Belmont Park

One of my favorite parks this summer has been Belmont – especially yesterday, when it was utterly deserted.

Unlike Pen Park, which seems constantly crawling with kids, or Greenleaf, which seems better maintained and more shady, Belmont’s been kind of empty and crumbly. There’s giant holes in the blue spongy flooring of the sprinkler; several times the sprinkler hasn’t been working – sometimes just a trickle.

While sometimes I like a busy playground, sometimes I like the spacious feeling of a quiet park.

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.

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.

Residue for a story

Why little strips of translucent plastic scattered across the ball field – as though a plastic tree had been shedding?

Why a jacket, a sock, strips of cotton, abandoned?

Why this blue bowl, cracked, upturned – left here?

What is the animal control van waiting for?

The old beer bottles aren’t hard to figure – but as I collect the plastic pieces – one intertwined almost lovingly with a leaf – I feel both pious outrage at the litter and confusion and curiosity about its origin -

I recently heard one definition of evil as being “the inability to be curious about the inner experience of another person.” (paraphrase – and I wish I could recall where I heard it) This statement nibbled at me for days.

As I try to learn to describe things as they are instead of defining their meanings (good or bad), I try to use my curiosity and imagination to help me with those descriptions, even if they are guesses – then I am not engaged in the very dull, rote exercise of judging those who have trashed the park, but I am engaging in the life that happens here, which is much more interesting and real.

Here’s my outline to explain the residue:

Perhaps some girl was in a hungry rage to eat all the Cheezits in the package  – her boyfriend ditched her – she tore, crying, at the package, stuffing them down her throat – A man, letting his dog drink from the blue bowl, heard her howls and ran in the other direction, leaving the bowl behind – a boy practicing soccer grew hot from the effort, shed his jacket, accidentally stomped on the blue bowl – the girl got distracted from her weeping-stuffing-face implosion by the graceful soccer-playing boy – the man’s dog gets off leash and chases the boy and girl out of the park, so the man calls animal control…

?

Three Pieces

A bite on the radio, that bit me: one street over from our park, a man shot in the chest last night.

Leaving my driveway, two boys in bright red slogan & commercialized loungewearish track suits greeting joyfully middle-aged women swathed in African prints.

The sky starts to ice over, like a windshield.

An Introduction

Graffiti on the blacktop

The first time I ever went to the park, I found a used, blue condom on the toddler play structure. Gang signs swirled over the arches above the slide, where splayed a red kerchief that made me think of gang colors I’d first learned about in junior high, when I lived near LA and our eighth grade sadie hawkins dance had a shooting incident due to someone wearing a valentine dress.

Ah, memories.

My daughter was about a year and a half, and the place was empty, until a couple little girls, one black, one white, sprang out of the grass to play with us, shouting, as kids do, “Watch me slide! Watch me! Watch!”

I remember the contrast of the noble, arching oak trees to the scraps of plastic drink containers and Bud Light bottles left forlorn and ugly and random across the thick grass.

I fell in love with the park, and when a house went on sale right next to it, a year later, I wanted it, badly.

Something about the park’s scrappiness, it’s disheveled nature under a benevolent composure of trees, made me feel at home the way neater, newer, more straight-laced parks did not.

But I’ve never quite fit into newfab surburbias or fancypants gentrified cityscapes. I’m not claiming any kind of street cred I don’t have; it’s just where I come from. I shop at the Salvation Army because I like the gems and the crap, and I like them mixed together. Rows of mass produced shirts at Sears give me the hives. And I myself usually have an untied shoelace, a hole in the armpit of my shirt, an ignored sauce stain on my sweater. It’s not that I like being unkempt, or that I relish the trash in the park – it’s that I’ll live with rattiness if there’s something else more magnificent and important going on – something muscular and fanatic and unique, if there’s soul.

