grandchildren in town, I’d arranged for them to meet with Claire O’Neill, a French scientist who is training volunteers to keep count of pollinators in a community garden near my house. But, it turned out, in order for more people to understand what is happening to our world because of climate change, she trains adults, not children—and my close-range vision Not Good, I’d be hopeless at this!

Besides, as I have had ample time to reflect upon over this past month, Just Sitting has gifted me the message Claire so passionately seeks to share with us: observe this precious world, love it; mourn.

From The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martin Prechtel: “Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

“How Do I Tell Myself?”

Buoyed by a weekend with precious family, I felt brave enough to read this.

And then I finished my coffee. Put away the laundry. Sent some emails. Not surprisingly, given that I’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling lately, Cody Petterson’s essential question remained, however: “How do I tell myself?”

How do I tell myself this story?

Some instructive, guiding adverbs: Unflinchingly. Honestly. And perhaps most important, Humbly. To keep in mind that whatever I tell myself is simply my own, inadequate version. It is absolutely not The Story. Another version, guided by different adverbs, perhaps, may present itself over time. (Will Kindly join the mix? Would that be remotely possible? TBD)

Key elements: Change is inevitable. And impermanence is, to quote my current fave, Frank Ostaseski, “an essential truth woven into the very fabric of existence. It’s inescapable and perfectly natural. How we meet that truth makes a world of difference.”

Key Question: Do I insert “Nevertheless, . . . ” into my story? Do I unflinchingly list all the ways we’re doomed—but then employ that wonderful literary device referenced by Richard Powers in a recent interview?

Question: What moves you most in a work of literature?

Powers: The bending of certainty, the surrender of ironclad temperament and the surprise capacity of otherwise completely predictable human beings to forgive each other and counter the unforgiving world with a “Nevertheless.”

A couple of possible, key word neverthelesses: Indigenous wisdom. Women. Trees. Botanists. (Hmm. I think I just inadvertently googled Robin Wall Kimmerer!)

Ending: I won’t live long enough to see how this story ends. So I’m left with only that old, old way to conclude: ” . . . and the moral is:”

And that’s easy. Mourn. Now. Be grateful. Now. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with my God. Now. Shower the people I love with love. Now.

The View from Here

View From El Yunque National Forest; March 13, 2019

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain

On our way to El Yunque National Forest, Narayan De Jesus Reyes, our excellent tour guide and driver, made a stab at this quote. Our small white bus weaving in and out of Puerto Rican traffic and over the island’s not-great roads, Narayan got Twain’s remarks pretty much right— although he was a little shaky on attribution. (Which happens a lot with Mark Twain quotes, right?)

So many ironies, so many paradoxes, so much to consider and to hold:

That so often, it is only the privileged who can afford to travel!

That, seemingly, travel = selfies these days, i.e. an opportunity, for example, to pose in front of a rainforest waterfall, post your ecstatic face on social media, then climb back onto a tour bus.

That there were so many tour buses! As we moved from site to site—most of the park’s trails are still inaccessible so we mostly stopped at look-out areas—Narayan constantly struggled to find a place to park. Every day, two or three humungous cruise ships visit San Juan; every day those cruise folks book tour buses bound for El Yunque.

These other tour buses proved a personal struggle. I resented all those fossil-fuel-powered vehicles—like the one I rode on; like the plane I flew on—and was grateful that this still-recovering-from Hurricane Maria paradise might benefit from all those tourists’ dollars. (That our mainland money might actually benefit Puerto Rico was a major reason why my husband and I had chosen to go there.)

That, according to Narayan, a good third of the rainforest’s trees had been destroyed by yet another climate-change-era superstorm. And, as one of the park’s rangers later told us, its famous, endangered parrots were seriously impacted by such devastation and now seem to have disappeared. The kicker? I only know this because I can afford to take a guided tour to this holy place in a fossil-fuel-spewing bus!

About that holy place: For our last stop, Narayan had arranged for us to bathe in a delightful swimming hole surrounded by rich, tropical foliage and fed by a rainforest-generated river. Think of it! As I sat on a volcanic rock at the bottom of a small, gurgling waterfall in bright sunshine listening to birdsong and the soft, gentle murmur of three young women nearby, I felt wholly blessed. Annointed. Utterly grateful. “My people believe El Yunque takes care of us,” Kenia, who served me breakfast the next day, explained. “That’s what you were feeling.”

Oh.