Spring is happening.

Ouch.

My little heart is shipwrecked, tangled in the reef of my ribs. I'm taking on so much water that I'm always seconds away from being overcome. No ebb in sight. So I only speak in specific tenses, trying to corral my unruly thoughts. I fastidiously avoid songs with certain chord progressions and refuse to look up each evening when the sky is that treacherous shade of blue that can break me. I'm not sure it's helping. It's strange to be so lonely yet know that everyone endures this from time to time, except perhaps the luckiest or the most cowardly. I try to remind myself it's not too heavy a price, even just for that one sun-drenched day. For that memory I am indebted, and will not shush my bleating heart. For that perfect early summer day I would pay it twice, or a hundred times.

This is that blue.

I found myself within spitting distance of my 65th birthday and for the first time or so it seemed, not able to believe in anything; not good government, not organized religion, not protest marches, not free market economies, not silent auctions, not the girl scouts or the apocalypse. It makes it a little tough to get out of bed in the morning. I spent 65 years getting up for some good reason or other and they had all deserted me. Marched right out of my life.

It all came tumbling down over a little dustup in a small library in the Yucatan. In this scale model of the larger world, I learned close up that the truth is fragile, public opinion is temporary and a hastily contrived perception satisfies most casual observers and by the way, most people are casual observers.
Extrapolate this little political fracas to the larger world of drones and assassinations, global warming and Planned Parenthood and you can pretty much guess my numb terror. How in the world could someone, anyone believe or verify anything. And so the only place for my thinking to go was the, I believe nothing place.

This did not solve my problem about getting out of bed in the morning or afternoon, or at all….I needed a cause, a skill, a razón de ser. Dogs only work for so long and then, being the kind spirits that they are, they decide that if sleep is what the lady wants, we’ll stay right here and sleep too, never mind that walk.
The first call to action came from the parrots. Many mornings a flotilla of parrots careens through my neighborhood and stops in the ceiba tree in my backyard to fuss. It sounds like complaint, of course it could be the news of the day. Without that tree, I would not have this, vocal and much needed, early morning call to action. Their noisiness certainly lends quality to my life, I get up. But a larger question invades my sleepy mind. How would those guys get from place to place without trees to make a path with rest stops. They are terrible fliers. They look like they might fall to the ground in a loud mess at any moment. I doubt they would make it across town, never mind that, how would we get from place to place without trees along the way. After all we breathe in air every seven seconds or so, last I counted, and we need trees to put oxygen into that air. Without it we are frankly dead.

So those two somewhat related thoughts got me from horizontal to vertical. Maybe here is a non-political- something to do that is; good for the world, good for me, and doesn’t lead to the inevitable disappointment of the naïve. Trees……
I point my pajama clad sadness to the computer, with a cup of coffee, (now declared good for you) and look it up. Naturally the internet delivers a handy list of fast facts. I keep searching to verify them, but they are repeated ad nauseum by many tree sites, leaving me wondering who originated them and how “true” they are. Don’t forget I am a newly minted cynic. But here they are with a promise that I will dig deeper in future.

In one year an acre of trees can absorb as much carbon as is produced by a car driven 8,700 miles. Hey handy way to reduce your carbon footprint…plant an acre of trees and drive 8, 500 miles that year…net gain. Other sites give much more generous mileage.

Shade and shelter of trees reduce heating and cooling costs an estimated 2.1 billion dollars. Wonder how they figured that one out.

One acre of trees creates sufficient oxygen for a year for 18 people. Do you know 18 people you want to put on virtual life support? The self-same acre removes 2.6 tons of CO2. And the shade from said trees can drop the temperature as much as 20 degrees…that would be Fahrenheit, I think. It takes ten years for a tree to reach its peak of doing all of the above….

Trees also cut noise pollution, stabilize soil erosion, improve water quality and provide shelter for wild life.

Trees take 90% of their nutrition from the atmosphere and only 10% from the soil. Think for a minute what a miracle of nature that is. What a gift. But there is more. Trees do not ever, yes never, die from old age. They are the longest living organisms on earth. They are only killed by insects, disease or PEOPLE…..

