On A Winter Day

Winter here is green and silver, but a snowfall of white blossoms has accumulated beneath the manzanita, and paperwhites I planted years ago along the fence have sprung up and surprised me, swaying like long-necked dancers, incongruously delicate, tipping forward from the burden of blooms on slender stalks. The sycamores have been shedding broad yellow leaves; I see them strewn messily against dark earth, like outstretched clown hands. Meanwhile swirls of cloud drift about the hills, and a very blue bluebird perches on the top branch of a toyon, dining on bright red berries. A train chugs and whistles in the far distance, preceded by a chorus of coyotes. Sometimes I can hear the surf. This place incites wonder; the day invites reflection.

Seven years ago, I marched with friends in Washington, D.C., along with 500,000 other souls, filling up the trains, pouring into the city, the mood friendly but not festive, a sense of mission and resolve. Iconic buildings loomed before us…the Washington Monument, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. The messages on the signs that people carried were collectively a kind of poetry of the people, and there was a feeling of extraordinary unity and unshakeable determination. My heart was filled with hope. Half a million people? A million? Who knows. We were everywhere. We were a harbor. We were the sea. And how can it be? Seven years later, with all that has happened, the lies and delusions persist.

Rumi: you have seen my descent, now watch my rising.

May this year mark a rising. May our hearts escape the insidious toxins of despair and disillusionment. I’m trying to channel the fierce sense of hope and conviction we felt back then, and even turn it into action. On this gentle winter morning, from this island of silver and green, it isn’t difficult to believe.

And I enter this day, as Mary Oliver wrote:

...believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea...

On this day twenty-four years ago, my sister Marlene died. Only three weeks earlier, I had been curled up in the window seat in this very house talking to her long-distance on the telephone, looking out upon the hills I see before me now. Marlene lived with a debilitating kidney disease and was always on the brink of terrible complications, but I had gotten used to this, in the way that people do, and assumed she would always endure. She was three years younger than me, my childhood playmate, sometimes my angry adversary, always witty and funny and beautiful, the one who could sing. (Somewhere I have a recording of her singing, but I can hear her voice in my head too.) Anyway, on that day in January when I sat in the window seat talking to her, we pondered the unrolling not just of a new year, but a brand new millennium, and we remembered the kinds of things that sisters share, and we contemplated the wonder of all that had passed and might yet come to be, and it may have been the best conversation we ever had. I had a tangible sense of how familiar and dear she was, and I felt a surge of intense love for her. I never imagined that this would be our last good-bye.

And I have no excuses for my chronic stupidity and denial. I just think we learn some of the most important lessons in retrospect and a little bit too late.

So what do we do with that painfully acquired knowledge? We apply it to new situations, I guess, and try to learn the alchemy of transforming it to compassion, and when it comes to the loss of someone we loved, we honor their spirit with kindness, or maybe we do something brave. I want the residue of my sister’s life to be so much more than sorrow and regret.

And while I was typing those very words, I looked up and glimpsed a hummingbird outside the window like an affirmation, its iridescent ruby throat glinting, its stalwart little body in perpetual motion.

In the course of this winter week, I wandered at low tide with a few of the ladies who hike, had dinner with dear friends on a rainy night, and saw a bobcat nonchalantly strolling down the road. I ran into one of my besties in a grocery store, which turned a mundane errand into a social event, I did some closet sorting, and I tried to write a story for Felix. Outside, the procession of light and rain and greening ensued, and the world was vibrant in its growing, and I felt joyful and sad and sometimes afraid, over and over again. I remembered winters in Chicago and Syracuse and other cold places, and leaned gratefully, still amazed, into the winter that is here.

I have asked so many questions, and no answers came, but I’ve decided to be patient with all that is unsolved, and “live the questions”, as Rilke advised. In the fading winter light, I rest my head upon the pillow of not-knowing.

And Mary Oliver told me this: