In the garden works a woman, in the woman grows a fear, in the fear lives a truth, in the truth is an ache. After some time of pulling weeds and deadheading flowers and before the rain begins, the ache has sloughed enough layers to make it more easily seen. On its own, the ache is not so large. When the woman meets it between the sunflowers and snapdragons, the ache does not disappear, but somehow it no longer consumes her, it simply is as she tugs at taproots, removes yellowed leaves. The world is so much more alive than the fear would have her believe. As day goes down, she tends the soil, she speaks to potatoes, to basil, to kale. There is no seed for peace, yet it grows here, the peace of green leaves and dark earth, the peace of nightcrawlers, moss and bees. She speaks to the plants as she moves through the rows, and knows ease.
*Inspired by Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
The poem you’re going to write tomorrow is somewhere in your cells, is made from language you’ve been learning and forgetting since your birth. The poem you’re going to write tomorrow will ask you to go beyond who you are today, will invite you to leap over the edge of the known and may or may not offer wings or a parachute, may in fact stuff stones in your pockets. It promises no net. The poem you are going to write tomorrow will certainly be more wise than you are, drawing as it does on infinite potential, something you can only touch for a moment before the words on the page become solid and stuck in their serifs, trapped in their clever cages of metaphor. But the poem is there, it’s always there, that poem you will write tomorrow, with a promise that if you show up, it will come to wrestle, will let you glimpse its latent thrill, that thrill you’ve tasted before that keeps you coming back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
On this gray morning, sitting on the porch, my whole self tunes and re-tunes to a single swallow stitching figure eights above the field, attunes to garden marigolds all radiant and red, and wetland rushes wicking gold, the river currents thick and brown from mudslides after last night’s rain, the sour scent of autumn in the air—
and for a time, I’m charged with raw contentment, visceral and deep. How is it true that if I could, I wouldn’t change a thing— this moment forged by ache and grace, this hour that knows no striving, this wet-winged astonishment, this quiet koan: nothing’s missing.
You would think only my ears went for a walk, because all I could focus on this morning was the constant putter and drone and rumble and whine of the steady stream of cars on the highway below. My ears were bothered. Mightily so. Bothered enough they drowned out the woodsy scent of spruce and the dry earth perfume of late summer so I could focus on a backfiring engine. Bothered enough I had to force myself to notice how soft the trail was underfoot, how easy it felt to stroll on the flat surface. Had to force myself to see how some leaves in the understory were already turning red, how beautiful they were, how good the warm sun felt on the bare skin of my arms, how a crisp breeze made my arms rise as if in praise to receive a brief and welcome chill. Surrounded by so much beauty, it’s a wonder I could be fussy at all, but wow, was I fussy as those cars roared by and I dreamed of a different, better trail where I wanted to be right then, some other trail where I heard only birds or wind or blessed nothing. Hours later, sitting on the couch, it’s obvious what I heard loudest was not traffic, but my own fussy thoughts as I longed the world to be different than it was. By some grace, a sweet self-compassion floods me, quiets me, stills and softens me, helps me befriend myself just as I am, a human who is sometimes fussy, sometimes compassionate. For a grounded moment, I am so content I think a whole highway could thunder right through me, and I might just be okay.
The way a robin or oriole might weave string or yarn into its nest to create integrity or an anchor, that is the way I weave an imaginary red ribbon through each square on the zoom screen. My friend has just invoked a Japanese legend about how we are all connected by a red thread, and though I have not heard this legend before, I can imagine a deep crimson stitching moving even now through all of our backgrounds, making of this gathering a most wondrous nest, a sturdy place made of wet poems and fresh music, song and mess, a durable creation in which we might all rest, a sturdy, safe place to find spaciousness.
Here, there is highway heading east and west. A great basin we have named The Great Basin is rung by mountains and filled with low brush and not much that man has touched except this small roadside stand that describes how once the Pony Express riders would use this rugged route, changing horses every ten to fifteen miles. In the car, my daughter sleeps while my husband and I stand in a merciless wind, reading how it took only two days after the first transcontinental telegraph was sent for the Pony Express to shut down. How much of what we rely on now will become obsolete in a heartbeat? The postage stamp? The satellite? When I return to the car, I squeeze the solid hand of my husband, trace the soft skin of my daughter’s arm, grateful for gestures no technology can supplant. Later, we tell inside jokes. Later, we ooh and ahh as lightning bisects the Great Basin. Nothing can replace this, I think, as my daughter tangles her hand mindlessly in my hair and I lean in toward her touch.
I wish she would. I wish she’d breeze in with her big white smile and her big blonde hair and her sing song voice saying, “Hi, y’all.” I wish she’d come over and sit at the counter so I could serve her a tall glass of iced tea or a cool lemonade. Serve her stories of times when her songs met me in dark hours or lonely hallways, times when I sang “Coat of Many Colors,” but heard her voice instead of mine. Times when I sang about how wildflowers don’t care where they grow, somehow feeling so seen by her as a wildflower. I would serve her stories of the children I used to work with who lived in a small, dirty house far from town with an angry dad and an earnest mom, and how they got books in the mail every month from Dolly’s book club, how those kids and I would sit on the old plaid couch and read aloud for hours. I would want to serve her huge platters of gratefulness for showing a nation what generosity looks like, for being a role model for kindness. But I bet Dolly wouldn’t want a huge platter. My guess is she’d want a few honest words, so I would say, Thank you, and she would probably smile and do that shrug she does. Then we’d walk out to the porch and sit in the shade and watch as the grass in the field tells stories about the shape of the wind. It was never going to happen, this meeting, but now that Dolly’s gone, I walk outside with a burgeoning bouquet of many-petalled thank yous and toss them into the air. I imagine the wind taking them to her, a colorful, fanciful folly. I imagine a world where we’re all as generous, as loving, as impossible yet possible as Dolly.
