be ignited, or be gone

I used to believe in signs. As a kid I was a bit obsessed. I grew up in rural northeastern Utah and often when I’d go out walking, I’d see mule deer. I always wanted to get close to them. I’d walk as close as I dared without spooking them and then I’d stand still and will them to understand that I meant no harm. I’d try my best to communicate telepathically with the deer. I’d think in their direction things like “flick your ears if it is okay for me to get closer.” Or “stomp a foot if you know I’m friendly.” None of these things ever happened, but eventually one of the deer would realize I was there and swivel her head around on her gracile neck to stare at me with dark eyes. Eventually I’d decide that her stare was actually the sign I was looking for and begin to edge closer, my confidence and my faith in signs rising the closer I got.

As I grew a bit older I began to look for signs from God. I imagined God as a large man in the sky peering down and wanting me to make specific choices, but some unexplainable rule of the universe prevented him from telling me what he wanted outright. My job was to “read the signs” if I wanted to be a good person. I can’t remember specific dilemmas I asked for help with but my prayers were similar to my earlier telepathic conversations with the deer—I’d think things like “God if you want me to do X could you make the wind rustle those leaves?”

In my early 20’s I discovered the writing of Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These two introduced me to the idea of the Divine as an energy that runs through all things. An “Oversoul” as Emerson calls it “within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other.” Thoreau describes the world as holy making all that is before him reflections of divinity. He writes: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” He uses his two- year stay in the semi-wild space on the shore of Walden Pond to get closer to the concrete world and describes the divine through the flash of fish scales and the shine of lake water. I soon shed my earlier notions of God as a super human with an incredible eye for detail and stopped asking the world to communicate with me in “God-code.” I began to look for ways that the world might reflect divinity in ways I could find meaningful.

One day I sat on the banks of a small creek and watched a dipper bird looking for food. This small grayish bird would stand on the rocks on the creek’s edge bouncing its body slightly up and down then dive under the water. When the bird would resurface all water beaded instantly from its back. I thought of the way I too was trying to maneuver two different elements—the physical and the spiritual and the small bird’s ease moving from one to the other turned it into a sign for me. I did not force myself to fully articulate a “lesson” from this moment with the bird, I just enjoyed the way it’s small animal existence moving in and out of the water inspired me to embrace the spiritual and the concrete.

While this new way of seeing the world allowed me to enjoy the world for what it was doing instead of waiting for it to “tell” me what to do, I had experiences that felt personally directed at me—moments of serendipity that elated me and then later made me uncomfortable. I’d just finished reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and decided to take a few day trip on my own. Dillard’s words made me want to see the sacred in the world that she described with the new eyes her book had given me. I drove into the Dixie National Forest in southern Utah and pulled over at a lush bend in a creek. In Dillard’s, book she describes stalking the muskrats on Tinker Creek because their shyness makes them so rare to see. Her stalking of the muskrats becomes a metaphor for the way she stalks the sacred, or the divine. I sat down on the edge of the creek thinking about Dillard and muskrats. I looked out on the rippling water then on the willow-lined opposite bank where the sleek hunched form of a muskrat crawled out of the water with a mouthful of grass.

Many religious texts speak of happenings that are signs of God. In the Christian Bible: “And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands…” (Mark 18:17-18.); In the Koran: “And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned. And one of His signs is your sleeping and your seeking of His grace by night and (by) day; most surely there are signs in this for a people who would hear. And one of His signs is that He shows you the lightning for fear and for hope, and sends down water from the clouds then gives life therewith to the earth after its death; most surely there are signs in this for a people who understand” (Romans 30:22-24). According to writer Gautam Chatterjee “modern Hinduism is studded with varied signs and symptoms which are mystic in character and symbolic in nature, and are sacred symptoms of spiritualisms as well.” Some Jewish households place a Mezuzah—a scroll inscribed with specific text-- on the doorpost as a sign of God’s presence. On a website (globalpsychis.com) psychic Lisa Nash writes: “There are many signs that we can read to make sense of any life situation at any moment. Signs are everywhere. The Divine delights in sending us messages 24 hours a day. The Divine is earnest and responsive to your concerns. The unfolding of each day holds meaning and significance.” Nash reminds me of my God-code breaking early years as she goes on to explain that we may not understand what these signs mean but if we watch for a “key” we will “find an answer.”

