Vulnerability 2.0

In late October, Veronica and I went to Toronto--our first trip together since the pandemic. We've been travelling together since we became a family of two, and she's one of the best travelling companions you could ask for. She was the one who found the garden on the lakefront designed by Julie Moir Messervy and inspired by Yo-Yo Ma's performance of the first Bach Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. She gave me one of her AirPods and called up the music on her cell phone, so we walked this magical garden with its inspiration in one of our ears, the sound of Lake Ontario in the other.  She is the queen of Google maps and can find you the closest parking lot or craft a route to the airport that stops at the nearest gas station.  She can find you the closest bento box or the funkiest coffee shop where everything is laced with cardamom. (Cardamom in your coffee is amazing.) But mostly what I appreciate is the conversation.  It took us six hours to explore the Art Gallery of Ontario because we kept stopping to cogitate and talk.  We sat in front of a Mark Rothko for a good fifteen minutes while people drifted in and out of the gallery. We went to the ROM for their special exhibition, "Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools:  Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks," only to have the crowds flow past us while we put together our knowledge of European history aided by her wide knowledge of art, talking about Belgium's place in the religious wars of the time and Van Dyke's brushwork.

We were accompanied, unfortunately, by the post-viral exhaustion that has been my companion since a mid-February cold. I've already written here about vulnerability ( BLUE DUETS: On Vulnerability ) and my post-viral exhaustion (BLUE DUETS: My Process Quilt). Fortunately, the mantras that I've slowly constructed didn't take up much room in carry-on.  The first is "Cope with what is."  I like the short, blunt, matter-of-fact word, "cope."  Don't wail or ask existential questions:  get on with life. The second is "If you can't do it with energy, do it with grace," "it" being a kind of X that could mean making dinner or getting yourself back to the hotel once your energy has fallen off a cliff and the brain fog has rolled in with the ocean of tiredness. The third is "It's just a problem to be solved."  This is an old mantra that I've repurposed to mentally help me grasp the exhaustion that infuses my body and mind and depersonalize it. It asks "How would you deal with this if you didn't take it personally?" Create a strategy.  Put it into action.

Each day, the exhaustion and brain fog were more insistent, to the point where, on our penultimate day, while we were at the ROM, being awake was painful.  But I had a plan.  ("It's just a problem to be solved.")  I'd seen taxis zooming down Avenue Road past the ROM as we walked from the underground station to the museum, and thought that when I got exhausted I'd just pour myself into a cab and get back to the hotel while Veronica continued to explore the collection.  I even channelled Bill's practice of asking for help, so when I got to the entry I asked the nice young man who took your ticket if I could easily flag a taxi out front.  "Oh, no.  No, no, no.  Go talk to that person" he said, pointing to a young woman in an alcove, "and she will call you a taxi."  I was on my way back to the Chelsea Hotel within 5 minutes and Veronica had a wonderful time exploring Byzantine glass. She told me all about it at dinner--more conversation.  Did you know that glass isn't a solid but a very slow-moving liquid?  If you take old stained-glass windows out of their frames to clean them or repair the building, you will find they are now thicker at the bottom than at the top! That was my reward for coping with what is and just turning it into a problem to be solved.

Learning styles is a big topic of conversation for people who teach.  Yet research shows that one thing always works best:  repetition.  That's one of the reasons I valued class discussion when I taught.  It encourages people to do a mental search of what they know or thought or remembered about the text and then use that in response to my queries.  Conversation  among the class ensues and different perspectives are introduced, meaning you return to your mental model of the text for other examples while listening to what other people have noticed. 

As I contemplate my own vulnerability--which is really a dress rehearsal under very bright lights that highlight my mortality--I've been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who lived between 121 and 180 and was a Roman emperor during a very tumultuous time, conducting multiple frontier wars that were punctuated by a plague.  Yet Marcus Aurelius took time to write himself notes about the principles he had learned from philosophy that governed his response to life and the challenges of ruling. I had read somewhere that he thought we were "lucky" to be mortal, and I wanted to understand that attitude. In an odd way, it echoed my sense that my vulnerability is an opportunity, a chance to consider aspects of my mortality, particularly my mental and physical decline, before it's started in earnest. 

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are repetitive. Pierre Hadot tells us that this is a function of the way they were composed.  They weren't meant to be a book, a finished and sequential series of thoughts. They were, in effect, numerous bundles of note cards.  He'd think to himself, perhaps during a difficult time or even a peaceful time, "Time to go back to first principles" and write himself a sequence of memoranda about how to live serenely, wisely, effectively, and fully.  I don't know how many times he exhorts himself to be independent of public opinion, to remember that he's doing his best to rule, make decisions, and conduct wars, and that if he gets sidetracked by opinion it is likely he won't be doing his best. Or how many times he reminds himself that human beings are social by nature; thus is reasonable that the focus of his job is to take care of the vast population of the Roman Empire and to be just in his decisions.  If he doesn't like or respect some of the people he is working with, he must proceed with patience and deliberation because it is his duty to care for his people and not everyone has had the advantages of his philosophical teachers. I'm completely losing his gravitas, so let me quote him on how leaders should proceed in difficult times:  

"What need is there to fear, since it is in your power to inquire what ought to be done?  And if all is clear, go forward content, without turning back; but if all is not clear, stop and take the best of counsel.  But if any other things oppose you, go on according to your powers with due consideration, keeping to that which appears just....He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected."

He was fortunate enough to live in a time when he could believe that the universe made sense, that it was under the influence of rational gods who continually nudged the world in a reasonable direction.  (I don't know what he would have thought if he could have time-travelled to the third decade of the twenty-first century.) Nature was part of that meaningful order, and death was simply part of nature. Let me string some quotations together that come toward the end of the Meditations:

"Consider that before long you will be nobody and nowhere, nor will any of the things exist which you now see, nor any of those who are now living.  For all things are formed by nature to change and be turned and to perish in order that other things in continuous succession may exist."

In other words, change is part of the universe; the new can only come into being at the expense of the old. Thus, "every man lives in the present time only, and loses only this." You are not dying; you are making way for birth, he continuously avers. "How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man! In a moment it is swallowed in the eternal.  And  how small a part of the whole substance, and how small a part of the universal soul!  Reflecting on all this, consider nothing to be great, except to act as your nature leads you and to endure that which the common nature brings."

I could say that he takes all the blood and pain out of dying, which is experienced by a vulnerable, sentient being connected to the people around them, not a node in the universe.  Though maybe, like truth, the sense that you are part of universal change is a horizon to orient yourself by.  But what struck me again and again was his repetition, his constant reexamination of his principles.  Because it helped me see something about my own vulnerability.  Yes, "Cope with what is" is a great mantra for someone who is exhausted.  But it was only after weeks and weeks of telling myself this that I could get beyond saying what I knew to be wise and actually doing it.  It was months before those words could stop me in my tracks, force me to examine exactly "what is," how exhausted I was, admit my vulnerability--which is not the same as powerlessness--and to ask what could bring joy or peace or a sense of purpose into those still and frigid hours. In other words, I had the language but I had to learn its complex meaning and acknowledge how fatigue impinged on my own life.  Perhaps therein lies the power of the repetition of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Don't let the distance between what you say or know and what you feel to defeat you.  Keep listening.  Keep learning.  

