Smoke from the Springer Fire turns the dawn orange over the Arkansas Hills last week.
You have to get over the color green.
Wallace Stegner’s advice about how to live sustainably in the inland West is not a suggestion. You won’t survive, he says, in these largely arid expanses between the 100th Meridian and the relatively well-watered West Coast, if your soul requires green.
Especially this year; especially in the Southwest and the Southern Rockies, where last winter’s snow pack–the source of our summer water–was so sparse as to be scary, and spring heated up so quickly even that paltry moisture simply vanished.
Which is why we have nine wildfires burning in Colorado right now, three in the southwestern corner, two west and one east of Colorado Springs, one near Leadville, and two in northern Colorado. Two of those fires are now contained, meaning they are burning within fire lines, but they are not controlled–on the way to being out; the other seven are not anywhere near contained, especially the largest three, the 83,000+ acre High Park Fire west of Fort Collins, which has so far burned nearly 250 homes and cabins and cost more than $29 million to fight, the 8,300-acre Weber Fire southeast of Mancos, and the 3,400-acre-and-growing Waldo Canyon Fire immediately west of Colorado Springs.
A tattered and worn tiger swallowtail, most likely a western, resting on the relatively green and well-watered hanging basket of flowers on my front porch.
The high temperature here in Salida, at 7,000 feet elevation in a mountain valley that is always dry, but not usually this parched, topped out at 99 degreesF yesterday. That’s the hottest by far in the 15 years I’ve lived in this high-desert valley in the rain-shadow of the tallest stretch of the Rockies.
I feel as tattered and worn as the tiger swallowtail butterfly in this photo, which looks like it has been through heck and back, its tails and the lower edges of its wings broken off, and the scales completely rubbed away in several places.
Wholeleaf indian paintbrush blooming in my native grassland yard because it’s gotten some supplemental water.
The landscapes I love are hurting in this drought, and that hurts me to. I can water the native grassland and wildflowers in my yard sparingly to keep them alive, but I can’t water the mountainsides around my valley. I can only watch helplessly as mountain meadows usually green at this time of year turn brown, as the evergreen foliage of the pinon pines and junipers on the nearby hillsides begins to dull, as the streams and the green band of riparian vegetation they nurture shrink.
We’ve received less than three inches of total precipitation in the first six-plus months of the year. That’s not enough to keep alive the living communities that animate these landscapes–from microscopic soil inhabitants to black bears and towering ponderosa pines, from rustling willows to lithe trout. These landscapes have survived long droughts before, including the decades of drought in the late 1100s that were a factor in causing the Ancestral Puebloan people to move from cliff dwellings like those of Mesa Verde to more reliable water sources along the region’s major rivers. But I’m guessing that survival wasn’t easy, or pretty.
Richard Cabe at 18, all James Dean restless creativity….
As I watch the landscapes I love wither in this extraordinary drought, I grieve the losses. For the company we humans are losing as each individual, and in some cases, whole populations of plants and animals, die out. For the homes burned in the wildfires. If this is global climate change, I hate it already.
And I grieve for my personal losses too, especially that of the love of my life, sculptor and economist Richard Cabe, he of the brilliant mind and boundless creativity, gone on to whatever is next in the cycle of life after he died of brain cancer last November.
How do we survive times like this? I know that I turn to nature, be it ever so beleaguered by drought and fire, and look for the grace notes–like that tattered tiger swallowtail or the brilliant indian paintbrush blossoms–signalling that life manages to thrive despite all.
Those small miracles remind me that joy lives on; I only have to pay attention and let it in.
Hi Susan, We are, as always, hearing you and sharing the thoughts and feelings. Stay well and stay ‘online’.
Best – Mel and B
Bless you, Mel and B. You are both wonderful!
Joy does and can still live, even if we must remind ourselves of that more than once a day. I’ve been grieving for our planet, and for whatever role we humans have played in this growing catastrophe, for a long time now. But the earth has always been changing. At one time, North Dakota was under an inland sea. Later, a tropical forest where dinosarus roamed. More recently, under a glacier, with a glacial lake over the eastern part of the state (explaining its flatness). It will keep changing. I can tell myself that this is a warm interstitial period in an ongoing ice age, but I can’t generally believe it anymore. But life will survive. It may not be life as we know it now, but life finds a way. Always. But I share your grief and loss. Only time can heal the loss, and maybe it can just make it easier to live with; I’m not sure yet. And I didn’t have years with the little one I lost, only months. But my whole life with my parents, and I miss them still, but not with that sharp pain of the first years. Now it’s like a scar; a reminder that hurts a bit if you poke at it enough, but more or less healed, although the memory will always live. Hang in there, Susan.
