Mid Pandemic Check-in

How habituated we have become to the pandemic life. Masks hanging from the turn signal rod in the car, always at the ready, masks in the handbag, masks folded with dog poop bags at the ready, in the pockets when I do the laundry. 

Once or twice we have dined out in public indoors. There was a moment when it seemed we could give up the masks. We ate by the door, eyes upon all who entered, hearing the alcohol fueled laughter with the dismay of having heard too many times that laughter and singing spreads the virus more effectively than casual conversation. 

Some time ago I stopped checking the statistics every day. Then I stopped listening to the talk and separated myself from social media. Now my only reminders that we are still living in the time of plague are when I leave home. I leave home nearly daily. This is a big change. 

There are parks here where we now live. There are vast outdoor spaces dedicated to matters of eating and mingling. Some call the revamping of the center of the city gentrification. I experience the change from boarded up old motor lodges to white stucco tap room and international food court, all outdoors, as homage to place, as acknowledging human requirements and preferences. 

This part of town is a hodgepodge of style, decrepitude, grand older houses with venerable trees and gardens, and the renovated, rebuilt, and newly constructed dense residence structures with too few parking places. The purpose is to encourage public transportation use. 

Here in Albuquerque it is called ART. Rapid transit one imagines. All I see is Art. The Art district. I feel myself to be within the Art District. Behind our house upon our property is a never finished addition to the garage. It looks like part of the garage but is more like a barn, inside. Or it used to be, before the moss green concrete floor got poured. The millions of spider webs are next to go. Cable studio lighting, a heater cooler mini split, drywall, and voila, an art studio. We have a nifty air purifier that is sized just right for the space. Does that make it covid safe? Doubtful. Everything is doubtful. Safety from virus is a matter of personal practice, wearing the masks.   Choosing the outdoors to linger. 

Perhaps the best part is that the studio has an outdoors. Already, an outdoor room, with a bar and barbecue and sink, a fire table, seating for a small group.  There is an old elm. I read up on elms. They are a tree people are not encouraged to plant. This one is so far past its prime that it is potentially near the end of its life. It has dead branches. I would prefer an oak, a sycamore, a cottonwood. But, such thoughts are best abandoned.  This elm provides beautiful shade, and makes the entire back area an expression of Bosque beauty. 

Soon there will be a pond back there, and a hot tub surrounded by a wooden platform with container plants upon it. This is a time of becoming. 

Were it not for the pandemic, would this chapter have been inserted into our lives? There is no answer. Like the weird twist of fate that took us all indoors before it thrust us all outdoors, what prompts we take to action are not to be anticipated. Like earthquakes in other places, these large events happen upon the earth stage, and we take them in stride. For me, better without the opinions of the world strewn like autumn leaves during high winds. 

The Women Writing

 The Women Writing

Here they are on the edge of the world 

Perhaps you see the crumbling cliff on which they sit

leaning on bent palms

coconuts waiting to drop

precarious as all existence

They are finding their voices

words coming at them from that soft clattering cadence of rattling fronds

You can imagine the azure sea glistening with sunlight on the curls of the tide 

You can see the green leaves and grey brown trunks

With the color changed to sepia as with images of old, you can barely catch the ocean breeze and fragrance of distant plumeria in the image

These women writing will not be hearing the critical voice, the telling them how to capture their audience

Those who listen will hear their authentic emotive song as the sailors once heard the sirens 

compelled to the rocks

shoals that never learned indifference 

rocks of fate upon your shore itself

#napowrimo2021

Moirai

 Moirai

A young girl is told the facts of life, given to understand the nature of the spindle, the rumination of the thread, finally, the arbitrary scissors that end it. 

In her dreams, she sees the length of thread spinning out for her, how it stretches into the endless sky, thusly quieting the deepening hole in her gut.

The randomness of fate assures her of a broad path, a trapeze of a life, swinging broadly between achievement and ruin, love and despair. 

