In a World Responding to Climate Upheaval

This is that era now, written up in publications and on broadcast reports in all the decades I remember, when the greenhouse effect would wreak its changes noticeably, almost everywhere. Those changes have come on so subtly, but are so sweeping in their effects that many who think about it can't yet sort out any consistent response much less a forced ending to the ways we live, travel and earn a living. Every step and every sidestep, where fossil-fuel-reliance is in demand, reverberates--and which decision may be worse than which in terms of another outburst of carbon, ozone-depleting byproducts, methane, etc. here beneath the skies? If we're going to personally do anything to lower emissions it should have worth obvious at least to the doer, and, we figure, should be something we can afford. Anyway, what does it matter, up against all the wholesale stuff that keeps going on--commercial trucking and air travel, oil refining and fracking, military maneuvers and bombings and urban overgrowth, because there is still economic, military and population growth worsening climate change.

We follow our hearts, and what are better drivers than hearts informed by minds, where this matter is concerned?

There are so many compounding effects from climate change along with shortages aggravated by massive population growth; it's disconcerting to think what may be required of ourselves not to mention whole societies. Not just in death but in survival, too, there is shrinkage. What we love we will try to save, or help it to save itself. Each of us who are concerned bears a repository of lifestyle modifications or intentions in response. For those who have no cares about the whole situation, the world will do its best and worst to convert such people into different versions of themselves.

When I was still young enough to have picture books from the library, there was one book whose cover illustration bore a sun drawn in wavering, black kindergarten-grade lines on desert-gold background, a vision of skyscrapers on the sun. For a moment I may have been charmed, but mostly I remember how these pictures touched me with despair--for I could imagine living on an earth-like sun, maybe not the real gaseous devouring sun but a planet all about heat and light--all that a person could want of it. Any number of readers might be smitten with the picture but for me it felt like a vision of sterility. Who would want to live on a hot planet that had scorched itself bald?

That memory came to mind last evening as I drove in the old Prius back from my downtown day, at long last, after days and days above freezing, even many nights above freezing, in a brisk December snowfall. It was not quite blinding but enough to make the roadsides uniform and slow the motorists down. A full measure of my old childhood glee awoken by a downpour of snow awoke in me so I was exuberant again, talking to myself and the radio announcer, peering along the dark route ahead for the ever-more-remarkable glimpse of winter's splendor. Tomorrow, I said, I'll go out since the hunters are all gone and see what I find on the way to the river. Never mind that there probably won't be enough snow to ski on.

It is significant what subtle but widespread effects a climate has, probably on all of us. As realms known for snow and ice seem to transform, before the eyes of those of us in love with their beauty, to something out of a fairy tale or movie or dream memory, we're not necessarily enchanted. It is possible to feel partially stranded, ignoring the emergency of folks in other places watching the ground alongside  their neighborhood subside into the sea because of ice caps shrinking, seas rising. For the many who are grieving climate change, our personal identity, along with that of the place, is being baked away. What used to console us with a feeling of eternity is in the early stages of a transition that will move us far from a lot, if not all, of what we cherish. How our mood responds varies daily, but if we're tackling or waiting out other issues, we may seem to observers like someone waking up out of troubled dreams into a problematic Monday, the opening of a week defined by confusion.


Cottonwood in Pasture After Frost - watercolor & pencil, 8x11"

Questing for Epiphanies Afield

On a Sunday excursion, driving faster than my usual highway speed in order not to miss the thrill and majesty of a rare visiting bird, I also felt beckoned by a sense of due reward on the heels of all my various endeavors toward protecting habitat and migratory safety for birds. Faring off to a first encounter with an archetype--a documented species--must be a familiar feeling to many birders who head out to cross county and state lines, by car, train, on foot, bike or plane in response to a sighting that would mean a life bird (lifer in the lingo) added to a private list. Birder's adventure-lust is a kind of yearning for one of nature's rarities in the long stretches when special sightings go unheard of, often as a result of monotonous weather. Stormy weather most often whips birds into local areas from far away. A lot of us can't stay forever contented with the same resident bird neighbors: Canada geese, English sparrows, coastal seafowl, wherever we may happen to live. Isn't bird-finding sort of an act of worship, going to bear witness to an itinerant life form, created into the world by way of all the staunchness, daring and discomfort wrapped up in the process called evolution!