Trees can induce rainfall and cool the land. In one day one large tree can lift up 100 gallons of water out of the ground and discharge it into the air, an acre of maples, 20,000 gallons in one day. Needless to say this has an enormous effect how peacefully water moves around our planet. An as of 2011, there are 81.5 million acres ( other sources say 1.4 billion acres) of trees in the Amazon Basin. Do the math. It is stunning. Some people estimate that this represents ½ of the planets trees and 20% of our oxygen. Certainly it forms some of our weather patterns. There are estimates that we are losing 1 and ½ acres of the rainforest every second and that by 2030 55% of the Amazon Basin rainforest will be gone. This is a huge topic for another day, but it rivals in my mind the melting ice as a harbinger for dramatically different conditions on earth. (Oh yea and it is definitely political.)

Back to happier facts. Trees have been shown to have a psychological benefit reducing both blood pressure and muscle tension when people are shown or placed in a tree environment. There is evidence that hospital patients recover faster and prisoners are healthier when they can see trees from their confinement. Police believe that adding trees to a community reduces crime.

Finally, even when a tree succumbs to disease insects or human activity, it continues its nurturing ways. At the very least it replenishes the soil as it decays. But otherwise, it becomes your house, your chair, your casket, your violin. That’s some last act.

So…

“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” Anonymous

There you have it. I have my reason to be; trees and a hero, Johnny Appleseed, my guides, the parrots. I can plan and plant trees, one by one, no politics, no organization, no fundraising needed. And it will work for a while, until I know too much and study too much and want to crowd source funds to save the rainforest or something similar and then the politics begin again, but for today a kind of beautiful simplicity prevails. I think I will enjoy it.

“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.”
Chinese Proverb

PS. This was written yesterday. Today I am happy to say that The Komen Foundation capitulated in one day and restored funding to Planned Parenthood, based on the force of public outrage, pressure and persuasion. Way to go everyone who lifted a finger and noted their disgust. This lifts my spirits about the power of the everyday right thinking person to see the truth of a political situation and reject it.
The future will be full of the unruly wonderfulness of flash mobs and crowd sourcing and we are going to use it for the benefit of all. Come on people, we do have a voice. (Don’t forget boycotting, that works too.)

Rats

Erin posted this quote from an NPR story on Facebook, this morning.

“Not only will rats frantically work to free their trapped cage mate; they will do so even when there’s a tempting pile of chocolate chips nearby, the study reveals. Instead of leaving their pal in the trap and gobbling the candy all by themselves, rats will free their cage mate and share the chocolate.”

To which she added, “Rats can do this people. Come On!

Patty Mason designed this experiment to study the evolutionary roots of empathy and wrote up her conclusions in the journal, Science.

Maybe Patty Mason, the scientist at The University of Chicago watched the “Secret of NIHM” too many times when she was young. Maybe rats don’t have a vivid memory of what chocolate tastes like and it is easy for them to ignore a pile of chocolate. Maybe in fact that is a good and noble rat.


Most of my thinking has revolved around the question of how such an anthropomorphically despised animal could be so ethical, and we so apparently lacking. Maybe our folk lore is all wrong, the rat as noble beast, the human not so much. But wait a minute. If we humans saw another human being caught in a trap, surely we would work to extricate that person, before reaching for a snack. That is given a visible tangible trap that can be mechanically sprung. Heck yah! I would be there and working hard at getting any person out of it, not just my cage mate. Of course there is the odd time or two I have driven by an accident. Granted others had stopped and I reasoned that I was not a nurse, doctor or otherwise in any way skilled to assist. Rats can’t rationalize.

But, truly, people are often in much more complicated and even invisible traps. And that is where it gets tricky and time and chocolate are often very helpful. Helpful because it takes patience and understanding; first to even recognize the trap that another person is in and then to slowly, cautiously proceed. Chocolate needed just on general principles.

I remember giving a 13th birthday party for a young man who had just come out of one of Virginia’s mental institutions into therapeutic foster care… not because he was mentally ill, but that’s another story. He threw the presents in my face and stomped out of the room. My first lesson in how truly there is no simple or glib answer to complicated human traps. I offered to take him back to the store to return the presents and get whatever he wanted. No, that wouldn’t work, he wasn’t allowed in the store because he had been caught shoplifting there.

