New Life within An Old Life
An Imperfect Perspective
Out the west window, I can see the new, porous knots of buds on the birch branches, like bone spurs on a damaged bone. Out the southern-facing window, frost tops the holly hedge, semi-transparent and as thin as powdered sugar icing. But it will be months before spring actually brings green to the birch branches again. And it’s possible, despite today’s blue sky, that a fresh centimeter or two of snow will top the hedge tomorrow morning.
There is a rhythm in nature, but it is syncopated. The signs today are false heralds, which are still a kind of promise for promise.
For some reason, a children’s rhyme comes to mind: “Knick-knack, paddy-wack, give the dog a bone…”
When you look closely at nature, it always offers hope. We can hold it between our teeth as we zoom out, taking in the landscape, and the shoreline to the horizon. We can bite down to withstand the pain.
Settling with patience is like gnawing on bones. On old promises with a history of fulfillment: death and life and death. “Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around. I hear the word of the Lord.” Nothing stays. Not even death.
The local lake is sick and poisonous with green algae. When you pull a stick through the water in summer, small whirlpools develop in its wake, like orbits within orbits, like tiny cosmos within a cosmos. Here the farmland has drained its waste into the water for a century. But the decades’ old filtering ponds are working, slowly. Every summer, we run into the local wildlife ranger taking water samples. “We’re close.” The lake is close to being healthy again. Maybe this summer, after a run, we will be able to bathe under Midgardsormen. There will be barking dogs, and screeching children, with inflatable balls caught in the reeds where they found a body last summer. I say this, not to shock, but because all of it is true. The intertwined orbits of the history of the present and the tossed-out bone of hope for the future.
Today, though, everything is almost quiet. I hear the passing cars. Since our new neighbors moved in, I’ve missed the sound of the blackbirds outside my library window so much that I’ve actually cried. Now the neighbors have torn out all of the trees, too. I want to issue a formal apology to the crows that have stopped there every morning. I want to give them shiny things to take home to remember us by. Maybe in a decade, when the neighbors’ children are in school, they’ll move away, and the crows will return and remember how we smiled at them—and let them be.
I want to sell the house and move somewhere where I won’t hear or smell cars. Or the trains, that scream when the ice builds up on the wires. I want to share the early mornings with a heron and a cup of coffee, while my husband and Leonard sleep in.
I’ve have reached a point in my life where the promise of growth and decay intermingle on a personal level and, like focusing on an orbit within an orbit, things hold together while remaining discrete in my consciousness. No illusions.
Today, I move from the sofa, to the wheelchair, to the crutches, to the toilet. And back again. Being superstitious, I’ve never played around in a wheelchair. And now, superstitions aside, I know my next home will need to take into account the possible need for things like wheelchairs, even though the not-a-promise-but-a-very-likely prediction I got from the orthopedic surgeon was that I will run again by the end of summer. “It won’t be the same.” (What is ever the same as it was?) The cartilage in a toe joint is gone. There’s no repairing it. Just a work-around, to work around useless body part until all the other parts stop working.
Oddly—though it shouldn’t be odd—the bones still grow in this iteration of my 58 year-old body: they will grow into one-another. I will walk with my toe at a permanent 20 degree angle. I think about my body’s ability to compensate, and the toll it takes in the long term. And sometimes I forget what I know, and I habitually imagine there is any other way for things to happen. Any other outcome. We grow into our deaths.
Cancer isn’t about the death of cells. That is actually the treatment for cancer. Cancers are cells gone wild with life. What kills us isn’t death, it’s life.
Some Buddhist monks meditate on an image of their on corpse over and over. But isn’t that really walking in the same river twice? Fetishizing death would be a counterproductive activity for me. Fetishizing one’s own death holds that possibility that is is just another form of narcissism under the guise of humility.
I read once that one of the hallmarks of maturity is understanding that you can’t fix anything in time. Everything will change. And not according to your will. I don’t think “understanding” is an accurate verb here. Not even “accepting”, but actively incorporating that understanding into our decisions. Into our emotional responses.
I cry for the blackbirds. I cry for the hedgehog who no longer overwinters in our holly. I cry for the poisoned lake, for the corpse of a stranger, for my missing breast. For my mother, Linda, and the mother she couldn’t be. For my children, and the mother I never was. I cry for the stories that haven’t been told.
It is so damned inappropriate, and completely out of context but, as I write now, I hear Death of a Salesman’s Linda say, “Attention must be paid.” I don’t know. Orbits within orbits. Imperfections are literally the way our DNA changes, the way we evolve, and yet: we cling to our expectation that we are entitled to perfection. We are impatient that our sick lakes heal slowly. We fear that crows will—that they can—carry a grudge. Everything, like the death of a salesman, deserves attention, and we are reluctant to give it. Afraid to see ourselves?
It’s a big leap, I know.
But come spring—when it really comes—I’ll wander off-trail to find abandoned wasps’ nests. I will take photos, and let them rot where they land, as they should: new life. One way or another there is new life.
Thank you for taking the time to read/listen. I’ll be back again next Monday with an audio poem. Until then, I hope you have a great week!
Warmly,
Ren
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Beautiful writing like this can only come from beautiful thoughts. It was a pleasure to read your poignant, poetic, and in its way, spiritual piece. Here’s to swift healing and more beautiful contemplation.
This is just lovely, Ren.