How on Earth?!

Is it possible to look at those clouds and to think nothing?  To not wonder "How on earth?"

I've come to believe that "how on earth?" is the most important question in our vocabulary, one that drives and feeds, saves and fills us, often all at once.

Today at 3, I'll be retracing my earlier steps from the Women's March, this time in support of science, a field of study birthed from the question "How on earth?"   That it's also Earth Day is probably no coincidence, even if the realization just occurred to me this morning.

Two celebrations--one for science, one for nature.  To borrow a word understood by both, it's a perfect confluence.  Science, after all, is the flashlight we humans shine on this universe.  And, ironically, the more shadows we cast out, the more as-yet-unnamed shapes emerge.  To me, it is an irresistible, unimaginably beautiful relationship these two have developed.

This morning's walk with Finn was peppered with "how on earths?"  As is often the case, the trees were the first to catch my attention.  Tracing their outlines, many now softened with newly unfolding leaves, I wondered where in their limbs lived the life-giving knowledge of shape.  How did each know just how best to grow in order to soak up the most sun possible?  And what ancient vibrations were their roots listening to today, so that they might map a new, thirst-quenching route for this upcoming season?

There are a thousand things--silly and serious--that I'd like to see in person someday, each fueled by my own "how on earth?" utterings.  Cashews in their natural state, for instance.  Where are they housed--a bush, a tree, the ground?  Sure, I could Google it and have my answer.  But I want to be there, to see it with my own eyes.  And then, afterwards, I want to stop by a ramshackle stand at the end of the grove (is that what they're called?) to pick up a few in their more familiar state--naked, roasted, lightly sprinkled with Himalayan sea salt, thankyouverymuch.

I also want to swim in a sea of bioluminescent creatures.  To lay on my back August 21st and look up at the moon's umbra (a scientific word for "umbrella!") as it snuffs out the sun for a minute or two.  I want to be engulfed in the bending light show of an aurora borealis. To ask a house wren how it learns its songs, and to see its throat vibrate as it calls forth a mate or chastises a neighbor's cat.  I want to know how my body--this radical community of things that have never bothered to introduce themselves to me--how this body moves, how the blood flows, how the synapses fire, how it fights the cancers that invade it and heals itself afterwards.

 How on earth could science ever be construed as anti-God?  I have no patience for people who are put off or threatened by the questioning.  Pity?  Yes.  But no patience.

There is no growth, no wonder, where the big questions go unasked.

Mercy Me, Little Hound!

There's a yippy, mean mop of a dog on M Street that likes to scare the pants off Finn and me.  Yeah, I know.  Dogs don't wear pants, but you know what I mean.  In the past few months,  Finn and I finally have gotten wise to him and cross the street ahead of time, if I see his porch light on.

Today, though, we stayed the course, dog be damned.  Porch light ablaze, his shag-carpet body quavering at the ready, I did my best to ignore the slathering hound and his ear-piercing bravado.  For me, it was a lesson in mercy.  Better for me to forgive the dog its annoying dog-ness than to keep crossing the street or cursing it.

Lately, I seem to keep bumping into that word--mercy.

Just last night, I finished Bryan Stevenson's book "Just Mercy," a sobering account of this country's imbalanced, incapacitating practices of incarceration.  Largely devoid, in equal parts, of both justice and mercy, our country's prisons are brutally hard on people who are not rich, are not white, are not desired.  Stevenson, whose law practice focuses on these under-/over-represented people, wraps his mercy in the form of giving voice and compassion to this largely forgotten, often demonized population.

Stevenson's brand of mercy is not for sissies.  His is framed in a relentless, demanding and, at times, demoralizing pursuit of returning the elements of humanity to locked-up humans.  His work reminds me to reach across, especially to those whose voices too often go unheard.

Notions of mercy are also coming at me from Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico.  Action and contemplation--in the same sentence!  Isn't that a kick in the pants?!  My friend Scott recommended I pick up a copy of Rohr's "Falling Upward," a book that focuses on this second half of life I'm in.  Rohr's also got a daily email he sends out and today's was focused on--you guessed it--mercy.


In the email, I learned that the word mercy (a word that can feel quaint and awkward in these times) comes from the Etruscan merc--meaning "merchant or exchange."  In this context, then, mercy is a flow that requires openings on both ends--in giving and in receiving, which makes mercy the opposite of a power play because it distributes its power--its forgiveness--equally.

Just like the name Center for Action and Contemplation seems ironic, Stevenson's book title "Just Mercy" pits together seemingly opposite ideas--how can justice and mercy possibly coincide?  Doesn't one knock the legs out from the other?

Back to Rohr for a little perspective: "Every time God forgives us, God is saying his own rules don't matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us."  Wait, what?  God isn't the rule-obsessed, letter-of-the-law, don't-mix-your-materials titan of Old Testament fame?!

Mercy, it seems, is a rebel clothed in soft fabric.  A nudger that puts us in unfamiliar territory, a desire that causes us to question the rules, an act that flies in the face of authority and fills all while emptying none.

Mercy is me bending down at the little white fence on M Street so that I might pet the snarling beast.  I'm not there yet, but I'm getting closer. 

7:15 Sunday at Holmes Lake

7:15 Sunday at Holmes Lake

Sometimes, the grid is laid with gravel.

But, today, I want to be silent.

So I shift my feet off path, to soft soil,

my presence now muted.

Is it a denial of self to want to be absorbed by

everything around me?  
To long to lay down among the morning-light miscanthus

and look up?

Maybe it is something quite the opposite

--a blossoming of self in the presence of others.

Pressed against the warm earth, I disappear,

watching skeins of geese stretch above, noisily recalibrating.

My ears awaken, tickled by the chit-chit-chit-whirrrrr of red-winged blackbirds.

Agitated and full of sex, red-breasted robins circle,

swirling upward like angry dry leaves in the wind.

I am awash in this beautiful, this perfect science

--the audaciousness of a crab-apple blossom breaking through

--the sweet, iron-tinged scent of a rain cloud as it moves overhead

--the umber flash of fox, trolling for voles along the dam’s backside

I love my people, to be sure.  

But, some mornings, I love the wild world even more.

Heroes Just for One Day

Susan Sontag wrote "courage is as contagious as fear."

I have felt equal parts of both this year.  On levels both cellular and societal, my world has burbled and burst open, time and again.  And the resultant exposure has been intense.

Cancer and death, politics and personalities have made me both brave and bedraggled.   Often in the same day.  And these odd bookends end up blurring the good and ordinary things that exist between them, which sometimes leaves me feeling unanchored and isolated.

How is it that I have found my voice and lost it, too?

It is April and I have only written 7 of these.

It is April and I have seen Sandhills Cranes and the English Beat, the Gutenberg Bible and a Pileated Woodpecker.

It is April and our president announced his commitment to the coal industry.  While standing at the Environmental Protection Agency.  

It is April and I don't like what my cancer meds are doing to my body.

It is April and I am a 55-year-old woman, invisible to many, and empowered by that fact.  Nothing to lose.

It is April and the earth reminds me that it is hard work to nudge spring to life again.

It is April and the rains have slaked our thirst.

It is April and I am alive.

It is April and I shall be courageous.