out of the park – onto the trail

I moved

away from The Park.

Now my Outside Space is The Trail.

So the question has loomed: Do I change the blog name? Do I leave it all together?

Certainly a trail is a bit different than a park, both on the literal level and the metaphorical one. My experience has completely changed.

My relationship to the park was about entering and reentering a space with somewhat static boundaries – clear edges – a contained green, a circle or square, meant for playing, sitting, reflection. Kind of like playing hokey-pokey. Or diving in a pool. Or drawing a chalk circle and stepping inside to test if it really will protect you from scary witches.

The trail near my new residence requires a totally different type of engagement. It is, of course, a path; linear, it leads to hidden trails, unmarked gutters and ditches, footpaths, streets, a park. There are many entries and exits, some obvious, some hidden. People here are usually in motion. Going from A to B. Appearing, passing, reappearing, on foot, bike, scooter, with gear like sticks and headphones and water bottles. The trail feels more serious. The trail has a more direct purpose. An outcome-based focus.

The park was often the scene for a shindig, with fried chicken or balloons.

The trail is not so much a destination as a place of process, the scene for sweating, walking sticks.

The park had the detritis of litterbugs.

The trail has the stashes of homeless folks.

The park had graffiti on the play equipment.

The trail has graffiti on the walls under the overpass.

The park had rolling hills.

The trail has a rushing river.

The park had rabid squirrels.

The trail has snakes and turtles.

The thing is, at one end of the trail there does happen to be another park. It’s not my park; it’s not the park I fell in love with last year, that incited me to blog.

But the trail and the park together does, like my park, serve as a space where I go to encounter myself and my relationship, my private study of my relationship to the world. The parts and wholes, my juxtaposition to reality, my belief in beauty, to refresh my humility, to resize my ego.

Maybe it was time for a different way to move through the landscape – at a quicker pace -

It is an interesting thing to contemplate, a shift I haven’t quite figured out how to address here, and to be honest, elsewhere. The park had a communal feeling to me. The trail, populated as it is, is very much about my singular journey.

I’m off on a path; following my bliss; running down a dream -

- missing the park, though.

April

Looking out the window (apparently something poets do much of)

Watching this wind, these tender flowers

that aren’t tender at all, but started over

who knows when beneath us as we tromped and glowered

in our various furies, (getting  smashed, divining fairies),  as snow crashed

against the breathless ground from a car’s hot speed -

toward what was I driven? -

Everything is about to open now;

why not me?

Certainly, I shouldn’t liken myself to anything

less than

the leathery-lipped tulips joyously puckering up from the grass,

or the grass itself, chin-upping in plump clumps,

or the pricking corners of the holly tree -

all glorious and unhidden -

The wind is slapping us all awake into life

And I, too, am red and raw and ready

to be, for it is all, when you think about it, risen.

A Call For Poets of the New Reality

When I went to the Ani DiFranco concert a couple weeks ago, I didn’t expect

a) to fall in love with her as a performer, or

b) to find myself moved deeply, reminded of a passion born within me years ago in graduate school that I had somewhat forgotten about.

Yet both (a) and (b) happened when Ani and her band played the song “The Atom.” The lights seemed to get misty and the song had a husky quality to it as she sang:

the glory of the atom

begs a reverent word

the primary design

of the whole universe

yes, let us sing its praises

let us bow our heads in prayer

at the magnificent consciousness

incarnate there

Not only was a someone offering musical worship of a “scientific” particle of matter, but later in the song our troubled relationship to nature through the cause of science connects to our environmental crisis:

human beings are a cross

between monkeys and ants

you can see us from your spaceship

melting the polar ice caps

with our arroagance

summon a congress of angels

dressed in riot gear

we’ve got ourselves a serious situation

down here

It was gorgeous, moving.

