the cold air was stinging my face. i pulled my scarf up further, to block the wind a bit more. as we rounded a curve in the trail, the breeze was biting. it seems early for this kind of cold. but it’s not.
it’s december and the official start of winter is right up around that bend in the trail. the cold is predictable. this is wisconsin.
i walked away from the stockpot of chicken soup i was stirring, waiting for a warming dinner. i sat on the steps in the hall, overwhelmed. i keep hearing and picturing the words of my firing, the non-explanation-explanation given to others. it may seem like it’s time to be over it. but it’s not.
it’s only been three weeks and even sitting on the steps doesn’t yield an explanation or comfort. it just creates more questions, more astonishment, more hurt. the distress is predictable. this is shock.
i look, again, at the christmas list in my hand, trying to summon up the energy to shop and wrap and ship. it seems like the time is going slowly. but it’s not.
the holiday is rapidly approaching and, like many of you, we face it alone, wondering how to celebrate without our loved ones. we grieve traditions set aside, normal ways we honor these holidays. we ponder what we might do anew. the sadness is predictable. this is loneliness.
the night sky is filled with stars, the cold air beckoning them. the moon out the window is steadfast. the vast universe is vast. our tiny world inside, away from the biting wind, down the hall from the steps, at a table with a steaming bowl of chicken soup and a tiny christmas tree, is tiny. it seems that real peace is somewhat elusive. but it’s not.
there are days when it’s necessary. last saturday was one of them. we drove out to the bakery in lake geneva specifically for one thing: flourless chocolate cake. we bought two pieces and drove home with them nestled in their little box, excited about the prospect of having such a treat two days in a row. (we share desserts, so this purchase was not merely one day’s worth.) in the middle of everything, a little flourless chocolate cake will go a long way.
there are a few things that fall under this category these days: a few vices, a few salves. strong hot coffee in the morning in mugs that remind us of favorite places, long hikes, glasses of wine, happy lights, texts or pictures or calls from my children, big pots of pasta sauce, being snugged by the dog and the cat. every so often, flourless chocolate cake makes the cut. because it is not inexpensive, these days it is a rarity. but last saturday we decided we could skip a meal if it was necessary in order to share some decadence.
soon it will be the solstice. the sun will seemingly stand still and the light of day will start to shift. we will, slowly but surely, start to welcome more light.
as this world, this country, our communities start to embrace the administering of a new vaccine to aid in the deterrent of the pandemic, we begin to see the beacon of light. it is farther off on the horizon, but it is rising.
as this country, our communities start to embrace the changing of this nation’s leadership, we begin to see the possibility of sanity returning to the chaos. we begin to see the promise of light. it is farther off on the horizon, but it is rising.
as our communities agree to distance and be safe, to work together in common goal, we begin to hope for a return of responsibility, of accountability, of respect, of kindness. we study the horizon, watching for light. it is farther off on the horizon, but we’re sure it must be rising.
as we stand and straighten up our 2020 bodies, aching but holding steadfast on our journeys, we begin to look for the paths of the future, paths of symbiosis, paths of goodness. we peer in the dark, catching glimpses of light, like fireflies in a summer backyard. it is farther off on the horizon, but the light is rising.
and we know this because flourless chocolate cake makes it so.
van morrison said it: “i want to comfort you. i want to comfort you. i want to comfort you. just let your tears run wild like when you were a child. i’ll do what i can do. i want to comfort you. you put the weight on me…i want to comfort you.”
how is it that, in the middle of feeling low-low-low, these sweet animals know exactly what to do? tucked under an old quilt, dogdog and babycat jumped up on the bed, searched my face and snugged up tightly right next to me, bookends on either side.
there are days – in these times – we must all feel the anguish of mental health exhaustion, of wide-awake anxiety, of worries too steep to climb, struggles, fears to which we close our eyes, wincing in pain.
there are days we reach out to others, extending words of reassurance, tiny tidbits of humor, virtual hugs, care packages, texts of love.
there are days we can only lay under a quilt. we sort and sort through the stuff-in-our-brains, listing the realities of our angst, wondering, reeling, succumbing to lonely early winter darkness.
if only it were so easy as to be dogdog and babycat. with no hesitation, they simply comfort. their response is pure. their compassion is the stuff of unconditional love. they don’t make assumptions or have judgement. they don’t assail with questions or platitudes. they don’t slough it off or explain it away. they don’t ignore it.
instead, they show up. and it is absolutely clear to me that they are saying, “i want to comfort you.”