Shifting her gaze from sad eyed lambs to children in cages, from tumors on sea turtles to arrays of flying fish breaking out of the ocean, the idea the world should make sense in her terms lays out upon the sand. All the ideas shimmer in the ocean augmented light. A wave comes, and sweeps them away. Ideas lost in the ocean.

Time rattles on like a freight train, humming on the tracks before and after the rail cars flash by. The long threads of very long lives, the short threads of those who vanish before they finished what it seems they had been meant to do, and the rest. You see the reasons with those on the ends, the careless daring before the snip, the stray illness that comes from nowhere, the elderly demise where the senses have been stilled. What then of those cuts in the middle of it all, those lives snipped off like fabric cut in the wrong place, proof of the wild nonsense that is in fact in charge of our lives. 

Fifth, maybe of tequila

Facebook is unthinking and uncritical of what it throws in our path from the times before.  We can count on whatever we did a year or five before popping into our path again, in all its colors.

Today, this:

This evening as I went through my end of daylight routine I reflected upon how strange it is. One highlight is putting my hand in the trough of baby koi and having them swim into my hand and loll around in my palm before I turn out the light. 

Inside, I am treated to the sounds of guitar practice. There are more things for me to do, but they will wait for morning. Dinner is over. It was early. 

I hold something in my heart for my friends in the ICU in Honolulu. It is a well of hope. There are many more words for the sea of thoughts and feelings that come with waiting to know which way fate will twist, once it has struck a critical blow. There is no calling in favors from the universe of chance, no making deals. I do not know what moves among us that some experience as the divine. 

Are we each here for a reason? Do we have a unique purpose, something we are given to live out with grace? I do not know. 

There is a phrase in Philippians that I love when I rework it into my own language, the language of what I feel to be my authentic self. We have it within our selves to accept a peace that surpasses human conscious understanding. It is within the embrace of this peace that we can keep moving when the world we thought we knew changes course in wild ways.

This is not anything I would repost there. But, it recalls a flood of memories. 

The baby koi were divided between the pond and a friend. Now even the pond is in the past, under the care of others who bought our home. They tell us they were moved by the pond to claim the house. 

The sounds of guitar do fill the house of an evening, although tonight the plan is to head over to Kaktus for the flamenco show. There is snow on the ground, and the temperature out there just now is 44.  It will drop into the 30s during the evening. The show is out of doors. Maybe too cold for us. 

Our friends in ICU. It was a peculiar accident. They had been in Kona at a beachfront rental with friends from the mainland. There was a rock wall between the house and the water, a little sandy beach, and all day long everyone had been up and down. My friend was getting a tray of pupus ready for before dinner snacking, and looking around for her husband, didn't see him. He was lying on the ground at the bottom of the wall, his head smashed on the lava. Apparently he had slipped scaling the wall, on the steps, and tumbled backward. He could never say what happened. 

The doctors warned our friend her husband might never be anything like he had been before. He would suffer some amount of permanent brain damage, and how severe was an unknown. But likely he would need constant care and supervision. It was a daunting prognosis. There may have been something he wrote out explaining what he would want done in the event of a crisis like this. Oft times people say, do not bring me back. I would have said that. 

But if there was such a document, it was nowhere to be found, and everything went into saving him. It took hours upon hours, but he was airlifted to Queens trauma on Oahu, and placed in a medical induced coma, then allowed to come out of it on his own. 

It all took a long long time. Weeks and months, and slowly he returned. There were tedious gaps in his full recovery. He was not interested in eating, for example. He had a tube, and seemed content to continue to get his nourishment that way. Food held no interest. It was hard to imagine this man with whom we had had dinner in restaurants, at people's houses, at his house, the man with whom we had shared food above all else, separated entirely from the urge to eat. He had to be cajoled into taking mouthfuls of anything. It was almost more frightening than when he had been unconscious and it was unclear whether he would wake up. 

