We are Lost

You came up the canyon, taillights from the freeway a sea of flashing red below, your backpack heavy as you scaled the brush-covered hill. You ended up on a lawn next to the swimming pool, the view of the valley spreading to the distant mountains. 

There is no street, no way to the city, just grass and gates and the semi-darkness of sprawling urbanity. There is a Christmas tree in a window and a light in the kitchen. You knock. 

I hear a knock at the backdoor. I look at my brother-in-law mid-conversation and wonder why one of my sisters has gone outside at ten at night when I thought they were both in bed. I wonder if the door is still locked. I wonder who the hell it could be. I go to the door and look out the window. There is a pale young guy in a hoodie and cap, a backpack, a nervous sway. 

There is a baby in the house, my sisters and mom. I call to my brother-in-law R. and tell him there’s a guy out there. He thinks I am joking. He thinks it is one of his friends fucking around. Then he sees my face. I back away as he grabs a knife from the drawer (a steak knife. He laughs about it after. Not during. During he just wants something sharp and he cannot find a chef’s knife so he grabs a tiny, proper, serrated steak knife. As if.)

I call 911. There is a man at the door and a baby in the house and it is night and that is what you do in the night when someone strange knocks on your backdoor, right?

I am on the phone when R. opens the door, his fierce don’t-fuck-with-my-family fearlessness kicking in  and growls, "What are you doing?" (get back inside, I yell to him) The guy in the hoodie stands a few feet away and asks, “Is that your tree with the light?” R. is as confused as the guy in the hoodie seems to be. What tree? What light? Why the fuck are you in the backyard? This is not said. Nothing is said.

(Baby in the house, R’s baby in the house, R’s wife in the house with the baby.)

The conversation does not continue in the dark.

“We’re calling the cops.”

I am calling 911 as the guy in the hoodie runs away. I do not know this yet. I just know he’s in the backyard and I have just spent the last five days admonishing my family for constantly locking the doors behind them, for locking me out when I go to get the mail at the end of the drive, for living in fear. I tell them of the house I live in up in Washington where we don’t even carry keys for the front door; its always unlocked. I leave my car keys in the cup-holder of my car parked in the driveway. If something moves outside my window I assume it is a deer or heron. If someone comes to the door (there is only a front door), we may welcome them in, ask if they want a cup of tea, assume that they are friendly even if a little odd (aren’t we all). But maybe it would be different at 10pm.

So I am shaking, on the phone with the 911 dispatcher saying there is a man in the backyard who may be trying to get in and telling them to send a cop. I almost say, “This is a private, gated community,” but I hold myself back because I am startled by the impulse to say this. I am embarrassed by this privilege. Sickened by the assumption that we should feel safer behind the gates and fences, that we are somehow exempt from disturbing interactions with other human beings that we think should not have access to this land. Disgusted with myself for holding beliefs that I outwardly disdain and speak against.

The cops show up. They are almost blatantly exasperated with us. They picked up the guy in the hoodie across the street. As in, he was standing in the sidewalk-less street across from our house, confused about where he was, where to go. He’s a transient, they said. Most likely harmless, they said. He’s not from here and was looking for a main street, they said. They would drop him off somewhere else, outside of the gates and fences, unless he gave them a reason to take him to jail, they said.

R. said the cops gave him a look like, Really dude, you’re bigger than this guy, why the hell did you call us?

Baby, wife, family.

Baby, wife, family.

Baby.

Claro.

And I wonder if I would’ve called if there wasn’t a baby in the house.

Probably.

If there hadn’t been a man in the house.

Yes. (I hate admitting this, but its true)

This bothers me, this fear.

I consider what I would do if I was at my old place at the beach or at the house I lived in in North Park. Most probably I would have answered the knock on the door or just ignored it and waited for him to leave. If there was someone camped out on the patio maybe I would have asked him what he was doing, maybe yelled for him to go away if he seemed out of it. I wouldn’t have called the cops if he ran away. I may have felt a little weird about such an interaction but wouldn’t have felt such a sense of vulnerability as I do in this big house on a hill behind the gates and security station, where you rarely see your neighbors as you overlook the lights of thousands of houses full of tens of thousands of people in the valley.