Years ago, in graduate school, I took a class with Robert Nadeau, a historian of science who, along with a noted physicist, has written a number of books on “the new science,” quantum mechanics and new biology, that argue that what we learn from these new studies undermines the dualistic Cartesian and Newtonian thought that still dictates our philosophical concepts – in the humanities and elsewhere. They show that principles of nonlocality and complementarity that appear in the latest science give us new models for understanding humanity’s place in the world – we are a part of the whole, quite literally. And they stress that without this new understanding, we will continue to erode this world, and ourselves.

But Nadeua, in class and in his work, feels strongly that our culture is not going to change through intellectual argument alone. He calls for “poets of the new reality” to infuse scientific revelations with spirituality, knowing, it seems, that reason alone won’t have the heft to shift such imbedded ideals and behaviors. He and Kafatos say, speaking about the ecological crisis, that

the global revolution in ethical thought and behavior that is prerequisite to human survival may not occur unless intellectual understanding of the character of physical reality is wedded to profound religious or spiritual awareness… central to this vision would be a cosmos rippling with tension evolving out of itself endless examples of the awe and wonder of this seamlessly interconnected life… the astonishing fact of our being.

I found this quote in one of my papers, in which I tried to show how some contemporary poets seem to be attempting to use scientific fact to create a new theoretical landscape in which to consider ourselves no longer dominant masters of a subjugated earth, no longer alienated outcasts caught in Nietsche’s prisonhouse of the mind, no longer either separate and in opposition to the physical world nor completely, Romantically merged with it, but existing within it, and it within us, in a complementary, “both/and” framework.

Reading what I wrote about this reminded me how inspired I was at the time to write poetry that could do this important work… and how later, I felt like I found in Unitarian-Universalism a possible foundation for the spiritual piece of  “the new reality”…

But in the midst of things, I had kind of forgotten about those idea. Listening to Ani the other night, I was heartened to feel that she, too, is a poet of the new reality. A song about the atom could have been a goofy They Might Be Giants anthem; instead, there was a loving, mystical quality to the music that made her words powerful.

And while I like The Streets’ song about our environmental crisis, “Dodo,” I believe that human beings aren’t going to be motivated to do what they need to do to save the planet by being confronted with a pessimistic dismissal of our value. It has the same empty effect as telling a kid that smoking a cigarette will kill her. Of course,she doesn’t want to die; but death is so far off, and so inevitable, and the wagging finger so chiding, all she does is light up another one.

When that same kid gets pregnant, though, and becomes aware of what smoking will do to the baby she feels kicking inside of her, she might be more motivated to stop smoking because of the hope of new life present and heavy within her. Hope and love will encourage her to change where a picture of doom only added to her nonchalance about her health.

I had a book of stories as a child that included one with what must be a common theme. It’s about some grimy old guy in a shack who gets saddled with an orphan baby while working in a mining camp. The baby’s sweet beauty makes the guy realize she needs a clean blanket; then he sees she needs a clean bed; then he sees she needs something pretty to look at, so he puts out flowers; soon his shack and his clothes and everything is spotless, clean, beautiful – his transformation spurred by beauty, adoration, love, and the sense of responsibility that such love imbues.

How does all this relate to The Park, you ask? The litter challenge. People aren’t going to stop tossing their Dorito bags on the oak tree roots because of a posted admonishment, even the threat of a fee. So what about the beauty of the place? Can we write poetry about it, recite with missionary zeal? Should Ani DiFranco do a song about it, preaching its glory and divinity?

Those of us who want to “save the environment” yearn for “everyone” to feel that we belong to the earth, to experience the special relationship, so that we treat it as we would a mother – this is familiar language.

In the microcosm of a small little park, how does that larger vision translate to the concrete space? How can we save the earth if we can’t even have enough care to stop littering on one square of grass and trees?

One thing I have noticed about this park, which saddens me greatly. There aren’t very many visitors to it. I happen to know there are plenty of families with kids along the surrounding streets – I’ve met some of them; I see their abandoned toys in their front yards when I take walks. But the park is more often than not empty. Why?

