ACCOUNTS

Exhaustion, sorrow… Released from numbness, I fall into sorrow’s arms, fall through her into a canyon wider than I can see. It is not freefall. I am held aloft and protected from the rocky sides of ruin by the soft and limitless sky in which all sadness, in all its beauty, floats. I am carried by currents of sorrow - columns of warmth and cold, thermals of grief between bluffs and sea. It is with me always, and it must be contagious because when I speak it, when the stories walk out of my mouth into casual conversation people tear up and sometimes want to hear more, and to keep from being rote, or bored, to keep from having to wind myself up and click across the conversation until I can stop, to keep from having to push until the words squeeze out of me like air through an accordion, I am learning to pause, inhale, and let the sadness sigh out, pulling the rest of me with it in a careful story that I can offer from the heart if someone asks to hear.

I drive with Sorrow down the street, heading for home after three hours of conversation with my accountant. I have gone in to ask how to write up next year’s budget for everyday gandhis. She wants to know what our objectives are, what results we expect and by when, who will do what, where the receipts are, the depreciation schedule for vehicles and camera equipment long since beyond repair and rotting in the humid heat, she asks for the lost deeds to the land we have bought, asks why we are making documentaries, who our audience is and why, all the endless legitimate questions that compress everything that takes so long to live. I thank her and answer as I know how to answer, by telling stories. I ask her to think with me how to respond to the dilemmas we are facing, help her understand (and myself, too) how a series of recent ‘mistakes’ could have happened, why they had to happen, so we can see what is being asked of us now.

And so I tell her: Of wanting to see a Leopard and meeting an ex-combatant named General Leopard who changed his name to Bethelson. Of how he received weapons training and anti-terrorist training in Israel, Romania, Jordan and Lebanon, paid for with US government dollars. Of how he ‘woke up’ beneath a Mango Tree and decided to become a peacemaker. Of how he ate human hearts, has three children of his own, is a traditional man who was raised Muslim and turned born again Christian at the insistence of his wife. Of how he says he wants to become ‘African Jewish’ and when he calls, greets me by saying, “Shalom, Mama!” Of child soldiers still being bribed and conscripted, massing at the border of Cote d’Ivoire. The accountant and I weep.

I speak of being stranded in a village and how we were welcomed and handed twin infants; Of seeing the women demonstrating for peace along the road the next morning; Of the 80% illiteracy rate; the unspeakable conditions at the Firestone rubber plantation and the unspeakable pollution of the sacred forest and river and coast beyond it - and of the elephants who have come to the towns we are working in after we make offerings to the elephants and the animals. I tell of riding along for hours on end and wondering why the hell I had come all this way and for what? How I had inconvenienced my family and spent all this money and got stuck in all this fucking mud, thinking next time I would just send a check and thank my friends and colleagues and tell them to carry on with the work as they saw fit, of how I couldn’t speak any of this out loud, but just then my Liberian friend, STV, sitting across from me, wakes up and exclaims, ‘What greater love is there?’ and I say, “What love?” And he says, “After all, you left your family to come all this way just to be with us. You could have just sent money but you came to be with us.” The accountant weeps some more and says, “You must tell your story. This is an important part of the story. Help us understand.”

I tell her how the NGO’s come to a place with their plans already made, shaped by political and economic agendas, and tell people, “We are going to drill you a well”, and the people tell us that they feel they cannot tell the NGO’s “We don’t want a well”, or “We don’t want a well there because it’s sacred ground”, or “It would be impossible for us to get to that well because we would have to cross disputed land”, because then they would get nothing at all. This way, the NGO’s can say to their funders and write in their year end reports, “We drilled x many wells to serve x many people in x many villages at x cost and in x time frame”, and be lauded and get continued funding.

And yes, of course we are accountable and rightly so, and we make mistakes we probably shouldn’t have made, and we must make plans and produce results. And we must do this in such a way that we can be grateful for the mistakes because they are our best teachers because they keep us humble and searching. We must do this in such a way that we find new language that lives and breathes ‘outside the box’ of predictable results, that enlivens the work by paying attention to what we can’t know in advance, and that will produce tangible results that are invisible in a cause-and-effect universe, in ways that give us new eyes that do not yet know how to see or what they are actually looking at.