Last week-end's quarry was a pair of vermilion flycatchers over in Becker County, in Minnesota's northwestern quadrant, and would lure me across five counties including a stretch of the Chippewa National Forest. Deer season opener was that same day, marked by an unusual number of trucks and a few modest cars at trailheads along the highway, nose to nose as if aware and conferring. For me it had been since early May that I last listed a new bird, the ruff observable at long range across a lot of warm bottomland overlooking Minnesota River mudflats beneath the thunders of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.

A sweeping National Audubon bird study released in 2014 concluded, based upon projections of temperature, rainfall, vegetative changes and other alterations in climate that by 2080 over half, or 314 out of 588 species of North American birds will lose more than fifty percent of their customary range. Out of those 314 threatened species 126 are classified as climate-endangered, and projected to lose more than fifty percent of their accustomed range as early as 2050. Abstraction from these trends serves as a reminder that powerful, prevailing conditions (climates) do, even in a lifetime, blur and blend into one another, and that a force on earth so manifold and multitudinous as people do increase a generic all-of-a-type habitat/climate regime characterized, among other things, by a growing variety of plant species in common. Then what happens when the people-force that's taken over all the landscape divides, inevitably, into sub-sectors of clashing priorities? Civil war, or rioting may break out. In the face of such tensions, conserving pieces of habitat slips to a low priority or the effort gets wiped out. How well do we cherish the wild birds, more or less of which are archetypes, treasured emblems or voices of a distinct but vanishing type of habitat, in our minds? in our actions?

Maybe one-hundred to three-hundred of our continent's bird species seem as irrevocably slated for extinction as each one of us is in a tinier time frame--each species, comparable with each life. My attitude during this road trip rode on a stream of joy, as my aging Toyota hybrid pierced a course through the lake country, slowing through farm towns that seemed to belong to other times beset with somewhat other threats than today's. Yet however vaguely a twinge of mortification presents itself at the prospect of these losses--if the Vermilion flycatcher is not on the list of 314 climate-threatened birds because it hails from a hot latitude far to our south, our loon and Bohemian waxwing, our great grey owl and sundry favorite northern-breeding birds are. A few devotees to these creatures, to pristine lands and seas with their character facing peril will keep standing up out of a welter of angry sorrow and saying: this kind still has a chance! or this place still looks how I remember it, so let's work to keep it that way. Right now we're taking a breather in a kind of temporary contentment at how, in due time and in the comradeship of recognizing an increasingly desolate future, thousands of us got our president to rule against the latest mother of all transcontinental pipelines, the Keystone XL.

Restoration of degraded places might increasingly be taken on as a local mission; I can't forget the story of Hanna Mounce, featured in the early-autumn 2015 issue of Audubon magazine. She coordinates the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project and works with a crew replanting seedlings of trees typifying the lost dry, upland forest that once supported Hawaii's rarest bird, of which only a few hundred diminishing individuals remain. A forest restored for one species holds the promise of saving any number of others. In more desolate times ahead, if all together we agree that a community's birth rates as well as death rates are best held in check to ensure abundant living for our foreseeable future, the recreation of habitat full of complementary trees, shrubs and soft-bodied plants may well become a therapy, a discipline, and a vocation, the horticulture and silviculture for collective survival.

                                Restored, protected tallgrass prairie, Becker County, Minnesota

I celebrated a distant old friend's 55th birthday and the rejection of the Keystone pipeline by observing the nearly-adult vermilion flycatcher perching on a metal pasture fence, in late morning sun and 55 degrees F. Though he wasn't close to my position looking through a window, the flycatcher was spectacularly lit, red as candy red-hots as he blurted back from nabbing insect prey midair to his perch on barbed wire; viewing conditions could not have been sharper. The few people present traded lively conversation, amid the thrill of thin, early bonds formed when folks otherwise unlikely otherwise to meet find themselves of a common mind-set. Then came time for me to hurtle back eastward, out of prairie country into what remains of wooded acreages and lakes known for ice-fishing and cracking, dry cold in most of the winters in memory.

       Vermilion Flycatcher Minds his Business  - 5x7" original watercolor on   semi-glossy Yupo polypropylene paper $50

     Life appears fair to the extent that it offers such a variety of emotional sustenance, and one category has to do with getting back to visit what means most to us in our weariness and numbness, often what never changes but presents itself as a constant, or a continuum. The vermilion flycatcher and other surviving species of birds are that, are in bird books and illustrations going way back through our generations, and though these birds are in that way a constant, some of them offset the impending era of extinctions by showing up where and when least expected, like an advertisement for some other trend that we could cooperatively set in motion.

