THE DOORS OPEN

It’s Memorial Day and everything is backwards - a burst of icy weather at the beginning of summer, ghost stories told in the morning, The Doors open a radio show, singing, ‘This is the end’. I am driving to a mountain retreat, listening to a Memorial Day special on NPR, a compilation of stories from men who were medics during the Viet Nam war. “I don’t want to hear this,” I say to myself, and change the channel. But there is nothing else, really, and so I listen.

The first man says, “I was in Viet Nam from May, 1968 to May, 1969. It was only a year but what I experienced there shaped my whole life.” By the end of the interview he is weeping and asking the host, “Isn’t there something else we can talk about?”

Then two men are telling a story together. When one trails off the other steps in. When the second one falters, the first one continues. The story pours into the car like a rising tide: They have just arrived in Viet Nam. There is a midnight attack. Bloodied bodies are strewn all over the deck outside their hut. They rush into a surgery bunker to work on a marine whose chest is blown open. They see the heart. They see the stomach. He dies. They bring him back to life. He dies again. They bring him back a second time. An artery is severed. They open one of his legs and splice a section of vein into his chest. They lose count of the units of blood they replace. They lose him for the last time.

The name of the surgeon is Dr. Mouna. (I think of luna. I think of moon.) He is so distraught that he tears off his gloves and storms out of the operating room. The others follow, except one man, the one telling the story now. He is left behind, alone with the body, to clean up. The room is cold. He stands in silence looking at the boy with the open chest when suddenly the heart beats, and beats again, and he’s screaming for the others to come back. ‘He’s alive! He’s alive!” They come running back in. Dr. Mouna plunges his ungloved hands into the boy, massaging the heart, commanding him to live. Shouting and massaging, shouting and massaging, but it’s no good. He is gone, and they realize that the beating heart was only the body doing what it does to adjust to death. In the words of poet Naomi Shahib Nye, “Death comes when you can no longer make a fist.”1

1 Naomi Shihab Nye, “Making a Fist”

SEPARATION

We humans long to know we've made our mark and therefore are living/will have lived a noble or at least worthwhile life, especially if, by so doing, we can leave a curative mark on the very system that has been destroying us and the Earth, and which gives rise to/has infected us with the illness of this same longing. Ironically, of course, is that the purist antidote is to step out of this paradigm altogether and re-inhabit a cyclic, non-linear and intentionally unremarkable life of surrender to and re-absorption by that same generous non-linearity.

The preoccupation with the Mayan moment of 2012, likewise exalted linear time and its mono-directionality. The more we emphasize these marker events, the more we strengthen linear time. Is writing, by its nature, so linear that it is of limited usefulness as a tool that can conjure (and thus inhabit) an alternative ecology?

Is it possible (reasonable? desirable?) – and, if so, how - to (re)forge a dialogic relationship with Life while simultaneously retaining a foothold in the dichotomous, linear, commodified, fear-based, history-bound culture of self-nonself? Can one, ought one, step across that paradigmatic border and arrive intact in the undifferentiated, mythic reality and be sufficiently healed by it to withstand re-infection with modernity? Can one truly inhabit both realms? What kind of mixed message is this of the locus of potency? What is the purpose of our stubborn pursuit of this kind of travel in and out of connection? Do we imagine that we can heal the malignancy of separation and still choose to live within it?

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?”