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 SOIL REMEMBERS 1

The soil of Liberia remembers the taste of the ancestors whose placentas were buried at birth under the trees, uniting the bodies of people with the trees and the land. The trees and the rain remember the taste of a land that could not be bartered or sold, paved or mined or moved away from. It is not the same as the taste of dismemberment and grief, of sewage and fear, not the same as the empty soil where birdless trees are struggling. In this soil are the nephews that were sacrificed to ensure peace, buried alive, one in a generation, an offering from people whose word for sacrifice means to give more than you can. The offering is not meant to placate an insatiable or bloodthirsty Spirit. It is an offering of themselves to each other that delivers them into the hands of the mysterious forces that keep them indivisible and safe. How then, can it recognize these children forced into it at the point of a gun or a knife, their blood drained and stolen for purposes never intended or demanded by the gods? The soil remembers the old times when the villages that sacrificed a nephew were not touched by war. Because of this, a boy whose name we do not know, in a small village not far from the capital, may have kept the killing at bay. They say the story is true, that it really happened.

Here is how I imagine it: On the day of the offering, at the center of the village, is the mother of the boy. The whole circle watches, hushed and humbled, terrified by their gratitude as the silence swallows him on their behalf. They say that everyone in the village – except the mother - helped to dig the grave, even the toddlers who are too small or the ones who are too old to understand exactly what is happening. They say that each person removed one shovelful, or one fistful, and added it to the common pile, until they had opened a chasm that was wide enough to hold the end of a life, all the days that lead up to it and all the days that would never come after. Perhaps this is because everyone knows that in order to meet the magnitude of the offering, everyone must recognize that they are responsible. This is why the grave became a sacred spot in the center of the village, where the people built a sacred palaver hut so the councils of elders can gather and, before they speak of weighty matters, they remember where they are.

What are the appropriate questions here? Are they: Who, exactly, was that child? What actually happened? Was it foreseen? How did the dreams inform them and what did the animals know?

Each person watching knows that boy and must now relinquish who he has been to them: The young men offer their companion, the child who was their playmate, with their memories of playing marbles together in the late afternoon heat before the fireflies appeared, a game played in the last light, and the way he became so absorbed in the game that the world fell away as they watched him move noiselessly on his haunches, fast as a shadow, artfully flicking his marbles into the dust.

The town chief offers the lanky, quiet boy who used to loiter by the teashop, listening to the men as they worried about the war, deliberating whether their Christian god could save them or if He had brought it upon them, and, if so, for what reason? Had they offended Him? Or had they offended the ancestors? Did they offend one by honoring the other and did the honoring of one inevitably mean the other had to be destroyed? Who or what could they call upon to solve the riddle of such suffering? What were they to teach their children about the order of things in a world such as this?

The uncle offers the memory of the boy learning to prepare the council tea for the elders: the small cup that barely fits in the palm of one’s hand. The ancient kettle, smudged and dented, as the uncle lifts it from the fire and fills the cup. As he has seen his uncle do countless times, the boy raises the cup above his head and tilts his left hand until the tea flows out in a long, steaming curve that disappears into the cup held in his right hand. Then the right cup up and the left one down. Raising one, pouring into the other, now closer together, now farther apart, shrinking and stretching the thick brown arc of sweet, scalding tea, never spilling a drop, not even at first, as if he had been born to pour this tea in this way, as if could conjure it even without a kettle, a young Zeus practicing with tea until he can pour lightning between his hands. Teacup to teacup, palm to palm, he pours the possibilities back and forth until the tea is ready and his mind is made up. As he offers the first cup to his uncle, he informs him that he wishes to be the one who is sacrificed, buried alive for the sake of the village, in the center of town, as it used to be done before, for peace. Is this how it happened?

What are the questions here? Are they: What actually happened? Did anything change afterwards? How do they speak of it now? And, Is this real or is it a story, and what’s the difference? Whether it’s a story or it really happened, what do we make of this?

The boy’s mother does not offer her consent. She does not give her permission and refuses to relinquish a single memory. The mother can only bring herself to take a pinch of dirt form the pile and sprinkle it into the pot of rice that she must cook for the common meal. She will force herself to swallow just one bite so that she can carry a grain of him inside of her always.

Even the birds must relinquish him, the echo and answer conversations of his boyhood. The dog he has secretly been feeding will expect no more rice. The shaman who dreamed this is secretly begging the spirits, and God, that he will never again receive such a vision in this lifetime.

DEATH TOO EARLY

Last year my former nephew died (nephew by marriage, former by divorce) at the age of 41, leaving a wife and three small children, ages 2, 5, and 7. About three years ago he joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, where something in the water may or may not have caused a rare form of liver cancer that is less rare among young men of Middle Eastern descent and particularly young men in Iraq. It is mysterious if or how he could have contracted the disease while in Iraq, as he was primarily confined to the military base where the water is carefully filtered. Nonetheless, it is a troubling coincidence. It is this oddity that attracts my attention, and I wonder whether his decision, his insistence, on this choice, was driven by a deeper call than patriotism, adventure, politics, rebellion, duty, or defiance. It reminds me of a strange story that I heard years ago while visiting Hawaii. I was with my children, who were 6 and 8 at the time, on a tiny motorboat, heading out to a snorkeling spot offshore, a famous submerged remnant of an extinct volcano that is invisible from the surface or the shore. The caldera had a strange magic, located seemingly in the middle of the ocean far from land. Inside it, the snorkeling is beautiful, the water warm and shallow and so very clear. I remember swimming to the edge of it and slightly beyond, the rush of suddenly finding myself in extremely deep water, inky and teeming with mystery beyond the visible world. The sloping outer edge was a yellowy pale white tinged with blue as if seen through a blue lens (as, in effect, it was). The root of the caldera faded, then disappeared into blue nothingness. On our way to and from it, sea turtles flitted like shadows beneath the boat.

The skipper told us that some months back he had had a client who was a middle-aged woman who hired him to take her snorkeling. On the way to the caldera, they saw some kind of disturbance in the water in the near distance, and she asked him to take her closer to have a look. He told her that it looked to be a feeding shark, likely a tiger shark, and said he didn’t think it wise to go any closer. She insisted, and he took her there. As they neared the roiling water, she jumped in and disappeared. My nephew’s insistence on joining the Marines has a similar quality to it, a quality of leaping off the boat of safety, common sense, the urgings of family and friends, driven by what seems to me to be the irresistible arrival of fate.

What is the landscape of each of our fates? For example, that the seed of a certain disease finds us somewhere, and develops into a rare cancer? That we dive off a boat in Hawaii and disappear? And what of the inner landscape of these fates? Liver, breast, mind.

However and whyever it happened, my former nephew’s death had an unexpected effect on me. Though I hadn’t seem him in more than twenty years, I wept for three days. The only way to sleep was to create a nest of quilts and pillows on the floor by the window where I could see the moon and the night sky. I phoned my ex-husband, with whom I have not spoken more than once in the last decade and we talked for an hour. I wrote to my former sister in-law and told her that I wanted to plant a grove of trees in Danny’s honor. She wrote back, a sweet and soulful note. I spoke to someone at the Arbor Day Foundation and learned that they plant memorial seedlings for $1 each in national forests and state parks that have been devastated by fire, in groves one can visit. A snapshot of my former nephew’s legacy: moonlit nights spent weeping beside a curtain of stars; three children under ten without a father; a young widow; a grieving family; young Iraqi men dead of the same inexplicable disease… and a hundred trees near Yellowstone reforesting a hill devastated by fire.

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?”