Blessings!
Lori, I was thinking about how much life on earth has changed over the millennia as I wrote this post, so it’s interesting that you picked up that particular thread. I agree with you, life will survive. Not necessarily the way we would hope for it to be, or the way we would want it to be, but it’s not all about us anyway.
So I guess we just go along doing our best to leave our particular part of the earth in better shape than we found it, and honoring the ones we loved–for however long–who aren’t with us now. I tell Richard every night that my resolve is to live in a way that honors and celebrates his life and our love. Seems to me a good way to be…. Blessings back to you.
Ah, Susan, how right you are that you won’t survive there if your soul requires green. I write this as tropical storm Debby pounds my roof with water and the greens outside blind me with their brilliance. It astounds me to think of the contrasts in our world…and the extremes. Because the aridity is so hard on my spirit, I have a deep feeling of that harshness as I share your loss and grief. I wish the negative ions from these daily rainfalls could fall upon your tattered heart and soothe it.
Bobbe, I am so glad that you figured out that your spirit needs green and found a way to get it. I just hope you don’t get flooded out by TS Debby. Yikes! Stay dry, and let that green nourish you. We’ll get our rain here–someday.
Sending healing thoughts your way Susan. You handle life with such great care and do a beautiful job of helping us feel your presence. Difficult times. Keep your faith. Blessings and good wishes all around you. Everywhere is nature. It finds a way to survive and rebuild. We treasure it all.
The picture of your Richard at 18–it’s so awesome! You made me smile
Robin, Thank you for those healing thoughts, and for the sympathy and support. Sometimes we just need to express that grief; if we carry it with us, it’ll become a burden or something that distorts us, body and spirit. So I’m “speaking” about it in order to let it go as best I can. I think grief is something to honor and respect, but not to accumulate. And yes, isn’t that a great photo of Richard? I found it when I was putting together the photos for the celebration of his life back in December, and I just loved it. I just want to take that boy home with me, you know?
Susan, I do believe that grief is something we need to confront. It is healthy to live with an open heart. I think about life lost. It weighs me down on certain days. When this happens I go to nature, like you, then I feel restored. You speak about the fragility of life through ‘drought and grief’, yet you forge on through your day with optimism. The landscape is a multitude of color. When I first arrived back in New England, the color green was almost blinding. Now it is just part of my landscape, once again. In So Cal, I saw ‘warm gold’ because that is how I felt most days living there. We feel our surroundings, it affects us profoundly. It is difficult to find balance. But we do and we must.
Robin, I agree that living with an open heart is essential, and “sitting with” our grief is part of that. Not easy, but an important part of being with what is. I am fascinated by what colors we are each drawn to in the landscapes we love. F or some it is the vivid rust of the red rock country in western Colorado and Utah and northern Arizona, for others the ocean-like expanses of the tawny Great Plains, or the symphony of greens you have around you in New England. For me it’s less a color–though I do love our blue skies!–than the spicy fragrance of piñon pines and the unforgettable pungency of big sagebrush. The smells are what take me home to these dry and sometimes difficult, but so sparely beautiful landscapes. We do feel our surroundings, in part because they are full of other feeling lives communicating with us too, whether we can “hear” them or not.
I hear your sadness.
Xox
Thank you for acknowledging it, Denese. Sometimes that’s what we need, isn’t it? Hugs back to you.
I so understand this, Susan. The last two years I was in Yemen we lived on the coast, but the land was desert-dry. All shades of brown and sparse, spiky vegetation when there was any at all. I looked at the blue of the Arabian Sea, but longed for the green of my home here in the States. Finding the world here in SC so green has been a blessing, I feel my whole soul opening up again. I never realized how connected one could be with the land until I felt the way that dry barrenness affected me so much.
Thank you for the gift of the picture of Richard at 18- James Dean didn’t have a thing on Richard!
I looked at some of the photos of the part of Yemen where you lived those last two years, Khadijah, and I was awed by the spareness of the land. There’s a spiritual quality to desert so bony and dry, and a reason that pilgrims and seekers of all sorts have gone to those kinds of expanses–life is honed down it its essence there. But revelations aside, desert that harsh is a hard place to make into a home. I’m glad that you’ve got green now in South Carolina, and I hope wherever you end up feeds your soul that way as well. And Richard at 18–oh yeah! As I said to Robin above, I look at that picture and I just want to take that boy home with me….