The Feel of Having Been Someplace

Again there was no one else for distraction from a northern Ontario mood evoked along the way as I traveled in my little old Toyota, climbing in altitude from west to east. In my mind's eye right now I am around Thunder Bay, though the window views have been scrolling since morning as I came out of Minnesota over the border. Since I've been through the Districts of Thunder Bay and Algoma most years since I was barely of school age I've had half a lifetime to build up a sort of mental mulch of vistas and bush-texture, the facades of cliff, the etches of deadwood standing up that belong to this Lake Superior region, characterized by a kind of light or weather that might, even in one well-traveled soul, evoke visions of a slew of places but, in my case, still tie me to the Algoma region in memory. Compacted scenic imagery must give rise to endless landscape art, for all that I know, among artists regionwide. 

Land-mood like this has caught my notice for as long as I've been aware of my earthly surroundings; it's the feeling left when I'm away from that place but recalling time that I spent there. Maybe the abundant sense of it is a function of time spent alone in one's psyche, in the faith that these impressions are to be privately savored but are wasted if much talked about. One of the things I enjoy most about favorite movie scenes is the mood they set up, whether it's farmed countryside, wilderness or bleakest desert or a skyline along a city, set to the filmmaker's exquisite choice of music.

Mood imparted to a person by surrounding landscape is what's meant by a land's spirit, the difference from one region to the next as stark as the opposing scenery is. What's there to account for that spirit comes, I have no doubt, of the leftover character of whatever drama unfolds there, influenced by characteristics like air turbulence, heavy tree growth, profusion of other living or dead matter, humidity or aridity. What engenders the mood of the Canadian Shield, north of Lake Superior, in its peculiar sweetness emanating out of a quieter savagery--this is my theory--is inherent in the way all the big and little lives play out within that land. There is so much cover from ground level to treetop--there are cliffs full of crevices--there is a muffling expanse of forest cushy with needles in addition to paper-thin leaves, and there are sparse, ripped places bearing pockets and rivulets of water--so that living is secretive, hastily undertaken and sudden, often, in its curtailment by predator come unseen or heard. There is pain and stifling imposed by a long winter of nights that swallow up the wink of days whose sun arcs, glinting but gone again, far in the southern sky. Warmth, gleams of winter blueness, autumn red and gold, resin-scented breezes are cause for seasonal celebration until, sooner and later, the participant freezes into winter's freezing dark. So much has lived and died there with an emotional framework borne of those conditions that the prevailing mood, conferred upon all nervous systems opened to it, comes of a deep sense that summer is short and death, mild or traumatic, hovers nearby. From forested mountain regions to the west the mood is bound to be similar, though in ways that can be guessed, subtly differing.

From decades ago I remember the broad-leaved hardwoods and farm fields of the lower Midwest, and now try recalling the character of what seems to have been a louder landscape. The crown of the forest hissed with summer's downpours blasted through broad leaves, till winter changed the wind's voice to a roar, the gale in bare branches clicking or at times creaking, hinge-like. Cicada sound in summer--was it the seventeen-year locusts?---pulsed louder, then ebbed like a shut-off motor. Bird noise carried farther among the pillars of those woods than it seems to in the boreal forest.

So a prairie, often gone to agriculture, has more of a spirit of the resolute--there is much less to obscure your view but you have to stand, peer, organize your intentions, but do it with greater assurance than you'll likely feel in forestland--and on a shore, facing a sea or lesser water, you'll act similarly but pausing longer, taking shakier physics into consideration. And so the fabric of each of those places is patterned by whatever happens there, again and again and again but by assorted agents, lineages native to that place or come to visit and influenced by it. Microbial action must play its own role in the evolution of spirit, influenced by temperature and moisture.