Revelations of Fall

 

Nikka and I used to make annual late November or early December Christmas shopping forays to Saskatoon.  We'd take in the shops on Broadway, have lunch at Calories and spend an hour or two at the old Mendel Art Gallery, ending with ten minutes or so in the conservatory next door, admiring the display of the brilliantly red poinsettias against the white snow in the Japanese garden just outside. Inevitably we'd need to stop in Chamberlain for a quick break.  There I heard the clerk welcome a woman by name and ask how she was.  "Not good," she replied.  "The days are so short, and I'm solar powered." 

"I'm solar powered."  I try to give that insightful woman credit when I use this description of myself on a series of rainy days or as we travel into the dark of the year. It makes me ask myself why I watch autumn so assiduously, without an iota of dread.  I watch the archways that the elms carve down the Cathedral Village streets, looking for the moment when they are pure golden light, days later admiring the light drifting beneath them. There are a couple of trees I can see from my study window that I carefully watch change: a tall aspen a few houses down and some ornamental fruit trees across the street.  After a summer of same old same old, change is welcome.  

This year, settling into fall was unusually odd.  In mid-October, I sat out in my back garden to watch the sparrows at the feeder while I chatted with my oldest friend--we go back 55 years. It was a glorious summer day.  Then the sun went down before dinner, and I shivered slightly at the incongruity. We take so many of our cues from the light.  

Fall brings a light of its own kind into my life.  I first note the changing of the season by how sunshine lights up corners of my rooms that I haven't noticed for a while.  I have a crab apple tree in my backyard, on the north side of the house, that keeps my kitchen cool through the summer.  But when its leaves begin to fall, I do a little dance in my kitchen because, midday, I can see to make a cup of tea without turning on a light.  I can admire the sparrows waiting in the branches for a turn at the feeder, where before I could only hear them--so skillfully did they hide themselves among the leaves. On the bank of Wascana Creek, there's a craggy old tree that is full of stars in the fall--tiny yellow fruit dotting the brilliant blue sky.

Our streets begin to look a little more urban, a little more open, with the leaves fallen off the cotoneasters, flowering almond, or lilacs that normally shroud the doorways and windows of our houses.  Walking at dusk, we glimpse one another's private lives: someone stirring a pot in the kitchen or a teenager dancing to hidden music. Domesticity takes on a new beauty as we think of inwardly marshalling our energy, reading the season's new books or making pizza sauce of the summer's tomatoes.

Trees losing their leaves look to me like old men and women shedding their clothes for a familiar and trustworthy lover. Normally we admire them for their green flourishing, but as they lose their leaves, I study their bark.  The craggy depth of an elm.  The twists and turns of my crab apple. The roughness of the usually serene willows. They are modelling openness for us, allowing us to see how they have grown, how they have been wounded by storms.  We can imagine how their roots help them endure the cold, just as we find our underground ways of enduring the dark of the year.

 

Sympathy and Middlemarch

"The meanness is the point."  That's been said about Trump and about MAGA more generally. It can certainly be said of ICE. "My viewpoint is the only one that counts" might well describe quite a number of world leaders' assumptions.  Or "I will have what I want, and humanity or history be damned" might describe others'.  Those ideas about how our relationship with other human beings is constituted drove me into the pages of George Eliot's Middlemarch.  One does not undertake this commitment lightly. In my charming hardcover Penguin edition, the novel clocks in at 850 pages, which challenges the abilities of Penguin's binders:  I quickly had errant pages falling out of my book. 

There's a special group of books that we read for the narrator.  Most of these involve a first-person narrator with a charming voice or perspective.  Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, flawed as his perspective is, nevertheless embodies the nostalgia that infuses the novel. I wanted George Eliot ringing in my ear--I know, that's a lazy conflation.  But who else is responsible for this remarkable passage about Dorothea Brooke's unhappiness with her marriage, an unhappiness felt by many newly-married people who find themselves in painful situations they didn't anticipate: 

"Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.  That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of its frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

How to unwind the perspective here, the gentle ironies?  On the one hand, we're being forgiven for being insensible sometimes.  Yet do we want only to feel "the coarse emotion of mankind"? Somehow, painful as it is, Eliot gives us the sense that we should strive to have a "keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life." 

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  What is this magical tome, this exemplary novel called Middlemarch, which Virginia Woolf called the first novel written for grownups?  The first thing to note is that it's called Middlemarch.  Wafting through its pages is discussion of the 1832 Reform Act, which sought to end the kind of gerrymandering that let some small communities return their favourite MP while huge areas were underrepresented. On the other hand, we are witness to many acts of kindness.  In many ways, it's about our collective lives, how we influence and judge and support one another. It's also about growing up:  many of its primary and secondary characters are in their early twenties when they meet challenges beyond their ken and we learn whether or not they have the integrity and spirit to use their frustrations to grow. 

That broad, serious concern is levened by the three romances at the novel's centre. First, the fervent and serenely beautiful Dorothea Brooke marries an old scholar, Edward Casaubon who is working on his magnum opus, "The Key to All Mythologies."  That he even assumes he can undertake such a task tells you something about the size and single-mindedness of his ego.  He and Dorothea go to Rome for their honeymoon, largely because he wants to do some research there, but what really happens is that he begins to see that his project is fatally flawed.  So Dorothea's eagerness to help him is interpreted as criticism of his abilities. Thus he is often cold to her during her most sympathetic moments, which led to the tears that provoked the narrator's commentary above.  Also in Rome, Dorothea meets Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw.  If I tell you that he was played by a young Rufus Sewell in the BBC version, you will detect in the casting the likelihood that Dorothea finds Will more attuned to her feelings--and a lot sexier.  I shan't spoil the ins and outs of this second relationship for you.

The third romance is between Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. Lydgate is a French-trained doctor who is alive to all the latest science and whose practice implicitly challenges the ways of the other Middlemarch doctors.  In spite of the fact that his practice is in its early stages, he marries Rosamund, largely because she is beautiful and accomplished.  (He has met Dorothea early in the novel and finds her earnestness exhausting. He will later change his mind.) It is Rosamund who will entertain him when he gets home from a difficult day. Eliot frequently notes how Lydgate combines the coldness of science with very human warmth and sympathy in his practice , and it is this sympathy which binds him to Rosamund when he finds her crying because she loves him and he stopped coming to the house until her brother Fred became ill. 

Rosamund and her family have pursued all the exterior markers of success.  Her beauty, her taste in clothes, her skill at the piano, her perfect manners, learned at Miss Lemon's finishing school, will guarantee her goal:  to marry up.  Her father is in trade, so she seeks someone with connections to the landed gentry, preferably titled, and a profession.  I find her a sad character, one whose happiness is doomed by the fact that her sense of self is constructed out of whalebone and money.  She has no inner life that is not shaped by how others see and admire her. That life collapses when Lydgate's practice is in difficulties and he must live more cheaply--a smaller house, fewer dresses and parties.

There's a third tier of characters we come to know well and then there is Middlemarch more generally, with all of its smallness and gossipiness and its delighted criticism when "their betters" are brought low.  There are machinations about inheritances and the ruining of reputations--which ripple throughout the community. There's gossip and people going out of their way to be kind. There is also poetic justice about unkindness, meanness, or cruelty.  It is like a boomerang and will come back to you, possibly ruining your life.  One of the subtler examples of this occurs in Rome.  Just as Dorothea is pulling herself together after the disappointed tears we witnessed above, Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw, is announced and since Casaubon is away, Dorothy meets him alone.  

