A long hiatus from the blog. Chalk it up to spring fever, everything alive pushing up through dead grass like these false hellebores. Earthy birthday candles. So I'm taking some deep breaths, slowing down some to write. These reflections are from our first trip into the field on the boat this season, into Resurrection Bay. Could there be a more appropriate name for the place we start each summer season? So this is a dispatch from a bay called resurrection, somewhere on a planet called resurrection: my divine teacher.
May 26
On the boat, rocking.
Thumb Cove. Figures moving
down the beach. Mountain slopes
deep in old snow. A holiday weekend. We take out place among many anchored
boats. The air cold, metallic, old
snow’s exhalation. Craig asleep
already in the bunk. Breath of
life, divine teacher, the chant I’m listening to says, I bow to
you again and again. Despite my resistance at leaving home,
now, in the evening, at anchor, I feel that I have actually come home. Left useless things behind, returned to
something essential, a kind of salvation.
(I know this is fleeting).
Water endlessly moving, cradle endlessly rocking (Whitman), the cup a
hand makes dipping water from a stream, bringing it to the mouth, the cup a bay
makes, a cirque, a valley.
The thing held (me) (you) (time).
And part of the ache of it
is the knowledge that it’s fleeting.
(The water in the cupped hand leaking out drip by drip no matter how
tight I clench my fingers, so drink fast, slurp it up!)
Speaking of (time) can it be true that it’s been an entire
year since I returned to the ocean for the first time after cancer
treatment? That I’ve lived out a
whole year? Been given 365 days,
scooped each one into my cupped hand, drank it down? All of these days, mine, now, inside? That I’m allowed another, this one with
quivery, mercuric water twitching like the hide of a horse? I feel the external things
falling away, how I am defined by others, how I measure myself against others,
all the meanness, all definitions, slipping away.
This is mercy, I am thinking, this
right-now-awareness-stopped-time-sensation one of my grad students calls
“momentness.” The thing a poem
tries to capture but can’t. This
is it. And of course it’s always
present, this mercy, and was a year ago, two, forty-five. There are animals who’ve died in the
deep winter snows I’m looking at, animals buried in avalanches, there are
hunted and killed birds, and still, mercy is this place. Leaving home to come to the water is to
come into the presence of this mercy.
(I know this is fleeting, this feeling, it won’t last). So I pin it to the page, I try, right
here:
May 27
It didn’t last, no, this is another kind of momentness, the
merciless kind. Out in rough water
following a small group of orcas,
I’m seasick, and I can’t help myself, it reminds me of chemo. Not just the nausea but the trapped
feeling. Here, I am trapped by a
limited set of sensations, a limited palette of colors (mostly grays), a
limited acoustic repertoire (chugging of pistons, groan of engine, clanks of
shifting gears, the boat’s sway
and shudder). Where is the silvery
light, the mercy? Mark Nepo
writers: “No matter how I lift my
heart, my shadow creeps in wait behind, background to my joy.” This is
fleeting, but in the grip of the unmerciful, that awareness is lost, or is irrelevant. Conclusion: I am NOT enlightened. All around me, the islands we walk on at night, speak to it: merciful, merciless life.
June 1
I dreamed that cancer came back, Dr. S. told me I had five
days left to live, just five, five exactly. At first, I railed, I screamed, clawed, wept, raged. Impossible, that I could let life
go. But then, as in a dream I had
just about a year ago, this strange fog began to creep in, on the inside, a
sort of grogginess, a little like anesthesia. And I began to let go.
And it was easy. I lay down
to die, perhaps the way a moose in the deep snow does. It was so natural. This winter, a lot of moose died around
Homer in the hard, long winter, the deep snows. One day, Craig and I, out skiing, spotted two brown bear
juveniles playing with the bones and hide of a moose, throwing them around a
creek bottom. They were alive on
the snow, in the sunlight, unaware of us, and the moose was over, and yet it
was present, a part of the living earth, its surface, like a piece of ordinary
detritus that makes up one of artist Sarah Sze’s sculptures . Divorced from its moose-story. A player in some other, ongoing
history of life on earth, a plaything in the earth's ongoing memoir.
Today, I kayaked to a rocky shoreline, carefully extricated
myself from the cockpit, scrambled up into the forest, followed the trail of
river otters through the blueberry thickets, and suspended from branches, all along the trail, were the black and white wings of
killed murres. Gruesome
decorations. Looked almost like
they’d been impaled on the branches.
Or like they’d been carelessly shed, cape-skins thrown over twigs, then
abandoned to the rain. The sharp
breastbones protruding from matted feathers, marking the place where the spirit
of the bird detached and fled.
When I love it out here, it’s because in the woods, all my
fear of dying goes away. It is no
mystery, just the facts: these wings were once murres. But that’s not so. I look carefully for signs of
bears. I do not want to die of
cancer; I do not want to be eaten by a bear. How I will die: that knowledge isn’t given.
Tonight, in the near-darkness, the island of severed wings
is alive with the cheeps of nesting storm petrels, who come to land only once
each year, at night, to burrow into the ground under tree roots or tussocks to
lay their eggs. An island of
hungry mouths. Bones and feathers
litter the burrow entrances. The
body, my body, yours, is a similar island. Little deaths, and the urge to live, manic aliveness, bottomless depression, coexisting, feathers, bones, eggs, cheeps. In the body, little deaths asleep, burrowed in the
bones, lungs, brain or liver, and every moment, the body replenishing
itself, renewed. William Stafford said “the
darkness around us is deep,” but so is the light. The light around me is so damn deep.
I dip my hands into this stream, and all I have is what the
stream yields up, what’s in this cup of my palm, this sip, these severed wings,
that silver light, this moment. Today, I
followed the stream to its source, a pond in the forest half-filled with
snow. From its mud-bottom, the
water looked nearly black.
Half-white and frigid with enormous anvils of snow. Surrounded by forest, by nests and corpses of seabirds, I kneeled down in the mud, filled my hands and drank it all.
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