These thoughts easily sidetrack me into recalling a bit of a memoir from my neighbor Joan Skelton, a Canadian author and playwright, who wrote of traveling into Michigan to join up with friends. Joan keeps a rock garden, which she describes as an outdoor horde of geological finds, not a flowering garden. Every stone in the garden has its far-off point of origin, someplace where Joan has been. For a long time wanting a Petoskey stone, a type of fossilized coral, she was invited into the countryside by a group member; this was in a part of Michigan near Petoskey and Little Traverse Bay where it was still possible to unearth Petoskey stones. Joan surprised herself by digging up a chunky specimen which she brought back with her to Ontario. It was rusty-toned, smudged all over by the soil it came up from, so she chose to soak it overnight in soapsuds, noting as she handled it that it looked like brain tissue. She went on to tell how the oddly colored and patterned stone refused to leave her thoughts that whole night, affecting her with sleeplessness and haunting, visceral-colored visions. At one moment she could hear wind, then a knocking at the main door, but a walk to the door revealed nobody there and no wind  moving any of the treetops. Everything that was troubling her she felt traceable to the lurking of that stone hauled out of place, so she ended up, a day or two later, scooping it up in a coffee can and taking it to a landfill, and rolling it down an embankment in front of a bulldozer in the act of burying garbage. She summarized that she had always considered all personal experience fare for rational explanation, but that the Petoskey stone proved to her that some things in the world really do lie outside of that whole conventional approach, matters tied to realms beyond our senses or understanding.

                                                                     Petoskey stone



I can go on from there with an ancient childhood memory of my own, taking place when I was about seven, on a family hike south of Indianapolis in a dry limestone ravine inside Shades, one of Indiana's state parks. We must have been walking the regular trails for a while but when my parents decided to step down into the ravine and follow it, I was perturbed to the core for no reason I could give when asked, even though we could see the trees and sky above our heads the whole way. I cried and sobbed like a forsaken little waif the whole way though in arms' reach of my annoyed parents, who did all they could to ignore me. We were a party of five, I think, including my sister and a boy, George. After we climbed out of the ravine I myself could only wonder why--what threat since none was present?--was I so upset in those surroundings. Was it the feeling of caverns, maybe, running indefinitely far back under the lip of land that came maybe as high as my parents' heads? If there were any such caves or crannies we were in no danger of getting trapped in them, nor did we deviate from following the pathway of the ravine.

I'd been reminded of that day previously, already many years back now while I stood in a bookstore and paged through something I can't so far tie to a title or an author, about phobic people--first, a little boy who loved the fireworks and fanfare of the Fourth of July, till when that eagerly-awaited holiday came around again he went into a panic and screamed inconsolably to the mystification of his elders. His parents took him to a hypnotist whose process of questioning narrowed down his fears to a specific admission that came out worded: when I was a soldier. Further questioning turned up evidence that the little boy, who was maybe six years of age, had some recall of being in a bloody battle full of cannon fire and the like, though no war that he or his elders could name--it could have been an American Civil War or revolutionary war battlefield, or European. The conclusion was that his extreme youth allowed an impression from a previous man's life, reincarnated in him, to emerge at this early stage of life amid his presently embodied consciousness.

In the same book there were other phobics; the other one I remember was an adult with a sickening fear of heights. A query put forth by the same hypnotist uncovered another linkage with a long-ago life lost, not a blood ancestor's, but just someone's specific death, and the terror of it somehow revisited on a soul from our century. What haunted this person was a nightmarish fall from the steep gabled roof of a Gothic cathedral with a sharp peak and a spire. The victim had slid, then caught on or just beneath the spire, then finished falling to his or her demise. All are tales, their validity uncertain, drawn from tales drawn from memory, but if founded in people's true experience they do hint at things we are commonly kept from knowing about who we are, what we come from, and likewise about the earth and cosmos.

Here I am trying to relate the spirit of place with sequences of animal movement (it could be human) that has typified them, with ghostly dramas that hardly anyone would probably think worth their notice much less verification of detail. The mystery common to all these categories of encounter is sensed, real, not supernatural but a current holding the universe together. (Supernatural, I think, is a term to keep for these phenomena when they're not sensed but just documented, impersonal.) But the mystery is the vitality that drives us as if beyond the material world, as far from it as we can pull ourselves, then, inevitably, back to it since we are material ourselves. Art is the momentary and recurring habitation of the mystery, moved into view in order to be shared.

Because I'm seized by mystery in the phenomena of birds, I like to paint birds in weather or sky mood conveying an energy that capitalizes on the prevailing spirit of a habitat, wherever that habitat may be.