"She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds." While she and Will do not flirt, Casaubon senses that their lives are carried out on a different plane, one he can't reach by dint of his focus on thought over feeling.  Dorothea and Will have a common language of sympathy, a common generosity and curiosity about the well-being of others that immediately binds them.  In his will, Casaubon anticipates the romantic blooming of their relationship after he dies, so he disinherits Dorothea if she marries Will. The community regards this as an ugly gesture, one that implies Dorothea's faithlessness. Obviously it says more about Casaubon's envy than about Dorothea's relief in speaking openly to someone who understands her desire to give and receive sympathy. Why should Casaubon wish to control her happiness after he dies, except for the ill-tempered envy that follows him to the grave?  It blows up in his face. Yet this is what Eliot's narrator says of him:

"For my part I am very sorry for him.  It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy:  to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."

What critics call the ideology of the plot--the pattern of who gets rewarded and who gets punished for their actions and attitudes, and what that pattern says about the values of the narrative, whether it's a novel or a film--certainly punished Casaubon.  This passage is the culmination of three pages that begins with a consideration of Dorothea and cuts off by asking "But why Dorothea?  Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble." In these pages, Eliot is certainly undercutting our expectations.  But to what end? We hope we live in a world where fate is scrupulously ethical--though at the present moment, we doubt that fact, adding to our anxiety, making it existential as well as political.

But what if sympathy were, so to speak, a universal human right?  What if, when you saw or learned of someone behaving oddly or badly, you shifted from ready judgment to the harder task of being curious? Frank Bruni has written a wonderful book on what he calls the "grievance industrial project"--peoples' general tendency to feel aggrieved when they don't get their way or feel disrespected--describing a general trend right now. The evidence he has is irrefutable.  MAGA and Trump, you might have noticed, eat grievance for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But perhaps sympathy is the force that might hold the rest of us humanly together during this difficult time.

 

Lights and shadows of Autumn

In spite of the pre-grief I wrote about in early September, I am falling into the pleasures of fall.  September is always exciting because it's a signal to learn new things. So I've been reading Walt Whitman's remarkable Specimen Days, a kind of journal-ish autobiography, to see if he doesn't have a place in the second half of the book of poetry I'm working on:  Nature's Culture; Culture's Nature. Whitman thought he could hear spring, which I've already written a poem about.  He also felt that nature helped him recover from a stroke he had in the later years of his life and regularly "wrestled" with a sapling tree near a brook he frequented, often bathing in the brook and then having a dance with the sapling. I'm often terrified of the task I've set myself:  writing poems about a handful of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century naturalists. What can I say that they haven't said?  But then I just get caught up in learning about them, caught up in how our ways of seeing need the prompts and inspiration of people who didn't live in our wired world.  So yes, I'm terrified.  But I'm also learning. 

I'm also reading some essays by John Burroughs, the man who helped care for Whitman at the beginning of his stroke, collected in The Art of Seeing Things.  Burroughs is almost didactic about the pleasures--I know, that sounds like an oxymoron, but I don't think it is--of taking the time to really see the world. He talks about the necessity of loving the world and loving the act of seeing:

"Love sharpens the eye, the ear, the touch; it quickens the feet, it steadies the hand, it arms against the wet and the cold.  What we love to do, that we do well.  To know is not all; it is only half.  To love is the other half....Love is the measure of life:  only so far as we love do we really live.  The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts--if these do not measure our lives, what does?"

What we love defines the quality of our lives.  That's good advice for a 75-year-old writer who is undertaking something she's not certain she can pull off. Perhaps it's good advice for all of us.

Burroughs's advice certainly applies to autumn, which gives us a different palette.  We have to look more carefully and more often to see its beauty, the way some leaves become more bronzy, the way trees withdrawn their energies into  themselves, leaving ghostly gold behind them.  The leaves of the wild roses on the bank of Wascana Creek become more ruddy--an entirely new shade of green. The Crayola green we've seen on the trees all summer becomes more subtle, revealing ochres and bronzes and ruddy tones that, paradoxically, are fresh and new to our eyes. And if we have to look more carefully, we slow down. 

And I take pleasure in feeling a little bit like a bear, ready to withdraw.  I find myself opening drawers or closets and thinking about what I really use or wear and how I can make them work a little better--as if I were a bear preparing her den. This morning, leaving the house to grocery shop, I loved the changed smell of the garden, how the smell of leaves mixed with a hint of the smell of lightning on the air and the smell of rain.  Coming home, knowing that rain was forecast for the entire day, I thought "Lovely.  I've got a baby quilt to work on, a Halo quilt I can hand piece while listening to music, and I can make good headway on Middlemarch," which I'm re-reading to appreciate the profound humanity and sympathy of George Eliot's narrator. She even manages to be sympathetic to Casaubon, though that didn't lessen my relief, for Dorothea's sake, when he died.  

The other part of autumn I love is the way the light changes.  It comes into my rooms in different ways, prompting me to see a house I've lived in for 35 years in different ways, to even ask questions of light. Why does the light coming in through the leaves of my crab apple tree resolve into roundish shapes? Two nights ago, Bill and I went for a walk through our neighbourhood rather than on the creek bank.  I think I wanted the comfort of elm-enclosed streets, the dim light of evening pierced by scenes in living rooms.  I wanted to see the gardens people had put in, but to see them in the half-light. I also noticed how many people in Cathedral Village have added art to the sides of their garages.  I ran into a former colleague and had a lovely chat.  I thought about community. 

Because the last week has been awful. Frankly, the last few months have been especially awful geopolitically speaking.  Israel's attack on Hamas in Qatar and its further incursion into Gaza, where people are starving.  The military exercises in China organized by Xi and attended by Putin and Kim Jong Un. Russia sending drones to Poland.  The ongoing war in Sudan--more starving people-- which Anne Applebaum calls a pointless war. Charlie Kirk's assassination. Trump intoning about how leftists and Democrats practice political violence and he's going after all their organizations.  (Never mind that the assassin was a disaffected Republican.) Trump and ICE.  Trump and the National Guard.  There are two things going on here that I can't quite get my head around.  One is how untruth is not only given credence, but is multiplied by the algorithm.  Second, there's something going on in the chess match that is nations' relationships with one another that I can't grasp, some terrifying shift.  Or something about the permission given to men--yes, men--who have been allowed to become despots. I can't take it in.

So, like a bear, I've wanted to hibernate.  But something kept prompting me to think about the places where we live.  There's the nation state, which seems in good shape here in Canada, but fubar other places in the world.  As a species, at this historical moment, we're not electing good leaders.  What is driving this tendency?

There are our communities.  Probably each of you has a different Venn diagram showing where you have a sense of belonging.  Maybe it's your city or neighbourhood enhanced by belonging to an organization or union, further enriched by your belonging to a group of people who loves the things you love--the Stitchers' and Weavers' Guild or the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild here where I live. Here we keep conversations open--something that's being threatened around the world by censorship or polarized political climates where voices are silenced. Here we celebrate what we have in common--regardless of how different we are. Really, if all you do in this terrible time is keep conversations happening, that will be a worthwhile act of resistance.

