Yesterday was a good, a surprisingly good day. I had gone to Sauvies Island, rather than giving in to fatigue, and found myself with an embarrassment of riches. It was as if all of nature conspired to wait for me and shower me with extraordinary beauty, wherever I turned. The wetlands looked like a Dutch landscape painting from the Golden Age.
The willows glowed like little lanterns against soft air.
32 egrets (I counted!) grazed in a field, occasionally flying off to a better spot for hunting.
Sandhill cranes overhead and hopping around in their elegant, if short-lived, staccato dances tugged on my heart strings – I so love these birds.
Ducks joined them.
Swans moved northwards, will I ever see the tundra again? No. That’s ok. Can’t be greedy.
Snow geese rose with a cacophony of noise when spooked by a raptor. When they eventually settled it looked like huge white blossoms tumbling down onto the ground.
And then a pair of eagles decided to show off, noisily announcing their arrival, or yelling at each other, what do I know, maybe they’re courting. Not mutually exclusive, I hear.
So, just for today, I’ll revel in nature’s gifts, leaving politics aside. In that spirit, music will also be enchanting, a new find of an L.A.- based Jazz trio. Little guy below hops in rhythm….
Some claim that Valentine’s Day had its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival included fertility rites, wild bacchanalia and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. “Young women’s names were drawn by bachelors from a jar. These matches, initially formed for the festival’s duration, often led to long-term relationships and marriages.”
Enter the church, eager to replace Pagan rites with Christian values. Up pops the symbolic martyr St. Valentine who secretly married lovers, ignoring Roman Emperor Claudius II’s edict that prohibited young men from marrying, as to serve more efficiently as soldiers. Valentinus was executed for his defiance, but lives on as a champion of love. (Ref.)
First comes love, then comes marriage. And then comes the forfeit of women’s right to vote.
Think I am joking? Here is what Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center for Justice has to say about the consequences of a new Republican voter registration bill sponsored by Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy, the SAVE Act, which experts warn could be a major threat to voting rights for all Americans, and particularly for married women, in addition to people of color, young voters, and other marginalized groups.
“The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote.” The bill would not only impact the 21.3 million Americans who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or passport, as well as anyone who relies on voting by mail. It would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse’s last name. “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law.”
They chitter at each other violently, then hop at each other, until one flies off.
The festival Lupercalia was celebrated in and around caves. Looks like that is the location we are pushed back towards – Project 2025 explicitly condones and seeks to enforce a family structure where only the head of household, the man, votes. This was, of course, a common argument against women’s suffrage before the 19th amendment was introduced.
While I might angrily scream at the hostility extended towards all those threatening the top tier of the power hierarchy, there are others devoted to peace – probably way more effective (and certainly better for your blood pressure…)
You can join them in a Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace this Sunday in Hillsboro, OR. Here are the details:
A Community Event Promoting Unity and Understanding
The Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), Lutheran Community Services Northwest (Beaverton Office), the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization – Greater Middle East Center (IRCO GMEC), DAWN, and Unite Oregon, in partnership with the City of Hillsboro and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement, are proud to present the Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace.
This inaugural event will bring together community members from diverse backgrounds to celebrate culture, share stories, and promote unity through music, dance, art, and meaningful conversations. This event aims to foster a sense of community amidst the attacks on immigrant and refugee communities in Oregon and across the country by the new administration.
Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025 Time: 2:00 – 5:00 PM Location: The Walters Cultural Arts Center, 527 E Main St, Hillsboro, OR 97123 Website: https://tinyurl.com/connectionlovepeace
Here is a poem that will be read on Sunday, in various translations as well.
A Proclamation for Peace
Whereas the world is a house on fire; Whereas the nations are filled with shouting; Whereas hope seems small, sometimes a single bird on a wire left by migration behind.
Whereas kindness is seldom in the news and peace an abstraction while war is real;
Whereas words are all I have; Whereas my life is short; Whereas I am afraid; Whereas I am free—despite all fire and anger and fear;
Be it therefore resolved a song shall be my calling—a song not yet made shall be vocation and peaceful words the work of my remaining days.