I feel schizophrenic when it comes to my ideas about signs. While I poke fun at Nash’s decoder key idea, I also love what she says next: “The unfolding of each day holds meaning and significance.” I know with a bone resonating certainty that when I can convince myself that there is an ordered beauty in my life that allows things to “come together” for me and that sometimes the evidence of that resides in small see-able things—a water dipper appearing at the moment I’m wondering about the barriers between the spiritual and the concrete—my life is better. I am filled with purpose, delight and best of all wonder. And yet I can’t get over my discomfort that this kind of thinking is naïvely arrogant. In his work The Book of Yaak, Rick Bass writes about a day when a pack of coyotes howls uncharacteristically all day. When he learns that a woman in his community has died he writes, “Now I knew why the coyotes had been singing and carrying on all day. I didn’t know what they were saying, but I knew they knew.” When I read this I rolled my eyes, something way behind my ribs squirmed, and I put down the book.

New Age thinkers that reference quantum physics explain signs in a way that sounds Karmic—the kind of energy that you put out into the world is the kind of energy that returns to you. So if you exhale thoughts of inter-species connection or thoughts of a world that is connected, then experiences that reinforce that idea will manifest themselves in your life. Publications such as the “The Secret” (both a book and a movie) caution one on the power of thought. Thinking something like “I don’t want to be alone” will inevitable leave you lonely while thoughts like “I am on the way to a fulfilling relationship” will bring you what you want.

I used to think about signs and the divine energy that holds the world together with blazing ferocity. In the last few years I’ve felt that blaze die back to a smoldering, sometimes sputtering ember. And as that heat fades so does something vital to my being. While I never felt settled on how exactly I envision the divine and how I think divine energy manifests itself in my life, the questions themselves invited me regularly into the realm of the sacred and the unknowable.

Just yesterday—the day I acknowledged that this pursuit of understanding and mystery was lacking from my life—I went walking alone in the park near my house. I felt incredibly bleak. A few hours earlier I’d moaned to my partner that I couldn’t make my passions central to my life—writing being the one I spoke about openly. But I was also thinking about ritual, and mystery-seeking, and meaning-making. I’d cried. Now here I was slogging through the park trying to make myself feel a little better. I found myself engaged in something I hadn’t done since I was a kid. I came to a crossroads and stopped. Should I go further into the park, or should I walk through this neighborhood instead? I felt that one answer was right and if I could just pick it something would be revealed to me. I looked briefly for a sign, but the indecision made me squirm and I firmly stepped onto the neighborhood street. As I was just realizing that this street paralleled the park and that I’d run into a street soon that would let me cut back into the park—allowing me to make both decisions I guess—a hawk dove low in front of me. From the flash of her I’d seen—low to the ground and angling lower—I was sure she’d landed on the ground or maybe even caught something. I stopped and stared. I could have walked across a grassy field and perhaps seen her again, but that would take me directly to the park and somehow my decision to walk on the neighborhood street felt important so I just kept walking. I walked the few blocks to where the park entrance intersected my road. As I turned into the park, the hawk came from behind me and lit in a nearby tree. I was pleased to get a closer view—her undersides were creamy white and brown. Her feathers on the top of her body were dark , and she was huge. I paused to take her in then kept walking. Two minutes later she landed on a light post. Like the tree, this perch was directly on my path. The first two times she’d landed, I’d simply felt excitement—this time I felt, with some dread, the formation of a question—is this hawk trying to tell me something? Is this a sign of some sort.? I looked at her and tried a little to crack open whatever defense (or logic) did not want me to invite in this idea. If I could just peel it back a bit maybe whatever idea this hawk represented could trickle in. I couldn’t fully bring myself to accept that the hawk was supposed to mean anything—well anything specific to me. I kept walking. And for the fourth time the hawk flew past me and landed just a bit down my path.

Here’s the thing, I’m uncomfortable writing this down. I’m a little angry that I’m doing it and I can feel some kind of mass at the back of my ribs squirming. I know if you’ve had an experience like this you’ll get it. And if not—well you’ll roll your eyes, sigh, and put down this essay. I guess that’s what I deserve Rick Bass to do if he ever reads this. If you are fully uncomfortable with this turn in the narrative you should know I wasn’t converted. The problem with the hawk’s new perch was that it was at a crossroads. If I kept walking straight I would head right for her, but I’d intended to circle back at that very point so that I could walk home through the park instead of on the neighborhood street. I paused for a very long time. Perhaps if I followed the hawk for a bit something would happen. It was pretty hard to ignore that she kept landing just in front of me. Then I began to get angry at the hawk—my anger had nothing to do with her existence as a hawk but at her ambiguous existence as an entity I was supposed to let influence me. I might have stood five minutes; maybe it was just two. But then I simply thought about what I wanted to do. I wanted to walk home through the park where I could get a glimpse of the river and the dogs in the dog park. I turned toward the park.