Thank you, Susan. I’ll share this with my friends who have lost their homes. We need to keep the biggest picture in mind, even as we mourn large losses of today.
Dear Deb, I’m honored that you would want to share this particular with your friends who have lost their homes. I can only imagine the shock of losing everything you own in these fires, the suddenness of it and the terrible power of the flames. In the end, the forest and woodland and grassland will rise from the ashes like the phoenix of fable, but it won’t be the forest we were used to; it will be life though, going about its business. How we see it, whether we love it the same way, is up to us and our ability to accept the changes we have participated in setting up. It’s not easy learning to love life in all its aspects…. Please give your my heartfelt sympathy along with the post.
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about this Wendell Berry poem, first encountered in Terry Tempest Williams’, _Refuge_:
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I’m not sure how much a remedy it is for the grieving of a beloved’s absence, though; nor when the “where” of the wood drake and great heron are dried to dust. Maybe, it’s about understanding some things are bigger, and stretch so much further, than our own cycles of life.
I think that’s exactly it, Eduardo: what spending time with the larger cycle of lives teaches us is that our own lives are part of the tapestry of lives that make this earth such a beautiful and nourishing place, and that life goes on “stretching so much further than our own cycles.” That’s the comforting part, and thanks for sharing Wendell’s poem. I would disagree with him in one place, and that’s about “wild things” not “taxing their lives with forethought of grief.” Other species do grieve, and mightily, whether elephants gathering to hold vigil around the body of a dead matriarch or condors unwilling to leave the side of their dead young. Perhaps Wendell hasn’t kept up on animal behavior research….
Susan, that same line is what made me pause before posting this poem. A sense of anthrocentric arrogance and incorrectly “simple-minding” other animals.
I figured you had thought about that Eduardo. You’re always perceptive. Isn’t it funny how even the best thinkers among us have blind spots too?
A beautiful tribute to you, to Richard, and the arid world in which you live. Honoring grief, respecting it and allowing it are all good to do. Otherwise…it just gets stuck. I recently, after seven years, grieved again for the loss of all that I had hoped for in my family life. Doing that opened me for what is now to come even though I don’t know what that is. Thank you for sharing your journey as you do. It reminds me to be aware of mine. To stay in the moment, open to joy, wherever it may reveal itself…even in a tattered butterfly. I also love that picture of Richard. I believe the float trip is approaching. I hope the fires and drought will not affect it. Much love to you dear friend.
Grief does get “stuck” if we don’t express it. I am glad that you can stop and notice when you need to grieve, even years later. Those chunks will continue to float up from time to time, and you’ll let them go as you can, and as you say, open yourself up for what is to come. That’s living fully in the moment, and it’s hard but rich. And yes, the float trip is approaching, though I haven’t had much time to think about it what with writing my TED talk and getting my presentation ready to send off before I leave for the float trip, organizing my dad to be away for a couple of months at an intensive training for the blind, and getting the shop ready for a big volunteer weekend to put up the new ceiling…. Somewhere in there I find time to sleep and eat, but I’m not sure how.
Love back to you!
I read your post and found myself thinking of green, and how important it is to me. I seem to require it to flourish–but the downside to green is mold, which I learned, to my sorrow, is Not Good. So now I live in a place between, green fields and orchards for much of the year, and evergreen mountains to one side, and high desert to the other. There’s an uneasiness to it–a feeling that I am balanced on a knife edge. It forces me to stretch, to seek to encompass the broader view, to understand that everything goes in cycles. Here, we’ve been having a little too much rain–nothing like TS Debby, but the wheat is lodging, and some farmers have cut alfalfa lying in souring windrows. I find myself thinking that maybe the secret to survival is traveling light–keeping one’s self portable, owning nothing that can’t be given up at a moment’s notice, living with the world, rather than seeking to impose one’s will upon it. Paradoxically, there is great security to be had in keeping one’s “necessaries” to those things we carry in our souls. A couple years ago, when I was grappling with The Crash, I found great comfort in knowing that as long as I had knowledge in my head, skill in my hands, and my son, we would be fine. Everything else could go.