The third place we live in is art or nature. Nature always tells us the truth, and it's a truth we need to attend to.  We can find a way to be co-conspirators with nature.  Art keeps dialogue and rebellion alive, challenging, affirming, prompting us to ask questions.  This is where we go to keep our souls alive, whether it's to measure the changing greens or admire Eliot's truthful, broad-minded narrator in a time of grievance and lies.

But if you've been reading my theory-of-everything list of the places where our lives unfold with even a hint of critical thinking, you'll say I left something out.  The media.  Our cell phones.  But they've hijacked our sense of what is real and reasonable.  They don't report the fact that in the last decade 100 million children have been lifted out of extreme poverty.  Or that the yellow mountain toad is coming back to Australia and the Jaguar to Mexico.  Or that carbon emissions seem to have peaked. Even the responsible media, like The New York Times, has weaponized the limbic system in my brain that latches on to news that makes me frightened or makes me angry.  Several times a day, they are in my email inbox with "Breaking News!"  I've stopped opening them.  Rather than doom-scrolling, I'm going to be a bear, and see which berries are just now getting ripe.  I'm going to keep reading Middlemarch, and keep working on that baby quilt. There is hope.  You just have to stop your ears against some things, as Odysseus did, and focus on the journey you are choosing to take. And remember what John Burroughs said and how it resists our war- and hate-filled world:  "Love is the measure of life:  only so far as we love do we really live.  The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts--if these do not measure our lives, what does?"

Pre-Grief and Sparrows

I'm not a botanist, so I can't tell you what is actually happening inside leaves in August.  I only know what I see.  Over the summer, the richly varying greens of late spring and early summer--each kind of tree with its own take on the colour green, from the grey-green of willow to the lambent green of aspen--homogenize and simply become a darker version of the green you find in your new Crayola box of 9 crayons.  (I'm dating myself.  Are those flat little boxes even available any more?  I think the smallest is 24. But when I was in grade school a new box every September was a treat.) Their leaves sound different. Stiffer. They susurrate rather than taking the breeze in their stride. And I see it in people's gardens, how the early summer perennials look like their tips have been dipped in bronze.  My hydrangeas, no matter how valiantly Bill keeps them watered, give up blooming and their ivory flowers stiffen and infuse with a dusty pink. The tips of the ferns turn crispy.  Even my Lemony Lace Elderberry gives up some of its vibrant young green, as if to say "Green's good.  Any shade." Of course, I notice the shorter days, but only in the evening.  All day my world looks subtly different.  If I could just ignore it for a moment, I might fool myself.  

It's like pre-grief, something I first felt when my parents were in their early nineties and I would visit them at least once a year in Atlanta, Georgia.  Of course I would notice the little changes. How my father talked less, had less to say, how his deafness came between him and the world. The look of incomprehension on his face when he watched the evening news. Or my mother's anxiety, which ran rampant after surgery left my father incontinent. (This was before the surge in "incontinence-wear.") The laundry! The worry about going out for anything, even just ice cream! I went for five or six days to problem solve and to listen.  To hold my mother's hands. To reassure her about her anxiety medication.  To sit next to my dad and just let him wordlessly rest his head on my shoulder. Just as I now spend August picking beans and thinning carrots again, and watching the happy bees, I would simply immerse myself in their world for the days I spent there.

Then I'd drive the terrifying Atlanta expressways the full hour back to the airport, return the rented car, get myself checked in and through security, and sit in the lovely airport atrium with its filtered sunlight, and take out whatever journal I was working on at the time. Then I'd write about what I saw and the sadness it brought with it. I knew I was lucky to have parents in their nineties, but still. Each tiny loss was another step toward their mortality. Pre-grief.

A couple of nights ago, I sat out in our back garden for about an hour.  It was still hot, but August-dry--the kind of weather that comforts rather than stifling you. I just let myself range over the brake of trees on the west side of the yard, letting myself sink into accepting the changes. But it was apparently time for the sparrows to come in for their bedtime snack. Somehow the first half dozen managed to simply drift down to disguise themselves behind a leaf or two.  When I began to notice them, the only sign was a slight branch that was bobbing out of rhythm with leaves caught by the breeze. The light was waning, and yet as I watched I could see that more and more branches had sparrows.  

Somehow my perception of the trees changed. It might have been like the Rubin's vase illusion:  how you can see either the vase or the two faces in profile, but not both at once. I could see the August-green leaves, or I could see branches peopled by sparrows, and my vision would flicker between the two. That flickering was pure magic: the moment when that brake became sparrows trees for a millisecond before trees that hid dozens of sparrows.

Sparrows, as you know, often travel in flocks, and each flock has a couple of personalities who take it upon themselves to warn the rest of the flock of danger. There's always one sparrow with a hair trigger, and a flock of sparrows learns to ignore this little boy who cries "Wolf!" too often. But they have their more reliable watchers. These came down in twos and three to peck at the seeds in the "bird garden"--an area I've planted so that mounds of fallen seed or husks of millet aren't a problem that needs to be relentlessly cleaned up. The ferns and Bishop's Weed are good with birdseed.  A few more would join them. Then half a dozen. Soon I watched at least twenty snacking on millet. But I was getting stiff on the metal bench in the cooling evening, and so I moved slightly. A watcher chirped.  And the wings beating back the air sounded like an archangel leaving my garden.  

My Process Quilt

 

I have come to call this my process quilt.  I had no idea what I was doing aside from putting together some cheerful fabrics and hand-piecing sunflower blocks.  I had no colour scheme in  mind:  I'd make it up as I went along, I told myself, just as I was making my life up as I went along during the last eighteen months.  I certainly had no idea how different fabrics would  fulfill their roles.  I didn't know, for example, that buying a crazy gold to match the floral fabric of the diamonds in the bottom right block would completely take over the block.  Nor did I know that being too "matchy-matchy" would compromise the drama of the middle block on the left.  I chose a pink for the points that picked up a pink in the diamonds.  That was my first block, and I was just following the rules I'd learned for conventional quilt blocks.  But the pink almost disappears and the white spaces in the red and white diamonds kind of take over.  I saw the diamonds in the top left block as, well, pink!  I didn't know how the white quatrefoils would make the diamonds look really busy and not very pink. But that was all okay. I just kept choosing cheerful fabric.  And I kept learning.  If you want two fabrics to contrast dramatically, changing value isn't enough.  Make one a cool colour, one a warm colour.  And maybe, as in my last block, the top one on the right, choose the centre first rather than choosing the three fabrics for the points and then hoping you have a good centre.  That gives the block more focus.

I just hit "delete."  

I had written two long paragraphs--an overly-long organ recital detailing the last eighteen months of my life.  "That gets in the way of the reader," I told myself.  All you really need to know--and I had love and support through the whole thing, and none of it was life-threatening, so you needn't feel sorry for me--is that for the last eighteen months I felt frightened, incompetent, and exhausted.  These are the words you can relate to, can map onto your own experience. 

Because I felt incompetent, I didn't hand quilt much and rarely played the piano.  I was doing enough things in my life badly; I wouldn't add these.  But I could hand piece. No one would see my stitches and note any irregularity.  If you mark your fabric carefully, using templates to trace the diamonds or triangles and place the dots where your sewing should begin and end and connect these dots with a pencil line, it's easy to piece this difficult blocks, as long as you also connect those dots with pins before you begin to sew. I simply chose cheerful fabrics that I hoped would work together because what I needed from the entire process was a little cheer and a challenge I could manage.

