Litany of Validation

Been thinking about people lately.

Fellow humans. Folks.

With my eyes closed, I imagine us gathered in one place big enough to hold us all, posing for an unseen camera with a 30,000-foot view and somehow, it manages to catch everyone in the frame. I’m this close to using the word “huddled” because the events of the past nineteen months have wrapped us up in an uncomfortable common embrace of vulnerability, leaving no one untouched. I know not everyone will get along, packed together like that. Some are pushing and shoving others out of the way, fistfights break out on the fringes of our raggedy village and brave voices call for peace. But someone is baking bread and the aroma helps soothe our raw nerves if only for a moment.

I open my eyes to look into the faces of each person my imagination conjures up, and I see mostly tired goodness looking for affirmation and just a shred of relief. Laughter may seem an undulating mirage on the horizon, but it’s there and we should keep walking toward it. There’s an ache for the aching to stop, for the walls we’ve built to come tumbling down, but not on top of us. In every face are a thousand stories, piled up reasons for an out of character short-tempered response or a lane change without using a turn signal. It seems distant and cold to insist on an explanation for such behavior, to condemn with “why?” instead of nurturing with “how?” as in “how are you?” Don’t we all need a measure of grace that sees the fragility first, the attempts at doing better, even when we fall short by our own short and harsh yardsticks? How about a little benefit of the doubt instead of instant judgment?

Perhaps we could reorganize our reactions, recalibrate our compassion just a nudge and give each other a nod of understanding and validation, just through the simple act of acknowledgement. What could that look like?

Hey parents of young children, doing your best to let them learn things on their own and also guide them with enough structure to keep them safe while you brace yourself for the rough edge of every critic’s tongue…I see you.

Dear caregivers, who know that the next time you’ll get to sleep in will be after your loved one’s funeral, and so, setting that inevitability aside for now, you get up in the brittle pre-dawn darkness to change linens, empty the bedside commode and open the day’s can of liquid breakfast because that’s what love does…I see you.

Sweet teenagers, on whose shoulders we’ve placed the burden of another generation’s poor judgement and ingenuity alike, with your feet trying to find purchase on the shifting sands of optimism and the overwhelming Unknown…I see you.

School employees, from bus drivers to teachers to cafeteria workers, for the grand enterprise to which you belong—transporting and shaping and feeding the future—sometimes not knowing the difference you’re making…I see you.

Any and all of you in the healthcare continuum, after working your third twelve (sixteen, really) this week, or listening to details you have to (HAVE to) remember from one room to the next while your stomach grumbles for the lunch still waiting in the breakroom fridge…I see you.

Newlyweds, with the big day’s celebration just over your shoulders and the path ahead strewn with the fragrant possibility that yours truly is the Greatest Love Story Ever Told, as you write thank you notes and can’t wipe those happy smiles from your faces…I see you.

Road construction workers, who stand for hours with your “Stop” and “Slow” signs as we drive past you, more or less compliant but still inches from your hardhat-covered head while the sharp acrid smell of fresh tar sinks into your very skin…I see you.

That’s just the start of a long list of individual circumstances begging to be noticed, loads too heavy to carry anymore and losses grieved in the darkest corners of a sagging heart that longs to be touched by the precious gift of someone else’s undivided attention.

I encourage you, dear reader, to add your own acknowledgements to this list, to share what you see, what you notice when you look through the eyes of love, in the hope that it moves us even the slightest bit closer to the exhale we all so desperately need.

This movie ain’t nowhere near over yet.

Saying Goodbye, One Leaf at a Time

From a distance, the farm fields hugging the two lane road from work to home are a soft and inviting tawny featherbed. With my eyes going just a bit unfocused, I imagine falling asleep atop a patch of their caramel-colored downy comfort. It’s also impossible to see the deer as they stand completely still in the middle of it all while I drive by. But up close and with eyes focused (as they should be when you’re driving, mind you), they quickly reveal their true nature—stick-y and poke-y with their dry rattling soybeans and papery corn husks. After hours spent scanning spreadsheets across dual monitors in a windowless office, though, I’m happy to give myself over to the illusion of a giant’s al fresco bedroom.

Autumn is nature’s long, luxurious yawn and stretch before she curls up and settles under the covers of a moth-eaten gray blanket of sky for the next four months, dreaming of spring. She’s earned a rest, after pushing bright red tomatoes out of slender green stems and colorful chard from the composted gifts of kitchen scraps and loamy soil. And all that grass she grew for us to walk through, barefoot! After spending the last six weeks without a lawnmower, Patrick finally tidied up eight or so acres of walking paths and open field gone wild. It took him two days and two levels of mower deck cutting (high first, to take down the bulk of the knee-grazing grassy weeds, and then low, polishing it to a smooth velvety green), transforming the scene from neglected to tended. We walked the full set of paths this morning after breakfast, the first of the season’s leaves slowly drifting down around us, talking as we do about plans for this section of the woods and that stand of multiflora rose in the meadow. In our usual shamelessly ambitious style, we overreach in our minds what it will take to finally clear out the brambles and give those young shagbark hickory saplings a chance. Forgetting we have full-time jobs plus a weekend farmers’ market commitment coupled with aging bones and not-thirty-year-old-anymore muscles, we make the outdoor project to-do list for fall with naive impunity and keep walking. One of us has the presence of mind to point out that whatever we rearrange we will also need to maintain; good to remember that as we look down the well-lit tunnel of our next twenty years.