Eventually, he began to eat again. He took part in conversations. He did not seem to grope for words or ideas, and was present. His efforts at everything however were dampened. His enthusiasm was not as great, his joie de vivre lessened. And then over the months, life continued to improve, and brought more happiness. It is a long way back from a severe traumatic brain injury. 

What I take from this personally is a range of ideas. One is that I am still thinking about how to word what I want done if I have a brain injury. "Heroic measures" were taken for him. Had they not been, he would surely have died. Had the measures failed, he would have lived on but not conscious or not fully conscious, disengaged. Is he the same person who fell? His wife said yes, immediately. What matters in this life has everything to do with the people who love us, the people we love. I knew that already, but perhaps not in this depth, or with this level of conviction. 

On a more public level, the things that matter are sometimes nearly ruined for us. The state of our nation is for some just fine, and for others, we perceive a well of putrescence. The past of racism and sexism is laid out like a cadaver, but still squirming. Ageism, something you would think would be rampant, has all kinds of ugly tendrils but the government leadership seems firmly in control of old white men. Something is rotten. 

So taking all this together, as the world changes about us in wild ways, we keep our feet solidly on the ground, and make our lives and the lives of those around us just as solid and good. We let them do that, according to their abilities, and we offer our hands to help as needed. We accept help as needed. It is all so much more complex and wild than we ever imagined.

Addendum: As fate would have it, about an hour after I wrote this, I heard from a good friend that her sister lay in a coma, across the ocean. A simple infection, untreated, resulted in sepsis. No one was there to help and she passed out, and inhaled vomit. She lay on the floor 30 hours before being found. She had no document on file with instructions. She is now comatose on life support. What this means for her family is that those who want to gather before she is gone will be able to do so. They will be able to meet up, have conversations in the room with her, experience their goodbyes.

Life, death, and that realm that lies between life and death do go on. A 91 year old man, an actor, on his way to a performance, stepped between cars on a busy California street and was struck by two different cars and killed. It mattered to me how this happened, just as it mattered to me how my friend's sister came to be comatose, and how my friend came to be so severely injured. Today my husband remarked about what joy it brings him to maintain the beauty and integrity of our home. These sorts of details tell us the story of how and why, not the story of "that".

I am ready now to focus upon plans for our next venture into the wild. Maybe all this is to be careful to keep the road map going while there is no internet, to bring a tow rope and shovel, and plenty of water and blankets since it is still winter. 

Four::

The clouds over the Sandias speak of snow, yet here in the lower levels it is rain warm and dry beneath the quilted gray sky. Ulf paces and pauses and paces some more, needing to get out. Once out, he sniffs and pokes about. Whatever his needs, they seem to be bids for breathing the outside air. I understand this. Inside the dryness is sometimes like breathing cotton, taking the fibers of the air in rather than air itself.

I used to like sleeping outside.  That was never exactly under the stars. All that openness kept me awake. But I like to feel the air moving around me. Screens are good. Lots of screens. A screen porch, where the outside is just there.  Or in a tent with screen windows and doors. You feel the air and hear everything but this little fabric skin keeps you safe. From insects I guess, although for me, the feeling of being protected was deep and nameless.

The first time I ever slept on a screen porch was among kind strangers in Moline Illinois. They had a screen porch on the Mississippi river. I had a hankering to go across the country. My friends all had gone to Europe for the summer months. I needed to escape the everyday and join in the adventure. There was a ride board, someone driving from Berkeley to Massachusetts who wanted riders to share the gas cost and respite for the driver. I was not quite a car snob, but it was a BMW and that sounded like a car that was going to make it those thousands of miles without breaking down. I was in.

One of the other riders had an aunt and uncle who lived in Moline. Either this couple were the coolest ever, and possibly that was the case, or it had been arranged in advance. But we showed up, four kids from the west coast with sleeping bags, and they put us up on the screen porch. They also took us out in the motor boat on the river under the full moon.