denver riggleman said it best, “what is going on?” the chaos abounding in the political arena is the stuff of wildly hysterical hyena-laughter, the stuff of destruction, the stuff of the danger of propagandizing that-which-is-not-true.
the politicians who have lined up behind the current president, the-one-who-lost-the-election, are merely minions being played, little people doing the dirty work of a man who is so immersed in himself he has ignored a sweeping pandemic killing thousands of americans-on-his-watch every single day. without fact, without conversation crossing the aisle, without second thought or conscience, these politicians are cowering to this president for what? a pat on the head? my dog is less needy than that.
as we move through this time, we see professionals who are doing their job with excellence reamed out and cast to the side. we see people who are speaking out against the management of this leadership who are dismissed. we see individuals spoken about with strategic words of malice, gaslighting insinuations of wrongdoing, meanspiritedness at play.
we are left – deliberately – with confusion. as people watching, we are served up narrative, a silver platter full of nothing, expected to go merrily along with it all, to join the crusade, to not ask questions. we watch Power and Control take over. we are appalled at the gall this leadership and his team have exhibited. we are expected to believe him because, well, he is who he is, they are who they are. you can’t see the pedestal but it’s there. his minions have joined him inside his sickness and we, as populace, have been made the stadium audience as this unnecessary wrestling match moves forward, as people are thrown to the mat, as due process is ignored and the foundation shudders.
slowly-but-surely-time-rapidly-rushing we are approaching the holidays. with all the concurrent spinning plates wishing i could slow it all down, wishing i could feel it happening. i want to feel the peace of the season, the peace of quiet winter coming on.
wisdom comes from unexpected places. softly. an instagram post here, a text there, a conversation on the phone, a note. people, wittingly and unwittingly, giving me words on which to linger, images in which to immerse, snippets of thoughts to ponder.
i woke up this morning feeling hopeful. a bit more sleep was restorative. i read wise soul-provoking words of my girl; i received an email from a generous stranger.
i started to recall the times in my life when an obstacle was actually a gift, when a turn in the road was the thing that protected me. instead of railing against the current, i am slowly slipping onto the raft that is taken by it.
i took a picture of the blue sky yesterday – just blue – because it was the first blue sky in days. i felt deep gratitude for it and for the sun i could feel on my back as we hiked. the two masked women we passed on the trail raised their hands, fingers outstretched in the symbolic v, and called out, “peace.”
early this morning i sipped coffee that david brought me, my legs stretched out on the bed tightly snugged between dogdog and babycat, both laying ever-so-close. and we spoke of waking a little bit lighter today than yesterday. it doesn’t change the circumstances. but how we are in those circumstances changes us.
and in the slow-but-sure-rapid-rushing-time advent of this winter, this season, this time of quietude and rejuvenation, it allows space for peace.
when my daughter was a baby, the thing that could calm her, quiet her unhappy crying, was to hold her tightly and dance with her. her favorite back then was the sound of marvin gaye’s heard it through the grapevine and i can remember it on repeat in the sitting room while we danced and danced and danced.
it seems perverse to think about dancing in the middle of a raging pandemic, in the middle of intense concern about david’s dad’s declining health, in the middle of being fired from my job. so much to worry about, the list seems expansive and ever-growing. i wonder what will calm us, what will quell the fears that keep us awake at night.
jonathan wrote to me, in the wise way of jonathan, and said to “get the water boiling and the corkscrew; it’s time to celebrate!!” he left no room to push back. “take stock,” he texted.
i’m wondering if i should put on the big chill soundtrack and put #1 on repeat. maybe the music of marvin gaye and dancing would help.
truth seems a scarcity these days. like various species of rhinos, elephants, penguins, tigers, whales, it seems to be on the endangered list. vulnerable, it is threatened by agenda, by usurping rhetoric, by propaganda, by people hiding behind cloaks of superheroes. it has been battered by self-aggrandizing people, by persons in positions of power, in high places, in low places. dangerous falsehoods and narrative abound, both in the telling of lies and in the non-telling of truth. “we are suffering from truth decay,” brian stelter reports, “we are in a truth emergency.”
it has become pervasive, this rotting apple. from the top down, we do not have fine examples of truth-telling. we watch as the spinning stories spin faster, out-of-control, madness. it has permeated every little corner, this toxicity. even in our own little worlds we see evidence of spinning stories, of truth-evasion, of gaslighting, of madness. it is a contagion of its own merit, this decay, and we must brace, stand steadfastly in reality and facts and protect truth. we must ask for it, require it, demand it. we need push back against the covering-up of what is real, what is truth. we must find the verifiable core, have hard conversations, move in a healthy, unwavering way to verity. we need rail against the extinction of truth.
because of the hard work of dedicated organizations, wildlife may make a recovery. with the dedicated work of each person, each capable of forthright honesty, humankind would benefit from a truth recovery.