I wonder how much of this fear is perpetuated by the gates and fences and security patrols.

From what are we being kept safe? Why are we hiding? Why do we think it is so bad ‘out there?’ Who are the dangerous ones?

You were lost and I immediately assumed the worst.

You were lost and a gate slammed down around my heart, a fence obscured my eyes.

You were lost and you could’ve been dangerous and I didn’t know but maybe you weren't.

I fall asleep on the couch in this house I grew up in.

I am not sorry I called 911 last night, but I am uncomfortable with what it means about me.

I am embarrassed by perceived privilege and the isolation it can bring.

I am disturbed that this sense of Otherness is my deeply ingrained default. 

I cannot discount the impulse to stay safe; that is human. 

But I can work to connect more, rein in my assumptions, be present in a world full of people and lights and trees and confusion and kindness.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I would prefer naivety (hope?) over constant fear. 

I want to find/be the balance. Is it too late for me?

You are not the only lost one in this struggle to find a safe path, to find your way. 

Thank you for this reminder that we are all transient, all of this earth, all just looking for a way through a locked gate.

  

December 16th

There is light in the east and I am drawn from the stars.

There is a fire in the woodstove and a pot of tea on the table. 

A far off steady stream of cars weaves through the trees unbeknownst to the frozen road beneath.

A hemlock bends and waits for the wind to lift its head, stroke its needles, whisper that everything will be just fine.

In the depths of the Sound there is the vibration of fins and teeth and tongues wailing into the receding darkness.

In the forest the owls screech their finalities before closing saucer eyes and tucking themselves into branches.

The hum of modern life cankers its way into my gut and I want to be out of doors, so I go.

The hum of my heart brings the sun over the horizon and the day begins with a song and prayer.

Mending the Circle

A string of rough wool circles my wrist. It was spun not with a spindle but with my fingers, my intentions. 

October. I plunged my hand into the bag of dirty fibers, an afterthought thrown into the corner of a barn after the shearing of ewes and before the birthing of dozens of soft-limbed lambs. The birthing time of Spring felt like a distant ancestor to this season of red and orange and brown. I pulled out a fistful of the tangled hairs that once marked time with lengths of protein, marked movement with bits of leaves and clumps of mud. 

I teased out strands to make the wool bracelet that would remind me of this day in the barn. Remind me how tired I was from chasing turkeys down a hill when they escaped, how my arms ached from shuttling buckets of grain and water to the broiler chickens in a far off pasture ringed with oaks and maples, how my mind kept spinning with all the different kinds of grass and feed and fowl and four-leggeds to know. How farming is hard and dirty and wonderful. How it is the most necessary skill in the world right now. How much has been forgotten, how much is rooted in remembering.

November. A month has gone by and the wool now on my wrist, spun between my fingers into a long line of dirty white, reminds me of these actions and ideas. It is stretched out and dirtier, soaked with rain of the Northwest and flecked with soil from the garden. It has grown thin in parts. 

As I pull off sweater after sweater, it breaks with the friction of fiber on fiber on skin. I am startled at my sudden anxiety as I hold the once-circle-now-line in my palm. I wonder if I will remember laughing hysterically as we chased turkeys down a hill on an autumn afternoon. I wonder if I can trust my brain to remember anything without visual cues. I wonder if it means that the relationship that helped to weave this circle together is somehow damaged, broken, as if this wool is tied with fate.

As December approaches, I slip the ends around one another, a forced embrace, and loop them again to secure a knot. It is not smooth in this place, there is a visible difference, but everywhere else in the thread is varied, too. I see the circle of relationship, with the world, with a person, within a family: it is a tangled thread that is constantly breaking and being retied, thinning in places, bunching in others. 

What happens when there are so many bunches and knots that the bracelet is no longer a bracelet because it is too broken and knotted and thick to fit around a wrist? It becomes a ring. A promise wrapped several times around (other) flesh and bone to become something new. A something that will always fit, a something that can always be connected, tied, mended over and over. 