Even the thought of collecting another couple of decades here makes us go all quiet and humble, filling the space between us with a rich gratitude. That’s eighty more seasons changing, 7300 sets of sunrises and sunsets (add in a few extra days to that for leap years) and forty more half-year property tax payments (a little realism to sharpen the edges of our romantic daydream). All of that too much for our minds to grab onto, it’s enough that we get to walk past a trellis full of vining spinach that needs to be harvested and prepped for the freezer as we make our way back to the house. On a brittle day in February, we’ll thank ourselves for putting in the effort as we sit down to dinner that night.

Summer was extinguished with the flip of a seasonal switch this year, humid and almost unbearable its final day, then cool relief the minute autumn’s equinox slid into place on a sunny Wednesday. A door closed on three months’ worth of warm balmy memories, from building another four raised beds for tomatoes and delicata squash to playing with Bumper in the thin grass of the old fasting site one sunny morning, a patch now encircled by maturing sycamores, red cedars and thickets of blackberry stalks. Did June even happen? It all seems so far away, blurry around the edges and idyllic. A lingering feeling of comfort rises to the surface and takes my face gently in its hands, “even your marvelous imagination, darling, is no match for the reality that surrounds you.” A reassuring lesson in trust.

When the trees are finally bare again, and this year’s harvest of leaves lies pressed and matted beneath my boots, I’m sure I’ll look back on a quiet early autumn Sunday and forget the exact date, but remember holding Patrick’s gloved hand in mine as we climbed the steep slope out of the meadow, our dreams unspooling behind us for the deer to contemplate.

Deep within every farewell is the promise of hello.

This Next Trip Around the Sun

Before driving into work last Friday morning, I’d cued up the 2008 Tony Awards performance of The Lion King’s “Circle of Life” to listen to as the hills and farms slipped past the car windows and beneath the tires. It’s a grand theatrical achievement, with actors becoming gazelles and giraffes right before your eyes while the audience, enchanted, roars to its feet with approving delight. As the performers’ voices reached the song’s arcing crescendo, I had to pull over, blinking back tears. Such an anthem of celebration for all living things, but playing now against a backdrop of my perpetual ache from the last twenty months of disunity, wholly preventable pandemic deaths, violence and vitriol between members of my species and a planet drowning, gasping for air. It all mashed together in a slurry of sadness and despair for the murky path ahead. In that moment by the side of the road, I recognized my grief for what it was—the loss of connection, the absence of regard for others, of civility and kindness. All of it touched tenderly by the wellspring of hope that a simple Broadway company of actors conjured up with stilts on their legs and zebra masks on their faces. I’ve watched this performance several times, but it sliced through something different that morning and I’m still unpacking it.

When I arrived at the office, the last thing I wanted to do was check emails.

But check them I did, and returned a couple of phone calls, all the while registering a lingering sense of unfinished business for which I could not find the words. Thankfully, for the past twelve years, I’ve worked in a setting where silence is an acceptable and healthy response for what the mind can’t grab onto (I also have an office with a door that shuts, a “do not disturb” button on the desk phone and colleagues whose demands that day were on the light side).

Earlier last week I told Patrick it would be fun if we danced more. It’s not like anyone would see us, in case either of us felt self-conscious (which we don’t) and movement of any kind is good for the cardiovascular system, so hey, just a suggestion, honey. Patrick’s primary way of “cutting loose” is his art, his wood-turning happy place just steps from the back door to the mud room. His studio is a long pre-fab wooden barn-style shed perched on the ridge with front doors that he can fling open to pull in the breezes. He works always with a soundtrack of the most eclectic mix of music threading its way across the grass and down into the meadow. It’s gotta be that loud because the lathe, the bandsaw, the air compressor all compete for his attention while he’s wearing his noise-muffling headphones and dual-filter anti-dust mask. One evening he stepped out for a break just as I was crossing the yard to check on him and the music playing was a Caribbean-style island beat. Without a word to each other, we picked up the drums’ rhythm and let loose right there beneath the towering silver maple with moves neither of us knew we had in us. Smiling, hopping from one foot to another, arms reaching and hands pushing against the air between us, we danced like no one could see us until the song and our moves resolved into one final unified note. The sweet laughing smile on his face is an image I plan to hold onto for some time to come.