On that same journey I saw fireflies for the first time, in Lincoln, Nebraska, where flags were outside all the houses for the 4th of July. It was a sight to behold, block after block with red, white and blue banners decorating the verandas. It seemed like such an innocent love of country, a pride of belonging to a time and place where Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers could be brought to life by an entire community. Where I grew up, it was all about the fireworks. We would head out to the shopping center in the station wagon. There would be a soup pot full of popped corn, a bottle of root beer and some plastic glasses. The tailgate of the car would go down, and between the explosions you could hear everyone at once going "OOOOOHHHHH!!!!". I remember wondering if there was a script of some kind the adults had, letting everyone know the sound to make.

Today we stack rocks. I make a mistake and do one tall stack at the edge of the down slope, and it tumbles toward the road way below. All the rocks stop short of coming to rest on the road, and I realize setting these spires on the edge above may be a bad idea. There is no reason for them, other than to balance boulders. I lift the largest ones I can manage, and play with them, edge upon edge, until they are steady, then add a third. Today, it is threes only. Most of the snow is melted away from the shadowed side of the arroyo, and yesterday temperatures stayed in the 50s in the afternoon. Winter will have another go or two here in the high desert before it is done for the season, and those are the days I anticipate most, the days of the fluffy snow. I can never get enough of it falling through the air. It doesn't fall so much as swirl and dance. High desert snow is like little girls in full skirts, turning and turning.

These are the days of impeachment hearings in the senate. Someday people will ask, why was the country so divided? How is it possible that enough people believed in the righteousness of a man so intent upon fostering the divisions? How could the same people who elected a progressive man of color turn around in just a few short years and elect a man so crude? But for now, there are many divisions. The other party, the Democrats, who could put an end to the madness, are also victims of the scourge of divisiveness perpetuated by social media. Their weakest candidate, the so called Democratic socialist, an elderly crotchety man who believes in social justice but no more so than the rest of the field of candidates, is supported by a cadre of non-persons with social media accounts who publish divisive stories designed to cause people to dislike others. Ironically, they are the same non-persons or designed by the same group in eastern Europe who fostered and fomented the campaigns to discredit the 2016 progressive candidates and promote distrust and hatred. Does anyone who supports him give credit to these revelations?  Most people think they know the future now. They thought during the 2016 elections that the first woman would be elected president of the United States, and they think today that impeachment will not proceed to removal from office. I watch with only the knowledge that the future is malleable, unknowable to those caught in time, mutable, bearing surprises no one can predict.

I am not pretending to predict anything now.

There is no such thing as being right, in the usual sense of right or wrong, a sense we all agree upon. There are points of view. This is not a play on morality. They said ten years ago, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. The world today is torn like paper along divisions where interests are represented one way and then another way. You can take up the banners of any side and find arguments to support it.  The subdivisions are becoming ever more numerous, and tribes keep forming and reforming. We are more and more like sand. When the tribes are so small no one can define them, we achieve unity.

For those living within them, these are harsh times. Here I am, having left my island of sanity having recognized there was no such place. Some of us feel it is midnight in the garden of good and evil, midnight at new moon. We all carry cell phones that light up, and which way is the light turned? Out into the world, or up into our faces?

Tonight shall we sleep under the stars? It is almost warm enough.

third: Stepping Out

There were the years when we were young.  We were never all that young together, but young enough that half our lives, and more, still lay ahead. There was no way then to know that, only the suspicion that we were just starting out on a grand adventure.

So much intentionality went into every facet of what we became, from before we ever crossed paths, all the way on. He, the one I had sought for so very long, had also been seeking. ISO. That was the acronym in those days. In search of. There is power in the search. The search defines the path, the search finds the path, the search adheres to the path.

There was something he did, and something I did, to bring us to each other. It was deliberate. I have amused myself from time to time wondering if we could have done it another way. I had thought perhaps I could meet someone if I went to a night school class in wine tasting. One evening I walked by one. The classroom door was open, and the room was full of men and women. There must have been fifty people jammed into that small space. I knew right away that half of them were seeking life partners or at minimum a casual date. The others, who knows. Maybe they just wanted to taste wine in an uninteresting room with dozens of other people, rather than drive a half hour to the wine country.

