Loving this World in Difficult Times

I sometimes feel guilty because I don't comment more on politics and current affairs. Politics and current affairs are not, I remind myself, my beat, my area of expertise. The truth is, I shy away from that kind of commentary because it seems to me that the tone and tenor of public discourse leave no space for my voice.

It is all so shrill and angry and fear-mongering, all extremes and labels and I-hate-you-because-you-disagree-with-me. All sides, no middle. No time or place for thoughtfulness, for pondering and reflecting and trying to see, much less respect, other points of view. 

Thoughtfulness and respecting other points of view are critically important values for me. I am an INFJ personality type in the Myers-Briggs spectrum of understanding human personalities. The "I" is for introverted and intuitive (yes, I like people; I just need a lot of time alone to process and reflect). "F" stands is for feeling in the empathetic sense because I am sensitive to the non-verbal signals we humans give off with such abundance, and "J" because I value concrete data and the ability to think over the patterns it creates to explain the world.

(If you're curious about where you land in the personality spectrum, check out the test at 16 Personalities. It's thorough without taking too much time, and surprisingly and sometimes a bit uncomfortably informative.)

Put more succinctly, sound bites and labels and divisions are not my thing; fairness and consideration and justice are. Love is.

Look up photos of me and I'm the one smiling with my arm around someone else, or on hands and knees admiring some detail of leaf or flower or rock. I'm the one in love with this world and life, hard as that may be. 

That's me expressing two kinds of love, love for the Chihuahuan Desert  in southern New Mexico, and big "L" love for the man who has his arm around me, the late Richard Cabe. (Photo by Susan Kask. Thanks, Sue!)

My mission is loving and restoring the world, not tearing it to bits by reducing its human and wild communities to warring factions. 

I believe that our species' greatest attribute is not our big brains–those are wonderful, but can also get us in serious trouble. Nor our intellect, strength, or even our creativity. What we humans do best, I think, is love. As I wrote in one of my books:

What we do best comes not from our heads but our hearts, from an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our best steps in the dance of life.

–From The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes

Loving Molly Cabe at the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco

I've been pondering lately how to best live that love in these times. Not so much in my writing, because my love for this troubled world threads through everything I write, from the haiku and photo I post each morning on social media to the columns I write for Houzz and Rocky Mountain Gardening Magazine, to my work re-imagining Bless the Birds, my memoir-in-progress. And of course my podcasts on end-of-life choices for The Conversation Project, a national effort begun by writer Ellen Goodman to encourage dialog on how we want our lives to go at the end. 

In the being. How can I, how can we keep that love flowing, and encourage it in others when the world seems to value love so little, when fear and anger seem to have so much power? 

To express love is a conscious choice that comes from within. Which means that we have to have love to express. We have to nurture our own supply by taking time every day to restore both heart and spirit. 

Here are some suggestions adapted from a list I posted on social media in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting:

* TAKE A BREAK from the news–watching violence over and over triggers more stress and grief, exhausting our ability to love. 
* BREATHE: Take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, then exhale slowly and completely. Repeat a few times. 
* GO OUTSIDE. Find a quiet space, as natural as possible. Nature nurtures our empathy and ability to love.
* SIT. Let your mind empty. Listen for the wind, bird sounds, the flutter of leaves. Look for the beauty of flowers or form. Feel the sun on your skin. Let the pulse of life soothe your pulse, refill your capacity for feeling beauty, awe, and gratitude.
* CRY, SCREAM, RANT if necessary. Then find quiet again. 
* CONSCIOUSLY SPREAD LOVE and light, not fear and anger: Smile at strangers; be kind in a difficult situation; offer help to someone who is struggling; act with generosity and compassion. 

How can we practice love in a world as troubled and frightening as ours seems right now? By remembering that love is not about being perfect, either us or the world. It is about actively looking for and nurturing beauty, diversity, kindness, courage, compassion, empathy, creativity–the basic goodness of life, all lives, in the community of this planet. It is about seeking and nurturing the heart in every living being, in every moment. 

Remembering that love is always stronger than hatred. 

And deliberately adding our mite of love to the world. Every day. 

Thank you. 

It's not perfect by any means, but I love this community, this place, this life.

What to Do Now?