This is what we do. This is what we are: knotted and tangled and worn thin in places and always able to wrap ourselves around what we love, what loves us, and go on as a something old and new.

Her body and bones

Hands closing over cold ribs, I lay her frame on the rotting boards beneath a drizzling sky. A long-cloistered body unfolds in front of me. She is naked, undone, jagged and stiff in a freezing barn. I smile at the rawness of the day, the vulnerable strips of wood tipped with metal, corrosion clinging to hardware, varnish chipping off delaminating edges. She is a mess. And yet she is mine. 

Mine! (as much as anything can actually be a possession)

I haven’t bought a boat since I was 24 years old. And then it was a partnership, parentship, a ship that would teach me about relating to another human I would spend glorious years with at arms length, both meanings so true, so close and so far. 

This boat is solely mine. A soulful project waiting to work with me as much as I work with her. 

(Can a kayak be a she? I've decided yes; there is no minimum length requirement for the tradition of treating boats as feminine entities.) 

I can feel her tough lines burst through me. She is roughed up at the edges, polish worn to faded yellow and splintering cracks, once-solid metal pieces rotted away. Pieces that may not be replaceable. And she is beautiful. I imagine adventures had and to come. I wonder if she imagined me into buying her from the silver-haired lady in Olympia who told me stories of remote islands and thin sails and the hull stuffed full of food and endless laughter ricocheting over soft waves. 

I piece together the frame and turn the pliable shell over and over, wondering how these bones will fit in the body. Wondering how my body will fit in these bones, the muscles of my arms dipping paddles into the cold clear blue.

Someday. 

But today, I shift the frame on the boards of the barn and realize that yes, I will need to read the directions. And yes, I can do this by myself. And yes, this is exactly what I need. My boat, my project, my dreams. With that solid foundation, the screws set tight, the rudder in place, I can invite others into my small floating world. We can share dreams and paddles and navigate whirlpools, but I want to know her bones and body first. I want to know the how and why and know that I can float on my own. 

And I do. And I am. And she has found me to put her back together.

Coming Home

I can feel the quiet seep into my bones, muscles aching from a day in trains and buses and planes and shuttles and cabs. The damp green smell of the woods and earth, the light shining on the porch to greet me. I climb the stairs to my room as the house sleeps. Six weeks isn’t long but long enough to forget details and invent a whole other life. I hadn’t thought about my room in weeks, about the driftwood whales and shells on an alter and the tree that scratches hello at my window that had green leaves and whispered of summer when I left and is now an orchestra of brown pods shaking in the autumnal wind. But in the night I couldn’t even see the tree. 

In my big bed I dream of orcas. It was if they were welcoming me back to the northwest, reminding me of my place and my blessed vulnerability when I float quiet and still, orca jaws rubbing and nipping at my side. They swim in the wide deep expanses that consume my mind with shadows and multi-toned movement, consume this land and create a shore licked with cold salty tongues.

I wake to soft conversations and the smell of onions and eggs in hot oil. I shake free of fins and waves. I stare at the trees outside until I throw off the quilts and stretch in the coolness of my room. The smell of cooking mingles with coffee and fades. The conversations below cease as days in the wider world begin, doors open and shut, I imagine boots slipped quietly onto wool-socked feet. I walk onto the landing and catch my breath at the outer beauty of the old barn in the soft gray of a cloudy morning. All I can hear are frogs and birds and a brushing of motion that could be tree or car or water but I cannot tell and do not need to know. 

Downstairs a guitar rests upon a wall as if ready to be picked up and strummed, an avocado sits half eaten on the counter, coffee is still warm in the press. Signs of life and simplicity that I have missed. Tables tumble forth with eggplant and onions, apples and garlic. The abundance of this place! I can’t help but smile as I brew my tea and suddenly hear the songs and words that have been stoppered by city fences break lose into the foreground of my mind. Oh that’s right. They need space, too. The space I had briefly forgotten exists, like the spiderwebbed cracks in the wall of my room. It is like waking up from a dream with the relief and knowing that even if both worlds are real (orcas (taxi cabs? A city life?) nipping at your heart), this is the one that feels good and true and alive.   

