Sunday - May 30, 2010
Between Seasons - April 2010
We sigh a little. Just a little.
And light a fire in the dusk. We have lit several of them lately. In a small fire pit in our backyard. Leaning into the snapping, sparking flames. Holding our hands toward the heat of the glowing coals. Grinning with white teeth through the shadows, drawing in to a circle, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, our backsides chilly, our frontsides too warm, as we huddle closer.
We prod the flames with slim green wands, toast marshmallows, add another log, watch the sparks dance glowing up into the deepening night sky. Voices rise and fall. Children and adults crowd close. Family and friends sit knee to knee, or stand just a little on the edge. Faces transform in flickering light and shadow.
---------------------------------------------------------------
We sigh a little. Just a little.
And light a fire in the dusk. We have lit several of them lately. In a small fire pit in our backyard. Leaning into the snapping, sparking flames. Holding our hands toward the heat of the glowing coals. Grinning with white teeth through the shadows, drawing in to a circle, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, our backsides chilly, our frontsides too warm, as we huddle closer.
We prod the flames with slim green wands, toast marshmallows, add another log, watch the sparks dance glowing up into the deepening night sky. Voices rise and fall. Children and adults crowd close. Family and friends sit knee to knee, or stand just a little on the edge. Faces transform in flickering light and shadow.
On any night when it isn’t raining, there’s a chance we’ll light a fire and make a circle outside. We’ve been inside for so long. We crave the outdoors, and the fire in the center, and the intimate community of nighttime gatherings.
There’s something primal and hopeful and affirming about a fire in our midst, and a willful gathering of people to be together, even if it’s a little cold and threatening rain. We take our chances, strike a match, and convene.
As April comes to a close, the river waters have receded, going back to familiar tidal levels within their banks; no more floods. The beach has a new shape, carved away by wild winter storms. Spring blossoms come two weeks early in the softening temperatures, flowering first in small violets in the grass and the ivy and yellow forsythia on the branches, then luxuriously lavender and pink in the rhododendron and like a late frothy white snowfall on the limbs of magnolia and apple trees. Tulips bob as upturned brushes in the wind, painting a pastel spring palette. Lush growth arises overnight, green and new, creating softness along the hard edges of winter’s ending.
The first lazy bees drone around the edges of the world, spring birds explore possible homes and grow brighter day by day in their plumage, ants march in determined lines toward spilled foods, and mosquitoes nip in the dusk. Life stirs and buzzes, pushing up and requiring attention.
Suddenly sunlight is bright and strong enough to burn. Humidity gathers, and it’s easy to sweat and slow down in the first teasing waves of heat and moisture thick in the air. Early storms pile up, their tension and static towering in the clouds overhead, airless and pregnant until they let go and send deluges plummeting, thunder rumbling, and lightning striking.
People stay outside. Repairing winter damage. Turning over earth. Pruning. Moving through sun and wind. Wading into the water. Returning to local beaches. Putting in boats, slipping in kayaks, or swimming in currents that have grown tame and amiable again. Cycling on clear roads (some with potholes) through dappled shade.
Yes, life is demanding attention. Requiring our presence. It’s spring, and it seems as if the world is keeping its promise to awaken and renew once more.
But. But. But.
Even in this season, we have endured emergencies such as more earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and storms. Manmade catastrophes like oil spills and coal mine collapses. Power outages, leading to loss of communication and food storage. Unsafe drinking water. Impassable roads or skies. Exponential losses of life. More emergencies, within our borders and abroad.
Admit it. Even in a season as raw and revealing as April’s spring, sometimes it feels like the end of the world. As friend John Fiske reminded us recently, poet T.S. Eliott called it the “cruelest month.”
About once a decade or so, a prophecy is “revealed” that requires a countdown to doomsday. We have lived through several of them. The popular one right now is the Mayan calendar that ends in 2012.
When natural disaster after natural disaster strikes, it seems like the prophecy must be true. When human-created circumstances explode, it seems more probable. We could interpret current events in the light of such foreboding forecasts. The world’s possible end sometimes…often…feels scary-imminent. Coming to a close. Ending. Whoosh-bang-done!
Species are passing out of existence. Ecosystems are pushed to their limits. The planet is imperiled by global warming and pollution and energy consumption and population surges and nuclear tensions. People continue to die of preventable causes such as disease and starvation.
Outside, tires growl on a wet road after a spring rain. A sleepy fly buzzes and bumps against the screens that have been put up to let in the tender air.
The news is frightening. And yet. And yet.
As spring awakens, we’re listening more closely to the world, despite the filters we put up. At this time of year, in this hemisphere, as the seasons change, we’re letting the world get close and dirty. Putting up screens. Opening doors and windows. Wearing fewer layers. Staying outside longer. Absorbing its sounds and smells and sights. Breathing it in. Internalizing it. Letting it become part of us.