It was cold, the water, and clear, so clear, and we swam through the center of a secret cove in the calm, blue water, my daughter and I, surrounded by pine trees and smooth white rocks.
The morning was new and the lake water still, and no matter how far we swam, we saw to the sandy, white bottom. In a world of chaos, currents and swirl, I longed for my heart to be that clear.
For a moment, it was. For a moment, I understood the magnitude of the gift of clear blue water and smooth white rocks, a strong able body and a secret cove. I may not know what holy means,
but I know I want to give back to this world that gave me a gray and glorious morning swimming with my girl.
Injustice everywhere. How do we go on like this? The air says nothing. Nor does the window, the wall, the desk. But the desk holds up the blank page I put on it. Holds up the computer, the cup of tea. Holds the pens, the books, the great piles of the stuff of my life, as if to say, this is how you do it. Hold what you are given for as long as it is here. Trust what you are made of. That is what is doing the holding.
One summer’s evening, when a woman was sitting with friends at a table in a fine establishment, her daughter announced it was the one hundredth anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh. “Well, Hallo,” said the woman, as she remembered how oftenishly she and her son would play a game in which they would guess at what character a person would be if they lived in the Hundred Acre Wood, so, scratching her ear in shy sort of way, she suggested they play such a game. One woman at the table, being a good adventurer and liking to stay at the edge of the action, knew at once she would be Christopher Robin. Another was mostly Tigger with a dusting of Eeyore and a share of Piglet-ish nervousness. And the woman, who had long known she was part Tigger and part Rabbit, seeing as how she was both exuberant and rather fond of control, was not keen to discover that perhaps she was also a bit of Owl, somewhat of a know it all who is most likely wrong, especially, as it turns out, about which character her daughter might pick for herself, which made it Awkward when the woman’s inner Rabbit took notes and scoffed, and her inner Owl went on believing it knew best. But her inner Friendly Tigger soon felt Bouncy and Boffish again, just enjoying the night. “Perhaps we all have a bit of all the characters in us,” one woman suggested. Such a Pooh thing to say. And the evening went on quite right.
Mostly I remember them holding hands. Not swinging over rivers filled with crocodiles. Not passionately kissing on the edge of a canyon. Not jumping from planes, though they did scuba dive. I remember them peeling and chopping thirty pounds of carrots they bought bulk so they can freeze them. I remember them cleaning the boat. I remember them stopping for rummage sale signs on Saturdays and sitting in the back row of the church on Sundays and sitting on the couch holding hands on most days. And even so Dad isn’t here today on their anniversary, he is here. I remember how they shaped each other with their love in an everyday way, year after year after year, then offered that love to me, to the world.
There is the moment when the woman is deciding what to make for dinner— a tofu curry with beet greens from the garden? Or maybe guacamole with all those avocados she bought on sale. When she reaches for the greens, that’s the kind of moment when a Greek goddess doesn’t appear beside her and shake her head as if everything depends on the woman choosing the guac. Something wonderful about a choice with so little consequence. Red socks or blue? The low green vase or the clear vase from Finland? The woman has read about the butterfly effect, trusts a life—in fact all of civilization—is built on every smallest choice and inaction. But tonight there is peace in the way she presses water from the tofu, then slides the white cubes into the pan. Six seven, as the kids would say. The scent of turmeric fills the room. If a goddess were to show up, she’d probably just ask for a glass of sauv blanc and join the woman for a bowl of curry. They would sit at the kitchen table for hours, laughing as the cats chase each other across the room, talking about the three-hour movie they just saw. Tomorrow, the choice. But tonight, the goddess nods at the sunflowers on the table. “I like your low green vase,” she says.
There is a slip of time before the foot missteps and twists and breaks, that moment when the bone’s still whole, the woman still upright. And from that slip, well, then there’s only after.
After, when the bone is cast. After, when the child has left. After, when the callous words can’t be unsaid, the missing ring can’t be unlost, the train can never
be unmissed. And now, and now, and now is both before and after and a tip- ping point on which we cannot pause or stand.
But if we did trip off the tip of time, what would we find beneath it all? A chance to play in the infinite? Or would we simply fall and fall and fall?
The way the cellist smiled at the first violinist, that is the way I want to smile when I die, a joyful smile that says, “I am all in on this song; and here, let me now toss the melody to you.”
I know I like to keep my secrets close. It’s who I am. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it when you plant larkspur and roses, lavender bushes and apricot trees, as if you believe in investing in a world years from now. Of course, I appreciate the way you call your congressmen to tell them about the world you believe we could live in. I love every time you put a letter in the mail with a stamp, every time you learn a new skill or make a ten-year-plan. How beautiful you are to me when you dream. It’s lonely here, of course. Everyone always coming toward but never arriving. I’m not complaining. Being the future has its perks. Like infinite potential. Like hope. I know it’s hard sometimes to believe you will ever get through this. But haven’t you learned by now that just because you don’t see the way forward doesn’t mean they way doesn’t exist? That is the only promise I can make you, sweetheart. You can’t see the path. But here it is.
It felt so good to walk in the rain, to walk in the rain and not put on the raincoat I’d carried for over ten miles, to not put on the raincoat and let the rain soak into my sleeves, my shoes, my thoughts, my words, let rain soak in and realize with each squishy step each soggy word what a gift it is to not always protect myself from the world.
