With This Knowledge

I’ve noticed that in my interactions with others lately, people seem more accessible. There is a certain candor and vulnerability. Conversations go more quickly to the real. There is a recognition, implied or explicit, of crisis, and a sense of our own brevity and fragility. I suppose that knowledge was already there, but suddenly it has risen to the surface, and not in a way that discourages, but in a manner that somehow renders us more passionate, less filtered, more determined than ever to connect, and to do something with what Mary Oliver described as our “wild and precious” lives. Are we living with greater urgency now?

Or maybe I’m just seeing reflected in others what I am feeling in myself.

But no, it’s palpable. Perhaps it’s what Rebecca Solnit would call emergency behavior. She has observed that people are often kinder, more real, and more generous in a crisis, their shared humanity underscored.

It could also be what happens as we get older. Yesterday, we held a meeting of our little writing group, the Gaviota Writers, which has been trundling along for thirty years, and is always a source of sustenance. And there we were, a bunch of weatherbeaten boomers, each of us facing our challenges and changes, and even in our fragility, surprisingly resilient. There was a sense of community and camaraderie. We talked and read about influences in our lives, family members long gone, teachers and friends, loss and the lessons that linger. Sometimes there were tears, but we also laughed, and we resolved not to give up. It was a very warm day, and I walked back through the canyon with Sally and Christine, and the air smelled like earth and summer, and the twisted, broken oaks were sprouting new leaves, and we walked on the gravelly path very slowly, guarding against falls, but savoring it all. Later, Monte and I went down to the beach at low tide, and I wandered on the ocean floor. “What we need is here,” said Wendell Berry, famously, and I agree.

Early this morning, the crew of landscapers drove up. They come to work for us every few months, helping to clear brush and tidy things up. Their jovial banter drifts up through the window. There is something merry about them, but also very diligent, and I am delighted by their arrival, for they are part of the tapestry of living here at the edge of things. I’m delighted, too, by the sight of quails in the driveway, plump and self-important. And the cows with their calves, peaceful and oblivious.

It occurs to me anew every now and then, how much I love this place, and my community. But a few days ago, I was driving along a favorite country road, and I had a tangible sensation of heavy-heartedness, initially a surge of grief, and all the influences converged upon me. I felt the sharp ache of loss commensurate with the depth of love, but also the presence of the learning and the memories that were still there, filled to the brim and overflowing. My heart literally felt weighted, swollen, on the cusp of bursting. However it was full not only in a sorrowful way, but also in a bountiful way, full with the everything-ness of life, the surprise of it, the wonder and the gratitude.

During World War II, my father, honorably discharged from his own Army service, took it upon himself to write letters almost daily to his younger brother, my Uncle Joe, who was still on active duty, stationed in the Pacific. I was reading those letters recently, struck by the love in every line, the reporting of news about rationing and politics and the progress of the war, worries about money, hard and menial jobs, the health and well-being of family members, but most of all the cheerleading and encouragement offered to my uncle who was surely in a kind of hell. “The object,” my father wrote, “is not merely to survive, but to come back with balance, with a reasoning mind, to hate your enemies and to be on the alert for them, to respect your friends and appreciate them, to love those who love you and to love them in return….If you must become angry even that can be harnessed constructively. Accept it all as a challenge to break your spirit. Defy them to break you! Dare them to prevent you from coming back as you want to: alert, intelligent, healthy, with ambition, with goals to seek and win!”

Sometimes my father’s words from 1944 speak directly to me even now.

He also told me this once, “Yes, it is possible to have your head in the stars but keep both feet firmly on the ground.”

Talk about an influence.

My friend Jan sent me this poem a week or so ago, "A House Called Tomorrow" by Alberto Rios, and it seemed to explain exactly why my heart is heavy. Here it is in its entirety:

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—

You are a hundred wild centuries

And fifteen, bringing with you

In every breath and in every step

Everyone who has come before you,

All the yous that you have been,

The mothers of your mother,

The fathers of your father.

If someone in your family tree was trouble,

A hundred were not:

The bad do not win—not finally,

No matter how loud they are.

We simply would not be here

If that were so.

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.

With this knowledge, you never march alone.

You are the breaking news of the century.

You are the good who has come forward

Through it all, even if so many days

Feel otherwise. But think:

When you as a child learned to speak,

It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,

And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us

The simple solutions and songs

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies

All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.

What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves. And that’s all we need

To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.

Look back only for as long as you must,

Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.

Make us proud. Make yourself proud.

And those who came before you? When you hear thunder,

Hear it as their applause.

That poem articulated it perfectly for me, that I am every age I ever was, and that I am the sum total of all that came before me: the history of my family, the history of the world; the sorrows and triumphs; the unlikelihood of each of us, the sheer miracle and wonder of it. And in this urgent moment, it motivates me. I want to go forward, adding to their stories, trying hard, being good, being present, being proud and grateful and determined instead of sad, hearing the thunder as their applause.