“this much is clear: we cannot afford to fail in our mission to save a living planet.” (world wildlife foundation)
each day we would walk to the edge of our pond and look for the two frogs hiding in the rocks or sunning in plants in which they blended.
we’ve had frogs in our pond before. and, at the time that ice starts to form on the top of our tiny waterhole, we have removed the filter and stored it away. we’re not sure where exactly the frogs go, but research shows us that they are intrepid creatures who will burrow underground or under the debris of a pond. some portions of a frog’s body will freeze during the winter, stored glucose preventing vital organs from freezing, the frog waking from its frozen slumber in the warming spring days. wow. research also shows that they need oxygen and the bubbler of the filter system will keep harmful gases from accumulating and, hopefully, will keep the pond from freezing over completely.
we decided that was worth a try.
we dug our pond in 2013 and have had the same equipment ever since. when a tree landed on the pond in the backyard a few years back, monster glue came to the rescue and, each year since, david has rube-goldberg-ed the pond’s fixings back together again to last for one more season.
with everything that 2020 has been, we felt like we really needed to give our frogs, the only houseguests we had all spring, summer and fall, a fighting chance. we decided to leave the filter on and the bubbler bubbling.
and now we cross our fingers.
because every little thing counts this year – a year fraught – – –
there seems no need to even finish that sentence. each of us has our own story of this year’s challenges and disappointments. each of us, hopefully, has at least one success, one victory, one moment of bliss.
but, admittedly, the sighs that have been the soundtrack of 2020 are plenty. we have all been inundated with them.
we are choosing also to remember the bubbling of the pond out the back window and the croaking of two sweet frogs who found their way into our little pond. and we are hoping to see them again, croaking and sunning, when the spring comes.
the unknown is often worse than reality. i had all kinds of monsters in my head battering my nerves, just thinking about having a covid test. i wasn’t feeling well and, with my symptoms aligning with the utterly vast myriad of symptoms attributable to coronavirus, i was checking the list and checking it twice. worried and already quarantining for 14 days since we had been exposed, we scheduled tests. and i started getting nervous. it felt like we were living inside a sci-fi movie.
my adrenaline was rushing before we left the house. i felt shaky. it was a big response to what must have been a letdown for that adrenaline rush. the test itself was easy, painless. it was a rapid test and we knew we would find out our results in a mere half hour.
david’s came – “negative,” read the email. my email asked me to come back inside for a confirmatory test, a specimen that would be sent to a lab for results that might have a slightly lower degree of fallibility. we went back in, standing on the dots stickering the floor, slathering with hand sanitizer, speaking through two-ply masks. and now, we wait.
we have been inordinately careful. we’ve been wearing masks, washing hands, our fruit, the bottles of wine gift-delivered at our front door. we’ve wiped our groceries and kept our mail separated. we have distanced and not gathered. we have worried about ourselves. we have worried about my girl and my boy. we have worried about david’s parents and all our family members out of town. we have worried about the people in our community, the customers and staff at the corner store, the people in line at the grocery. we have tried to be respectful. it has mattered.
a friend re-posted a meme today that read, “it shouldn’t have to happen to you for it to matter to you.” this feels like the baseline, a low bar of compassion, the starting gate of people taking precautions to protect other people. it has been stunning to watch people of this country ignore all cautions about a pandemic raging across the nation. a dear friend, way earlier in the year and in the early arc of this devastating disease sweeping the world, wrote that the lyrics “you would cry too if it happened to you” were on replay in her mind. a number of people were quoted as saying, “i don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.”
what does it take?
there truly are no exceptions. we have been instructed in the use of masks, the advantages of social distancing, the merits of proper handwashing. as things have been escalating up the devastation scale, we have been encouraged to limit our gatherings, to not travel, to not have parties, to not make exceptions. because, truly, there aren’t any. every one of our lives is valuable. every single one. to be cavalier is to take chances. big chances. it is all an unknown.