    Watercolor :  12 x 16" tableau of finches--Redpolls--(and vole) against a wind-carved snowbank - framed, @$225

                                 Watercolor, 5x7" on glossy Yupo paper : 'At the Very End' - with Crows and Cardinal - unframed, $50

                                Watercolor : 'Wayfarers from the Arctic Night' - Long-tailed Ducks - 21x28" framed, $495

A Circulatory Slow-up drew us Face to Face

At 55 years of age now I'm advised, after a doctor's checkup, that I have high cholesterol and should follow the dietary guidelines that were supposed to be enclosed in an article sent along with the letter that came. I'm still waiting to receive that article since the sender forgot to include it. Conversation in the doctor's office and material on line say that a cholesterol score all by itself needs to be considered with other hereditary and lifestyle factors that together predict the likelihood of later-on heart trouble.

Where diet is concerned I relate to the idea of cheap junk food easily gotten from vending machines during the work-week. Fixing my diet to banish those snacks shouldn't be all that hard to do. My other risk factors beyond the dietary ones for heart attack are relatively low. A person with the means to stay home for days on end and put together delicious wholesome food high in vegetable bulk and low in the wicked fats, free of preservatives would be at a greater advantage. (Are there some eaters who will never rid themselves of cravings for favorite mass-manufactured snacks?) At any rate I'll be glad if ever that printed matter from the doctor's office gets here; I surely might learn something.

It seems likely to me that high cholesterol in my case (it's 240 so not extreme) is the result of age, heredity and having more than enough to eat out of what's promptly available and moderate in calories (I have always fought back against getting too fat.) Worsened circumstances would come from the loss of freedom to move, maintain muscle and reliably use the bulk that's my body and heritage. Hardship would follow, but not devastation, from no longer having a car to make my basic rounds, but I could, if survival required it, take up the ancestral way of life driven fully by calories and what muscle, joints and discipline are strong enough to accomplish. One goes along in the habits of life that promise predictability and security, but a lot of the time I think I'm watching and waiting for enforced forms of outer and inner change. Any of us does what we have to do and changes mainly when we're scared out of old habits. Nature around and within us threatens to rid us of corrosive but comfortable habits.

As the natural world changes through the pressures imposed by human usage, I watch from all my vantage points, including a trusted variety of printed news sources. Old scenes, lost and faded glories of nature help to remind me of what tomorrow would be without that color palette of seasonal wildflowers, that summery array of explosive rain clouds, those migratory species of warbler or breeding duck. Other people's descriptions of a rare sight--like the lynx that spurted across the Trans-Canada highway in front of my sister's car, eluding my niece's camera by running straight up a rock wall--give me hope of a world in which there will indefinitely be some of these creatures and a few appreciative souls to report on them. We can't indefinitely, willfully act on the world to assuage our limitless hungers without it reacting to stifle those hungers. What's coming is corrective, whatever it may do us out of.

October is coming soon with Octoberous looks that are familiar yet worth rediscovery. With the frosts of autumn this homeland will likely again see the young of big northern-nesting sparrows--the white-throated and white-crowned and the Harris' sparrows, scratching in old leaf carpets by our pathways-- and will hear the soft, solemn, drawn-out 'chee-ee-eep' that identifies them. Wild songbirds along American back-roads are to me as spellbinding as the English author J.A. Baker must have found the peregrine falcons in his book The Peregrine, Harper & Row Publishers, 1967. I lately read a gift copy from my Aunt Mary Jo, from cover to cover despite my unfamiliarity with the birds of Europe, where I have never gone. But the earth is in so many ways small; what's ever repeatedly traveled over the relatively short stretch of ocean between North America and western Europe has kindred on both shores.

Speaking of being fit to travel under power of heart and lungs, Mr. Baker some fifty years ago found himself so needing communion with the migratory falcons of the British Isles that he flung himself in search of them by bicycle along rural roads near the eastern coast. His book is almost entirely word-pictures of his region, its weather, tides and bird movement as seen by a person impelled by the same energies as falcons:
     "...Head to wind, like a compass needle cleaving to the north, he drifted, steadied, and hung still. His wings closed and curved back, then opened and reached forward, splaying out wide like an owl's. His tail tapered like a dart, then opened in a broad spreading fan.... When he banked in the sun, he flashed from blackness to fire and shone like white steel. Poised on two thousand feet of sunlit air, he commanded the birds of the valley, and none flew beneath him. He sank forward into the wind, and passed slowly down the sun. I had to let him go. When I looked back, through green and violet nebulae of whirling light, I could just see a tiny speck of dusk falling to earth from the sun, flashing and turning and falling through an immense silence that crashed open in a tumult of shrilling, wing-beating birds....

