Impermanence

Walking under the newly blossomed plum trees, watching the happy bees of this false spring, I found myself recalling a fragment of a poem I wrote maybe 30 years ago. Possibly more. I don’t even recall the rest of the poem, which likely sits in one of my crumbling notebooks and  in published form in some literary or academic magazine. Well, I could spend time sorting through the hundreds of poems to figure out where the fragment fits, what I was thinking, when it really was.

Maybe I’ll do that. Probably not.

The words are “impermanence alone is fixed”.

And sure, I know what I meant. We live in a world of rise and fall, of turns of the seasons, turning of the wheel. Beautiful things happen. Bad things happen. The white plum blossom drifts down like snow, and then there may be hard green nubs, and then sweet yellow or red or purple fruit, drawing the wasps, staining our mouths, sticky on our fingers, luscious to our tongues.

In the old days the news that ripped our lives apart came in letters & in phone calls & in people standing stiffly on the doorstep, faces fixed in a polite and terrible calm.

These days—perhaps a text message, a quick pixilated private message, a scrap of news, may turn the world over.

The trees keep blooming. I think you have to figure out what’s important. The flowers are here briefly. And so are we.

At our latest stop at the fancy medical place in the big city we met our youngest kid’s latest doctor. I loved the clouded emerald set in thinned gold he wore on his right hand, but you can’t very well gush “gee, what a fab ring! Family heirloom?” while the guy is confidently telling you that 10 years, maybe 15 years…there are new medications…endolthelin receptor antagonists, experimental program…

I told him I’d read some précis of his research. “I like rocket ships,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want to learn to build one”.

I did not say that the health of my youngest child was of grave concern to me and not really like a hobby. I figured he knew that. I said I felt better when I had as much information as possible. I don’t know how he took that; he promised to always be honest with me. Well, okay, that’s cool.

And we liked him, and his pretty ring, and his stories of England, and his firm disapproval of surgery for this particular case, this particular person, this being I held in my arms when he was born, drenched in wonder and exhaustion, his siblings and papa right there.

It’s a fragile place, you know, a top of the line medical research center. People rush about with internal calendars. Memories are just below the surface. Hope trembles on the lips and in the eyes. Hard to keep centered, sometimes.

But that’s the trick, in the turning wheel and the upheavals, in news from far away and tragedies in our front yards and aching hearts and aching legs.

Once I was a little girl, playing with imagined friends, my fine pale hair in my eyes. Once my children played under the falling blossoms. Once, well once upon a time I trusted nothing would ever hurt.

And I was wrong.

I’ve seen deaths, and loss, I’ve lived through a lifetime  of wars and damaged souls. People and things have slipped through my fingers.  They’ve been lost. I can’t rescue them, I can’t just break out the unicorns and dances, though I would love to. I’ve stayed up, haunted, through many a long night.

And I wouldn’t have missed it. And…well, in the moment, the air is sweet. The bees have gone into their hives for the night. Some I love are dead, some are far from me, but right here the cats are purring, my littlest kid sits with his papa, the dog is smelly and loyal and content, and life goes on.

For now, that’s enough.

The World Spins

I attended a memorial recently for a young man I knew. Most of the others there were his agemates, buddies, past & present loves. And lots of dogs, a mass of flowers, & abundant weed. Plus plates and plates of food from one of the people closest to him because when all else fails at least there is food to offer. I think she spent three days cooking; she’s a generous soul who every day puts herself on the line for justice, kindness, connection.

I don’t even remember what we talked of; I admired the dead kid’s photos & the portraits others had done. He had a kind of goofy charm & a great smile. And he was around my younger kids’ ages.

What I remember, what still haunts me, was looking round that ragged circle of nomads and housies and dogs and all and thinking, hoping, wishing with all my heart that I could keep them all safe.

That nothing would hurt them. That no despair would cut their world into pieces. That they would live, thrive, find their way through the thicket of youth, poverty, ambition, drugs, hormones, frustration & joy & be the best they could.

It hurts.

There is no safety in this world, at least not that I can find or give out.

So I give out apples or oranges. At least there is food.

Two whales washed up on our beaches, juveniles. The science people tell me not to worry, there have been years in which twenty have beached and died. Two is nothing at all.

But there was the great flood of krill washed up on our beaches the week before, some still alive, some having mated, full of eggs. The scientists scratch their heads about this one. Possibly the ocean is too warm? Possibly—they don’t say this, but the thought comes—you know that radiation from Fukishima, still leaking, still making its way to us along with the wreckage of broken lives—could that be a cause?

My bold Finnegan, a Manx cat, brings me a snake. The snake is not very happy. Finnegan himself looks confused—what to do about the coiling, stretching creature? I thank Finnie for the gift and take the snake from him. It is still vigorous and seems unhurt. I tell the snake I’m sorry my cat grabbed it, and take it to a shady nook near my little fish tub, where it quickly disappears, I hope to safety.

If only I could do that with everything.

The world spins with accident, shock, revolt, and beauty.

A couple weeks ago I watched an expert tree climber ascend into an eagle’s nest and cradle the big eaglets in his arms, taking them to be measured and banded and then returning them to their home 95 feet in the air. He is infinitely patient and calm, talking to them in a quiet voice. They seem unflustered, and within a week or so they will fledge, fly from the nest, go out into the uncertain, beautiful world.