Marking the blocks--there are 16 pieces of each shape in each block--can be time-consuming, but I made that pleasant by streaming Soweto Kinch, the BBC's knowledgeable and upbeat jazz DJ. I guess you could say that I made an idiosyncratic little bit of pleasure out of the most boring part of the process.  Then you take the sixteen pointy pieces next to the centre and sew them to sixteen diamonds.  These you press before adding the rounded triangles of the outer edge.  Press again.  Then begin to put these little units of three together--a tricky proposition, because your seam doglegs in the middle. You pin the first half of the seam and sew it, and then completely rearrange seam allowances to find the dots and pin carefully at the turn.  Something grows under your hands and it's unpredictable and cheerful at the same time. It's a safe little adventure for those days when your brain can't penetrate the exhausted fog that hems you in.

I'm not convinced it's a good quilt, which usually has a unity of conception you might find in a work of art, but I do think it's cheerful and fun. I was going for process, for something doable. Something I could manage. I would sew four triangles to four diamonds after dinner in a kind of meditative way. Four 1 1/2 inch seams of tiny stitches.  

I had heard Oliver Burkeman be interviewed about Four Thousand Weeks, which was one of The New York Times's 100 notable books for 2021. If we live to eighty, we live 4,000 weeks.  It's an uncanny number, large and yet small enough that we can get our heads around it and feel mortality at our backs. Not like 280,000 days, which is the same time frame but feels much more generous.  What's a wasted day here or there? According to the interviews, there was one important takeaway:  we are not going to get everything done.  We are not going to accomplish everything on our list.  We have to make some choices. This rang true for me.  

When his Meditations for Mortals came out, I bought it. I guess self-help isn't exactly my cup of tea.  But there were a couple of things he said that stuck with me, probably because they were good metaphors.  The first is that we'd like our lives to play out on a computer-controlled super yacht.  We could put our course in our computer and get on with our daily lives, not worrying about navigating the larger trip.  But truth be told, we're really swooshing down a fairly rapid river in a kayak. We have to be observant navigators all the time. In another of his meditations, he puts it another way:  we can't stand on our toes and look over the fence of today to see into tomorrow. We have to live here and now. That's what each piece allowed me to do.  I could be inside the cheer of the fabrics and the tiny straightness of my stitches in a way that was almost meditative.

Two things might redeem my little made-up-on-the-fly process quilt.  One is craftsmanship.  The points of the triangles and diamonds are sharp. Each bit of carefulness--from marking to pinning to the tiny stitches--counted, just as you can make each minute count.  (It sure beats doom scrolling!)  The stitches fastening the sunflowers to the white and black background are invisible. Similarly, you may not know where you are going, but you can get there in a way that has both self-respect and pleasure in the moment.  That's not a bad recipe for getting through difficult days.

The second thing is the black sashing.  My sister Karen had made a small quilt out of half square triangles in a huge range of colours and then wondered how she could get it to hold together.  Try a black border I suggested, and it worked. Black will work where other neutrals like brown or tan won't because it's just sharp. Decisive. So as I worked on my process quilt, I was pretty sure black lattice would give the individual blocks enough space to be themselves, and that perhaps this would hold the quilt together. Like me, you've got a handful of tricks up your sleeve for getting life's waywardness to cohere.  

One trick, I think, for getting through rough times is to glory in the moment because you're doing something that is very you and you are taking the time to do it well. Something to do with your hands, psychologists tell us, is an added bonus because it's both soothing and cognitively a little challenging. Knitting a sock or a scarf.  Writing an email to an old friend. Working in the garden.  Sketching a flower. Bathing a baby. The other is having faith--hard-won faith, probably--that you know a thing or two about navigating tough times.  

Reading and Gardening through Disaster

 As I sit down to write this morning, Lyra is on my lap.  He's picked up on my mood--his timing is often, like today, uncanny.  He has come to mitigate the profound sadness and despair I feel.  How many times will I begin a blog post with the words "It's not been a good couple of weeks"?  Until the midterm elections in the U.S., I suppose.  But it has seriously not been a good couple of weeks.  The floods in Texas and the heartbreaking loss of children and other innocent people living on a flood plain breaks my heart.  I want to tell everyone who lost a friend or a family member in those floods to dedicate their lives to addressing climate change.  Yes, it's not the only cause of those floods, but it's something people can actually do.  It's something all of us can do through daily choices.  Make each "green" choice an active act of remembrance for people around the world who die of weather or the disease and starvation that are exacerbated by a hotter climate, for people who have lost their homes or livelihood because of forest fires.

Then there are the people who die in Gaza waiting for food or water.  I don't know how we can fail to see this as genocide. 

And then there's the Big Beautiful Bill--the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that history has ever seen.  It's obscene that the wealthy get tax cuts while the poor get Medicare cuts. 

It is also midsummer in Regina, and we've been gifted with rain.  The city is quite lush.  One of the unexpected effects of my cataract surgery is that I can see every leaf on a tree, and I register the variety planted through the city with delight.  My clematis is vivacious and ecstatic.  My bush beans have put out the most etherially-coloured blossoms and the pole beans are half way up their poles.  My pots of herbs are jubilant.  When I make a salad, I simply go out and pick a handful of herbs and drop them in like more lettuce leaves. Last week, I told Nikka that my moods are super-charged, intense, and that I walk a very sharp knife blade; they could go either way.  If I'm disciplined enough to "Be.  Here.  Now." what I feel is joy in the fact that my small part of the planet is not hot and has plenty of rain.  I know there are parts of Saskatchewan where this is not the case. But when I look up into the distance--into the future or into other parts of the planet, I feel despair.

My fiction reading has taken a hit.  I have no resources left to tolerate the anxiety and uncertainty of a tense plot.  I'm re-reading a lot of things I know I can trust, like Frances Itani's The Company We Keep, about a group of people who are struggling with their individual and idiosyncratic griefs--no grief is like another, I suspect--but who nevertheless help and support one another in the most surprising ways. The novel is a celebration of the power that kindness, attentive listening, and conversation have to make us feel part of the human family, and so less isolated in our despair. 

Or I turned to nonfiction, often about nature, to educate and enliven my sense of wonder.  That was my intention when I picked up Robert Macfarlane's remarkable Is a River Alive?  The answer, of course, is yes, but connecting to, listening to, understanding that aliveness in a way that doesn't anthropomorphise the river is a deep undertaking that requires unselfing ourselves and our language.  

But of course, the three rivers he visits, one of them Canadian, are all under threat. Ever a thoughtful writer who doesn't (like me these days) avoid tales of doom, Macfarlane listens to the story of resistance to exploitation that many people, often at the cost of their lives, have put up to save his first river, Rio Los Cedros, a river in the cedar cloud forest of Ecuador.  Capitalism is hungry for the mountain's precious minerals. Do we really need more gold?  What for?  

Macfarlane writes of his and my fragile equilibrium as he hears about two waterfalls of the same river, side by side, one destroyed by mining, one pristine:  "I'm pierced again by hope and futility:  the two streams of the waterfall.  Hope at the tirelessness of these people, resisting across generations.  Futility at this living forest's vulnerability in the face of the force that comes from the barrel of a gun or the corporate profit motive.  Could such power ever be brought to recognize the river and forest as complexly alive?"  As I read these words, I realized that my fragile mood is simply an effect of living in the twenty-first century and paying attention.  (Maybe paying too much attention for my own good.)  Maybe my frame of mind is simply an effect of being human, certainly during hungry late capitalism in a time when power has been rendered toxic and self-serving in many places in the world. 