'At three o'clock I had a pricking sensation at the back of the neck that meant I was being looked at from behind. It is a feeling that must have been very intense to primitive man.... Two hundred yards away, the hawk was perched on the low horizontal branch of an oak.... For more than a minute we both stayed still, each puzzled and intrigued by the other, sharing the curious bond that comes with identity of position. When I moved towards him, he flew at once, going quickly down through the north orchard. He was hunting, and the hunter trusts no one."

The book ends with the author and a peregrine tensely at rest five yards from him: "I know he will not fly now. I climb over the wall and stand before him. And he sleeps."

Over a length of time the author had accustomed the wild peregrine to his slow approach and even his usefulness in scaring up small birds good for preying upon.

A comparably taut encounter--all about remembering the eternal in a moment--with one of our American heartland sparrows is exhibited here, hand-illustrated in watercolor and pencil, as inspired by autumn conditions in the arboretum of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The original 12 x9"  watercolor has now sold, but prints at 10 x 8" or smaller can be ordered. The title is "Startlement: Harris' Sparrow on an October Shore." 

www.epiphaniesafield.com 

...Till We Surge, then the Whole Earth Wither

In a world of two to three extra billion people will there be any more wild landscapes for retreating to or just burnt-off mountain ridges and barren desert? I've seen and heard the outlooks much rosier than my own, that rejoice in the ingenuity of ourselves building our way into a sense of security, stacking ourselves in high-rise condos, powering our structures entirely with wind and solar, fuel-cell and other renewable energies. I just saw a TV show about the triumphs of global high-speed travel and agriculture making humans the unparalleled masters of the earth, though significantly the narrative about the 21st century as it continues to develop bore a lot of ifs. Not addressed, as if it were completely off the topic, were these questions: Will there still be territory for any cougars, bears, wolves, apes, cheetahs, elk, etc.? What will be left of the diversity of wild birds? What will still live in oceans and freshwater, and will we have commandeered all earth-space for our housing and food-growing? Will there be manufactured soils? Also I never heard this question taken up: would very many people relish living in this fashion? Presumably the generations to come would grow up in expectation of little else.

Will there still be much individuality among the billions of people, or will conformity in terms of tastes and behavior become more prevalent along with the confinement, so that we're more like varicolored leaves grown on maybe five or six different kinds of familiar tree? Will there be memory of and yearning for an earlier era of open spaces--and people--that had distinct character? Will the next generations remember caribou in their legendary herds that migrated away from winters thick with ice?

There is that popular viewpoint that we will take charge of earth's environment in order to prosper as a mammal of ten and eleven billion in number, and the other, maybe-even-more articulated viewpoint that we'll crash like everything else that ever outgrew its habitat, because we'll use up too much of our resources and you can't make new resources out of nothing. The most interesting survey I've ever seen on the range of possibility with regard to basic materials for building cities is this essay 'Whatever Happened to the Good Old Days?', in one of the Forum Papers published by Negative Population Growth. Their site has other articles equally skeptical that our prospective limitless growth is viable with its requirement for infinite water and raw materials. The TV show the other night made it plain that we and our descendants will have to build a lot of new cities, to accommodate the new billions and the ones quite likely flushed out of major coastal cities of our time like New York, London and San Diego by rising seas. In step with population explosion is greenhouse warming, escalating those atmospheric forces that batter at the land, sea and polar ice caps.

The large and outspoken sector of society that says we and our descendants will have to adapt to the new blessings of science that installs us in dense vertical-living arrangements--mega-cities--forgets to consider the hordes of forgotten people who have nothing, in many cases, to call their own and live and die in slums. Many U.S. cities by now have them, the colonias or the homeless encampments, seen or not through the windows from freeways, boulevards and rail corridors. Too many documentaries about the brave high-tech future have written out not just our wild furry, feathery and scaled kin, as inferior and undeserving as anything not ourselves, but also the various kinds of wild people--slum dwellers, economically marginal heirs to rural holdings, tribal citizens and eccentrics like myself who delight in the balance of nature. We will have to adapt or die, we are told, and so we will. The mega-cities are here and will expand as much as they are able to do. As they run out of recoverable resources, their own inhabitants, resigned to their own degree of confinement and regulation, will face further dwindling choices. As money is implicit in the production of television, money plus a suave acceptance of increasing loss, insularity, and relentless infringement on the world outside the most prosperous urban society are on display and taken for granted. But considering the present and our entire past we are unlikely ever to found utopias, free of corrupt networks, rid of poverty and inequality. In fact the mega-cities are likely to exclude a growing variety of individuals.