If there’s spirit, soul, delight, irreverent humor, zinging out of a person, place, or thing, I can overlook – no, I do overlook – I don’t see the spiderwebs, the tears, the zigzags in the part. I don’t see; I don’t care.

This is not genetic, this flaw of mine, to love flaws. My mother and my grandmother exist to scrape away every possible dirt molecule that would take up residence on a kitchen counter; they pursue errant hems with the stubborn rigor of terminators; they forgo the health of their bones and ligaments to ensure that the laundry is done, the stains eradicated, the sheets ironed, shoes shined, the front stoop swept and washed clean and fresh.

Their efforts impress me – shame me – highlight evermore my incipient slovenliness.

But theirs is not my talent.

I’m not good at reforming the dirt; I’m only good at seeing it for its inherent richness; and it feels more real to me to love the uncouth, the crass, the malformed.

To love the park, and its people, even if they don’t know how to use the trashbins properly.

Look at this piece of art! Look at this friggin trash!

How interesting!

Into the Woods/Into the Wild

So, I’m aware that the title of this blog has its possible echoes.

1. Into the Woods, musical by Stephen Sondheim – one of my favorites – fairytales interwoven into one big metaphoric mass about the adventure of living. We go into the woods, the wild and dangerous and dark places, to find danger and magic, solutions and dissolutions.

The show covers multiple themes: growing up, parents and children, accepting responsibility, morality, and finally, wish fulfillment and its consequences.^[14] William A. Henry III wrote that the play’s “basic insight… is at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong — which is to say, almost everything that can — arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions.”^[15] Stephen Holden writes that the themes of the show include parent-child relationships and the individual’s responsibility to the community. The witch isn’t just a scowling old hag but a key symbol of moral ambivalence. She is also the only character in the show who always tells the truth. James Lapine said that the most unpleasant person (the witch) would have the truest things to say and the “nicer” people would be less honest. In her words, “I’m not good; I’m not nice; I’m just right.”[

I love the idea that so many fairytales involve a traipse through the woods – where our heroines encounter witches who offer candy, fantasy, escapism – but for Sondheim, they offer truth. I wander our park – do I truth-tell? Will I have my own family dynamics playing out on the jingling swingset?

Maybe not – “the park” is such a domesticated area – landscaped, mowed, conceptualized, planned. It is not a Wild Space. Or is it? Is it a human zoo of sorts? An old-fashioned commons? It is outmoded and unused now that people frequent cafes with wireless, coffee shops, video arcades, or just stay stuck in their homes? What is the point of a park these days? A place to exercise – exercise the dog at the dog park, exercise the kids at the playground – but what is there for us adults?

Why aren’t there more people doing tai chi in them?

2. Into the Wild. The book, the movie, both of which I consumed this past summer. The storyline of a young guy who graduates from college and then disappears to pursue ever more dangerous excursions into raw natural experience – the last of which kills him – what fascinated me about the story (book more than the movie) was the notion that the guy didn’t seek a lot of knowledge before going at his various adventures – he tried to rely on instinct – scrambling – making it up as he went along – meeting the wilds of the desert or of Alaska with just himself, not even the proper maps… foolish, and yet, I understand that sense of – purity?

I take my daily walks into the park without fear of moose, snake, or caribou. The most dangerous animal I’ll come across is someone’s untrained, unleased pitbull; perhaps a rabid squirrel will tempt my dog into a frenzy I can’t contain, and he’ll scamper into the boundaries of brush where I can’t find him.

I am not a mountain climber. Still, there are times when social anxiety kicks in, and I feel an icy precipice intercepts me and the strangers I come across on the green lilting slopes.