Photographs from yesterday through my (dirty) window, with House Finches and Junkos going at it, competing for seeds rather than showing some loving solidarity. Then again, maybe they are off mating in a cave, once fed. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Music is a Romanze by Schumann so long held apart from his beloved Clara. I really like this slow version. Brings out the longing.
When I wrote about my worries regarding the novel Corona virus in early (!) January 2020, I got some push-back. Did I have to be catastrophizing all the time? Couldn’t I provide a bit more levity or at least some art? 1.9 million U.S. deaths later, much as I’d like not to, I am back in Cassandra mode.
I’ll provide art (a poem below), all right, and photographs that I took at beautiful Point Lobos, CA last November, but today’s focus are issues related to the bird flu. Don’t yell at me. I am as sick, literally, as the next person, under the barrage of bad news. And today’s musings are as bleak as they come. But we must think things through to reach some kind of preparedness. That much we’ve learned from the last epidemic.
Let’s try a thought experiment, given that the Republicans’ slashing of NIH/NSF grants by more than half curtails actual scientific experimentation. (Here is a detailed, excellent review of the new rules.) Assume you learn the most important facts and statistics about the new H5N1 virus. Why assume? Well, since last week, many official publications of information about infectious diseases have disappeared from government websites. Data that briefly appeared on a C.D.C. website were gone a short time later, irretrievable despite scientists begging for a full report. For example, according to the NYT, “Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.”
So what facts do we actually know? The disease originated in Asia, almost 30 years ago. It spread among poultry farms, caused some 400 deaths in humans across these years, but rarely spread human-to-human. The virus started to explode exponentially since 2020, when it did not simply jump from poultry farms to wild bird populations, but when the latter started to disperse it along migration routes, spreading from flock to flock. It arrived on our shores in 2021, with 148 million poultry alone ordered to be euthanized since 2022. More than 5 million egg-laying chickens died in the first 16 days of 2025. (Ref.)
From North America it jumped to South America where it traveled 6000 km in just 6 months. It caused mass mortality, not just in birds, but in infected mammals as well, with elephant seals, sea lions, porpoises, dolphins and otters all affected. Almost 50% of the Peruvian pelican population succumbed. The ecological consequences are still up for grabs but likely devastating up and down the food chain.
Deceased elephant seal pups line the beach at Punta Delgada in Chabut, Argentina, along with a bird carcass. Cause of death: bird flu. Ralph Venstreets/University of California, Davis
Now cows are infected with the virus. As of last week almost 1000 herds across 16 states in the U.S. tested positive. In fact, cows in Nevada exhibited a new variant of the virus which has scientists alarmed for its potential to trigger a pandemic in humans. The genotype, known as D1.1, contains a genetic mutation that may help the virus more easily copy itself in mammals—including humans. This D1.1 version of the virus is the same variant that killed a man in Louisiana and left a Canadian teen hospitalized in critical condition. (Ref.) The real worry: with each genetic mutation, so easily accomplished since this virus mixes with other flu viruses quite rapidly, we might see increased severity of the disease and increased probability for human-to-human infection.
Back to our thought experiment. You now know that the virus is around us, mutating, and you start seeing people felled by it (by current expectations, it has a mortality rate between 40 and 50%. Compare that to Corona Disease mortality rate: about 1%. Imagine the hospital overload, increasing otherwise preventable deaths outside of bird flu mortality as well.) Let’s assume that scientists do find a vaccine (we have to be optimistic until the last minute!), just like they did for Covid, and it proves to be safe and effective in tests done outside of the U.S., since stateside we no longer support much contagious disease research. And now factor in the fact that you have an anti-vaxxer health tzar voted into office by a Republican Senate, instructing the FDA not to approve the vaccine. (You can still write to your Senator about Kennedy’s confirmation… their websites have a contact me link.) Fantasy? Read the proposed law debated on Friday in Montana (House Bill 371) that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines – you know the ones used to treat tuberculosis, malaria, zika, the rapidly mutating influenza viruses, hepatitis b, HPV, Covid 19 and in treatment of pancreatic, lung, prostate, and brain cancer.