Is it that people just play in their own little squares of owned turf? Are they afraid of mingling with others?

If people felt ownership of this common space, perhaps it wouldn’t be neglected, trashed. Someone would care about it. It would shine proudly, like all the gleaming cars in our driveways…but maybe we are too isolated in our single family homes these days to know how to have a common space. Maybe we can’t understand and live out a harmonious relationship to the earth because we can’t even find a way to heal the split between ourselves and our communities, our neighbors down the street.

I don’t have much of an answer for how to get people in the park, how to get people loving it, like it is a baby in a shack.

All I know is, I believe that we have to start where we are, with what’s before us.

Each piece, each park, is part of and reflects the whole.

Returning and Re-turning

Dog in the Receding Snow

On my circuitous route to the park today, (isn’t circuitous the best word!), I passed by a sobbing car – rather, a woman burying herself into the carseats, weeping and wailing in misery. I had turned to look – she drove away – hurriedly -her cries echoing on the quiet side street – and me, full of questions, and memories – how many times I’ve been on the side of the road, alone in my car with my devastation, glassed in but somewhat on display -

Ah, suffering.

She drove away -

Suffering, so easy to itemize and analyze on either side of it – so easy to shrug it off when it’s just a memory you can hang in the closet. But when you’re in it, it feels as irreversible, as inescapable as your own skin.

Suffering or love – so easy to forget what they feel like when you’ve moved out of their grip. A similar forgetfulness that attends my sense of the seasons – when winter cold starts slapping me down, I am always stung with shock, even though it happens every year. And then the warmth that creeps over me, the hot pressing feet of the summer cat – again, the thrill of my first real sweat feels tremendous and new – though I felt it, the same heat, just the year before.

I feel somewhat like an idiot when this happens – again and again and again – except for the fact that there’s something resuscitating to my spirit and body to go through, yearly, these processes, as if I am – for I am! – a living thing.

There’s a paradox I keep getting pointed to about experience and living that has to do with being fully alive in the present moment and its feeling, whether it’s suffering or love, while at the same time holding the awareness that all things change and pass away.

This is, I believe, part of what Thomas More is alluding to in his book Care of the Soul, when he talks about love:

It isn’t necessary to make strong efforts to avoid past mistakes or to learn how to be clever about love. The advance we make after we have been devastated by love may be to be able simply to enter it freely once again, in spite of our suspicions, to draw ever closer to the darkness and hollowness that are mysteriously necessary in love.

Red Buds

Of course, it’s nicer to think about re-entering love freely – not suffering so much. Last night I was out late in the cold and complained aloud, “This is one of the moments when I feel like I should be Buddhistically just noticing how damn freezing I am, but instead all I really want to do is to shut my mind down, to not be aware of it, so I can survive.”

Shutting down certainly feels easier and more expedient, more practical and possible, than staying open and exposed, when one is experiencing suffering, physically or emotionally. The problem is that when we shut down, we don’t notice or learn anything from our experience. And there’s a difference between experiencing recurring seasons or situations with a full fresh presence and going through the cycling treadmill of the same thing over and over because we keep our eyes shut so tightly we don’t look and see that we are going nowhere…Not to mention, when we don’t fully experience our suffering at the time it occurs, it comes up later, surfacing from the lidded depths.

Watching that woman drive off in her car, I felt like I could have been witnessing myself four years ago, four months ago, fourteen years ago, driving off in my Ford, my white K-car…

And I have a feeling, I will find myself there again. The thing is, can I practice entering these moments now, openly, enough so that the next time I am there in that cold place of despair I won’t be shut off, doors locked to the experience? So that I don’t drive away from myself, trying to escape what can’t be avoided? And will I remind myself, will I look out the window and see a woman walking on the side of the road, and know that that was me, is me again, that all things change, and to let that vision – that deeply knitted knowledge of the whole – allow me the comforting sense of the larger turning and returning of the world?