Every morning, I post a haiku and photo on social media: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That observation in words and imagery of a moment in time, of the natural world, of a bit of beauty is my way of reminding us all to take time to engage with the real world beyond our digital devices. To be aware and mindful, to be grateful for the miracle that is life on this numinous, breathing planet. 


Wednesday morning, after the election, I was moved to post a statement in haiku form, rather than my usual poem. (I’ve written about the rules of classical haiku before; here’s a reminder if you’re interested.)


what to do now? 

stand for kindness, compassion, respect

for all on earth


That statement felt right at the time, and still feels right. My mission in life is to reconnect us all with nature and its power to heal, inspire, and inform. Research shows what we might guess intuitively: time spent in nature–the more natural the better–is a powerful cure, restoring our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health.


Nature is also a teacher, showing us the value of diversity (ecosystems comprised of more kinds of species are generally healthier and more stabile than those with few), cooperation (species cooperate as much as they compete), and what I would express as hope (life finds creative ways to continue, though not always the way we would most prefer). 


As I know by my own experience with our formerly decaying industrial property and its block of urban creek, restoring nature can revitalize our neighborhoods and communities, clean the water and air we depend on, and provide homes and food for the wild species who are our partners in making earth a nurturing place. It can in fact, remind us that miracles are possible, given time, thoughtful action, and a loving and persistent commitment to the work. 


So as I’ve gone through this post-election week, writing, talking with friends and family, hugging strangers, and taking long walks around Santa Fe, I’ve kept that haiku-form statement in my mind. It helps to have something positive to focus on. 



Today I spent some time with the migrating salmon sculpture that Richard loved to visit whenever we came to Santa Fe. I thought about how salmon smell their way home to their natal streams from thousands of miles out in the open ocean, how they swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, leaping waterfalls if necessary.


And I thought about these carved granite salmon sculptures, forever swimming upstream in the waterless high desert. “Doing the work” as my friend and fellow writer Steve Edwards said tonight on Twitter. 


I am re-committing myself to doing my work, to my mission to reconnect we humans with nature, our home and teacher. I am more determined than ever to do that work with kindness, compassion, and respect for all. With, as I like to say, my heart outstretched as if it were my hand. 


Walking home to the casita where I am staying this month thanks to the generosity of the Women’s International Study Center, I looked overhead and noticed that next year’s leaf buds are already swelling on the cottonwood trees. Those cottonwood trees are doing the work, steadily continuing in the business of life–making food, growing, healing their wounds, reproducing, and when the time comes to move on, moving on to leave room for new life. 



That’s heartening. Life continues. 


****


If you’re in northern New Mexico, please join me and my fellow WISC resident, playwright DS Magid, for a presentation about our work at Collected Works Bookstore this Wednesday, November 16, at 6:00 pm. DS and a local actor will read her 10-minute play about May Sarton and the boulder in her garden, and then DS will talk about her project here, a longer play on Sarton and gender issues, among other themes. (A strikingly relevant theme.) I’ll talk about the book I’m working on, The Ditch & The Meadow: The Power of Native Plants and Passionate Plantswomen to Restore Communities and Mend the World. (Also pretty darned relevant.) I hope to see you there!

Restoring Nature: The View From My Deck

I was sitting out on my front deck late this afternoon, talking to my dad on the phone when I heard a characteristic chiming call.

I looked across the creek in the direction of the sound, and there was a slender little bird, shiny black above and canary yellow below, clambering on the slender stalk of a cutleaf blanketflower across the creek and energetically picking out the seeds, just a few feet from the pavement of my town’s most heavily-traveled walking/biking trail. (The photo above is the seedheads; I wasn’t quick enough to catch the bird.)


Cutleaf blanketflower (Gaillardia pinnatifida) with the finely dissected foliage that gives it its common name.

“It’s a Lesser Goldfinch, Dad,” I said, and described the bird to my father, half a continent away in Western Washington. 

“It’s probably a newly fledged male,” responded Dad, who may be 86 years old and legally blind, but retains a clear image in his mind of each of the hundreds of species of birds he’s seen over six decades of studying all things wild and feathered. “Have you been hearing nesting activity?”

“I think they nested in the big elm trees along John’s fence-line,” I said, mentioning the neighbor’s place, two houses away. 

“That’s likely,” said Dad. “Is the Gray Catbird still around?”

“I didn’t hear it singing this morning,” I said. “But it hung around for the better part of a week, and that’s the first time I’ve seen one right in town.”

