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.

To Save or to Savor

wintering

My view of the park these days is from far away – inside my house. You know – it’s so darn cold. The kind of cold that slaps your face, but it’s not bracing or refreshing – it just hurts.

That’s kind of how I feel about all the things going on in the world – the war, pain, suffering – it seems far away – because I’m In Here and it’s Out There. Even if, like the park, the reality is happening just across the street.

Our minister told this story yesterday in church – that Martin Luther King, Jr., shoved his plate of food away from him at a meal after seeing a photograph in the newspaper of a dead Vietnamese child killed by an American soldier.

“Does it not taste good?” someone asked.

King replied, “No food will taste good to me until I’ve done everything I can to stop this terrible war.”

Damn, and Oh dear. I think of all the tragedies occurring on this globe in the name of my country, both here and abroad – I consider the children dying in Gaza right now – I look at the food on my plate, product of blood and tears and sweat, poorly paid workers, truckers doing overtime – my bed filled with the down of a wrung goose – how can I dream on such a bed, how can I warm myself in these clothes, how can I find sustenance in this food, when all of it came to me through such suffering?

I’m currently reading a book by a Unitarian Universalist minister, William Murray, called A Faith for all Seasons, and in it he quotes another UU minister, Richard Gilbert:

I arise in the morning torn between the desire

To save the world and to savor it -

To serve life or to enjoy it -

To savor the world or save it?

The question beats in upon the waiting moment -

To savor the sweet taste of my own joy

Or to share the bitter cup of my neighbor;

To celebrate life with exuberant step

Or to struggle for the life of the heavy laden?

I love this, because it articulates a very personal inner tension of mine about how to live – I’m often like that Atari games ping-pong ball, plonking incessantly between the options of Enjoying Life, not taking things too seriously, going with the flow (which can feel selfish, indulgent, irresponsible) and Trying to Make a Difference, conscious and aware, (which can also feel myopic, self-serving, fake, self-righteous).

Murray answers this poetic question by suggesting that our lives are made meaningful when we savor and save the world – both.

But I find myself suspicious that even a mix is too easy, and all of it too abstract, and yet my own ability to toss a plate of food away in distaste, with disgust at my role in the chain of exploitation hard to address because I am supporting two small

children, and I need to eat in order to be a mother to them.

Is that a cop out?

I am also aware that extreme, dramatic acts are sometimes easier to perform than small, daily practices that go unnoticed and unpraised.

Someone once told me that King wasn’t such a great parent or husband to his kids.

But I wonder about that, too – maybe great people just can’t be asked to be everything.

Today, during Obama’s inaugural speech, I thought about his daughters, and how, despite the reports that their father makes it a point to spend quality time with each of them everyday, however brief, they are probably going to get some kind of short end of the parenting stick. I mean, come on – leader of the free world isn’t going to be helping them with their homework every night after dinner.

But is that necessarily bad? Following one’s bliss requires sacrifice. And when it comes to children – who end up sacrificing with their parents, usually without a choice about it – how does a responsible parent ask that of his or her children? Or do they not, and then just deal with the children’s feelings later? Is there something to be said for the calls to service for the greater good that do justify the sacrifice of an individual family, whether they choose it or not?

But I’m digressing.

I heard so much during the Obama speech that infused me with a new hope, my cynicism about this country and our prospects a hardened carapace cracking – but my heart was snagged by something he said (paraphrase) about not being faint-hearted and settling for the easiest way out – and I thought, oh lordy cakes, I often settle for the easiest route, I don’t strive for greatness; he’s talking about me: I am faint-hearted.

It is easier to stay indoors.

I don’t know how to have integrity and strive for greatness and follow the rugged path toward my bliss – or maybe I do but am afraid of what such a journey would require. But I know that I am inspired by the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and by the poem today about Love, and by Obama’s speech to address my heart and ask it to be braver and louder with its truth. Part of me wants to go out and start building bridges and digging ditches – but I know I need to actually dig right here, to hear what it is I need to do.

Maybe by learning to save the part of the world that is mine to save, I will learn to savor it, because it is part of the act of love.

Maybe I will find a way to eat what is before me, knowing my privilege, my heart breaking with sorrow and gratitude and humility and joy, maybe there is a way to be here that is not the easy way out, but the right way in.

I feel more hope today that there is.

the bus

The bus stop is adjacent to the park.

Going on the bus is a social excursion. The nurse next to us smiles at my baby and says to him, “You see this black face? You have a white face!” My son gurgles. I hear her accent – African? She tells me, as if she heard my silent question, pointing at my sling, “In Africa, 1 -2 – 3 months, they go to the back.”

“That would be easier,” I say, “For cooking.” I tell her how dangerous it gets when I’m heating oil. We laugh. I ask her where she is from, and she tells me she is a refugee from Togo.

“Do you miss it?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Very much.”

I recall my geography, ask her about the ocean. I feel like I’ve read about ecotourism there; rich people (browning themselves?) on the beaches.

“Yes,” she says. “My father owned a fishing boat.”
She tells me they ate fresh fish and bam, a kind of coconut. (We call our son “Bam,” coincidentally.)
She tells me her five children are all over the world, only her youngest is here with her in the US. One is in Paris. but she says this is a good place for children.
Her mother had nine.
They are planning to return for a trip next year.

“You should go,” she tells me, warmly, extending an invitation for me to come see the place she loves. For a moment, all I want in the world is to do just that; go to Togo, look her up in the phone book. I want to see the blue ocean she’s talking about and feel a different part of the world. I want to see what home looks like to her.

I am also thinking that I’ll never go to Africa. And this feels terrible. I will die having never gone.

I am also thinking of how much I miss my ocean, the Pacific, where I grew up – maybe I am not imagining Togo at all; I’m just remembering a place that used to make my chest cave in when I thought of it, a place I’ll never really return to.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a refugee. But I know what it’s like to be far away from home and to always feel that you are not where you rightly belong. Our oceans mingle in my imagination, become the same missed body.

And then she gets off the bus.

When we return back on the bus three hours later, the woman from Togo is there again. Headache she says, holding her forehead where a bright kerchief is slipping back to reveal gray hair on her brow. And my knees. I go home to rest.

She looks miserable. I don’t know her name. I don’t know really her story, how she ended up here. I felt, on the way, that I’d had this amazing infusion of information; but now I see, as we rattle down the road, that I’ve learned only that there’s so much I don’t know. My imagination made me feel like I was having some kind of poetic experience; reality is, it’s just a bus. We’re not traveling very far together, she and I.

In contrast to the other ebullient woman I meet on this bus ride – I’ll write about her next – the woman from Togo does not say hello to the people on the bus and street corners. She seems lonely. This makes me wonder if refuggees from other countries, though the same “color” as “people of color” born here in America integrate with them, and if so, how.

This question still when I get off the bus, walk along the park towards home, and there’s two boys with backpacks going home from school, speaking to each other in a foreign language. Again, I am wondering where they are from, and suddenly also, how many refugees are in this town, and of those, how many are feeling homesickness? And what do I, what can I do about – think about – that?