GRATITUDE

I go back to my office and thank the people working there. I sign some checks and borrow money from my son’s college savings account because I’m broke and overdrawn and still spending because there’s no stopping me now, or the work I am doing, I must finish what I have started so I can live this new life, and I am still going on the assumption that this is the right decision and the right moment and things will work out if I don’t flinch or falter, so on I go.

I drive home and there is a crew with a cherry picker and a chain saw cutting down the neighbor’s tall tree, the one that shields my bedroom window from the streetlight, and the shiny leaves on the half they haven’t cut yet are calling to me, “Help!” I remember that the night before when I walked the dogs I noticed something about that tree in particular and felt blessed that it was there and grateful to it, and now I wish I had stopped and thanked it and asked myself why I had felt that particular something toward that tree at that moment, but I didn’t, and now they’re cutting it down. I go to my studio and burn some sage and cry some more and quickly tell the tree to send its remaining life force into its roots, into the ground, quick as it can. I apologize that it is being destroyed, that it wasn’t warned. I tell it I love it and am grateful to it, and so sad, and the doorbell rings and it’s G. with fabric samples for new pillows on the bench along my dining room table, and the seamstress is coming and I am totally disoriented and not at all in the mood to talk about pillows. I come red-eyed to answer the door and tell her about the tree, the chain saw is still going in the background and we are shouting over it, and right away she tells me two tree cutting stories: The young couple that moved in next door to her cut down the huge old persimmon tree full of persimmons, then the old plum and peach trees as well.

The seamstress arrives and G. says, “Fran here has a tree-cutting story”. And indeed she has, about a tree at her apartment almost as big as the Moreton Bay Fig tree. (A Santa Barbara landmark, planted in 1877, and officially designated as a historic landmark in 1970. It is believed to be the largest of its kind in the United States with a branch spread of more than167 feet, a total height of more than 76 feet and a trunk diameter above the buttress roots of nearly 13 feet.) Fran tells us, “The landlord cut the fig tree as soon as his wife died. She wasn’t there anymore to protect it. It took them a whole week to cut through the thick trunk and get that tree down. It is true that the tree blocked a lot of light and dropped a lot of leaves and nothing grew underneath it, but still…”

My boyfriend arrives and tells me his neighbors have cut down the huge Eucalyptus between their yards because a giant branch is leaning on their electrical wires and into his yard. That night a flock of birds flew around and around, circling and circling, trying to find the tree they had slept in.

I speak with a friend who is writing her story of being fetched in her dreams to become a healer. I am writing about how everything that seems so wildly separate is in fact connected back through time. I am writing about ancestors. Another friend describes how the Wholly Law is written in her body and her life is to live it so that it can be seen. Our friend and teacher, Deena Metzger, is surely chuckling because this is the lived Hypertext she has been coaxing us into and we must write it, we are writing it, as we live it.1

So much of human expression about loving a place is about the human-to-land love. This is outlandish enough for some, but it, too, misses the point. Isn’t it possible that the relationship can be mutual, that the land can and does love us back, and the trees and the ancestors and the spirits, too…? Isn’t it obvious? Ungrateful as we are, the land and the Mystery continue to show us how to love.

1 For information on Deena’s writing, blog, and teaching schedule go to www.deenametzger.net.

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”

RESTORATION

“Until the lions have their own historians,

the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

- Chinua Achebe

Corporations are the hunters glorifying themselves today. Modernity requires that we sever our connection to the natural world and pledge allegiance to the things that money can buy. We are told that the impoverishment of the soul that overcomes us can be healed by consuming the things that corporations make for us, including ‘buying’ the stories they tell us about Nature’s latest diminishment or the inevitability of the wars that profit them. 

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about ecological ‘hot spots’ – pristine, endangered areas that conservationists seek to protect. The strategy is to identify places that are close to 90% degraded, then seek to protect the beleaguered remaining 10%. The assumption seems to be that this is all we can hope to achieve, that we’ll be lucky to attain even this meager success.

But when we’re talking about saving (as if it were up to us) the natural world, is it even correct to ‘strategize’? The definition of the word strategy derives from military activity: Strategy (Greek "στρατηγία"—stratēgia: from stratēg (ós) military commander, general (strat ( ós ) army + -ēgos noun derivative of ágein to lead); meaning, A high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty (Source: wikipedia). Secondary definitions refer to strategy in the context of business or games. 

Do we really want to depend on a military approach to healing our relationship with the natural world? Saving small percentages of the whole does not necessarily save or even protect what remains. Even the most passionate and well-educated researchers do not know the environmental ‘tipping point’ that will cause Gaia’s demise, nor do we understand the deeper function of such things as oil, uranium, gold, diamonds, copper, and other buried substances that surely are not random or inconsequential and so must have a larger purpose, though we have not bothered to wonder what it is. Decisions and actions arising from short-term thinking do not consider long-range consequences nor do they perceive long-range possibilities. And none of us knows what resplendent restoration is possible if we set our hearts on it.

Now more than ever is the time for a wildly expansive, un-practical vision of a natural world fully restored, within an epochal, perhaps millennial time frame. Infinitely better to spend our creative energy initiating the first 500 years of an unabashedly passionate vision of full, unimpeded and uncompromised global ecological and cultural restoration and to offer ourselves to an inclusive global dialogue that will create a global vision of restoration to inform and sustain us through multiple generations of effort. 

If we ‘surrender’ our vision of comprehensive global ecological restoration and settle instead for the struggle to protect tiny percentages of marine and terrestrial habitat, we allow corporations (and the culture which gives them primacy) to set the terms by which nature and nature lovers must abide. Remember that 100 years ago, commercial air travel, computers, and the Internet seemed impossible. Extinctions on the scale we’re seeing now seemed impossible, too. We’re talking here about the ‘surround’ upon which life depends. Do we really want to tell our children that the best we can manage is to save 10% or less of what remains of the intact natural world? 

Within each of us is a passionate love for some place or some being in Nature that will open our throats once again to the daily cooing of gratitude for Life. Once found, that gratitude is our most reliable guide to right action. All is not lost. Let us sing the natural world within and around us back to its fullness.