Tree

To love fully, to feel fully, to suffer fully – to step out of my enclosures, my habits of being closed to the senses – to walk to the park, watch the snow returning into the earth, and make my footprints there, as if for the first time – for it is the first time this foot has touched this piece of snow, and it is an old stepping, and the new buds coming are themselves only themselves, though their coming is eternal -

Let me return to the same place that is never the same, and to know it.

Cutting the Trees?

I heard that the cops want the trees cut down so they can see into the park better. You know, for security purposes.

A friend of mine went ballistic when I told her. “Why don’t those donut-eating hogs get OUT OF THEIR CARS?” she asked.

I have never seen a cop car driving past, an officer squinting into the park. I’ve not seen that many police cars at all.

And really, the trees shouldn’t have to pay for such a thing.

I have some reservations.

My friend and I were talking about Native American reservations last night. Reservation is an odd word:

reservation

Noun

1. a doubt: his only reservation was, did he have the stamina?

2. an exception or limitation that prevents one’s wholehearted acceptance: work I admire without reservation

3. a seat, room, etc. that has been reserved

4. (esp. in the US) an area of land set aside for American Indian peoples: the Cherokee reservation

What a strange idea – reserve a piece of land, corral, fence in, set aside, here’s your pasture…

My thought today was how the Park is also a reservation, only it’s not fenced in, because what’s being kept there can’t exactly move: What’s being reserved here is Nature.

Kind of like the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation – the park is not a place people visit for an hour’s recreation – Nature is something you go to, something separate, an entertainment arena, it’s not the environment you live in, the reality that circumscribes your life.

What strikes me is that when you set aside nature, you are not only restricting, delineating the appropriate area or zone for nature to exist, but in the same act restricting the experience of the people, too.

When we put human beings on a reservation, when we encircle animals within a fence, when we jail a prisoner, when we bound any population with restrictive demarcations, keeping something in, keeping something out, we effectively do to the thing on the outside what we’re doing to the inside.

We enclose the reservation; we are cutting ourselves off from that land, those people, too. It’s the inverse property of enclosure.

By saying of the world within the park, “Here is (public) nature,” I am conversely saying of my property and experience across the street, “Here is not nature, here is something else, here is something private, here is something managed for a different purpose.”

My friend was talking about the role of social workers on reservations, how oppressive the ideas can be that get enacted about what’s considered to be appropriate behavior for the wider culture, what’s defined as mentally and emotionally healthy, etc.

It is also interesting that the park represents the ideas of beauty and aesthetics of a small number of humans who decide what’s enjoyable in the park, what elements should be fostered or eradicated, what plants should grow, what trees get to remain, what makes it a nice setting. Seems like an odd arrogance, really.

We come from a basic assumption that our judgments have an almost godly justification to them, because they are based on science and study and learning. We can point to a book and say to a Cherokee child, You are out of line, or to a thorny bush, you don’t fit our strategic vision.

It’s been our problem from the beginning.

And because I feel when we slice and dice to make things nice we effectively hack away at ourselves, as well, I feel an empathy with the park. I feel like my humanity has also been corralled. I have been cut off of from Nature, I have been kept from the wisdom of the Native Americans, I have been circumscribed by conventions of propriety applied to society with the stamp of unquestionable authority.

We were talking about how people long for connections to old tribes, awkwardly so. It is a cliche to mention one’s Cherokee grandmother; it’s cheesy to put up a dreamcatcher in your window; it feels ignorant and condescending to want to read and hear and learn about the ways of people that had their world ravaged by our predecessors. It feels arrogant to want a neatly chopped and bug-free lawn for personal pursuits of peace, while not making any major sacrifices for the salvation of an environment we are continuing to desecrate and destroy.