I am an outsider who understands little of Liberian culture, knows nothing firsthand of this war or any war, who has never lost someone to violence and has never had to forgive someone for such a thing, or admit to being someone in need of such forgiveness. And I must speak of how our work soars when guided by dreams and reverence to the ancestors, and flounders when shaped by the linear thinking of people, and how we must decide, let Spirit decide, whether we are to apologize and cut loose, send money and thanks, mediate, create programs, dedicate staff, document or otherwise remain on the ground when all we’re mandated to do is find the story and tell it, but which story, exactly, and to whom and in what form and how to know if we’re getting it right, not putting people in danger, not leaving anything out, not still blind? And so the story is one story and several; the film multiplies and becomes many; the images grow until we have over ten thousand. One story - One with Everything? Ha. Now you see it, now you don’t.

And now she can see it and it only took three hours for this glimpse which she will forget until she remembers, as I have forgotten and am remembering, and which will live with her for the rest of her days because she wept. She will still wonder why I can’t get it right and do this in the way that can be expressed in checkable figures and maybe I will learn to do this without being swallowed by the mind that demands such a world and knows how to live in it. How to write something that can bridge the forms that created the world that made the war happen, in a way that shows how Einstein was right that we can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it, but in this case we don’t yet know, we are just learning how to think differently, sometimes, as best we can, and this is my new job. What is the budget for that?

OSPREY

The beach in front of the house I am living in has wide, powdery sand, and piles of driftwood – whole trees with their long, sodden trunks and intact root balls. The side branches are gone, broken off along the river bottom and in the churning waves. On rainy days, the dog and I get wet. On sunny days we walk to where the river empties into the sea, just north of the astonishing McKerricher State Park, an anomalous, sudden, undulating stretch of sand dunes along the beach. There is a spot just below the bridge where the river empties into the sea. At low tide, you can walk up the river, picking your way along exposed water-rippled sand and slippery moss-covered stones. Sometimes there are sea lions that look like stumps when they bask in the sun. Sometimes you see their noses break the surface, sending tiny wavelets toward the river’s edge that merge with the pull of a rising or falling tide.

Ospreys are teaching their young to hunt. Before they dive, they hover, usually at the mouth of the river, motionless in the brisk wind, flicking the edges of their wings, tilting their fan-shaped tail, then plunging into the shallowest water, into the thin white foam, lifting out a tiny, squirming silver fish. Salmon fry? Not yet, though conservationists are working to restore the spawning habitat of this estuary. There are tufts of native grasses and sedges along the briny tidal zone, and gravel beaches farther up where fallen alders and willows create protected pools for eggs. There is a taciturn, old male osprey that often sits on the railing of the 10 Mile Bridge, surveying up river and down. Sometimes a kingfisher joins him.

Even at high tide, the beach is walkable. I have fallen in love, and the conversation is deepening into intimacy. Love takes many forms, I think, including the love of rivers, beaches and Ospreys. When I see the birds, I say, “I love you!” in response to their high, shrill, staccato cries. I watch their slow, leisurely circling overhead, their outstretched wings backlit and finely etched in white and dark brown. Love is seeing a beach littered with sand dollars. It is seeing my feet in the clear, icy water, the water so clean that I know how seldom I’ve been in water this clear, or known its smell. I think of the radiation from Fukushima that is surely in it. I greet the ocean, saying, “I love you! Hello! I love you!”

Sometimes I must step away and into the relief of being indoors, or I must close my eyes and be grateful for silence – again silence - because sometimes these trees and this ocean are too massive. The trees especially seem too green, too complex with too much life in and beneath and among them, and there are too many trees and at the same time never enough, because so many, many have already been cut and it’s unbearable, like losing all the lovers of all the lifetimes. The past two days there have been thunderstorms with howling wind and lashing rain, and only the dog and the leaking skylights keep my pounding heart from getting up and running away to join everything that is rampaging.

One day, after one of those spring storms, with everything washed clean, I drive from town to the beach with the dog. As I come down the grade after the bridge, the Sentry Osprey suddenly swoops across the road and comes to land on a nearby post, his outstretched wings suddenly looming huge in front of my windshield and in my peripheral view, the enormous, fleeting shadow momentarily eclipsing the road and the sun. At that moment, a beat up car pulls over across the road and a disheveled man hurriedly gets out. Waving his arms, he shouts to me, “Did you see that osprey, the way he swooped down and landed on that post?” The man flaps his arms again and makes the sound of a man imitating the sound of a bird’s wings flapping. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I saw it!” My own heart is still pounding with the thrill and shock of it, so close. The man shakes his head in wonderment, and says, in a loud, ringing voice, “I’ve driven this road for 20 years!” He gets back in his car and drives away. He just had to pull over and stop his car to say to a stranger, “Did you see that bird?”