I loved your picture of Richard–how lovely he was, wasn’t he, both inside and out. How wonderful that you had each other for so many years–and how sad t makes me to know that you’re having to learn to travel even lighter, without one of your “necessary things.” Take very great care of yourself.
Bodie, I think knowing what colors and landscapes speak to us is an essential part of knowing who wee are. But as you learned, the deep green of the rainy coast comes at the peril of rain and mold. It sounds like your choice to be at home where you are, no matter how tenuous it feels to you sometimes, is the right one for you and your son–at least for now. I agree absolutely about the importance of being able to travel light–stuff is just stuff, and imposing our will on the world only leads to frustration, because we can’t. The world does not bend to our will, try as we might to make it. What is best about us, I think is not our stuff anyway, it’s how we live each moment of each day, and whether we leave this world–at least our small part of it–in better shape than we found it. I love your phrase “necessary things”–Richard was one of mine, and I find that carrying his spirit with me brings me a smile. He would like that.
Susan
Thanks for sharing that picture of Richard at 18. What a sensitive and smart looking young person he was. He never lost that look about him.
I can relate to your blog about this hot and dry summer. We’re feeling as tattered and worn as that butterfly down here in SE Arizona. The heat is about as bad is gets, but the rainy season is just getting started. I’m hopefull that we’ll get some moisture – even if its still drought conditions. The desert perks up so much even with just a little rain.
Peace and Love to you always!
Emily, When I found that photo of Richard, my heart just swelled. I so wish I had known him then, when his life was so troubled! You’re right though, he was already sensitive and so deeply intelligent. That was just who he was, even when he was deeply unhappy. I’m sorry that SE Arizona, and you and Linas, is feeling the heat and drought so keenly. I hope the monsoons come soon, and that they’re generous this year. Be well!
I have crawled out from under my rock and am poking around and loving your new blog design and musings! The horsemint is fading and so are hopes of an end to this drought for now. The good thing about the heat, I guess, is it drive me indoors to occupy myself. We had a glorious spring that allowed me to be out and about much of the time. I will adjust to this heat, I know~ we had such a display of green and blue this year, it is a shock to see it all shriveled up.
Martha, Welcome back and thanks for exploring the new blog and site! I wish the drought was over, but it looks like it’s here to stay all over the greater Southwest and Texas. I’m glad that spring was generous with rain in your part of the world, and sorry it’s now so hot and dry. It is a shock to see life curl in on itself and go dormant. The miracle is that rain will “wake” it again eventually, and life will resume going about its business as if drought was normal….
Our thoughts and prayers are with all of y’all in Colorado. I hope you’re OK! I’m fighting a bit of the “has to be green” syndrome here with my dead lawn. Hugs from HOT Texas, bobbi c.
My valley doesn’t have any fires yet, Bobbi, but I have friends who have lost houses, and friends who watched fires burn to within just yards of their homes before the flames were stopped. On your dead lawn, did you see my post about The Meadow Project? Catherine Zimmerman’s book and DVD might be useful to you in explaining to your neighbors about what you’re doing…. http://susanjtweit.com/2012/06/summer-solstice-restoring-healthy-habitat.html/ Hugs back from not-quite-so-hot Colorado!
Susan, thank you for sharing. I’ve gained so much from following you over the past few months since I discovered your website. So much beauty to which you have opened a door. Just a thought on the Wendell Berry poem. I think perhaps the key is that he says wild things do not tax their lives with “forethought of grief.” I don’t see that as saying grieving doesn’t happen after loss has occurred. As humans we tend to envision future loss and thus begin grieving “in advance” in a way that wildlife perhaps does not. I sometimes have to remind myself to “live in the moment” and not borrow more grief than I can bear today. Blessings to you.
Stephanie, I’m honored that you’re here with us, and that this blog is helpful to you. I agree with you on Wendell Berry’s point about not grieving in advance, and living in the moment. That’s so critical to fully living no matter what happens in our lives. What concerns me is Berry’s use of other species as an example of what we should strive for, as if we are the only species capable of that complex set of emotions involved in seeing what’s coming and mourning it. He often assumes that other species are somehow less than humans, and that’s only true if you ask them to respond as if they were human. Animal behavior research shows that a wide range of other species do “tax” their lives “with forethought of grief.” If you’ve ever seen two dogs for instance, hanging out with an ailing comrade, tails down and eyes sad, it’s pretty clear they’re grieving for the loss to come. I think Berry’s guilty of using other species as sort of the “Noble Savage” example there.