After Labor Day, just before fall, I am finally back where I began, in June, with prairie dogs. I am reading Terry Tempest Williams’ book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. I have traversed two hundred pages in four months. In the in between, I have read six books and taken ten graduate units in writing (from Stanford University) and teaching writing (from CSU Chico’s Northern California Writing Project). I am a writing instructor at a community college in Northern California; I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry; my poetry manuscript hasjust been resubmitted, again. I am finally back where I began, monkish, contemplating the prayerful life of prairie dogs. Terry Tempest Williams has just made me cry. I stir my boiled tea and remember.
This fall marks the first fall of the first year of my adult working life. Although I have worked straight through my life since age sixteen, this year is the first year I have worked without a break, straight through summer. By most standards, my life has been lazy. I have taken six weeks off each summer and two to three weeks off from work each winter. I have written poems and meditated. While almost no one knows this secret, I know I need this lifestyle like tomatoes need water. However, I live in America, where the prices continue to rise. The state of California is in a solid depression, with no sign of improvement. I have not received a raise in years. I must take additional units and try hard to network as a writer and publish my work. I have little choice. My son will one day go to college, but even before that happens, my culture dictates that he deserves to see Disneyland. Most kids of parents who work year round have seen Disneyland. My son has not: an English professor does not bring in enough dough to travel the planet with her son.
But if I take a few units, I can raise my income. So I do.
I cannot wait to see the final medical bills. I have very nearly averted surgery from an impacted gut. My diagnoses range from appendicitis to biliary colic, but in the final analysis, I manage to escape surgery and spend only one day in bed, after a CAT scan, a radiologic infusion test, an ultrasound. To find out what has been wrong with me, I have been exposed to all manner of radiation. It might have been better to take the summer off and go wander around some nuclear testing site.
Terry Tempest Williams’ brother Steve, the baby who was in her mother’s uterus when Terry witnessed her first nuclear test on the horizon in Utah, has just died. I mean, he has just died in the passage that I am reading right now as the book rests in my lap. His death feels like right now, because of my summer, because of my history of reading Terry Tempest Williams’ writing, because it feels real. A squirrel scampers across my roof. My walnut tree raises a few leaves in a slight breeze. The weekend here in Redding promises to be a brutal 100 degrees. I have no doubt about the impact of human life on this planet. The impact of human life on this human body is my acid test. If I were a normal working mom, I might have succumbed to colon cancer or several gall bladder surgeries or an appendectomy by now. Working all year round in a caffeinated world leads to sickness and death.
"We all wanna get rich quick, but your whole scheme kinda makes me sick. I'm gonna lay my head beneath this old oak tree."
Let me count the days off this summer. There were eight days between graduation on May 22 and the first week of June, during which time I prepared for my presentation at the Northern California Writing Project in June and finished the grades from spring semester. Those days do not count. When the Writing Project finished on July fourth weekend, I went away to Monterey and rode a rented bike along the coast to Asilomar, following a handsome man on a similar rented bike and squinting off into the waves. Those two days count. I got back home and had to make up assignments I had missed while I was away, so I worked a little bit of double-time.
Then my son wanted to go to Arcata. From Monday through Wednesday, we ran around on the beach together. I was so tired that each day, while he made sand castles, I literally crashed out and slept right there on the sand, my dog standing sentinel beside me. When some fool in a helicopter flew too close over the beach, the dog bolted. I watched my son chase after her as she ran around in utter terror. My most beloved duo, off in crisis, and I could hardly move my butt off the sand. Good thing my son is strong. He brought the dog back to me and said what he always does, “Don’t worry, Mom.”
When we got back to Redding, it was 113 degrees outside, so I didn’t even mind staying inside and writing and reading intensively, making up for the lost hours online with a steady march of study, study, study.
Much of our world is a fabrication, a fiction, a manufactured and manipulated time-lapsed piece of filmmaking where a rose no longer unfolds but bursts. Speed is the buzz, the blur, the drug. Life out of focus becomes our way of seeing. We no longer expect clarity. The lenses of perception and perspective have been replaced by speed, motion. We don’t know how to stop. The information we value is retrieved, never internalized. (Tempest Williams 196)
I have internalized the message of this crazy world. I have been quite ill for a number of weeks. But I remember how to undo this. The undoing involves a chaise lounge, a ukulele, and some poetry. When I read Tempest Williams now, I stop to contemplate. I write in response to her writing. I teach my students about this, an act of intimacy between the reader and the page. One of my students today promises to shave his face like the author Rich Cohen does, in the storied mustachio of Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. He wants to embody the results of stares and queries. He wants to report his live experience of the essay our class has been reading, “Becoming Hitler.” I think my student is getting the message about critical thinking, how thinking requires some internal change and external effort. None of this effort, however, is similar to cranking up a million hours of computer screen time. The embodiment of true wisdom requires energy and slowness.
