April book giveaway

Our beloved bookstore opened for online orders, so I was able to get a book for this month’s giveaway. This month, one of my favorite books of last year, The Overstory, by Richard Powers. A story about the complicated relationship between humans and nature. Just about perfect for right now.

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rattle

The tribal gods are rattling the skies.

The prophets of Mammon foretell the demise of the economy without a human sacrifice; the god of Fear extends the hours of the gun shop, weaves a fantasy-world of strength. Who do you worship? asks a famous preacher on the screen. Yes, who? Who, who? I ask myself.

In the woods, a pair of Owls talks through the night. In the morning, I step out the door and feel the nearness of some other Presence. I take the path to the pasture hoping it is the Deer returned with the soft-eyed Fawn whose legs have already grown long. Deer are the messengers of God, they always come when I am aching for comfort. I don’t know how to endure these days without longing to shed my skin and join the leaf litter, Fir needle, cast-off shell of a Hazelnut, lost feather, bird song, purr of Owl-conversation.

But up on the pasture, it is a trio of Coyotes who wait, panting hungry around the Duck house. Somewhere the gods laugh and the Owls hush. I can hear the Ducks locked inside their house, the morning shake of their feathers, the murmur of anticipation as they hear my footsteps, oblivious to what stalks them outside. Last week we lost the oldest of the flock, a black and white Drake, stubborn and mean. I thought he’d wandered off alone, ended his old age under the Junipers, but now I see I was wrong. The Coyotes and I regard each other and one takes off for the woods. The other two remain. I watch, afraid to move lest I send them running after their companion. The largest one and I lock eyes and I see she will break before I do; she is so full of knowing. She is a beautiful creature, golden and brown, her narrow face intelligent and wary. I grant her safe passage with a nod of my head and the two of them escape into the safety of the woods. Later, I will walk in the woods myself, our shared domain.

Rattle away gods of my past, I have forgotten how to fear you.

The next day, the Deer are waiting. How much more beautiful they are now, how patiently they come. They bend their tender necks to the grass. Their sentinel ears test the morning air.

Notes:

**The Chinook people, on whose land I now live, called the Coyote Talapus and saw him as a complicated figure, part trickster, part transformer. I found it interesting that in modern Coyote stories told by Oregon Indian communities “his chief function seems to be to satirize and "hold off" the encroachments of Anglo culture.”

**Joy Harjo’s poem, Grace.

we'll be wanting voices...

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers {painters, poets, photographers, artists, bakers, sculptors, musicians….} who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.”

~ Ursula K. LeGuin {addition, mine}

my repentant skin

“If we perish - I meant to say persist -

do we arise and turn

with the wind?….”

~Kyce Bello

I lose my appetite for distraction overnight. I’m full up with the world we’ve made, violent and exploitative, rapacious and unthinking. I’m full up on all the ways we can rehearse those realities as entertainment. I feel the great grief and burden of being human, full of possibility and yet incapable of restraint.

So many of our conversations now lead to: will the virus change anything? Will we just go right back?

My rational self fears writer Paul Kingsnorth is right:

“Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.”

But maybe not for me, I think. Maybe for me (for you?) something else is stirring.

Prayer in the time of corona: Slow me down enough. Give me enough time to change, to really change. Drive the truth down deep of what I could be if I tried, of how I could really live.

Maybe I will not spend these weeks in the dark feeding from the trough of a broken culture. Maybe I will spend them instead under the sun, the moon, the rainy skies, listening to old wisdom, to the heartbeat of the world and its creative Spirit.

I went to bed last night sick of heart, but then I dreamed of bees. I was standing under the sun longing for them to find me, my arms held open, waiting for them to come explore the territory of my repentant skin.

continually

My body and mind have adjusted to quarantine-time by slowing down. There is nothing urgent on the schedule and yet the morning slips away between cups of tea and cleaning the kitchen, I blink and the afternoon follows. Only a month ago I was all efficiency and order.

I worry a lot. Not about myself or my loved ones, per se, but about the curtain pulled back, so many teetering on the edge of disaster. Has there ever been a war or plague or disaster that came for the rich and powerful and left alone the weak, the old, and the poor?

This morning we dialed up France and prayed from the prayer book together. There was a time delay, and so our words stuttered and doubled each other. “Our Father…” “Our Father….” “Forgive us…” “Forgive us…” “Give us this day…” “this day…” I imagine the prayers echoing continually, continually.

Every day I shed hesitations like November leaves, gaining clarity. Life feels compressed, focused. I know what I want from it. Another week of this and I will wonder what all that wavering and questioning was about.

What matters:

Relationships: obvious.

Connection: to the world here, now.

Words: “…in some ancient societies storytellers and healers were one and the same.” *

Joy: integration - heart, mind, soul, body

I see a road ahead that is my own. It winds up and down following the land. In the notes I keep from these days of isolation I see that I am no longer afraid to follow it.

“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.” (Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities)

I balance the worry with gratitude, like everyone, seizing on the hints of a way we might choose to go in the aftermath. “What if everything shut down,” a young friend asks, “and we had to return to using horses?” For a moment, I imagine the clop of hooves on the roadway, feel my hand brush across a smooth flank, allowing myself a glimpse of a possible world. On the road below the house a car goes by, insistent. Our own cars sit calmly in the driveway waiting to be needed.

On our walks, we name the birds, the plants, the trees. We dig out the seed packets we hadn’t planned on planting and lay out the possibilities. It’s as if the earth is calling to us, drawing us into herself, the way I used to pull my babies into my chest to soothe them. All week the rain has been falling, shushing us, calming us.

I sign up for a class on bees. I stare out the window. Worry and gratitude surge and retreat. Prayers patter on the rooftop, hunger of the whole world for peace and safety, here, now. Somehow, listening, I discover I am not afraid.

*Terri Windling