Today I watched a lot of cops take a protester from his perch in a wick draining crane down in Willits (the wonders of video & computers). Oddly, it reminded me of the treeclimber who tags eagles. The protestor, Will Parrish, had that sort of calm, and for once the cops seemed calm as well. Though I wonder why they needed dozens of cops for this one arrest (and the later one of Amanda “Warbler” for trespass in an area unmarked by no trespassing signs).

What are they afraid of, I wondered.

And wonder.

I know what I fear, and what I try to face straight on. I’m old enough to have a litany of losses and panoply of joys. I’ve seen change I could not have imagined or forecast. I’ve seen social changes I thought were set—eroded. Watching Wendy Davis live I saw in that rowdy, determined, brilliantly unruly gallery a lot of fresh young faces and some very staunch women who might have marched with me at the demonstrations of the 60’s and early 70’s. Oh, we thought then we had won the way for the generations to come. Peace and freely given (and protected) love. Barriers crashing.

We didn’t know. The story is change, nothing certain but the beauty of fierce determination.

About the wetlands protests one friend asked “well, isn’t it a done deal?” implying that a sane person would give up. But that isn’t an option, even when faced with the power of money, corruption, governmental sleaze.

It’s not an option, giving up.

Though we stand at a memorial, though we see the patterns before us, though the whales beach, though young souls take their lives, we must go on. We must keep telling the truth, offering our food or our solace, our passion, our wildness, cradling this world as the treeclimber cradled that eaglet.

Yes, it could tear our hearts out.

We do it anyway.

Plum Blossom

Moonlight through the plum tree. A deep night in March. I sigh with pleasure, with a sense of coming home. There are times in which all is well, in which everything narrows to just a moment. Here. Now. The musky scent of plum blossom. The gentle drift of petals. A sky so deep, so dark, that the waxing moon slams my senses, a pure blast of light.

And nothing else matters. The world could turn on this pivot of white blossoms, white moon, and all would be well forever.

The plum tree I watched the moonlight through is the largest and oldest plum I’ve known. My arms cannot stretch around her trunk. She has been slashed and cut in years gone by. Half her branches seem dead, but are threaded with moss & lichen & the small nests of hummingbirds. Each year she bears small sour-sweet red plums with yellow flesh. Each year she seeds out dozens of infant plum trees. And each year, in late winter, she dances in a froth of white.

Blue jays nest at her top. Smudgie, the newest, shyest of my cats, used the tree for refuge and concealment all through the autumn, considering if I was worthy of her trust. I suppose my other cats, who climbed to sit with her,much to the consternation of the jays, gave me good references.

Or perhaps it was the ever brimming bowl of food.

Once this end of my little town was a plum orchard. Trees for blocks & blocks, summer gatherings to dry the plums and ship them off to…well, probably San Francisco. I figure this tree, scarred and surviving, wreathed with ivy and crowned by cats and birds, was one of those original plums.

That would make her about a hundred years old. Her roots reach the heart of a hidden creek that now runs mostly beneath cement and asphalt on its way to the gentle bend of the river.

A hundred years. It isn’t quite so long as it seemed to me in my 20’s, now that I am well past the half century mark myself. But it is long, and sometimes in the summer, gathering the little plums, I feel a connection to long ago people and long ago stories.

It’s too early for the blooming of plums in places like Iran or Afghanistan or in other countries, all around the world, distant, threatened countries. But I feel a kinship there as well. There is something….how can I put it…something very ancient about looking at the night sky through the branches of a tree.

Round here we are enclosed in an older world still than that of my old plum. It is a world held by trees and memories, and the memories are long ones. The forests that stretch through this region, the untamed coastline…these are part of a series of chosen, world recognized treasures. Heritage sites. Places where we learn our hearts and our past and perhaps can stand at the pivot of a moment. UNESCO has a list of these places, and I discovered—it should not have surprised me—that our forests are on that list, along with archeological wonders and Neolithic sites and places of grave magic.

I was reading about this particular treasure site—the forests of the Redwood Empire, the coastal corners—and came across mention (along with lists of animals and plants and birds that are cozied here, as no where else on the planet)…of human traces. Cultural sites.

My plum tree is a hundred years old, a grand lady, and I honor her age. These other sites…the people there left their traces almost 5000 years ago.

I sit with that thought sometimes. How many generations back would that be? Allowing, say, 30 years for each generation…17, 18? I know my own line back…back to my great grandmother, who lived and died in Finland. And on my father’s side to some mysterious people wandering from Bavaria, from a region soft with vines and flowers, where probably plum trees bloom. Though I also know my own genetic line, my maternal DNA, which goes back apparently over thousands and thousands of years to somewhere in east Africa, to a woman who bore a daughter who survived, who bore a daughter who grew up, who bore a daughter…and so on. The chances that led me to my moment beneath the blossoming plum tree…are rare, amazing, impossible. And so perhaps are the chances that led to the survival of the plum tree, and the fragile survival of the beautiful forests, the redwoods who network, root system to root system, growing, standing, being home to birds and small animals, shelter to bats, rain catchers, shade, inspiration.

Yeah, I know. I was caught in the plum blossom and moonlight for a moment, present only in the present moment for…far too short a time. My mind can’t help ranging. Past, future. So much is looming before us. I take strength from the power of bloom and root and endurance. From the apparently frail drifting petals, from the duff gently building at the roots of the redwoods.