Five years later on his 18th birthday, he had learned how to be happy and I knew just what to get him for his birthday. I held my breath and sent him off on a train to New Mexico to visit his Mom. It was a journey of immense proportions. The trap was sprung. It took a lot of time, a lot of patience and mostly in Jerzy Kosinski’s words “being there.” He was lucky, he had the heart to make it, others did not. My daughter found his picture on Facebook. In the photo, the is sitting with his son, a huge and genuine smile on his face. I haven’t contacted him, it would only be one of those glib momentary things, how could it be otherwise after all these years. I think of him often and hope his life is what he wants it to be.

And then there is the question, what if you are the person in the trap. That’s a different puzzle, because first you have to see that it is there, or allow someone else to point it out to you. Not easy. Only then the hard work of finding a way out can begin. There are ways to get help, twelve step programs, psychoanalysts, good friends who will abide with you. The you tube video of a the cage mate frantically searching for the trap door, which is what these rats did, while a pile of chocolate chips waits to be shared puts the level of difficulty of the two separate tasks in stark perspective. A trap door is a relatively straightforward task. Still it is worth noting that these rats would free the captive, even if the rat was released into another cage and they did not get to do the rat dance of joy and play with their mate. It is also interesting that they learned how to free their mates and eventually became masters of quicker releases.

Many of us have that altruistic disposition. But just now, I think we have entered a world of sharp and nearly violent differences of opinion and some of us just don’t seem to care what happens to the less fortunate. Some of us just don’t get that we, here on this small and increasingly fragile planet, are all cage mates. This calloused attitude will inevitably affect the poor of the world first. They are undefended against the changes that will erupt in the climate, in food supplies, politics and the like. Sooner or later it will affect everyone. Even the rats will find their efforts in vain. What good does it do to spring a trap when the world you escape into is no longer habitable? The rats will hardly notice and carry on as long as there is air to breathe and something to eat. They do have that beautiful single-mindedness of purpose. They proceed without question with what is necessary for their survival. Nature does that, much like the ants that Congo-line into the kitchen directly without fail to the spot of raspberry jam on the counter. How do they do that?

Stephen Hawking has announced that we had better ready the space ships; he thinks we have maybe 100 years left on this planet. He wasn’t clear on what exactly would be the instrument of our demise, our aggressive nature perhaps, or a final despoiling of this planet. My question is not, how we are going to get to another planet. I am relatively certain humankind can find a technological answer to space travel. It is not a problem, for us humans, trap springing of a certain kind. After all, “no matter where you go, there you are.”

Erin's Grateful 5 for 11/08

1. driving over a bridge in the morning so covered in fog it was like crossing a blank page.
2. coming back over the same bridge after the sun burned all the mist away and seeing the bay opening up toward the sea.
3. espresso & chai & avocado fudge with Sarah after work.
4. kittens! naps!
5. murmurations of starlings.

The Day of the Dead

 