We can no longer say, “Let nature take care of itself.” Our press on the planet is heavy and relentless. A species in peril will most likely survive now only if we allow it to, if our imaginations can enter into the soul of the animal and we pull back on our own needs and desires to accommodate theirs. What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences. (Tempest Williams 203)
From my desk I hear the train whistle in downtown Redding. In my mind’s eye, I see the train crossing from the east side always, as I sit in my car heading west. The last great frontier is out there, California wilderness. I have seen mink, bear, mountain lion, coyote, jackrabbit, rattlesnake, osprey and bald eagle out there. The western horizon is the reason I live here. There are a couple hundred miles of wilderness between here and the coast, and most of those acres, one hundred thousand of them, burned last summer. Without those acres and the time to witness them, I will not survive.
Downtime. None of my students would ever call me lazy. They wish. I pack their semesters with information and writing assignments. In order to succeed, they must contemplate; the classes I teach are a conundrum. I work them very hard, but to succeed, they must connect the disparate parts. I teach like Terry Tempest Williams does, drawing all examples together, revealing how the smallest detail of our waking life, like the iPhone, needs to receive the examination and attention of our contemplative capabilities as a world power citizenry, as personal observers of squirrels on the rooftops. I cannot imagine living any other way.
Meanwhile, I have cancelled my trip to Surprise Valley this weekend. I will not be riverside for the blues festival. I probably won’t buy tickets to the beer and wine festival. I will wait by my chaise lounge for the right moment to practice the ukulele, and I will update my Whiskeytown National Forest pass for another year. I will probably swim in the lake, surfacing and diving among the bass and perch in the cooling waters of approaching fall. Having cancelled everything, I will probably live until September 30th, when I next get paid. There is no guarantee.
From my chaise lounge, I will write questions and comments on their papers. Reading and interacting with their thoughts is my highest privilege. No doubt there, it’s not always fun, but it is highly provocative. To confront the human mind on the page, to delve into the reality of another person, is a profound gift.
My ethics as a teacher and a person are definitively Buddhist. To grade an essay holistically with the sense of purpose and audience and to honor the mind that has written the essay fits with one of the tenets of Buddhism, the contemplation of the precious gift of human life. To spend hours in the wilderness hiking or just observing the wildness is a Buddhist practice, honoring all sentient beings, including myself. To slow down and think of the whole world and remember “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death” is operationally poetic, the poetry of an English instructor, but is also a way of embracing reincarnation, the possibility of the interconnection of all lifetimes.
Buddhist ethics are common to literate people, thanks to the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. There are many other similar philosophical stances among the world religions; for example, many of the values I have expressed are also definitively Christian. Monks and nuns all over Christendom, both Protestant and Catholic, are honoring other human minds, spending hours in observation of all life, slowing down and remembering the world in prayer. Though Christians may not embrace reincarnation in the same way that Buddhists do, they remember Christ’s promise of eternal life.
Terry Tempest Williams is a Mormon. She quotes the Tao Te Ching throughout this book I am reading, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She also quotes Einstein and Albert Sweitzer and some Islamic philosophers whose names I do not recognize. Tempest Williams remembers that we are living in a post-September 11th world. Last Friday was September 11th. This Friday, my critical thinking class will be reading about Hitler’s mind, Hitler’s fascination with power.
The squirrel uses my roof to avoid the neighborhood cats. He has intelligence and a strong desire to live. A Native American medicine woman I know has predicted a strong winter. The squirrel seems to agree. Did we forget about the planet while we were organizing our lives? Did we forget about our bodies when we planned for constant work and activity in search of the American dollar? Did we forget about the expansive footprint of humanity in search of silly green pieces of paper and gasoline in our engines? I know we did. I just don’t know what to do now. Heal myself. Heal myself with my hands on the earth.
Gathering the Stones
Small rocks on the beach, palm-heft
blackened under seawater, aged under foot—
the long walk to the freshwater lagoon
where the river comes in
handfuls of rock held close under waves
washed clean in sunny saltwater,
stones for prayers, one for each spot
on the body where the sky touches
horizon so near like a hair’s breadth
sand between my ready toes
horizon of all worlds—your gentle hands
holding mine
return to the shore, waves at my calves
echo triumph of the walking in
against the mark of tide into you
where we barefoot meet, where beach
finds asphalt, the inevitable road,
handfuls of rock, the long drive
seagulls
buffeting wind
the healing we all wish for
earth’s gravitational pull,
the medicine we receive.
--Kathryn Gessner, from the manuscript, Gathering the Stones
Dyar, Jim. “Ain’t No Time.” Magical Land (CD). Jim Dyar Band, 2009.
Tempest Williams, Terry. Finding Beauty in a Broken World. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 2008.
Wow Kath, what an amazing essay.
Is this your correct email addy? I also wanted to share with you this neat new site we just launched, for my friends Liz and Scott up in New Hampshire.
http://www.falaloblog.com
Check it out!
xox
Chris
ps hope you are feeling better soon
Posted by: Chris Boese | September 19, 2009 at 03:00 AM