healing Archives

Solstice

In the still of a long night.

In the dark hours, we came together by the fire, the St. Lucia’s girls crowned by candle wreaths, in honor of the flames that lit the way when she brought food to the persecuted in hiding, a trespass that got her killed by the law. Now, in the somber mist, in the places once wooded with dark trees, we wait by kindled light for the rebirth of the sun. There is a moment when it is still, and in the full dark, a pause, holding breath, and then then comes a long, cry, like mourning. That’s when you know it is here, the hour when it stops pulling away, and begins a slow return. Against our mourning, we keep watch until it comes. Look east. At first light, say the word.

Shelter

Refuge during wartime.

It was a time of trouble, and people went around armed: holsters, knives, photos, pepper spray. What were the terms? We weren’t sure, but they were loaded. Whispering among us, we approached the temple. A woman waited at the top of the steps, veiled in underground pomegranates. She stood sideways between the pillars, one half in the shadows behind her. Look, she said, raising her veil, and with the other arm beckoned Come. A hush fell over us. We surrendered our arms and went in.

Ends and Means

On the insistent impulse toward redemption.

Language, in its majestic tyranny, if it had its human origins around the time when Adam went around naming the creatures, might be blamed for the way that he then forgot to see them. And if the first visionary made fire, it’s hard not to wonder what moved her, in the moments when she crossed back from the word to the first spark.

A common scene: you’re on a bench somewhere and a parent is telling the child with the ice cream cone, Careful! Hold it up! when it is clearly only a matter of time. You watch the child, see the cone fall. Now everyone is paying attention. Oh well! is one response. Another is Too late now!

It is, as a matter of fact, too late for that once-perfect cone to be salvaged. And yet, show me a parent who is not at least gut-level moved to offer a reminder of the promise of salvation, by proving that even the fallen cone may be followed by another. Who, if there is enough money and ice cream to go around, does not want ––on some level–– to perform the promise in living form, to say, Here and See and It’s Okay? They might resist on principle or principled pathology, but still. Some inherited impulse to embody hope in renewal and redemption has a way of pushing.

It is either too late or just beginning

or both

and––

Embers

A meeting at the water’s edge.

We knelt at the water, holding our urns, one from the depths and another from the surface. We tipped them both behind us, five streams to water the land, and each returned to us in its smells, its touch, the offered visions, songs. We tasted, too. We each had one foot in the stream and listened. Shhh, came the next breath. There was no cover. Only the stars, and we held them, too.

From Rubble

An invocation for healing.

After we’ve read and re-read the last bomb-shelter bedtime story, enough that we no longer need the books; after the skins of our backs have collectively dulled the barbs at our borders, after children no longer know the difference between fire and sky, what will we know for certain, except the common ghosts floating among us like pigeon feathers? When the rags of our bodies are strewn across the singed lands of our erased ancestors, and we’ve burned the last of our vengeances in the name of the justices we stood before rights, when the mute children no longer need to be hushed, will we remember to offer a beginning in our next word?

Sickbed at Sunset

A cautionary tale.

Are you ill?

Yes. Can’t you tell?

Of course. You sound like hell. And yet––

What do you mean?

You look and sound about the same as usual.

What do you mean?

I mean, what good is health if you are only going to complain about it when you have it?

Do you need something?

I have needed many things.

Anything! Name it!

Really? From there?

You are very cold.

Not always. I had a fever and it almost killed me. But you were too distracted by various ailments of your perfect health, to notice.

I would do anything, I swear, I am about to––

Now I have quite a bit to do.

Of what?

The living.

Oh. But give me something better, something grand!

Sorry to disappoint you. This is it, only daily stuff. Tasks, food, lists, cleaning, and then cleaning up what others can’t bear to look at.

But anyone can do that. I have a purpose! Well, I wish I could––

Even the mock-purpose driven discount runs out at some point. Why not for you?

Well, the sun rises every morning––

The sun, yes. But for the rest of us, there’s no guarantee.

That’s terrifying.

It should be. Enough to move a body to living, anyway. Still, many evade this––successfully, at least for a time.