What would you do?
Rich folks traveling abroad to inoculate themselves and their families? Would foreigners even be served if there are limited quantities available? What about poor folks?
Stock up on masks? There are already 16 states with masking prohibitions in effect, with more legislation in the works. And always think of the babies and toddlers that can’t be masked…
What will we do?
I can’t help but wonder about questions raised a decade ago by America’s smartest Cassandra, Sarah Kendzior, who has previously predicted everything we have seen unfolding since January 20th, 2025. in great detail.
***
Omnicide
And when our children ask, Why did you do nothing as the world was dying? what will we tell them?
Will we say, We didn’t know how sick it was, or admit that We gathered our rosebuds while we could,
Old Time was still a-flying—? It’s now the end of everything, our children will say, go crawl
into your arks and sail off destitute into your doom, and leave us only your shadows. And our children
will light candles across seven continents empty now of lions, kangaroos, ravens, squirrels, javelinas, pelicans—
devoid of praying mantises, koalas, ants, cobras, snails, Doberman pinschers, pigs, vultures, lizards, and alley cats.
Our children will hide in caves with blind cockroaches, together feeding on the algae glowing in neon greens and blues
across dolomite and limestone walls. They’ll leave no pictographs behind, no sprayed handprints, no artful gods.
Such silence now, they’ll say, this you’ve bequeathed us, this human indifference. And we’ll beg them, Survive.
Walk with me, but bring the gloves, on a brilliantly sunny and cold day at the wetlands. Puddles covered with ice, ponds slightly frozen, fallen leaves coated with sparkling crystals putting to shame any jewelry store – display.
My avian friends are warming up in the sun. For every heron at rest, there is an egret flying to the next perch, surveying their realm.
The sky occasionally fills with geese spooked by some raptor, and I wish I could add the sound here of them chattering and honking, a spectacular chorus. Eventually they come to rest, returning to snoozing.
I, on the other hand, have not been snoozing this week, driven by a sentiment probably shared by many of you: What can we do? I have been reading quite a bit, soaking up good advice from trusted sources, and making use of many helpful sites that display what we need to know in straightforward and legible ways.
Much of the advice overlaps: inform yourself, pace yourself, don’t give up in advance, protect the most vulnerable, engage, build and cherish community from the ground up. Two things I found particularly helpful:
Ask yourself what your strengths are: not all of us are able or willing to do public work, or join committees, or have the resources to support causes financially, or get engaged in elective office. We all have something to contribute, however. If you like baking, organize bake sales. Agreed, chocolate chip cookies are not going to defeat fascism, but a community nourished by seeing members contribute in whatever ways they can, will be more resistent and more effective in coming together and taking the necessary steps.
Focus on your interest. You cannot fight on every front. Pick the arenas where you have the most expertise or the most passion, and join efforts there.
In my case, I have a platform with this blog where I can summarize both relevant sources and write about my interpretations of them. I can do much of the reading you don’t have time for, and pick the best pieces with a critical eye on informational value, not necessarily ideology. I am also deeply interested in science and climate crisis, so that is where I will be particularly involved. Note, though, it really is up to everyone – if you are interested in protecting immigrants, DEI-or women’s rights, or fight against racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or newly established prison camps, it matters. There is no hierarchy of what needs to be protected- there is much under attack and requires advocates.
Here is a nifty google drive action tracker listing all the Executive Orders and memos proclaimed so far, grouped by targets. That allows you to inform yourself about your area of interest and what is currently affecting the status quo.
***
Given one of my interests, science, here is another bit of news (in more detail in Paul Krugman’s assessment today):
As of now there is a new communications ban from HHS. The gag order includes the publication of scientific information, including reports that are already done, prohibits emergency alerts for pandemic information, or rising health risks, including weekly data on respiratory disease developments.
Meetings and report releases for the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic Resistance are canceled. HHS is searching for DEIA programs and threatening anyone who disguises them. They are asking for people to report colleagues.