The hawk did not follow.

And yet she had swooped ahead of me four times. So there is that.

Recently driving on I-80 between Pennsylvania and New Jersey I spotted a dead bear on the roadside, its black coat marred with thick lines of red, its body limp and sprawling. On the same trip I saw the bright orange flashes from the bodies of three car-mauled foxes.

These animals are rare to see alive. I’ve seen black bear quickly disappearing into the Utah woods only twice always surprised by the speed of their strange lumbering gait. The last time I saw a live fox I was taking the bus from downtown Seattle to the airport; it was early spring and on a sloping brown hillside stood a fox. I said aloud, “well it’s a fox,” but no one seemed to have heard me.

Dead on roadsides I’ve seen deer, elk, moose, possums, porcupines, fox, turkey, armadillos, bear, far more times than I’ve seen the animals alive except for the first three. I don’t like seeing animals dead on the road and yet part of me feels thrilled each time I see one of those folded animal bodies on the roadside because it’s a reminder of what’s out there. So rather than turning away I usually slow down and stare hard to get a look at what lives in the world just beyond the periphery of my everyday experience.

I currently live in central New Jersey and much of my time outside the house is spent on crowded highways on trips to places like IKEA that seem to take much more time than is at all reasonable and take me past strip malls and oil refineries. It’s possible on certain routes to believe that human industry has wiped out all non-human animals except for a few flocks of starlings. And yet the road kill speaks otherwise. It speaks of the slow lumber of the porcupine come down from her tree, the desperate need of the deer that moves her so often into the way of traffic, it speaks to the fact that out there in those woods that blur and become simply “the view” as they cycle from the red swaths of autumn to the bare stalks of winter, the life cycle of large beings, while threatened, still continues.

Labels: animal lives, beauty, road kill

I think about my carbon footprint. I think about the damage done to the atmosphere when strawberries from Mexico or California are trucked to my supermarket in Pennsylvania. I can resist the temptation to buy Strawberries and grapes in January when they aren't in season here and they are trucked in from Chile, but when summer rolls around my heart always tells me I deserve fruit. Then I break down and buy produce that isn't local.

In the last year though I have made a much stronger effort to buy only local produce. I bought a farm share last winter and local produce was delivered to me weekly. I finally found out the difference between a turnip, a rutabaga, and a radish--you think it should be obvious but it is not. We ate a lot of soup in my house last winter. And lots and lots of root vegetables.

When I visited South Asia (the picture here was taken by my friend Jenny as we walked around Kathmandu) I fell in love with the fact that local produce was our only option. I only saw one grocery store in the two months I stayed there. Anytime we needed food we just walked to a corner stand and bought produce from a local vendor. It was so beautifully simple.

Now back in the states I'm struggling with how to use more local products. My town of State College has a few local farmer's markets a week so I've been doing pretty well. But every time I walk into a large grocery store I can't help but think--How did we come to this? How did we move from a place and time where we knew our farmers and our produce sellers? Why did we one day decide that what we could produce locally or regionally just wasn't good enough? I know it happened incrementally. Most horrible things happen incrementally.

I don't think we deserve California strawberries. We deserve to eat food that is grown in the soil that we walk in that we spend time in. I want only apples and pumpkins in the fall; strawberries and blueberries in the summer; squashes in the winter; and fresh greens in the spring. I want my food to tell me what season it is. I don't think this is asking for so much and yet figuring out how to do it is hard--affording it is often harder.

Hey just wanted to invite you all to a cool blog where some friends of mine write about their fave new music


http://milkymoon.blogspot.com/

Enjoy! At least get on there and watch the Andrew Bird video oh so good!