Because what's being fought out are two different understandings of power.  The power to exploit, to turn nature or the suffering of others into dollars.  The power to take, to gather into one's already sizeable hoard anything that's not physically or legally locked down.  The power of Smaug.  How lonely and isolated and ultimately inadequate such power is, even while it steals the well-being of others. 

Or the power to give. I've also been reading A Different Kind of Power, Jacinda Ardern's remarkable memoir of her journey from being the kid of a cop whose "beat" was a small, poor town to Premier House, where the New Zealand prime minister lives.  On her way to her swearing in, she takes a call from journalist John Campbell.  He wants "one last idealistic flourish" from her.  "What is it you want to do?" "'I want this government to feel different,' I said.  'I want people to feel that it's open, that it's listening, and that it's going to bring kindness back.'"  Ardern goes on to write "'Kindness.'  That was the word.  It is a child's word, in a way.  Simple.  And yet it encompassed everything that had left an imprint on me....All the people I'd known through the years:  family and friends, people I'd worshiped alongside or worked with, even fought with, but always--always--in the service of something better.  Some people thought kindness  was sentimental, soft.  A bit naive, even.  I knew this.  But I also knew they were wrong.  Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has.  I'd seen kindness do extraordinary things:  I'd seen it give people hope; I'd seen it change minds and transform lives." 

The other natural resource we have as these conceptions of power vie for world domination is awe. We can begin with the awe we feel in the presence of acts of "moral beauty," acts of imagination or compassion or generosity toward people who are struggling--as we all are.  But we can also be in awe at the tiny green beans that I found this afternoon as I harvested some rhubarb.  I learned from Zoe Schlanger's book The Light Eaters, a book on the intelligence and consciousness of plants--though the scientists she follows argue with those words even while the plant behaviour they describe can't be seen any other way--that seeds have been called a plant's lunch bag containing its first meal and its DNA.  Those beans I saw this afternoon, about an inch long and not much thicker than a darning needle, were contained in that little package I put in the soil about six weeks ago. In turn, those tiny beans will contain seeds of their own--a set of magical nesting dolls. Or the awe that we should feel about butterflies.  We don't actually know what happens in the chrysalis a caterpillar makes.  We know the caterpillar more or less dissolves completely, but we can't exactly open it up to see what is happening or we'll halt the process.  So for a while the chrysalis is full of goo.  Then it has wings.  What's the point of awe?  Or of kindness?  Or of sharing with someone who confesses that while she was grieving the death of her husband sometimes all she could do was curl up on the floor that you did the same thing after your mother died. I'll let Robert Macfarlane close today:

"Ideas move in space and time.  They swim like fish.  They drift like pollen.  They migrate like birds.  Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish."  

Small Pleasures

 

Tuck loves heat.  He scurries to get into the warm spot you leave when you get up for tea, but his favourite place is the heating pad I sometimes leave on low after I've made my bed.  Lyra prefers sunshine and window sills.  Tuck loves head butts.  He will stretch out a paw to draw you to him, forehead to forehead, as if you belong to the same tribe.  Sometimes, when you turn to leave, out comes the paw to grasp you for one more.  His record is twelve head butts at a time.  Lyra loves to arrange himself in my arms like a baby looking up into my eyes.  Or he sits with his head on my breastbone, one paw on my neck, his head turned, and simply melts into my body.  Tuck sleeps on my hips; Lyra sleeps staring at me.  But their absolutely favourite place is together in the space between our pillows, with bouts of washing one another's faces during the night.  "I want to wash your face," Tuck will say, putting his paw on top of Lyra's head to hold it still.  "No.  I'm going to wash yours," Lyra will say as he eludes the paw and runs his tongue along Tuck's muzzle, chewing whiskers as he goes.  Tuck never has any whiskers.

Tuck and Lyra are cats eight and nine in my fifty-three year history with cat families, and most of them have had outsized pleasures.  Niagara, the daughter of my first cat, liked curling up in the bathroom sink and watching water drip on her.  But her all-time favourite thing was the root end of a radish, which she'd fling around in the bathtub.

Of course, they are cats, programmed for pleasure, so much so that they have a sound for expressing it.  But they are pets:  how did their desires become so individual?  In the dark, I know Lyra and Tuck by their desires as well as their differently-textured coats. When I sleep on my side, Tuck is the one who paws at the covers and waits for me to lift them so he can climb underneath and sleep happily with my arm around him as if he were my childhood teddy bear.  When my arm is on my pillow, Lyra rests his front paws there, his face inches from mine, and purrs. No.  My cats aren't pets.  They're companions, and it behooves me to understand the simple things that give them pleasure. 

How do you know who you are?  There is some argument that, Veronica O'Keene tells us in .A Sense of Self:  Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are, we are sometimes comprised of our neural circuitry and our hormones and neurotransmitters, which occasionally take us over.  Or are you the synaptic tangle of  memories traced in  your brain? Are you your consciousness at this moment, infused as it is with the precise details of where you are right now, reading a mystery while the smell of Earl Grey tea wafts towards you?  Are you the ineffable stuff that floats through your mind about the past, this moment, the future, an idea you have been toying with or reading about? The feelings of bliss that irradiate you or of trauma that just won't go away? Post-structuralists argued that we didn't really have our own identities, that we were "interpellated," shaped largely by social expectations. Though I don't entirely believe this, I taught post-structuralist theories because I thought we should consider the ways our contexts--from capitalism to gender roles--often quietly, even underhandedly, shape who we are.  Are we our stories, some complex relationship between our memories and the way we have configured them to create our narratives? Memories are never neutral; the context of our recall always tilts them slightly.  So maybe we're a conversation, then, between truth and desire or perspective? 

We are many selves at different times. Perhaps one portrait of each of us is sketched by our desires.  And I'm not going down the rabbit hole into the complicated warren of sexual desire; that's altogether too large a labyrinth for any single individual to encompass, which is why I simply lean into the cliche that love is love is love. I'm thinking about the simple desires that sparkle through our days.  "I need a cup of tea!" with the caveat at right this moment it has to be the mango green tea, not Earl Grey. "Do I have some chocolate around here somewhere?" "My head is stuffed full.  I need to go for a walk." "Where's spring? I need to go seed shopping!" Your need to hear a particular song. Yourquest for a good movie or binge-watching reruns of Succession. Your drive, right this moment, to rootle through your crafting drawers and find your knitting needles and make yet another scarf, just needing your fingers to move in this soothing, particular way.

Thinking of our desires as part of our self-portrait has an advantage:  we can then look at them more purposefully and query them.  

We want errant politicians and world leaders to do this, not simply to offer excuses for, say, economy-destroying tariffs, but to ask themselves "Why do I want this?" and to be genuinely curious. My first remembered instance of this came in 2003 when George W. Bush essentially said "Give me some gossip or threats I can use to invade Iraq.  I want to finish what Daddy started." I suspect that most wars, like the one in Ukraine, are started with the unexamined words "I want," without the recognition that they said something about the person with those desires, as well as about history and ideology and the economy. Trump wanted to bomb something with those big beautiful bombs the U.S. has, and Iran seemed like a good idea.  But why?  Why not diplomacy?  Because he wanted....