NIH study sections are canceled/postponed. These are the sections that approve grant proposals and provide funding for institutional research. This affects more than 300.000 researchers and 2500 institutions. All travel is suspended and conference publications must be approved in advance by a presidential appointee. That affects nearly $50 billion of scientific research.
Pausing public health communications and research means delays in responding to emerging threats, like H5N1. But these measures also have an economic impact. Public health protects more than health—it safeguards our economy. Disruptions in systems can ripple across industries, as we’ve already seen with avian flu and egg prices.
Note that every $1 spent by NIH generates $2.46. For example, in 2023, $47B in NIH spending generated ~$93B. Halting it all will cost us money, create worse health outcome and might motivate all the scientific talent that is now losing their grant funded jobs to go elsewhere. As of now, it is all gone, with health and education directly implicated.
If you click this link, it offers map and you can tap on your state and find out what is affected by the new administration’s directive towards the National Institute for Health (NIH). Here are the OR and CA impacts, respectively.
Before we are getting too discouraged, here is the long read for the weekend that argues the world isn’t as bad as you think. I agree with much of it, but also want to point out that it is psychologically much harder to relinquish a right or protective matter that you already held or is available to you, than experiencing improvements of a state of need. If we know we can protect our children with vaccines or health risk alerts and they are subsequently blocked by political maniacs, it is a huge blow, individually for all the little ones I love and societally for what the future will hold.
Music today dates me since I still saw it live – album by The Band. RIP Garth Hudson, who died this week.
This spring the birds came back again too early. Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err, too. It gathers wool, it dozes off — and down they fall into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death that doesn’t suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws, their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing, the heart’s sensible sluice, the entrails’ maze, the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in stunning enfilades, feathers deserving their own wing in any crafts museum, the Benedictine patience of the beak.
This is not a dirge — no, it’s only indignation. An angel made of earthbound protein, a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs, singular in air, without number in the hand, its tissues tied into a common knot of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama unfolding to the wings’ applause, falls down and lies beside a stone, which in its own archaic, simpleminded way sees life as a chain of failed attempts.
Still awed by all the snow geese I recently encountered. And it was tempting to post Mary Oliver’s Snow Geese poem for its gratitude for unexpected beauty, or Wendell Berry’s Wild Geese with its admonition to recognize the here and now, but you know me. Szymborska hits the spot, every single time. Particularly since she depicts the death of a few unlucky birds, while I try not to think about the deaths of millions of them, saving the dispiriting topic of the bird flu (and its catastrophic implications) for another blog. We’ve had our fill of horrors already earlier this week.
I adore the poet’s sly juxtaposition of instinct and reason, both known to fail. I admire the way she describes the biological features of the birds in all their beauty, linking them to positive traits like patience, honesty and conscientiousness, but also works of art, sculptural finesse worthy of museums.
“This is not a dirge — no, it’s only indignation.”
That is the feistiness I want to take into my day, my life, when contemplating mortality or dealing with the “foolish fate” of witnessing erosion of achievements, justice and equality among them, that so many generations fought for. Maybe each single life is a chain of failed attempts, indeed, but lives accumulating across centuries were clearly able to improve the world.
What was this thing about the arc of the moral universe? It’s long, but bends towards justice? If a murdered man could cling to this belief, so can we. We could even muster some sort of hope that the danger of a snowy death upon too early a return is now gone with the arrival of climate change and rising temperatures. Oh well, another “failed attempt” – at gallows humor.
Then again, we could just stick with the poet’s resigned realism. It served her well, all the way to the Nobel Prize.
No, indignation it shall be, not sorrow, indignation hatching action.
In any case. The geese were luminous and loud and basking in the California sun, grey and white geese alike. The light still radiates inside of me, providing needed warmth.
I was not alone on my way South. Surrounded by innumerable drivers, we were all stuck on I 5 behind a garbage truck that managed to blow up and burn out on the middle of a bridge over the Willamette river, with no room to move it aside for people to pass. Firetrucks, police, all on site, with us patiently sitting and waiting for eternity in turned-off cars.