Stranger Phobia
More often than not, the stranger is friendly. A woman in a flowery, fiery red dress – “Five bucks at Roses!”; kids who want to pet the dog – “Does he bite?”; a woman also walking a stubborn dog…

If I were the kind of person to believe that We are All One, I would find each encounter an exercise – not of the muscle – but of the spiritual imagination. To identify each person, however hostile or distant he or she seems to be upon my initial appraisal – as not a stranger but another aspect of the same energy/life force / universe/ family that is mine – to treat him as if he were a long-lost brother, a newfound sister, to extend my arms, even if only with my eyes – this is my challenge, because we live in such a large society that is fractured and broken by its very profound size and the nature of our history together -

I read the Bible several times while I was growing up. And though I don’t treat the Bible with the same reverence I once did, I do still have verses that remain important.

“In perfect love there is no fear.” This is one I remember and think of, especially dealing with strangers, with the fear of The Other. To acknowledge our common humanity to love another person is to not fear that person.

In an industrialized society, fear is a survival mechanism imbued into our daily interactions. But is it truly as rational as we might think?

Promises, Promises
When I was 12, I remember I made a solemn promise with myself. I had noticed that adults did not look each other in the eyes when passing by one another. Instead, they deflected notice, they turned glances aside, they squinted. Me, I wasn’t afraid of looking right at another person and smiling – I was 12 years old, I believed I was a good, holy person, and I believed that others were, too. I had the protection of my sincere faith in goodness radiating around me like the fringe of an ecstatic aura. I told myself I would never ever stop looking people in the eyes. No matter how old I got.

But I failed my 12-year-old self. I did start cringing, at least with my lashes. Bending them over. Peeking through. Avoiding the stares and glances and peeks of others as we crossed paths on the sidewalks of the city. Feigning distraction. Looking at the cracks on the ground with intense pretend interest.

Some of this was the fault of people like the guy who wagged his tongue at me out his car window one night when I was going home from a college anthropology course. There are mean and attacking people out there who will take a trusting contact of the eye and turn it into an opportunity to hurt.

But if we are all one – or at least, we are all aspects of the whole – how can we not love, offer compassion, to the ridiculous and sweetness-starved individuals who would try to turn the brief coincidence of passing by into a moment of attrition?

Perfect love is the Buddhist loving-kindness, is the wide-open embrace of the universal mother who will take us all back, eventually.

And you can find this rich accepting stance – those open arms – at the base of any tree – in the metaphoric woods, the mythic wilds, and even in the – in my – city park.

me, heading on in

I didn’t mean to start a new blog.

But this one had to happen.

Sometimes, who we are is about what we do – I was a Cville Working Mom, for instance.

But my life these days is shaped now around place, where I am – which reminds me of the first college class I ever taught, English 101, the theme of which had to do with place and identity. So in some ways I’m coming full circle.

Only, I know enough about life now to know that there are never really true full circles. At least, not for very long. Circles tend to loop on out, or spiral back in. We cover the same territory, over and over, but we never step in the same river twice.

And so it is with my park. THE PARK. The park across the street from our new place of residence, as of a few months ago. I go there every day, sometimes twice or three times, and every time I go I see something new – a new person, a new kind of person, a new tree, a changed leaf, a strange sign. The City is planning to revamp the park (when it has money) – change out the old play structures, remove the leaking wading pools, add a sprinkler area – but I’m discovering that the changes I find on a daily basis, small as they are, require their own consideration, and have their own heft and impact on me, on those of us who wander in and out.

When I was eight, living for a while in Germany, a place thick with green trees choking the sky, I got annoyed with God for his lack of imagination. “Why are they all green?” I remember asking my Dad. “It’s so boring.”

All these years later, I’m starting to understand that the deliciousness of trees isn’t about color; it’s the miracle of so many individual shapes, the amazing variety within the same color scheme that makes you go on looking and looking. It can have a dizzying affect, staring into the lush fringes of the woods.

And then, of course, I didn’t see a deciduous landscape in the fall until I was 16, when I came east from California. I’d never witnessed the crazed frenzy when all these green trees rush out their inner reds, oranges, golds.

But once I did, I bit my tongue on my 8 year old’s impatience.

God knew what she was doing.