This is the Home I have missed and craved and fear and love. And now all I have to do is actually Be Here. That’s all. And that is simply the most difficult part for me. I am slowly realizing that my success lay not in the achievement of some outwardly goal like the city (entrenched in my brain) wants me to believe, wants me to stay busy running after, but in the act of allowing myself to Be Here Right Now. 
This is what the space allows. This is my challenge of finding Home. Finding me. 

I melt into the quiet as the fog lifts and I breathe in the Now, sigh out the Then.

And breathe in again.

Beets on the Asphalt

The beet hit the asphalt and rolled just a little. It was still (barely!) attached to the bleeding red stems and wilted leaves that had left marks on my shirt. The beet was fine. I was not. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream Fuck This Shit into the hollows between metal and glass and dirty ground otherwise known as Jersey City. When the bag that was carrying my groceries broke in the middle of the street, it seemed like too much. My arms were getting bruised from attempting to carry five overflowing shopping bags from the downtown Manhattan Whole Foods to a marina in Jersey City. 

Technically it was only 1.8 miles. 

Technically I could have walked this is 30 minutes. 

But technically I was across a major river, in a different state really, and about 30 pounds heavier with beets and organic milk and bottles of champagne vinegar (the latter of which bounced and cracked on the street). 

I plodded along for 15 minutes to the ferry from the store where the cashier had asked if I was getting a car and I had mumbled Or Something.  Blocks of concrete and avenues with cars and sidewalks with people looking at me like I was crazy. I felt crazy. One guy commented, “You got a strong back lady, a Strong back!” I took it as a compliment and huffed on. Crazy and determined and strong, that’s me. 

On the ferry, across the river, off the ferry, into the streets of JC, back aching. Crazy and not so determined and tired, that’s me. Fuck this, I’m getting a cab, I thought. But there was no cab in sight. I started stumbling towards the light rail hoping there would be more traffic. 

That’s when the bag broke in the middle of the street, beets rolling, glass cracking, me swallowing back tears. I just let the bag drop as I walked to the corner to put the other bags down. A man on a cell phone stopped and shuffled the beets and bottles back into the torn bag as he chatted about his weekend in the Hamptons to whomever it was who was on the line. He didn’t get off the phone or really look up but he did in fact ask if I needed any more help. Which I appreciated. And at the same time in my frustration I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself for not getting off the goddamn phone. Was that wrong? Misdirected anger? Projecting on him as a product of the city where people generally ignore one another and food comes in little plastic packages in brightly lit aisles and there is no way of knowing where it came from or who the farmers are or how much they are paid or whether the drought is affecting them this year or if the Begradas have finally moved north or do they use worm castings in their fields? This was not the man’s fault. He was connecting with Someone on the phone. He might have visited a farm stand himself out on Long Island that weekend. How was I to know? Even if he had been off of his cell phone I might not have asked him anything because I was so angry. 

Feeding the disconnection.

I want to feed the opposite. I know that cities can be amazing places to connect with people, with art, with food. But all these connections feel to me as manufactured and out of reach as a high-couture gown, me in my stained shorts and salty Converse. There are processes and barriers and some invisible scale on which we (I) compare one another and All This Stuff. This art, this conversation, this packaged and plated food. This yacht life feeds right into this weighted world that feels so foreign and plastic-wrapped. I want to step off the scale and just enjoy what I have. I can appreciate the effort and ambition and I also know that right now in my life I crave the simple. I want to shed all the pretense and drop down into the basic. Ground myself in place and community and converse about how we survive. I mean really soulfully survive. I want to make art in a falling down barn with the swallows flittering overhead. I want to go into the garden and pull out onions and carrots that I planted and watered and weeded, brush the dirt off their living backs and chop and cook and devour with gratitude, no plastic wrappers in sight. At home I have a chest freezer full of a cow I passed on the road everyday on my way into town. At home I eat eggs from chickens down the street. At home I have a closet full of dresses that have mud on the hems and I have shelves of dog-eared books on farming and soul. 