Fire seems to have been a theme of the drive. When I arrived at my motel for the first overnight stop, all fire alarms were blaring, fire police frantically trying to find the source of the alarms. 45 minute wait later, they decided it was just a false signal from a corrupted sprinkler system. I fell into bed, fried.
Surrounded by innumerable water fowl, I saw smoke of a small fire billowing on the horizon. By the time I had left the wildlife preserve, smoke clouds covered the landscape and wafted over the highway, the fire had clearly exploded.
What was really fascinating, though, was the constant change in light in this California landscape, close to Sacramento. All the variations you see in the photographs below were taken during a 45 minute stay amongst my migrating pals.
Rain coming down hard
Some 10.000 white fronted geese and about 2000 snow geese hung out, if we can trust the species lists provided by birders for the day I came through.
Snow Geese
White fronted Geese
I did not focus on many of the other birds,
a large flock of turkey vultures, however, focused on me. One came so close overhead that I thought he’d dive….
There is something interesting about people naming collections of these birds, depending on the activity they can be found in. Mostly they are called a flock or a kettle, but when they rest they are called a committee and when they feed on carrion they are called a wake. Sometimes they are called a venue or a congregation Is that true for other raptors as well? In any case, do migrate as well, sometimes in kettles of up to 10.000 birds. I had no idea that was the case. I sure was surrounded.
I am now near San Francisco, hoping to see gardens new to me. Stay tuned.
“The performers of this work by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933) imagined that the central figure of Wild Bird (1998) is a vulture, who finding his prey on the ground, tears it to pieces and eats it, before flying off again. The work is full of extreme dynamics, changing tempos and meters, and sharp dissonances. Clearly this is not your cute little song bird. In “Wild Bird” from 1997, the violin embodies the startled fluttering spirit, while the harp creates an echo chamber for it. The exhausting tour ends in audible fatigue.
Soooooo – I was going to write about a book I thought I would have finished reading by now, but life and a knitting project intervened. Sneak preview for all you Richard Powers fans out there: he scored again. Get on the library wait list for “Playground.” Very much worth it. I will report more anon. What to do for a placeholder in the meantime?
As it turned out, Greg Olear published a W.B.Yeats poem yesterday in his newsletterPrevail. I could not think of a more prescient description of our very own situation here before November 5th. I had to look up Helicon – a mountain in Greece, praised for two springs that sustained the muses in Greek mythology – and calumny – malicious false accusation or slander. Yeats’ ire was likely directed at the religious factions in Ireland, our’s is most certainly applied to whom the descriptions below match best: those averse to learning, open to slander, masters of fantastic falsehoods and opposed to anything that diverges from white supremacist norms….
The Leaders Of The Crowd
THEY must to keep their certainty accuse All that are different of a base intent; Pull down established honour; hawk for news Whatever their loose fantasy invent And murmur it with bated breath, as though The abounding gutter had been Helicon Or calumny a song. How can they know Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no Solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
But before we start this week with dismay, let’s look at those beautiful owls that simply sat next to my path in the woods, looking at me while I was looking at them. Bliss.
Now I must go back to the novel, dying to know how it ends…
Music is a reference to W.B.Yeats as well…a bit strange, and quite enticing.
I was walking on a dike towards the Columbia river, water levels so low that the geese rested on sand banks in the middle of the sidearm.
Drought had emptied the ponds of all water, colored the landscape with muted browns.
(The brown center is usually a lake)
Leaves of the cottonwoods all silvery in the bright light, mustard yellow on the ground once shed, echoing the lichen.
A few familiars, a harrier hawk, herons and deer, a fearless kestrel advertising the location, an egret flying in search of water. It was hot and it was still, only some isolated chants of geese formations carrying across the meadows, stark light, air shimmering.
If you can’t walk with me through a strangely out-of-season October landscape, find a comfortable spot to sit and read a very long poem. It contains worlds. Cyclic worlds of destruction, worlds of renewal, worlds of despair and ultimately resilience.