I've got desires that would benefit from asking why.  It's 9:20 in the morning, and I want chocolate.  Why?  Seriously, I cannot indulge every desire for chocolate I have; I already do it rather too much.  But I'm struggling with words, questioning each sentence, wondering if I've gone too far yet again with the ideas I share here.  Like, really, it's July 2 and I'm asking you to think about the little desires that sparkle through your day--or get  you in trouble.  In the case of chocolate, I'd like some comfort, and chocolate is my easiest avenue to comfort.  A lot of food is, really. 

The minimalist in me wants to say that we could interrogate our desires when, say, we're buying our twentieth pair of shoes or fourth white blouse or that new car or the book you have no place for on your shelves or the stack by your bed, which is already teetering.  If you can push it outside of you, you can challenge it and the planet will be happier.  Oh, and the book.  If it tells a story or elucidates an idea  you need to understand to become more human, buy it!  Maybe donate it to a little library when you're done.  But if it's going to sit on your shelves gathering dust as part of the self-portrait of who you want to be or be seen to be, give it a miss.  Or get it from the library and sheepishly return it unread.

In other words, if it's a thing you want, query it.  What is that desire telling you about yourself? Telling you about yourself this minute.  Maybe it's something you need to take care of, but in a different way.  With a conversation or a walk with your dog.

But if it's doing something, consider indulging it.  I have some admittedly odd desires, many of which circle around doing something that's small enough to be do-able.  Seriously, who else is driven to get up from her computer and go down to the piano to work on that waterfall of notes that hangs in the  middle of a Chopin Nocturne?  Nine completely unpredictable notes.  But it's still just nine notes.  If I play them often enough, I will get better at it, and when I'm working on a hard piece of writing I need a demonstrable accomplishment. At seventy-five, I've taken up fifteen-minute gardening.  I can't spend all Sunday morning in the garden, as I used to:  my knees and back won't take it.  But fifteen minutes weeding the vegetable garden is a tonic. There are microbes in the soil that raise serotonin levels in your brain, improving  your mood.  And when I'm done, I can see that my pole beans are going to get all the water and fertilizer I give them.  There's something peaceful and lovely about a weeded garden, something orderly that I need in my chaotic life. 

In the photograph above you see three sets of small pleasures.  Tuck, my black cat, and Lyra, my grey tuxedo tabby, love curling up in the afternoon.  Better yet, they love curling up on Mom's latest quilting project as she lays it out to see whether it's working.  The sunflower blocks are born of that desire to do something small and something bright.  They're entirely hand-pieced.  Last winter when I wasn't well, they saved my sanity because I could do just a few at a time, no matter how tired I was.

If planting a garden or planning a quilt or making a collage or writing a real letter to a friend is an intrinsic part of who you are, part of the sparkles that animate your life, celebrate it.  Flaunt it!  Indulge it. Find time for it.  Don't feel you need to justify it. It's you!

How to love the world

It's been a terrible week.  We may be on the cusp of a wider war in the Middle East.  And even if we're not, conditions in Gaza remain dire. Donald Trump had a birthday party with tanks and bombs.  The National Guard was brought in to L.A., not really to manage the crowds, which the police could have adequately done, but to provide a show of force.  To threaten.  To claim more power. To practice declaring a national emergency, perhaps getting the Supreme Court onside so that he can more generally silence criticism.  Here's a toast to everyone that attended 2,000 demonstrations, declaring "No Kings!" 

Not surprisingly, my insomnia has dropped in for an indefinite stay.  But there are perks to insomnia if you can calm yourself enough to grasp them.  One is that I get lots better at meditating, since meditation both stills me and leads me to the frame of mind that will sleep.  The second is that I'm forced to do a better job of sleep hygiene, which mostly involves staying off screens after 8 p.m. and reading something soothing or philosophical at bedtime.  No mysteries or tense novels. For some reason I can no longer remember, I bought myself a lovely hardcover copy of Seneca's letters, which are chatty until he homes in on his Stoic insights.  Here's some advice we could give to Trump or Putin or Netanyahu:  "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."

And then a few days ago, I took Devotions, my copy of Mary Oliver's selected poems, off the shelf to begin again where I'd left off.  In House of Light (1990), there's a poem on "Spring" where she imagines the experience of a black bear awakening from hibernation that ends

    all day I think of her--

            her white teeth

                    her wordlessness,

                            her perfect love. 

It's one of the mysteries of Oliver's poems that she can write so unsentimentally about the natural world:  here it's the combination of the bear's threatening "white teeth"; a lack of words that should, at least in human terms, make her appreciation elusive; and the surprise and mystery of her perfect love.  But what struck me most about the poem were a few lines in its middle that seem to speak to this historical moment:  "There is only one question; / how to love this world." How, indeed?

It's as if my reading is having a conversation.  A couple of days ago, Libby (RPL's e-book program) delivered Chloe Dalton's Raising Hare onto my shelf.  Dalton, a foreign policy advisor for the U.K. government and a self-described workaholic, retires to a renovated barn in the British countryside of her childhood to wait out the pandemic lockdown.  Dalton finds a tiny leveret--a baby hare--on an evening walk.  At the beginning of her walk, she's unwilling to pick it up, but returning that evening she is worried about its vulnerability to owls and stoats, so embraces it in a handful of grass.  It is so small it fits lengthwise in her palm.  The narrative that follows is the story of her relationship with an animal that, unlike cats and dogs or horses, has absolutely no DNA that has evolved to enable the human/animal connection.  Little is known about feeding them--though her parcel of books sent from the London Library contains many recipes for eating them--until she finds a poem of William Cowper, who likewise had a leveret and explains that they like oats, which replace the bottles of kitten food she's been nursing it with.  Dalton's memoir is replete with the mystery of the connection between her and the unnamed leveret (it's not a pet, so she has no right to name it). But no spoilers here.  

But it's the leveret's effect on  Dalton that I want to tie to Mary Oliver's query about "how to love this world."  Dalton writes that "It was not tame but made certain exceptions where I was concerned.  The fact that the leveret appeared to feel safe with me seemed a tacit approval from the wildest of the wild.  It made me feel accepted in my environment, akin to living in a state of peace with nature."  Hares tend to be active at night and sleep during the day, so Dalton found herself with a peaceful sleeping leveret on the stairs or in a doorway.  This prompted her to change some of her habits, sometimes even going out one of the doors of her house and through the rain to get to another room, or taking her clothes downstairs to the shower to disrupt the leveret's sleep as little as possible.  "The leveret's preoccupations influenced me in other, more subtle ways.  As its gaze travelled further, so did mine, drawing my mind, and increasingly my feet, outdoors." She finds herself observing other hares and changes in the landscape more closely: "I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me." The London-based, jet-setting foreign policy advisor finds herself thinking about how the landscape enables or endangers the safety of her leveret and other vulnerable wild creatures, leading her to plant trees and to create, on her small farm, complicated and varied hedges that enable safety to birds and other small animals.

My spring and early summer was uncertain.  In many ways, it was like yours.  Working in the garden was often made impossible by heavy smoke or by unpleasantly windy days, so seeds and flowers in boxes went in later than usual--something I fussed about.  I wondered whether the dramatic changes I was making to Home in Stormy Weather were working.  Why was brain fog so often dropping down at about 5 pm? Was the leftover of my post-viral exhaustion or just an ordinary tiredness from being 75?  If so, did I like 75?  "Cope with what is," I often reminded myself, not always successfully.  