Early on I discovered my choice in men had regularly gone to Barnes and Noble, thinking he might meet an attractive woman among the books. I myself had patronized another bookstore, in another town, and never even thought of meeting someone there.

What was it about him, this one man out of hundreds or even thousands whose path crossed mine in a meaningful enough way that we connected and resonated like a perfect chord?

Let me go back farther, back to the man who fathered my daughters. When I met him, I was lost in the forest of untethered ideas and emotions that sought expression like fireworks. I told myself that the only way I could meet anyone who would matter at that point in my life was if he showed up at my door. Sure enough, he did that. He knocked on my door, sent by my landlord to cause mischief. Truly. I had pushed my landlord away when he tried to kiss me while screwing in a lightbulb. Yes, exactly that.

When later I set about to find someone who would go farther with me than the door of my flat, and the door of my bedroom, there were just a few little wishes. He must recognize me. How would he do that? He would see my spirit was from the mountains, in my love of tall trees, enormous trees of great girth and immense age. I would recognize him, as he would have burnished his soul with musicianship. He would be painted in laughter and wit. He would love the immense outdoors with passion and bring skill to his love. And so it came to be.

The years when we were young were the beginning. We each started from a place in the world defined by having had children with people we could not continue to live with. Having made those choices, both to braid our lives with people with whom we created both ribbons of unhappiness and progeny, we lived in a continuity of distress. The simple act of choosing someone new and a brand new set of circumstances, with intentionality, lifted us both out of that distress. There were still obligations to those prior life partners to maintain a conversation, because we had children to parent, and those obligations were fraught with the tensions that had undone the marriages. The children that bound us to our earlier choices deserved every affirmative act we could each bring forward. The children were in our future an we were in their future, but not in the way we were each other's future.

Things I thought I knew then I did not know at all. One most important thought was that if we could model a successful, loving relationship then our children would be equipped to do the same as adults. They saw both, the stressed bondage of uneven partnering, where like two pieces of different puzzles the adults do not go through everyday life with an emotional bond, and the loving togetherness of adults who recognize each other and respect and honor each other. Which way did they break, our progeny? Not in any way we could have anticipated.

In the years when we were young, we learned we could not change the world but we could design our corner of it to be whatever we wanted it to be. I moved lighter weight things, plants and rocks, and my man moved boulders. He moved entire sections of the earth and transformed them from the chaos of nature or the flattened rubble of human interference into living dioramas. I have seen this only a few times in my life. The Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco is one such place. An immense indoor garden is designed in a series of rooms. You walk from the cool foggy city into a tropical paradise where lotus flowers are constantly in bloom and ferns as tall as houses line the walkways. Butterflies flit through in colors and designs that call to mind parade floats. Butchart Gardens in British Columbia is another form of paradise, or the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Monet's gardens. There is a theme here, the garden. The secret garden. There are many parks, many glorious gardens. And there are the ones, the gardens not designed mainly according to mathematics and proportion, but to convey an idealistic scene of a land where magic is afoot. This is what we did together, eventually. Sometimes he would take up the wand, sometimes I would. Together we sought the places we could begin with, and transform.

Eventually it seemed we would slow down, and as it turned out, we could not, would not. It was as if we were powered by a fierce wind of change. Now here, being here now, I use google earth to wander the gardens we created, and the gardens those who came after us tore apart. There are thousands upon thousands of photographs I made that form a record of places that are behind someone else's gates, now.

second :: Walk to the labyrinth

Rather than traces of snow on the deck this winter morning, frost has formed a sparkling veil over everything. Sunrise colors paint the sky, a watercolor wash of pink above the horizon. Oddly it is the northern horizon, slightly bearing west, long low winter rays above the mesas. 

When first visiting these parts, it was those mesas that drew my imaginings. When the light was right, striations upon them glowed red. When the weather produced some sort of extreme desert cloud effects, shadows of them added textures of light and dark, and the sky became a canvas of sapphire blue and brilliant white. My camera and I spent many sets of hours seeking the byways with the biggest views. 