I am sitting in my new apartment. I live here alone. Strangely (at least to me because I believe that I love solitude) I am a few months shy of 30 and this is the first time in my life I have lived alone. I have never had a house or apartment that was all mine. I haven’t even had rooms very often that were all mine. I shared a room and often a bed with my sister until I was 16, then I had my own room for my last year of high school then off to college where I began sharing rooms again. At 20 I married and there ended the chance to have my own room ever again. Then I divorced. I spent 2 months with my own tiny room in a house shared by 3 men. Then last fall I moved into my own giant room (the size of my current apartment) in a house I shared with 2 women. Now here I am in a space all my own.

I am astonished by the way I have always shared my space. It seems impossible that I have never set up all my own space solely to my own liking before. But that is the truth. I recently read that a person must embrace her past experiences in order to make herself hers so it seems I must claim my lack of solitary life.

I am living alone this year because I am writing a thesis. 130 pages of “literary quality” work. I thought it best to do it in a space with little distraction. But now that I’ve been here a few days I can see that this solitary life can pose a problem. There is no distraction to “get away from” in order to start my work. This means I may never pick a deliberate time to walk away from activities and work. Or this may mean that I always work. This blog is evidence that I’m in little danger of the latter.

Once I spent a summer working along in a wilderness area. So in a sense I lived alone then, but my tent (as large and solid as it was) was not my permanent residence so I don’t count it as living alone. I loved the work. I loved the solitary days. A few weeks during the summer I had a partner and I resented it. But the evenings and I mean each evening waxed long. No matter how tired I was. No matter how interesting my reading material, evening descended and dread always rose up from my lower stomach. The hours from 7 to 9 were the worst—It was too early to sleep, I’d eaten, and the evening just stretched on and on. I wasn’t scared being alone—well a few times—But my loneliness from 7 until I slept was always tangible—a heavy wet blanket of discomfort lying on my chest. I know why miners in California and Alaska went crazy. That kind of weight night after night indefinitely would have been too much for me. I only had to bear 6 or 7 nights in a row then I got a break.

Does that story relate to my current condition? It might, at least for now. My semester doesn’t start for another 2 weeks; I’m busy but not overly busy. Seven o’clock has rolled around bringing with it a familiar heaviness. I’m not exactly bored (plenty of work), I’m not nervous to be alone (I can hear my neighbor’s music I’m hardly isolated), but surprisingly I’m lonely.

I feel compelled to reassure you that I’m not sad, and that I’ve been alone most of the day and have felt whole and happy until now. It’s just the evening hours. I think its an evolutionary trait. Those of us who felt sad enough to seek company in the evenings garnered the protection of the group. Those of us immune to the heaviness of solitude died alone between the jaws of the tiger. A few heavy hours in the evening are a fair exchange for a heritage of survival.

South Asia has a way of leaving no place for black and white.

Here is a woman on the street; she is asking for money to eat and to feed the small baby she carries. If I give her money it may feed her for a day--and yet giving in this way perpetuates a system of dependence that solves no problems. Also there are many incidents reported of women actually inducing crying in their children in order to make begging more profitable--the worst I heard from my host I feel is too gruesome to even share. If I give to this women on the street I may be supporting these systems. Yet the woman is thin--to thin; she obviously truly needs food and they baby too looks thin. I don't feel that giving is the answer, but turning my head away also does not feel like the answer. It is a woman with a child and she is asking for food.

The autorickshaw drivers here in Pune have a meter system in which you multiply the kilometers travelled by 6 rupees and then add 2 rupees. This system makes sense if the kilometers travelled are 4 (6 x 4 + 2 = 26 rupees for the ride). But if the kilometers are 1.8 the math gets tough to do in a hurry. The rickshaw drivers often round up, charging 2 to 4 extra rupees. 40 rupees makes a dollar. So if I argue I am expending energy for a few cents really. I feel it is not worth my time. I feel ridiculously concerned about money. And yet the rupee reflects the local economy. One rupee does make a difference here to the lower income worker. And the less people argue for the rupee difference in the rickshaw, the more often the rickshaw driver will ask, even expect, the extra. So my choice to not argue may inflate the rickshaw prices. Rickshaw is a main source of transportation around the city. Yet when I argue for 1 or 2 rupees I cannot lose the feeling that I am making a scend about a mere 20 cents change.