healthcare workers and hospitals are overwhelmed. they are at the brink of collapse. yet, households of people are gathering together, playing a russian roulette covid game. citizens of this country are dying in situations that are “harder, scarier and lonelier than necessary.” yet, people are refusing to wear a simple piece of cloth on their face. the statistics of this pandemic are exponentially climbing. yet, people on the trail fail to move six feet away as they pass, people in the grocery store have masks around their chins, people regularly scoff at the science – S C I E N C E – that is guiding the medical experts.
on monday evening, in the middle of our quarantine, i had intense pain breathing. my lungs, my windpipe, my trachea were on fire when i took a deep breath. i had a video chat with a nurse who told me to go to the ER and have an EKG to rule out a heart event. i did not believe i was having a heart event. to me, it seemed pretty clear that it was a breathing issue, but there are definite limitations to having a medical visit online and i understood her desire to err on the side of caution. because of the sheer arrogance of people who scorn the restrictions to help with this pandemic, our healthcare system has been forced to regulate that only patients are allowed into the hospital. the very idea that i would be going A-L-O-N-E into the hospital, perhaps with something serious, was more terrifying than not going. thank you to all those people in this country who have foisted this gross unfairness on anyone suffering, on anyone in a medical emergency, on anyone hospitalized for absolutely any reason. the lack of compassion for others is abhorrent.
one morning we made a big pot of texas chili. we loaded a folding table into little-baby-scion. we packed plates and plasticware and cups. we drove over to 20’s and set up our folding table at least 8 feet from his folding table in his open garage. and we had chili together with our coats on and blankets covering our legs in the open-air cold garage. two days later he had symptoms and two days after that he tested positive. his covid was gifted to him from a friend of his sister’s who casually walked into his sister’s apartment while he was working there. she wore no mask and boasted of a party she had attended. she clearly did not care. it did not matter to her that 20 has chronic asthma or that his sister has a compromised immune system. her freedom to not have a piece of cloth over her face was more important.
he called us to tell us. that was the beginning of our 14 days. we didn’t go anywhere except outside to walk. no stores, no gatherings, nothing. nowhere. it was unknown to us if we were contagious. it was unknown to us if david was asymptomatic. it was unknown to us if my symptoms were covid. but it mattered to us.
meanwhile, 20, who needs a new cellphone did not purchase one. “why not?” i battered him with questions. he told us that he didn’t want to spend the money if he wasn’t going to live. the unknown. i want to shake the supposed-friend of his sister’s who just didn’t care. “what is wrong with you?” i want to scream at her.
and now. waiting. by the time this publishes i hope that i am done waiting. but in the meanwhile, i am waiting. for the unknown.
i started noticing while hiking on one of our favorite local trails. greenery and pine cones sharing space. a visual backdrop for hallmark holiday movie escapism, the repetition of these simple symbols of the holiday season over and again on trail brought my camera to hand time after time. capturing these photos has been decorating my mind with fancies of christmases-past and brightly wrapped packages and trees of all shapes and happy lights galore and times spent with my children, my family, my friends. the trail’s gift has inadvertently set me on the path toward light, my spirit breathing with each snap of the iphone.
a week before thanksgiving my son sent me a photograph of the christmas tree in their apartment. with garland strung and lights and soft holiday-themed pillows, it was straight out of a magazine. “a classic look,” he told me. yes. beautiful and classic, welcoming winter. my daughter’s photographs are snowy and crisp, crystalline and inspiring. winter is coming on in the high mountains. it dresses them with idyllic wonder.
we haven’t started listening to holiday music. it’s too raw at this point. but we will. i will climb out of this cavern, aided by every gift of nature as it heads into this magical season, and i’ll soon turn it – music – on. in the meanwhile, slowly, we have strung some new white twinkling happy lights, we have brought up a couple trees from the corner of the basement storage room. maybe we’ll bring up the big bins and we can step-by-step-forward turn our home into a celebration of what-is and not a daily reminder of what-was. walking toward light. each silver ornament a coaxing, each strand of lights an urging, each tuft of greenery an encouragement. all seasonal prompts, that out of the dark there is light. indeed, in the dark there is light. “nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.” (john muir)
john muir also wrote this: “between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.” maybe that’s somehow why i am noticing. the greenery. the pine cones. laying on the trail, juxtaposed yet clearly related. dark and light, juxtaposed, yet clearly related. a new world, a doorway.
no wonder i keep seeing these sweet moments in nature. no wonder i keep searching. no wonder i have my camera out on the trail.
reverse threading 