It also contains lines that describe perfectly what I experienced yesterday, “summer after summer has ended, … the low hills shine, ochre and fire, even the fields shine… a sun that could be the August sun … a day like a day in summer, exceptionally still.”
I have not been exactly a fan of poet Louise Glück who won the Nobel Prize in 2020, and died this week a year ago. For me, her biting wit too often veered into cruelty. Yet I do see why the Nobel committee awarded Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” She describes the core of coping with trauma regardless of what it was or whom it affected: a person, a people, a planet. There is indeed a universality to the processes she describes, understands and accepts, with a few recommendations toward action or acceptance thrown in.
Having written last week about Kintsugi as a ceramic art form addressing trauma, I thought we might be challenged by looking at poetry that shares some of that approach. Laying bare the scars, acknowledging the irreversibility to a prior state of being, but finding beauty in acknowledgment – there with gold dust as a means of emphasis, here with determined words that claim an untouchable core.
The poem I chose for that purpose is called October. It was written in 2002 as a response to the World Trade Center bombing, and published in Averno in 2006. Lago d’Averno is the name of a deep crater lake near Naples, Italy, thought to be the gateway to the underworld by the Romans. The volume contains several poems describing the myth of Persephone and her cyclical return to earth, with imagery alternating between the destructive world of Hades where she has to reside, and the fruitful world of earth where she is permitted to return to her mother, Demeter, and makes things grow, for periods of time.
22 years later, the poem fits with a world gone mad, whether with personal loss, or the ravages of war, the lure of fascism, or the fears brought on by nature shedding all reserve – through pandemics, or catastrophic changes in climate that lead to the disasters we are now experiencing. It alludes to fear, memory distortion, experienced harm and a refusal to give in to despair, even when we have to acknowledge that we cannot turn to the earth and the planets to rescue us.
Here is my spontaneous take (and you might want to read the poem below first, so I make at least a semblance of sense…):
The first section describes disorientation, a shifting and uncertainty of where the narrator is in time, a loss of a sense of hearing or the ability to decipher meaning. It alludes to pointlessness in trying to anchor herself, no more grasp on reality. It mentions a better, more fertile past where we believed in growing things, in good outcomes. It is a jumble of confusion. Wasn’t life supposed to have a happy ending?
The second section has the narrator reemerge with a strong mind, one that is tested and wary, observing, able to discern that the violence of trauma changed her, harmed a body in ways that cannot be reversed, but a mind now clearly assessing the world that is. Nature is still around, like a bit player, observed but not able to intervene.
Section 3 is given to memory. Remnants of beauty, succor in nature, a world beckoning you to be part of it. Reminiscence makes way to acknowledgment that life can bring pain worse than death. An inkling of defiance, not a submissive nod to saying good bye. So many amazing things to list.
Section 4 starts – for me – to deliver the goods. The poet acknowledges how horrid things have become, how fall (after trauma) contains so much more loss than spring, but she starts to add up what still exists: ideals still burn in us, like a fever or a second heart, music remains, though changed, perceptions are sharpened.
“How privileged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. Maestoso, doloroso: This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.”
Majestic. Painful. A core of us remains intact, despite the horrors, indestructible.
The fifth section reminds us that there is still work to do, work that can be done, and that we are not alone in all of this, whether in collective grief or through collective action.
And lastly, section six seems to sink into the depth of defeat, acknowledging the destruction of a barren earth, no longer nurturing, no longer an option to act as a rescuer. But then the moon appears, with the last lines referring to beauty and friendship. There is no illusion that the moon will do what the earth can no longer, but the concepts of beauty and friendship counteract hopelessness, suggesting there are still forms of connection.
Like in real trauma work, the alternations of drowning and lift-up, of cycling between hope and despair, of past and future orientation, allow us to spiral upwards on our own path towards healing.
“How privileged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love.”
Maybe it’s privilege. Maybe it’s grace. Maybe it’s simple grit, refusing to give up.