When a person treks in the Himalayas, porters are very affordable. Most travellers can easily hire someone to carry his or her bags for a week-long trek. When trekking in Nepal I saw many trekkers carrying only a day pack being followed by a porter weighed down with a 3 to 4 foot high pack strapped to his or her back with a headstrap. It looks obscene. And yet money for carrying trekkers gear supports the Sherpa communities of Nepal. Carrying my own pack--as I did--means I am supporting the local economy less. I am not giving to the communities that allow me to trek through and that build their livelihoods from this land and tourist dollars. And yet... the more money the Sherpa community receive the more guesthouses they build along the trekking routes. New buildings are constantly in progress--the materials for building brought in on the backs of porters. These materials are brought in from the outside meaning that the Sherpa communities keep their natural resources intact as they attract tourists, and some other communities lose their forests to the wood used to build the guesthouses that add to the wealth of the Sherpa communities.

The streets are often the hardest part of India. In the cities, cars, trucks, auto and cycle rickshaws, motorcycles all race to fill any available gap. On the highways and in smaller towns, vehicles race to pass anything slower than them—people, buses, cycles, cows. There is no waiting only the constant press to pass. This means that crossing the street as a pedestrian is a gauntlet run each time. If you step out to look a little, the auto rickshaws honk at you. If you try to just cross ½ way and wait for the next lane to clear, buses and trucks honk out a warning but never slow down. There is rarely a median that--mid-way “base” that makes you feel safe while you wait to collect your unspooling wits before trying to cross the next lane. Sometimes standing at a corner waiting to cross, the constant stream overwhelms me; India never pauses enough to let me catch my breath.

I’ve felt on constant display since reaching India. Every where I walk here heads turn and people stare. Often there is little effort to hide the stares. Women stare then often smile when I catch them, though sometimes young women look away quickly. Often older women look away slowly. Young children peek shyly around the corners of their parents’ legs or over the tops of train seats. Often while walking in the markets, children will walk up to me and say “hello, hello” and hold out their hand for me to shake—it’s adorable. But the constant stares of men wear on me.

The other day in the train station a man of about 55-60 sat about 30 feet from me. From the corner of my eye, I could just catch that he was staring in my direction. Finally I looked up in his direction. He stared me straight in the eye for a second or two then slowly slid his eyes to the left. As I looked away, I could see him turning back to stare. I looked back at him 2 more times and each time he continued to stare a second or two before moving his eyes slightly in another direction. Sometimes the stares just continue to be blatant; we were walking in a park in Kolkata and I caught the eyes of a younger man staring. I looked him straight in the eye and raised my eyebrows, but he just continued to stare.

Some of this staring, of course, I can understand is plain curiosity. In many places that we’ve visited, I’ve seen few or no other white people. Also of course, Jenny and I wear mostly western dress (always pants or skirts past the knee) so we just look different, but unfortunately the stares of the men are not always just about curiosity.

Jenny and I spent a few days in Nainital, a smallish tourist town in Utterachal in Northern India. One day as we walked through the streets, we noticed a 20-ish year old man following us. He called out “hello” a few times. We said “hello” but kept walking. When it became clear that he was following us, we slowed down. He just stopped and waited for us. So next we changed directions; we’d only walked about 3 minutes before we saw that he was still following. I finally stopped and asked him why he was following us. His English was not very good, so I don’t know if he understood me. He asked our names and seemed to be trying to say something else. Jenny began walking and said “we need to go” and I said a deliberately strong “good by” to him. Our next encounter was a bit more sinister.

Later that same day a young man followed us for 10 minutes or so before I finally stopped and asked him why he was following us. “where is your hotel?” he asked me. I shook my head and said “I’m not telling you—no.” He then said “no hotel?” “Then pointed at himself and said “hotel room number.” I said “no, no,” and we walked away. It was pretty evident that he was propositioning us. Even with the forceful “no” from us after that conversation, he continued to follow us until I finally stopped and waved my hand at him. I called out “stop following us; stop.” He ½ smiled, but we didn’t see him after that.

But the occurrences go on. Jenny and I get called out to wherever we go—last night a motorcycle driver passed us closely on the street and yelled out “hey sweetie.”

The low point was when a man (with two kids!) grabbed Jenny’s ass when we stood with him in a small elevator. It shocked her so much we were out of the elevator and he was gone before it even registered to her that she needed to say or do something.

We are pretty safe travelers and don’t go into isolated places just the two of us so we’ve never actually been in any danger and when we are traveling with Sameer things are a little easier (though we still get cat called constantly). But each stare now raises my hackles—some are just curiosity I know, but I can’t help but wonder what action the gazers might take should they catch me in an isolated place.