“That shrubby thicket along the creek is good habitat,” said Dad. “The bird was probably a young male; it takes catbirds about a year to learn their breeding songs.”


Part of the narrow but dense riprian thicket along tiny Ditch Creek as seen from my deck. (The creek, hidden by the plants, runs diagonally across the middle of the photo from lower left to upper right; Monarch Spur Trail, the town walking and bike commuter path, parallels the creek on the upper left.)

Dad talked on about Gray Catbirds, dark-gray birds more slender than robins, with a longish tail and a black cap. They’re mimics like their mockingbird cousins (yes, Harper Lee’s first novel is named for a real bird). In addition to borrowing phrases from other birds’ songs and human and mechanical sounds like car alarms, catbird’s drawn-out songs incorporate cat-like mewing sounds, hence their common name. 

I listened and watched the view from my deck, including the thread of dredged, straightened and once-polluted urban creek I’ve spent the last 18 years restoring to health, and the bits of mountain prairie I’m nurturing between the creek and the popular pedstrian and bike trail. 

Two monarch butterflies patrolled the airspace above the showy milkweed plants, probably newly emerged males looking for females to mate with. In the distance, I heard the thumping bass of a car cruising our town’s main street, likely on a similar quest to the butterflies’ patrol. 


Monarch butterfly feeding on the showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) I’ve nurtured along Ditch Creek just below my front deck.

A family biked down the trail, Dad in the lead, Mom in the rear pulling a trailer with the youngest kid riding, and in between two boys on junior-sized mountain bikes and a little girl on a strider–a bike with no petals propelled by her chubby legs pushing on the ground. 

A Tree Swallow swooped just over my head, trolling the air for small insects. (It’s one of a pair nesting in a gap in the eaves of my neighbor’s house, just above her front porch.)


Tree Swallow perched on the electric wire supplying the streetlight across the creek. 

Three young women strolled by, each pushing a baby stroller, and chattering energetically in Spanglish. One of the twin fawns born a couple of weeks ago in the vacant lot across the way stood up from the nest in the tall grass where the two hide while their mother is off feeding and bleated suddenly, perhaps startled by the trio of women, or more likely–since these are town deer and used to people, hungry and calling Mom. 


The twins, trotting by my front-yard meadow before dawn last week. (They’ve doubled in size since this photo.)

The three women jumped, pointed, laughed, and snapped photos with their cell phones. “¡Que cute!” one said. 

A bumblebee buzzed by so close that it nearly banged into my head.

Later, after Dad and I finished talking, I spotted the bumblebee energetically drinking nectar at a Lambert’s milkvetch (Oxytropis lambertii) growing next to the cut-leaf blanketflower across the creek. 

I walked over, crouched down, and shot a photo with my iPhone. The bumblebee’s not quite in focus–the camera phone isn’t the best at macro photos–but you can see what it’s doing.

While I was trying to focus another shot, two teenagers rolled by on skateboards, going slow and holding hands.

“What are you doing?” asked the blue-haired girl. 

I showed them the bumblebee and talked about the close relationship between wildflowers and native bees. “See how the flowers are shaped just right so the bee’s tongue forces the flower open when the bee presses on it? That’s how it gets a drink of the nectar inside, and in the doing, pollinates the flower so it can make seeds.”

“Awesome!” said the boy, sounding like he really meant it. “Did you plant these flowers?”

“I did,” I said. “I’ve been working on removing the invasive weeds and restoring the native mountain prairie to provide habitat for birds and insects, and to shade the creek and clean its water.”

“Is it part of some project?” he asked. 

“No,” I said. “It’s just what I do to leave my patch of this earth in better shape than I found it.”

“That’s cool,” said the girl. “Thanks.”

They rolled on, still holding hands.

I walked back across the creek and climbed the steps to my deck, thinking how lucky I am to live in a place I love as deeply as I loved Richard, the man who introduced me to this town and its landscape.


Photo by Scott Calhoun

The love of my life is gone now–he died of brain cancer four years ago come November. But I continue the work we did together, healing the creek and this plot of formerly junky industrial property.

Work that brings me the joy of sharing birds with my dad, watching butterflies and native bees, and teaching passers-by about the relationships that weave the community of the land–our home here on earth. Work that helps heal me, too.