I’ll cling as long as I want to, trauma be damned. I’m not forfeiting hope either, let me tell you. There is still too much work to do. (And I hope I’m not eating my words after the election. Then again, remember what Persephone and Demeter, central figures in the Eleusinian Mysteries, promised true believers: a happy afterlife. Looks like we have one final shot…)
October
1. Is it winter again, is it cold again, didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted didn’t the night end, didn’t the melting ice flood the narrow gutters wasn’t my body rescued, wasn’t it safe didn’t the scar form, invisible above the injury terror and cold, didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden harrowed and planted— I remember how the earth felt, red and dense, in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted, didn’t vines climb the south wall I can’t hear your voice for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground I no longer care what sound it makes when was I silenced, when did it first seem pointless to describe that sound what it sounds like can’t change what it is— didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth safe when it was planted didn’t we plant the seeds, weren’t we necessary to the earth, the vines, were they harvested?
2. Summer after summer has ended, balm after violence: it does me no good to be good to me now; violence has changed me. Daybreak. The low hills shine ochre and fire, even the fields shine. I know what I see; sun that could be the August sun, returning everything that was taken away— You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice; you can’t touch my body now. It has changed once, it has hardened, don’t ask it to respond again. A day like a day in summer. Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples nearly mauve on the gravel paths. And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer. It does me no good; violence has changed me. My body has grown cold like the stripped fields; now there is only my mind, cautious and wary, with the sense it is being tested. Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer; bounty, balm after violence. Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields have been harvested and turned. Tell me this is the future, I won’t believe you. Tell me I’m living, I won’t believe you.
3. Snow had fallen. I remember music from an open window. Come to me, said the world. This is not to say it spoke in exact sentences but that I perceived beauty in this manner. Sunrise. A film of moisture on each living thing. Pools of cold light formed in the gutters. I stood at the doorway, ridiculous as it now seems. What others found in art, I found in nature. What others found in human love, I found in nature. Very simple. But there was no voice there. Winter was over. In the thawed dirt, bits of green were showing. Come to me, said the world. I was standing in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal— I can finally say long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty the healer, the teacher— death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.
4. The light has changed; middle C is tuned darker now. And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. The light of autumn: you will not be spared. The songs have changed; the unspeakable has entered them. This is the light of autumn, not the light that says I am reborn. Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered. This is the present, an allegory of waste. So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate: the ideal burns in you like a fever. Or not like a fever, like a second heart. The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful. They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind. They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish. And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly in anticipation of silence. The ear gets used to them. The eye gets used to disappearances. You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared. A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind; it has left in its wake a strange lucidity. How privileged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. Maestoso, doloroso: This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.
5. It is true there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use. I am at work, though I am silent. The bland misery of the world bounds us on either side, an alley lined with trees; we are companions here, not speaking, each with his own thoughts; behind the trees, iron gates of the private houses, the shuttered rooms somehow deserted, abandoned, as though it were the artist’s duty to create hope, but out of what? what? the word itself false, a device to refute perception— At the intersection, ornamental lights of the season. I was young here. Riding the subway with my small book as though to defend myself against the same world: you are not alone, the poem said, in the dark tunnel.
6. The brightness of the day becomes the brightness of the night; the fire becomes the mirror. My friend the earth is bitter; I think sunlight has failed her. Bitter or weary, it is hard to say. Between herself and the sun, something has ended. She wants, now, to be left alone; I think we must give up turning to her for affirmation. Above the fields, above the roofs of the village houses, the brilliance that made all life possible becomes the cold stars. Lie still and watch: they give nothing but ask nothing. From within the earth’s bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness my friend the moon rises: she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?
Hot. Again. I spend the mornings watching the birds upstairs, on the balcony and in surrounding trees. Nuthatches, a young finch, flocks of fluff ball bushtits and the familiar band tailed pigeons all make a daily appearance, happy for the water dish.
Later I’ll move to the cooler (daylight) basement to hang out on the couch and unapologetically watch movies, junk and otherwise. The perks of retirement.
I blame my fried brain for all the recent fare I liked for little reason, but the truth is I would have liked it anyhow. I’m a sucker for delicious trash, as you all know.