But you need to understand––

A person can decide, consciously or unconsciously, that they are the living sun, endlessly rising and setting, emboldened with the powers of illumination and darkness, for all the world to see or wait to recover from. It’s very gratifying, apparently.

Well–––

And who can blame you? It works until it doesn’t anymore.

One day––

One day you will wait for the light that is coming, and you will know it isn’t you. And then you will be ready to begin. And if, when that day comes, you are alone, you will know that you will be okay. Not because you feel that you are, but because the power that made you what you were never is or was of you.

And?

Then you stand up.

And?

Then you walk.

What now?

Visiting hours are over. Now get to listening. Your shoes are under the bed.

Carry Dirt

No justice comes from ignorance.

Inspired by Christine DePizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), as translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards.

***

How is it that so many of them––learned, too––seem to speak from the same mouth, painting us with every vice they wish to wash from themselves, and why? This was my question.

Then came three women and the first among them said, Daughter, build a city. Make it of lasting beauty, and you will draw forth waters from the heavens.

I considered the births of other divinely inspired cities: Troy, Thebes. I recalled their ruin and said so. But the women insisted: This one would not be taken or conquered. Lay a strong foundation, they insisted. Set it deep. Get up, daughter. Go where earth abounds. We will help you carry it.

I asked, why do they revile us? She told me only, carry dirt. Then she added, no justice can come from their ignorance.

They explained that some derive pleasure from slander of what mystifies them. Others are moved by awareness of their own defects, and others by jealousy of anything they cannot own. Leave them, they told me, and avoid attachment to their tools.

Look closely, they insisted. They explained: these opinions only pretend to be based in reason. By claiming to own reason, they deny its essence with the same breath by which they mean to deny you access to their ill-begotten power.

The path to what is true may be narrow, but it leads to such abundance that no one who follows it to its natural end could ever consider keeping it to themselves, since such innate greed of purpose would naturally bar them from their destination.

No one can take away what nature has given, but many will deny what she is, attempting to hoard her abundance for themselves, by creating the dragon’s lairs that are their own demise.

I had more questions, but they became impatient with my need to know. Don’t be as they are, they insisted. Get up. Carry dirt. Go.

***

The above meditation was inspired by this morning’s reading of DePizan’s excellent theological critique of misogyny. I borrow some phrases from the original (translation), but rely more heavily on impressions, blurring the lines slightly to create a more encompassing critique (to include not only overt misogynists but anyone attempting to hoard access to truth and power by demeaning any other living group, including the non-human species of the earth), and to heighten the call to recognition of the vital flaw at the heart of this life-killing move while attempting to magnify the resonance of its answer, a call to return to a holistic, generous sense of logic, justice, and development rooted in a sense of abundance (rooted in an understanding of life) rather than scarcity (which has its roots in fear of the unknown/ death).

Vigil

Protection begins with attention.

Remember the bridled white eye, with his tiny spectacles, who seemed always to be offering an arch look to punctuate a well-placed question. As in, what are you doing?

Or Bachman’s warbler, who once knew the damp floors of the dense forest? Remember the Kauai akialoa, with his flourish of long bill, hooked like the edge of the reaper’s scythe, and the honeycreeper that once set her eggs in cup-shape nests. Remember the little Mariana fruit bat, the flying fox slowly poisoned by DDT in cycad seeds.

Careful! A mother calls after a child, ever reckless with living and ignorant of possibilities for being snuffed out. Watch! Watch out!

The Scioto madtom once fed on the bottoms of graveled streams in central Ohio. The upland combshell mussel could only produce with enough space in the clean waters of an undisturbed riverbed, with fish enough for hosting the young. The blade horned chameleon of Tanzania’s old growth forest darkens its skin under stress. It wraps its tail around a tree branch and hangs on.

Hold tight! she calls.

The Pacific bluefin tuna are often caught before they can breed.

Hurry, hurry!

The North American bumblebee made its home in the eastern grasslands now plowed for corn and its attendant poisons.

Watch out!

