Susie and the Large Fire

Last week I had two days off and a serious need to be outside. Despite a sketchy weather forecast, I took a chance and planned a quick, one night camping/hiking trip. For safety reasons, I told a good friend where I would be and what time I expected to be back. I intentionally picked a place I had never been before but one not too far away, a place that, according to all reports I heard, was little-used and out of the way. That turned out to be true of the hiking trail. The campsite was a different story. When I got there in the afternoon, one site was occupied by a quiet, single camper like myself. Shortly thereafter, two families arrived, one with teenage boys, the other with little ones and a dog. Things were anything but quiet. I went off on my hike, came back, and wrote in my journal for as long as I could before it got dark.

Nearby, the parents of the teenage boys were gathering firewood. They had a huge van, and they actually drove two campsites down to gather as much wood as possible, throwing it in the back of the van so they wouldn’t have to carry it a few yards back to their camp. Nearby, a sign explained the benefits of smaller fires to the environment, and why no fire at all was really preferable. They didn’t read it. I wanted not to care, not to judge. I didn’t succeed. I sat there eating my apple and writing.

The mother, having gotten close enough to my site to see that I was the only one there, called out in surprise, “Are you alone?” I went to talk to her and introduced myself. Her name was Susie. She wore a hot pink tank top and matching lipstick. Lipstick. In the woods. She was from Branson, MO, which is very close to my idea of what hell must be like, an unfair judgement, really, since I have never actually been there. I told Susie that yes, I was camping alone, that I appreciated her concern but that there was no need, as the purpose of my trip was to get away and be alone for awhile. Susie looked at me strangely for a minute. She told me she was the mother of two boys and that she would hate to think of them having no one to go to if help was needed. Being alone, to her way of thinking, was clearly not a good thing. But she smiled at me anyway. “That’s our red and white van,” she said. “We’re just down the way. If you need anything, if it starts to rain, if you just get tired of being alone, come on over.” Then she left.

I didn’t need anything. I had a tarp in case of rain. I would not get tired of being alone. But I was incredibly grateful for Susie in that moment. When someone else holds a space for me, it makes it possible to branch out a little further, take a little bit more risk, relax into things a little bit more, knowing that help and care are close by if needed.

As much as I try to defeat them, I still have my judgements. Lots of them are class-based, education-based. Knowing that often doesn’t change much. The thing I want to remember is that we all hold space for each other. Susie builds a fire big enough not just for her family, but for me, in case I need it. I camp alone with no fire, holding the space of aloneness and willingness to be in darkness for her. My psychology has evolved this way to allow me to do what I need to do in the world. Susie has a different task, a different psychology. Today, at least, I am remembering to be grateful for the difference.

The Darkness Around Us

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep

- William Stafford, “A Ritual To Read to Each Other”

Recently I had a breakthrough in a longstanding conflict with a close friend. The situation had been eating me up; we were both walking through it on eggshells, trying not to spur any further conflict, and we were not too successful. The issue at stake is unimportant. What it came down to was, she had a rich inner life and a deep sense of spirituality that we had never spoken about. Perhaps I had always sensed that it was there. Something, certainly, drew us together to begin with. But each of us, having learned through bitter experience that trying to put words to anything outside of ordinary, consensual reality is a very risky venture, spoke to the other in the language of the surface of the world. We were logical, intellectual, caring and problem-solving. We listened actively. We spoke safely. We translated for each other.

I have always chafed at having to do that translation. I go through a series of negotiations in each new relationship, testing the waters to learn where it is and is not safe to go, pushing the boundaries and hoping the person I’m speaking to will not, as my friend put it, prescribe an antipsychotic and suggest that I should not be allowed to work with children. My insistence on safety is the very reason, as Stafford put it, that “a pattern that others made may prevail in the world.”

But the question remains: How do we engage with people in such a way as to honor the possibility that they do not require such delicate and limiting translations, still protecting ourselves by acknowledging the probability that they do?

Lilacs Against White Houses

A man says lilacs against white houses, having seen them in the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his way to a sentence,….

Robert Hass, “Spring Drawing”

In New Mexico last year, there was a woman I adored who talked in beautiful incomplete sentences, confused poetry, rich with imagery but often empty of discernable meaning. I didn’t miss the meaning; I gave up the need to understand. It took me two days of wilderness solitude and fasting to break the hold of the sentence, to get to where she had been with language all along, where my thoughts only told me what was. Sitting on a mountain the third day, they said only: Fast moving sky. Hawk circling. Coyote prints in fresh mud.

Because all week I had been longing to break my mind open, and because all week it had been steadfastly and resolutely linear and unyielding, I drove yesterday to a favorite hiking spot and climbed the steep ridge overlooking the river. I leaned back on a rock facing and watched vultures circling above, six or seven of them. Because my mind was still in its everyday mode, associations formed instantly, and I thought of last year, in California, when my brother, the Deacon, got married. Out the windows that formed the backdrop of the ceremony, vultures circled and swooped. Later, at the reception, my brother, the Nurse, said that vultures were the animals charged by God to tear away the dead, the old, making room for the new.

I waited there on the rock. It started to rain. The vultures circled above me. Below, a train roared past. I stayed still. I waited.

Jellyfish

Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything discusses how life shows up in the oddest places. Jellyfish are, in his opinion, one of the stranger life forms. They are basically conscious bits of saltwater and a little protein. One of the key points of Bryson’s book is how improbable it is that life, which is to say consciousness, is here at all, and how improbable it is that it keeps on being here. We are in constant danger of everything from meteor collision to supervolcano eruption, an event that happens an estimated once or twice every million years, with devastating consequences.

For so many people, it’s easy to live in the day-to-day, literal reality of our world, harder to live in the spiritual and imaginal realms. But for some of us, as Michael Meade said, the work of a lifetime is the opposite, not to transcend the material world but to incarnate more fully. Most days, I have some ambivalence about being here; I do not trust the material world. I work at being fully in the present, in my body, not entirely living in thought, imagination and spirit.

For me, most discussions of the meaning of existence fall short (except perhaps Joseph Campbell’s when he said, life has no meaning; what’s the meaning of a flower?). When I read Bryson’s bit about jellyfish, I imagined small pockets of salt water, coalescing suddenly into conscious, corporal beings. I saw them like little floating light bulbs, turning on one by one in a dark sea. When it comes to the value of being incarnate in a physical body, human thought fails to convince me, but the jellyfish succeeds.