But the crab apple tree in our back yard was an enormous help.  It was in bloom when we decided to buy the house in 1990, and it's been my familiar since then.  I love the way its bark swirls around the trunk and branches.  It's been a place where nuthatches could jam in a seed to open it just above my head.  This year, I I stared out the kitchen windows or out the window halfway up the stairs just to follow the rising of tight pink blossoms in their leafy green cups, to watch the full blooms  hang on to the tree in spite of wind and rain, to note that there were apples the size of the head of a pin on the ends of branches that seemed to grow daily.  Then last week, I found that a dead branch had blossomed.  It was about a month late, but the bare brown stems had put out a handful of blossoms that looked both thicker and more crystalline that the usual blossoms.  I have been reading, in Zoe Schlanger's remarkable The Light Eaters, about how plants adapt to unfamiliar conditions by doing things we never thought them capable of.  But here was a mystery in my back yard. How do dead branches find the energy to blossom?  Why have they put out blossoms and not leaves?  They have lasted a good couple of weeks and continue to hang on.

Here, I think, is the answer to Oliver's question about how to love this world.  See it.  Study it.  Use what you see and observe to find paths outside your own preoccupations and obsessions.  That's exactly what the powerful too infrequently do:  find in a hare or a blossom or an imagined bear the compelling reality of something besides their own unassuageable desires.

Uncertainty, perspective, and moss

 

I like David Frum.  He's one of a handful of right-leaning commentators, like Canada's own Andrew Coyne, whom I always read because I need to know how people who don't lean left are thinking.  We can't just abandon ways of thinking on the basis of a thinker's ideology:  they know stuff we don't and have perspectives we ignore.  So last Thursday, Bill and I were finally getting our trip to Victoria, cancelled in February because the day before we were to leave I came down with an unspeakably bad cold, one that's still causing me to crash with post-viral exhaustion. But enough about me.  Back to David Frum. I had grabbed up a handful of magazines to read on the plane, including one with his article "Why the COVID Deniers Won."  We can't just ignore COVID deniers, labelling them uninformed or ill-educated, partly because such labels simply make them more intransigent.  Keeping conversations alive:  that's what civil discourse does, and that's what David Frum does in his careful paragraphs on uncertainty:

"The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event.  Some people who got COVID died.  Others lived.  Some suffered only mild symptoms.  Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered.  Some lost businesses built over a lifetime.  Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.

"We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness.  We don't like this at all.  We crave satisfying explanations.  We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like.  At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people.  This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories.  How did this happen?  Somebody must have done it--but who?  And why?" 

Blaming bad events on bad people.  We're in the midst of that right now, with all the uncertainty that entails.  (I won't name names.  In our household, we call him "Oh-oh," short for "Orange Oaf.") Even a brief review of history will uncover authoritarian leaders who made changes to millions of peoples' lives because they thought something--the economy?  Science? War?--worked the way they believed.  I only had to go as far back as Margaret Thatcher to recall an example, though her creation of chaos was largely limited to Great Britain and the Falklands. A war for the Falklands?  Why?

But what does this have to do with a week in Victoria?  Just as I put down David Frum's illuminating article, we were flying low over the ocean from Vancouver to Victoria.  I can't explain what I saw on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, except to say that there were swirls and streaks of smooth, silvery water punctuated by a background that glittered.  How could you possibly explain something as complex as these ocean currents?  How could you explain the islands that lifted from the ocean floor--someone can, I'm sure.  But those islands are also subject to forces too complex to be explicable in the aggregate, like storms and erosion.  Or this fact:  trees put out thousands of seeds every year, but very few actually root.  Why this one and not that?  And how will this tree growing influence the microclimate of the island? 

When you go on holiday, you put aside the daily commitments and habits that can more or less rule your brain and your life and instead commit yourself to wonder.  To being observant.  To asking idle questions.  That is was spring in Victoria--daffodils everywhere, even naturalized on the edge of the highway and in every yard, along with grape hyacinths and a dozen other wildflowers I couldn't identify; tulip trees in blossom; deep red rhododendrons in full bloom; moss everywhere--made shifting gears easy. I'm good at finding the little back roads on Google Maps, so after a day of walking along several beaches in and near Victoria, we took the back roads out to Sooke for dinner.  That was the second dose of wonder for the day, after the ocean and the mountains.  Bill drives the twisty roads and I get the chance to look deep into the trees where the forest floor is carpeted with ferns.  Or to gaze in wonder at something I saw several times we drove out to Sooke and up to Duncan.  The highway would be bordered by sheer rock--the side of the mountain vertical and exposed.  And the rock was home to ferns, mosses, wildflowers, trees, small cataracts.  I wish I had a photograph for you, but these were not good places on the twisting roads to just stop and take a picture.  Imagine the outburst in Victoria gardens when spring arrives in that luscious climate where gardeners have laboured in the fall to plant every bulb that will thrive.  Then translate that to the side of a mountains.

The mosses were a particular wonder for me after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss, which I highly recommend.  Actually, read everything she's written for the botany and the wisdom; she's a particularly philosophical companion during our traumatic time. She talks about the "ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure."  Mosses that grow on rock secrete acids that slowly turn rock to sand, allowing them patiently to thrive anywhere. There are 22,000 kinds of moss world-wide, occupying their individual niches. They are patience personified.  They can wait long periods for water.  They don't care how fast they grow and are willing to create their own ideal circumstances. And they create ideal circumstances for others.  Where there is moss, there is humidity.  They are perfect nurseries for baby trees.  They can pull moisture right out of the air and are the rain barrels of the trees they live on. They aid decay in the forest so it can renew itself. Where there is moss, the mycorrhizae that allow trees to talk to one another and share resources flourishes.

It wasn't just the moss, but everything growing out of the sides of solid rock that gave me the perspective I need right now.  Looking at these unlikely greenhouses, these massive vertical slabs of rock covered in plants, I said to myself "The earth wants life here and is inventive enough to make it happen."

Like you, I can have a pretty dark view of life right now, particularly as I look at the appallingly stupid willfulness and cowardice of politics south of the border.  But that's not the only place where disaster thrives. Yes, in spite of the mosses, we're destroying our planet, possibly making it uninhabitable for ourselves.  Yes, the IDF has gone back into Gaza and is purposefully killing aid workers. Yes, Trump and Putin are gambling with the lives of millions of Ukrainians with their awkward bromance.  What is it that allows people not to think about the consequences of their actions in the lives of others? Has Oh-oh even thought about what it's like to lose  your job and then multiplied that by hundreds of thousands? Oh, I forgot.  He's a narcissist.  What makes narcissists?  He just tells us it may take a few years, and his great America will arrive, made solely by him, he says. How much hunger and despair will also have been created?

But uncertainty is also a principle alive on our planet, a principle that gives rise to beauty and wonder. Do what you can.  Buy Canadian.  Elect the party you think will be most effective in tending to the needs of the unemployed while Trump has an explosion that none of his advisors has the courage to question. You know, I've almost gotten myself to the point where I think the human race could disappear, and I'd be okay with that. I'd miss the art we create and engage with.  I'd miss the friendly conversations that enliven coffee shops and show us at our most compassionate and curious. But I 'd trust the mosses to experiment their away around to a second draft.