I don’t mind the hills and valleys of an emotionally-rich existence. As the song goes, “from the day we arrive on the planet and, blinking, step into the sun”, we’re continuously plumbing the depths of our feelings’ vast well, pulling them to the surface for all sorts of occasions and testing the elasticity of our relationships’ tolerance of such expression. Those who can receive what we offer them or who can handle being drenched with our episodic outbursts are keepers; we move on from those who can’t and wish them no ill. We are born into a world that does not promise a smooth flat ride. If we’re lucky we find teachers who show us how to navigate the bumps, the twists, the hairpin curves and bring snacks to eat between gas stations. The last year and a half’s relentless slog through one heartache after another was heavier than I’d allowed. Watching a theater filled with people applauding, singing, looking for all the world as if they were indeed connected to one another, if only for just the duration of that grand performance, was such a stark contrast to the past 20 months….and not a surgical or cloth mask in sight, that telltale reminder that this current movie we’re in ain’t over yet, not by a mile. Who we will be on the other side of it all remains to be seen. I pray fiercely for the dormant seeds of resilient love to push through the compost of our collective grief.

I don’t know what the next year will bring, but if that sun keeps coming up for the next 365 days, I plan to laugh and cry and dance my way through as best I can.

After all, today’s my birthday. What better gift can I give myself than a promise to keep trying?

(Author’s note: the beautiful artwork in the photo accompanying this reflection is a collaborative effort between artist Becki at Old Mr. Bailiwick’s and my husband Patrick. Becki crafted the leather dancing skeleton and Patrick wood-burned and painted the frame. The latter is on its way to bring finished; just couldn’t wait to show you.)

Lessons From a Spider's Apocalypse

I’m sixteen years old, lying half in, half out of my sleeping bag on the dock at our family’s cottage on Marble Lake in Quincy, Michigan. By the glow of a July full moon, an orb-weaving spider is connecting one of the dock posts to the rough wooden edge of a plank with a diagonally dropped silken strand, on her way to filling in the space with that familiar spoked wheel design the night’s gnats can’t resist. I’m lucky enough to catch this one-arachnid show from just after the overture, and don’t plan to budge until she’s settled into the sticky spiraled center, upside down and patiently waiting for dinner to arrive (you do stuff like this when you’re sixteen, because you’re romantic and unemployed and on vacation with your parents). I’m also grateful to not roll around much when I sleep; a night spent on the dock of a marble quarry-turned-lake can be a rather wet affair if you’re prone to acting out those flying dreams you have.

It’s one of the most cherished memories from my youth, watching with unbridled curiosity and gathering wide-eyed respect the painstaking process of such an effort from start to finish, knowing that by the first lights of dawn most of what she spun would be shredded and torn, and she’d have to make a new one for her next meal. I have never worked so hard to put food in my belly; I doubt I ever shall.

In the past year’s more or less daily walks, I’ve clumsily barreled through at least a dozen of these gossamer creations, taking a few of them full on the face like a mask, blinking madly to disentangle my eyelashes from the gluey threads that crisscrossed my face. Always regretting it, always wincing because I know what it took to construct those meal-catchers. I don’t know if the web’s architect was dragged along for the rest of my steps or let go to save herself, grumbling at my overlarge thoughtlessness. I only recall deep regret that had I been more attentive, we all might have come through that leg of the morning’s journey with both of our universes intact and unbothered. If spiders use profanity, the air across the field is thick with it when I’m out and about, guaranteed.

The topic of impermanence has come up a lot in my conversations with Patrick lately, and it covers considerable ground between the sublime and the ridiculous. I suppose we’re trying to make sense of the growing whack-a-mole dangers and catastrophes continuously bubbling their way through our daily lives (sometimes it’s just not possible to ignore the news) and find even a modicum of consolation that both pleasure and pain will exhaust themselves with cyclical regularity. The trick is where we choose to place our philosophical starting point (so far, that’s still a moving target. No “once and for all” yet). We’re both learning to shift our outlook toward the more optimistic, with slowly plodding results. It’s just so hard to trust your current vantage point when threats are flung at you fast and thick from every direction.

And then we see the fields strewn with webs of all manner and style—the spoked wheel ones that are sagging with dew but still intact (there’s a lesson for ya); others resemble gauzey fairy hammocks and don’t appear to have ensnared a single stray or distracted mosquito, not one, in the dark expanse of night. Small and humble, big as Thanksgiving serving platters, snagged on a nearby iron weed stalk, it makes no difference. As the sun rises and sends its shafts of light down through them all, it’s nothing but enchantment and other-worldliness. We can’t look away and so we don’t. We know most of these creations and their owners will be gone for good while we go about chopping kale for our evening salad or sweeping leaves from the front porch. It’s easy to forget they’re out there, these little relatives of ours, setting their tiny legs and instincts to spinning another one from scratch. Again. How they don’t explode in anger and frustration I’ll never know.

And that’s the difference between spiders and me. But if they’re still willing to get up tomorrow and teach me, the least I can do is show up for class.