But deeper than that is the fact that when the earth goes down, so do we (if not us before it); and the spiritual paucity we have inherited as consequence of the reservations we created for others has crippled us already…

This is a shared world. May we learn to share it, so that all of us can heal.

call me baby girl

As I stop to talk with my neighbor, a long-time resident of our neighborhood, he is parked next to the park with a truck and with a couple of other guys, all decked out in hunting camoflage; he and his pals intermittently yell out hellos and hays at the trucks that drive by. Almost every one of them. The feeling I get is: Joe knows everybody. Everybody knows Joe.

When I first moved to Fluvanna County several years ago, it was the same thing: People had been around a long time. Waving on the roads – one or two fingers would do if you were driving – was customary, the presumption or norm being that somehow, everyone there knows everyone else – or their kin.

What’s interesting to me, though, are experiences I’ve had where the friendly gestures extend to strangers on what seems like outstretched good faith. I’ve noticed that in three distinct places:

1) in the cockney areas of East London, where I lived as a child – women at the fruit stands calling everyone “Love” and “Ducks” and “Duckey,” brightly inclusive, even of us odd Americans

2) in some rural areas of “the South,” where the cliche of “Southern hospitality” has its roots, perhaps – “Honey” applied to me, an obviously nonnative with a Californian accent -

and now, 3) I’ve noticed people on the bus interacting with familiarity, even when I know they are meeting for the first time. The thing is, though, my “stranger” status seems more problematic than in the other two examples. I feel very, very conspicuously white.

Yesterday, on the bus, the chipper lady next to us similarly seemed to know everybody on the bus, and called one of them, a woman as old as herself, “baby girl.” “hey, baby girl!”

This made me want to call other people baby girl and to be called baby girl, even though I’m clearly not a baby or a girl, because it seemed so loving, so sweet. I have it as one of my goals to always see other people as former infants, to remember how we all start off and retain in the core of us very innocent, tender beings who want to be held and crave love.

I don’t come from a class/race background that sprinkles conversations with the sweet nothings of Honey, Ducks, or Baby Girl. In fact, I was coming of age in a time when terms like that were suspect – elements of a patriarchal system we were being taught to resist. Don’t call me Baby.

But man, I like the loosness, the casual aspects of these cultures. I’m sick of the uptight middle class brigrade of Appropriateness and Reserved Respect. I would like to request that everyone start honking and waving and calling each other tender names. Next time you see me on the street, wave, will you?

they called me ma’am

Here’s an interesting test of my cultural assumptions. My dog breaks his leash loose from my hand to chase the taunting squirrels he so desperately detests. We are right near a pickup football game taking place on the blacktop. The dog is a scream of poofy fluff – and these big dudes guffaw in surprise “woa, look at him go!” They laugh. One of them calls to me, “Ma’am? Ma’am? Can he actually catch one?”

And I reel, internally at least. Ma’am? He called me ma’am?

I am so OLD.

Suffering

Life is suffering.

We can cushion our rooms till they’re soft as coffins, but we will still suffer.

We can swath our children, pad them, wrap them in bandages and casts as if they are already hurt and broken so that they won’t be hurt and break – but we will stifle and smother them, they will suffer.

I kept thinking the question was Whose suffering should I be attempting to stop or prevent? and How much suffering should I allow in my children’s lives? and Is there such a thing as ‘natural’/okay suffering and the type that is just too horrific to be considered the normal part of life and so should be prevented?

It came up in the discussion with other parents about public schools. I cried everyday after school in 7th grade. My parents didn’t do anything about it. I think I would intervene with my own. Then I think, Would I?

All of these questions of amounts and kinds, as if I’m a chemist in a laboratory, or a cook in a kitchen, with burners and measuring cups, and the power

The issue of power and control and choice, and people who say we suffer for a reason, or talk about the default deity who allows us to suffer so that we can realize things. The idea that we only learn through pain.

I don’t believe we only learn through pain. I think we learn all the time.

I don’t believe suffering is a means to an end. I don’t believe we’re being taught lessons – or that we should teach them, allow suffering, as an educational tool for others.