(And I am calling it Home! That is new. That is real. That is a connection I want to feed and nurture.)  

I also want to appreciate the now and all that this now is teaching me about what I actually want in this lifetime. All that this yachtie life and the city and its people can teach me. Absorb all the art and music and passion that I know is here. And then be grateful for the opportunity to choose my environment, to choose what and where I call home.

I rip off the bleeding stems of the beets and leave them as an offering to the lamppost on the corner. The concrete is simply sand and dirt and water. The city is a living thing, too, worthy of nourishment and gratitude for all it has been, all that lies beneath, all that will become of it as grass grows in the cracks of the sidewalk. 
Life doesn’t end, it is just the energy that changes form. 
The beet goes on.

Gratitude to the Chicken

Red warm against the back of my hand.

 The combed head in my palm, my fingers holding the little flap of skin between trachea and spine. Against the hills and valleys of columned bones is where the vessels lay. Now severed, now flooding the valleys with warmth, staining feathers with cells they’ve never noticed beneath the surface, dripping onto skin that is not of its own. The scaly legs kick into the air, the brilliantly colored wings flap, the hills of the neck twist and shiver. Freckles of blood cover my arms, are Pollock-ed against the back of the stainless steel sink. My gut is twisting in time with the spasms, my eyebrows knit in concern. Did I do it right? Is this fast enough? Can they feel the pinch and slice, knife through skin, forward cut one vessel, slide down and back the other? 

Two streams of blood, two eyes shutting, many cycles of breath and heartbeats emptying the body.

Stillness.

It is afternoon and I am outside in a field. 

My arms are scrubbed free of blackened red flecks, a few feathers cling to my tangled hair, my mind still holds images of slowly hinging beaks ceasing mid-breath. I carry a basket in my hand and shoo chickens from my feet and laugh at the chaos. I open secret-looking doors and am consistently delighted by finding eggs in golden wood shavings, sometimes with hens defending little bundles of DNA.

Warm in my palm, the energy of potential life.

We gather the eggs and put them into a cool room next to where we slaughtered chickens that morning. We head out again. We started the day with feeding the chicks in the barn and we end doing the same. Little fluffy bodies in our care. Little fluffy bodies that have a fate already determined. Is that a bad thing? Even if they don’t know their fate? Or maybe they do? Do they communicate with one another, can they feel the knowing that at nine weeks of age they will be processed into the next version of themselves, consumed at dinner tables and ooohhhed at at fancy restaurants and boiled into broth that cures the common cold? Is there comfort in the knowing? Maybe even pride? 

Anthropomorphizing aside, maybe chickens feel it all. Maybe they feel more than we do, maybe their clucking language contains a more complex lexicon of emotion than we humans will ever begin to fathom. Perhaps, like so many other species of animal and vegetable, they are the ones in control and have lured us into breeding them, caring for them, eventually ending their lives in a fairly humane manner (at least on this farm) all so that they have some structure in their lives. A structure they (perhaps) crave. A structure that many humans (me) wished they had. Would it be comforting to know that at 50 years of age we would be stuffed into a metal cone face down and pinch slit slit Done? Would our lives feel less frantic if the end date was determined? Of course there is always the chance for an accident. The chicken with the wing ripped off by a raccoon or rat would tell you so. But what if we just knew?

It is still warm after the sun has set. We scream down the dark road on the back of a motorcycle, our bodies blurred to trees and grass and the cows invisible in the fields. All this motion, all this energy moving forward, fragile and full of potential, our death already waiting for us at the end of some road, known or not. And as we hit a bump on the asphalt I wonder if this is it, the end, the pinch and slit and I think of the chicken perhaps orchestrating this all, including my ride on the back of a bike and that my fate is already determined. So I lean into the warm body in front of me, full of love and life, and I smile at the structure of the universe as we move forward into the darkness.