But the bad news in the headlines? It’s all overwhelming. What can we do? And does it matter, if the world’s going to end anyway?
Outside our door, whenever the day dries up enough, ants crawl across the crack in the sidewalk. A fat fuzzy bumblebee patrols the height of apple tree’s limbs. On an early morning jaunt, we see a doe dipping her head in the water. Out of the corner of an eye, we catch a glimpse of a fisher gliding-sliding in a sinuous race for the trees. In the twilight, we hear a wild turkey calling “obble-obble-gobble” from the hillside.
They don’t know about their possible doom. They just get on with life.
Yikes!
How often, in our own lives, have we stared into some urgent—perhaps life-altering —situation and felt the same about our own private universe as we feel about the fate of the planet? As if each of us, too, has a timeline with a cataclysm looming at the end of it?
And how do we live meaningfully, if we’re afraid it’s all for nothing? Is it all for nothing? That’s what we worry about, when faced with Mayan calendars that end in 2012. When events pile up in frightening destructive waves. Fatalistic thoughts crowd into our heads sometimes: we’ll all be wiped out, and it won’t matter if we’re rich or poor, good or naughty, healthy or sick, thoughtful or selfish. Humanity will be erased. That’s the big threat of such forecasts: that there won’t be anyone left to remember or to whom we can pass along our legacy. We’ll all be gone.
And if you pay attention to post-apocalyptic books and movies, which tap into popular veins of angst, we’re even afraid, if such events transpire, of whom we’ll become. In those “end of the world” story lines…what happens to humanity if our survival is threatened? Will our doom come all at once, or will we hang on for a while, losing ourselves along the way? Will we stockpile and hoard? Close the doors, bar the gates, run for the high ground and protect only ourselves and our kin? Will we do anything necessary to survive, at the cost of others? Will we exploit the immediate needs of others, to gain some comfort and privilege for ourselves, even in dire circumstances? Will all the basic aspects of what we consider to be civilization disappear into chaos and a me-first frenzy?
Will there be heroes? Or everyday good gals and guys who make humane choices?
Will the life beyond this one matter? Will those in heaven look down, or back, or inside us, and judge? Or remember? Will anyone care and measure what we have done in this life, before we get to that one? If you come from our faith perspective, you hold hard to those beliefs in times like these. It’s one way to balance out the doomsayers.
Should we behave like the ants and the birds and the deer and the predators? Just keep going? Not worry about the impending threat of the end of the world, whether it comes in some predetermined Biblical onslaught, or as the evolutionary reality of a species that has damaged its environment until that environment cannot sustain it?
Or should we live consciously, because we believe the world will keep going? Should we make thoughtful choices, in the faith that we can reverse events and heal the planet and evolve into more humane beings? Should we live purposefully, because it means something, either right here and now, or later on?
How do we, as humans, live in despair and under the shadow of such global threat?
Again, sometimes all you can do is examine the scale of one human life, instead of the fate of a whole planet. Your own life. And the life of those you know and touch around you.
Our family, and many of yours, too, have lived with and known those who faced their own mortality in life-limiting diseases such as cancer. And it didn’t usually turn them into whiners and why-me people. It tended to mobilize our loved ones into action, or prompted reflection and insight. It caused them to seize moments and take more risks, to reach out to lots of folks or to draw in and create a small circle of deep love. It inspired creativity and adventure, forgiveness and rage, primal screams and rollicking laughter, learning and forgetfulness, outspokenness and silence. It didn’t limit the quality of life —its meaningfulness or purpose—lived by people who knew their time was more brief than those around them. It changed and shaped their choices, though.
Shouldn’t we all live inside the knowledge that our time here matters? Whether we have hours, days, months or years? Whether we have just this moment, or decades and generations yet to come? Shouldn’t we act in the belief that there’s hope and time enough, and balance the opportunity to make “right now” as full and meaningful and fulfilling as possible, and also to do what’s right for later on and for whomever inherits this time and place in which we now exist?
We can live in fear, or try to live in hope. There’s not much in between, and only one of them seems like a bearable choice.
As springs rolls from April to May, sudden frosts and late snowfalls nip away at spring’s promise. Dusk comes, and in our backyard, we prod the smoldering coals in the fire pit, so they flare up again. We draw closer to each other, seeking heat from the flames and from our companions. We listen to the fire’s crackle and snap. Sparks fly up. Light flares across familiar faces, changing their landscapes, uncovering and then covering them again, like secrets and truths.
We sit outside, bundled in layers. Conversation lulls. Instead, we let the world talk to us. And again, we listen.
April has come and gone. What it has told us, and what we have learned, unfolds inside each one of us. Hope and fear. Maybe we live always within both of these realities. And find a way to balance them. For tonight, around the fire, it feels most like hope.
The journey continues.