If suffering is natural, part of life, why would I try to prevent it happening (to my kid, to my fellow humans in Darfur)?

Yet however part of life it is, I don’t believe we let suffering happen when we can stop it.

I think I’ve been asking the wrong questions.

I’ve been coming at this from the direction of to suffer or not to suffer – from an either/or construction -

“…The opposite of happiness is not sadness, but a closed heart”- Elizabeth Lesser

There are not happy childhoods, free from pain and suffering and challenges and disruptions and unhappy childhoods full of them. There are happy people who have suffered tremendously hard things and unhappy people who have ‘had it easy.’

Happiness is not a function of not-suffering; it correlates to the ability to live openly, fully, heartily, to live with suffering in a graceful and truthful and real way. To spend energy avoiding pain, to mainline anesthesia, is to invite death into life, to mummify oneself while still breathing.

Life is suffering. To live is to suffer. To live fully, to live happily, is to invite pain to have its way with you.

My goal, then, with my children, is not to prevent their suffering, to plan circumventions around hard things, to control the hard edges, to pad the coffee table’s corners. My goal is to teach them – emulating, coaching, encouraging – how to live with eyes arms heart and minds open to the experiences, the sweet and the sour, the tender and the hard. To teach them how to suffer without losing their ability for joy.

I can’t commit the fallacy of considering myself as ‘above’ the plane where the play of the world takes place. I am not playing chess, moving the pieces around. I am an actor. And as such, I do my part to avoid committing harm or causing suffering – I use the rounded coffee table, for instance – where it is in my jurisdiction to so, that is, within the truth as I know it .

Life is suffering, but it is joy, too, and as a part of the whole, my role is to enact what pleasures and warmth and comfort and delight I can for my fellow beings – we find comfort in each other, in our shared experiences, in our stories. This is not the same thing as immuring oneself against pain, or protecting others from living, or interfering with the natural course of things. For we bring the greatest joy to others when we share with them, not try to fix them; when we act with compassion, not with purpose.

I don’t think ‘do no harm’ is the phrase I want to live by – I think of the Buddhist nuns with the filters on their faces to prevent breathing in and killing of dust mites when they sweep – no, that is not my aim. I want to be care-ful, but first I want to be live fully, with the pads off, so that every punch and caress hits me where it hurts, where it gives. To be vulnerable is to fully live.

A Valentine for Snow

The ice twinkles – what a lovely word, twinkles – twinkle toes, my mother used to call me -

the ice in the sunlight twinkles, sparkles, flickers, the way stars do, bright with flashes of red and blue, minute planets – they are sputtering out signals, codes of their unbecoming – the sun is dashing them to the ground -

a mocking bird just crashed against the branch and shakes a crowd of snow -

this beauty out of my window and I am of this same world and that is my eternally springing joy -

oh, at the base of my spine, where the bony nerve-wrapped ending sits, that’s where I can feel it – oh world, oh lover, are you truly mine, am I one face of your multi-valentine?

My mind leaps to the gopis, those Hindu cowgirls flush with love for horny blue Krishna – the rapture of worship -

Romantic love is not the same as Worship Love, but the compelling sense of one’s humble adoration in the presence of a powerful beauty is the same -

A slice of ice flamed into a ruby three times, then streaked to join the slushing -

I remember stepping into the woods in thigh-deep snow in the Sierra Nevadas on a camping trip with my church youth group. I wasn’t familiar at all with snow and ice, being a native of Southern California’s dry, omnipresent heat. The holiness in that silence was palpable. The beauty stung coldly against my tender face. I felt the breath of god in the sweet, crystalline air, and sunk in the heaviness to my knees, undone by it all, by the All.

Love does that to me.

But seriously – how many must ask it – I know I am not the first one – do we need to mine for diamonds when these trees offer freely their encrusted shining selves?

Wrap me in the melting cuts of  ice; adorn me with precious frost. I am sufficiently bedecked.