Today belongs again to my Hawaiian crow. It would be wondrous if it made another appearance, here, where I am studying the photos from yesterday. Seeking out images of crows in flight to match the tilt of wing, signature variances in motion, I watch again and again for any nuance.

Kiwi would know the shapes and movements of the crow in flight. I could send her the video via email, hoping she will see it amidst the dozens of clamorous outreach pieces that inundate us every few hours. She is not a fan of electronic communication but it is what we have at hand for this purpose. 

Kiwi is a world renowned avian expert. She has spent years upon years as a nomad, following the birds and recording her observations. We became friends in Hawai’i through my daughter, who fell in love with her. By then Kiwi had traded her gypsy ways for a one room house in the rainforest.  All she had wanted was a sleeping platform but regulations forced her into a few hundred square feet.  She had acquired a lot one of the neighbors had hand cleared over the years, making a forest path several hundred feet long, lined with nursery logs of fallen ohia inter planted with native lobelia and mamaki. Ohelo berries grew on vines that stretched into the canopy, the food of the endangered nene rarely seen amidst the numbered streets of the subdivision. 

It is a bright day, and the frost has vanished. No mystical mist today. Ulf waits patiently for his morning sniff about. He is old now and no longer the rowdy beast barely controlled on leash. He stays close when we go out, running ahead then stopping and waiting for me to catch up before he takes off again. 

He stops to scratch the ground. As many times as we have walked together I am uncertain what causes him to want to uncover something below the surface. Is there an underground creature that has tunneled beneath the path? Is it a trace of scent from a paw? 

A shard of pottery pokes out of the dirt near the scratches Ulf has made. I used a stick of juniper to prod it fully into view. It looks to be an old piece of Sandia Pueblo pottery, but rather than the usual reddish clay with eggshell and black motifs, it has a faint white wash with a blue gray design. The shape suggests a beak design. Maybe it was a figure of a bird. 

A flat boulder nests at the side of the path. I prop the pottery shard there and we continue to walk. All along this path are rocks with other rocks placed upon them. I have done that, for no particular reason. No one comes here but Ulf and me. I know this because ours are now and always now the only footprints in the sandy dirt or in the snow or sometimes the mud. We see coyote scat now and then. Rabbits. 

A dusky grouse flies so close to my face I can feel the air moved by its wings as it circles into the arroyo. Ulf lunges toward it then stops short and turns with his tongue hanging off the side of his mouth. Once upon a time, he pulled birds out of the air, but rarely in front of me. He knew I didn’t like him hurting the birds. But he never understood that the captured torn carcasses also let me know what he was doing. 

We continue on to the center of the path. We have been constructing a labyrinth there. I carry the design sketch in my jacket pocket. Some days I add three or four rocks, some days only one. There are pieces of jasper I have brought in, serpentine, banded river sandstone, red rocks with mica sparkling on the surface. Others are simple flint from the hillside. Chunks of obsidian and textured lava from the quiet volcanoes that surround the area sometimes turn up on our journeys and end up here. I want to bring back a boulder from the far north, marked with lichen, for the centerpiece. How to move it is a mystery I have yet to work out. The size I wish for is outside my capacity. I do not wish to seek help as this is my solitary project. A meditation. 

We return to a breakfast of poppyseed strudel and cappuccino. Making morning coffee is as close as I get to a ritual ceremony any more. I used the notebook kept by the cappuccino wizard, specifying the grams to use, the timing, temperatures and valves and the feel of the thing. I used the notebook until I could just do it, each cup of coffee being like the one before it, finished with a swirl of pourable foam. He showed me how to do it, but I never had to. The coffee was his morning ritual. I made the toast and eggs. 

It is not useful to wish for anything to be different, to be as it was. As you can see the mornings are still beautiful, the birds keep us company, Ulf takes me out into the chill. The labyrinth is coming along.