Why Essays

I want to write essays. That said, my knowledge of exactly what an essay is, is fairly undeveloped. I am a reader of essays. I am a fan of good essays. They talk to me when they are good. They take a subject, nearly any subject, and bring it to startling life. And I sit there reading, but feeling as if in a conversation, nodding and saying sometimes out loud, I get it. That’s why, that’s it, or I know exactly what you mean. However, this deductive understanding of what constitutes a good essay is not too helpful in the writing of them. Being a beginner, my mind is not yet agile enough to function as both reader and writer simultaneously.
So I have been reading essays and essays on essays and here is my favorite description from Louis Menand, editor of The Best American Essays of what an essay attempts to do and why, at least to me, it matters so much.
“Writing (essays) is a window. It opens onto vanished feelings and vanished worlds. Often it is the only window there is, the only access we will ever have to those things. It is more than a mere record, like a photograph, because it is also a sensibility, a point of view, a voice. It is a place where fifty or a hundred years from now, people will go to see – or to hear-- what it was like to be alive when we were alive.”
My father died when I was 16. He did not write essays or journals. He left me vivid memories. But those memories were captured in the mind of an adolescent. And even though as a child I instinctively knew this man loved me fiercely, and as I grew older that he was possibly the only person who really knew who I was, he died when I was an adolescent. That ability he had, to get me, was sometimes the source of angry exchanges. Never mind, that was ok too, as he was the only person in the family with whom it was ok to be angry. But he left in that complicated time in life, where it was easy to forget that he was my champion. I have revisited and amended those memories at times throughout my life; at the big steps, when I became an adult and when I had children. When I became older than he was when he died. I remember many of the things he said and did, I remember his intelligence and unerring moral compass, his tenderness, his lessons, but they are blurred and shaped and shifted by memory. So I fiercely wish I had that open window and that I could return to journals or essays and hear his voice. There are none.
I have a box of photo graphs. My father and uncle were amateur photographers, but serious about it. My father had a make-shift dark room in our kitchen and some days we would come to breakfast to find photos hanging on a laundry line there. I have dragged a big box of those photos with me every time I have moved. I study their faces for clues. Asking them, what are you thinking, are you happy on this day, in this moment, when my Dad pointed the camera at you?
They are mute; they smile back at me or look into his camera with a question rising to their faces. How they felt or thought or what they were talking about that day is left to my imagination, which on a good day, tells me yes, look they were happy. They were beautiful and talented. On a bad day, their photos just set me adrift.
My mother wrote two letters every week, one to her mother and one to her sister. My grandmother’s letters came on monogramed stationery in big looping script. Aunt Kitty was a private secretary and her letters came always neatly typed. Reading them disclosed little about what they thought about the big questions in life, but by their very presence they were reassuring. I don’t have my mother’s letters. I have no idea how she reported the news or particulars, the pains and triumphs of our family to these two important women in her life. I wish I had those letters in my hands. I am guessing that they were newsy, not particularly philosophical, but maybe I could read between the lines. These women stayed after the men were gone. They came closer and paid attention. They raised us. As for my mother, a reckless, fatherless teen was a challenge that she faced with dignity.

I have no illusions about my essay writing. It is for me, it is for my children and possibly, their children. I’m not sure I would have thought of doing this without having moved to Mexico. Writing to my daughters became the best way to stay aware of what was happening in their lives and so became something I did every day. MY children befriended me on Facebook, a brave act, because for them it was the easiest way to stay in touch. I could see their latest photos, their quips and comments and have some idea of what they were thinking that day. But for me posting on Facebook is a little like having a conversation in a station waiting for a train. Uncomfortable talk offered loudly over background noise, announcements in a public place, where there is way too much for the eye to see and ear to catch to actually pay close attention to anything. So we started a blog. And this blog feels like our private space. We are its only visitors and maybe a passerby stumbles upon it, fair enough. But it is one of the curiosities of modern communication that this blog can become a family letter to itself.
So I am searching for a voice, to leave some whiff of who I am behind and open a window on this time. It will most likely be an everyday voice, a summing up voice. I have lived much more than half of my life and there is a lot to summarize. And it is to this attempt to summarize that my mind naturally wanders. There are the big topics, the little topics and all the in- between. Big topics: what is a good life or a steady moral compass? How do you come to know yourself? What is that voice in your head? Or the little topics; this or that movie, book or quote, that I can’t live without, and maybe you will like too. Here’s why. Or, this morning in the garden, I saw… And then, there are the in-between topics, which for me could be the whole wide world of interesting things to look into just a little more. What is a cephalopod? What would we do without bees and bats? Why does Yoga work so well? At this past half-past point on the clock the world is chock full of topics to explore. So I hope to explore away and put thoughts into a voice. An honest voice that warns when a rant is brewing up ahead and that really tries to find the kernel of the thing beneath the rhetoric of deeply divided viewpoints. I want a voice that could become a sensibility coherent enough to open a window on this time of ours. Is it narcissistic, or a kindness, I can’t say yet, probably both. It is for my children and it is for me. And here again Louis Menand makes it clear to me…
“Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. What you are trying to do when you write is to transpose the yakking into verbal music; and the voice inside, when you find it, which can take hours or days or weeks, is not your speaking voice. It is your singing voice.”