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.

Patterns, and Weather Events

The trees in the park had been longing for snow.

You could tell – the irritation of the pressing cold – that kind of feeling of wet bluejeans rubbing on your skin – it gives a person a pinched look, and the trees were looking like that, burdened by the holding pattern of the weather.

I was feeling it – days and days of one kind of air – sometimes the patterns need to be busted – unclench the hold.

Which made me think about how patterns can be helpful or restraining, depending on how we use them.

We can let a pattern carry us, raftlike, through turbulence. It can be sustaining – like the daily pattern of breakfast, lunch, and dinner can provide a comforting structure to a person in crisis, eliminating the burden of a person having to wonder when she will eat, coordinate a mealtime with others, etc. Patterns provide expedience for repeated requirements of existence. (Though for things like urination, working on an as-needed basis remains a good idea.)

Patterns allow returning. We come again and again to a table, to a curve in the line, to a church service, to a holiday, to a practice – and the similarity of the occurrence reveals distinctly the elements that are not the same. We can see how we have grown and changed, feel time’s efforts and effects, so much more clearly when set against the unchanged, familiar scenery; this helps us come to know ourselves, our relationships.

On the other hand, patterns can also carry us away from raw experience, burying our senses in habit (cloaking us in a nun’s habit!), so that we don’t even feel our own hunger or thirst or desire or delight. And then we can’t recognize these feelings when they occur outside of the patterns. Caught in habit, or ruts, we  become desensitized  to  realities both interior and exterior, not noticing  subtle changes,  unable to respond creatively and appropriately to life.

I noticed recently, for instance, that I was caught in a pattern of tension in dealing with my children. I had needed a certain pattern or ritual for dinner and bathtime at one point, but the pattern existed past its utility – and I was tense about maintaining the pattern, but this persistence interfered with my ability to be myself and enjoy time with my kids. Just noticing the pattern’s stranglehold allowed me to relax, let it go, and be in the moment.

How welcome this rain, ice, and snow! I feel interrupted and refreshed.  Schedules are disrupted, expectations unmet; but I scrape my windshield joyfully, because I needed a break from the sameness, before I forgot to notice the weather all together.