How easy it is to lose what isn’t watched. Among the African elephants, the matriarchs will slow their pace so a calf can keep stride. A cheetah will move her litter every few days to keep predators off the scent. An alligator will hold her babies in her mouth to protect them from being eaten by another.

She is watching out a window, through a screen. She is watching the sky, the temperature, the poisons, the electrical outlets, the latest reports. What do you know? She will ask, sometimes. Waking to check that her young are still breathing, waking to number the threats, count the fires, track the melting ice and the coming war, to calculate the timing of her next move, and wonder, how? Her song is silent like the watch she keeps over the lives of the living, so easily and recklessly lost.

***

This post was inspired by a sobering look at the report, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services Proposes Delisting 23 Species from Endangered Species Act Due to Extinction. This on the morning after an American holiday in which it is fashionable to offer thanks for what is solidly in hand. The juxtaposition of the report and this moment have me imagining how the notion of gratitude might be expanded to include grief over what was once had, but then lost, and vigilance over what remains, teetering precariously and often invisibly between here and gone.

In Bird News

This morning, I am heartened by the parrots.

“We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.” – Gary L. Francione

This morning, I am heartened by the parrots. First, it’s Bruce, a New Zealand kea with a severe disability, who has fashioned his own prosthetic. Bruce is missing most of his upper beak, which is essential for preening, which removes parasites and dirt from feathers. Researchers watching Bruce observed that he was not simply enamored with pebbles in a random manner. He only picked them up to preen. Unlike other birds interacting with stones for other reasons, Bruce only picked up pebbles of a specific size. He’d fit these between his tongue and lower beak when he preened. No other kea did this. It was his own idea, they concluded. Upon publication of these findings, some asked the scientists why they had not given Bruce a proper prosthetic. He doesn’t need one, they answered.

Also, in an experiment involving trading tokens for treats, African grey parrots have been demonstrating a remarkable tendency to help one another, even when there is no obvious benefit to the helper. When one parrot had the tokens, but no access to the treats, he would pass the tokens to the bird beside him, even if the other was a stranger. The other bird could trade the tokens for treats. Repeating the experiment with other species, researchers found the Blue-headed macaws to be more selfish, perhaps because they live in smaller, unchanging groups. One of the researchers offered an alternative reading of this disparity in sharing, suggesting that perhaps the selfish species are just not as good at understanding the needs of their mates.

I have no small amount of fascination with birds, and reminders back to this often call to mind a passage from Terry Tempest Williams: “Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated” (from When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice). Amen.

Notes

I discovered a report about the study published in The Journal of Scientific Reports, “Self-care tooling innovation in a disabled kea” through a link in this New York Times article by Nicholas Bakalar, which in turn led me to this one on African grey parrots by Elizabeth Preston.

Gary L. Francione has raised interesting questions about the way that current practices in what passes for animal rights legislation tend only to reinforce systemic hierarchies that treat animals as property. Distinguishing between rights and welfare of animals, Francione has argued that the single most important right of animals that should be understood, is the right not to be treated as property.

More bird-themed posts:

On Service: An Allegory

They did not turn their faces from the landscape in the dragon’s gaping maw.

When it came time to fight the dragon, one among them shouted, I will not serve.

He would not submit, but others would, to the lies he commissioned, always dressed in righteous robes.

The fighters went on, the one before them saying, I will.

Those moved by this example said nothing. They did not shout. No trumpets blared.

They did not turn their faces from the landscape in the dragon’s gaping maw. Announcing allegiance to another order, they moved with the quiet conviction of visitors to the dying and the sick. Each tended to another’s wounds and they left no one behind. They brought diapers to new mothers and to orphaned children; soap to the unwashed, clothing to those who had been sticking to their own stink. They shielded the unsheltered from the elements, including fire from the righteous. They brought water to those beginning to hallucinate with thirst. Not food, but meals. Not pretend answers, but real questions to real needs, and the mess of it never left them. They wept often under the strain, and knew joy, too. And in the land of fire with the dying in the dragon’s mouth, there was peace because they were there, offering it where they could.