What fits that description to a tee is Netflix’s new show A Perfect Couple, a star studded mystery that reviewers called “profoundly unserious in all the best ways.” The Who dunnit element of an Agatha Christie-like country-estate dinner- party murder (can you tell my brain is hot with all these haphazardly placed dashes?) soon recedes in the background when the spotlight falls on what rich people all do to keep up appearances.
An icy matriarch, Nicole Kidman is half of that perfect couple, botoxed into porcelain doll – existence, with a cemented cascade of hair to match, emphasized by delft and wedgewood blue outfits. Her husband is a drug addled lecher, whose pregnant mistress is the murder victim. Multiple children, partners, (Dakota Fanning shines)and house guest complete the assembly of outrageously overdrawn character, romping through the beauty of Nantucket Island. One wonders during this search for the culprit, how many real sins we are exposed to, besides murder, given that there are so many of them spoofed. The sin of binging, in my case.
Also over the top, but growing on you after a few episodes, is the British black comedy Kaos, a retelling of Greek Myths supplanted into modern times. It is equal parts trying hard and exceedingly clever, star studded as well, with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, Nabhaan Rizwan as a ravishing Dionysius and Billie Piper as a perfectly cast Cassandra. Someone, I swear, tried to reference as many famous film makers as possible in the visuals, from Antonio, to Bergman, to Eisenstein. I had a blast.
If you like historical dramas with a twist, I was quite taken by The Serpent Queen, featured on Amazon. It is a retelling of Catherine de Medici’s role in France’s politics, her steady rise to power from Italian orphan to queen consort to regent in lieu of her under-age son. The acting shines for both the young Catherine (Liv Hill) and the old one (Samantha Morton), with a super strong cast surrounding them.
Visually it is a feast. Narratively, it tends to cast one of the most scheming women in history into a role that demands empathy for her plight, and understanding for her cruel moves. It does so with dishonesty via omission – the rise to her ultimate power, we are told, rests on her desire to protect a France free of religious compulsion, inclusive to both Catholics and Protestants (in contrast to her daughter in law, Bloody Mary, known for her persecution of Protestants.)
The series, however, conveniently ends with the coronation of Catherine’s second son (and her regency,) before she herself becomes the killers of the Huguenots, one of the most heinous religious persecutions in history. Oh well, artistic license, I gather, extending to the decision to underscore the period costume drama with utterly modern music. Somehow it all worked.
And there is always Season 2, relying on our forgetfulness of Season 1, I suppose.
Walk with me. Midmorning in the wetlands before the heat rises once again. Yellow meadows, blue skies, make me think suddenly of Ukraine and guilt-infused gratitude rises that here I have the luxury of peaceful meanderings, when others fight for their life. This week has been hard, with all the news in our own country as well, and the inability to decide on what might be the right path forward. When did we even last think about Ukraine, or Gaza for that matter, with our national horror show unfolding?
I chose this walk to leave politics behind me, just watch the birds, but can’t easily let go of so much I read across the last days. Here is a remarkable piece on J.D.Vance from a year ago, that might raise the stakes, if that is even possible. Ukraine will be left in the dust. Well, focus, Heuer. You came out here to recharge, not ruminate.
The bugs are out. So are the bees, legs thickly coated with pollen.
Finches waking up and breakfasting on early elderberries. Bushtits prefer mites on the oak leaves. A pair of kestrels hanging out. Bald eagle observing from on high.
Closer to the water, with slowly drying ponds, hungry nutria. Kingfisher high on his perch. Turtle taking a sun bath.
Some late ducklings, lots of shore birds, the killdeer looking like s/he has a glass eye.
Herons and egrets everywhere, eying each other, herding the geese until some fly off in annoyance.
And then, out of the blue sky, come the pelicans, diving down right in front of me, circling me, eventually coming to rest in the water and starting to preen. These infrequent sightings still make my heart race. In a good way, in this instance.
Gratitude descends. About nature. About the privilege to have access to it and the mobility to enjoy it. About a world in which so, so many people engage in trying to preserve it.
Here are words by William Stafford from over 60 years ago:
Let’s all try to meet the rage without with the wing within.