If an old-timer from the twentieth century had to accept that her remaining lifespan was limited to enforced routines, as much of her own choosing as she could possibly hope, in one of those sprawling, towering cities against her will but through combined misfortunes, maybe she would take on, alone or with others, the importation of  little creatures and plantlets, shrubs and saplings from the countryside in order to enhance what it means to live in that city. Sometimes specialized life forms are able to adapt to narrow quarters. Or maybe, faced with the doom brought down on lives led in an open exchange of pollen, insects and pollinators under the wide sky--a sun so fierce through an atmosphere so superheated that it had grown deadly to anything not under a roof--she would turn inside out, through several artistic techniques inserting old panoramas that have lain like pages in her memory into the present day and mixing them up. Maybe she would go further and people them with her human dead, by this time an old lady herself. At worst she'd become one more who is sustained by nothing much more than her own delusions warped together out of what felt to her like the prime times of her life. Or the prime times in all life before her time. Haven't there always been freaks and romantics, young or ancient? Who and how will they be in the generations to come? Are they today, in part, the people who play doomsday video games, our cliffs and escarpments re-envisioned as their skyscrapers under siege?

A new friend's contributed reading, the Modern Library's 1933 edition of Great German Short Stories and Novels : an Anthology, edited by Bennett Cerf, reawakens my own German-American heritage, and introduces 'The Sorrows of Werther' by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to instill my recent days with literary romanticism. An excerpt is full of resonance on this theme, progressing to that of the blighted soul which seems so prophetic of the death of civilization through our combined forces of presumption, an attitude multiplied by a billions-strong humanity in a way that eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century writers like Goethe could hardly estimate:

     'Must it ever be thus,--that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The
     full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, overwhelming me with a
     torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable
     torment,--a demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in by-gone days I gazed from
     these rocks upon yonder mountains across the river, and upon the green, flowery valley before me,
     and saw all Nature budding and bursting around ; the hills clothed from foot to peak with tall, thick
     forest trees ; the valleys in all their varied windings, shaded with the loveliest woods ; and the soft
     river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the beautiful clouds which the soft evening
     breeze wafted across the sky,--when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of birds,
     and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams of the sun, whose setting 
     rays awoke the humming beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed 
     my attention to the ground, and there I observed the arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the 
     dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me,--all this displayed to me the 
     inner warmth which animates all nature, and filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself exalted 
     by this overflowing fullness to the perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of an infinite 
     universe became visible to my soul! Stupendous mountains encompassed me, abysses yawned at my
     feet, and cataracts fell headlong down before me ; impetuous rivers rolled through the plain, and 
     rocks and mountains resounded from afar. In the depths of the earth I saw innumerable powers in 
     motion, and multiplying to infinity ; whilst upon its surface, and beneath the heavens, there teemed 

     ten thousand varieties of living creatures. Everything around is alive with an infinite number of 
     forms; while mankind fly for security to their petty houses, from the shelter of which they rule in 
     their imaginations over the wide-extended universe. Poor fool! in whose petty estimation all things 

     are little...' 

We and our ancestors have taken for granted a sense of our own might, against a backdrop of nature's grandeur and even, in so many hearts, the Godhead, leading people of our time to the notion that we will only grow more able to orchestrate a world of our own selecting removed from what scares us in nature.

The romantic is the element in ourselves that adores our origins, whether in nature or in historic civilization, cherishes beauty and heroism, and tends to embrace the divine as inspiration for all these things. Well within this very tradition I remember a workplace conversation late in the 1980s when news sources on rarest occasions would allude to the threat of global warming, how my supervisor and I consoled ourselves with the thought that whatever happened due to climate catastrophe, wild nature would always be beautiful. Beauty is relative, just as it's true to the eye of the beholder, so that beauty is permissible even in the prospect of great decadent cities in the future as they sponge up all the water and elements they hunger and thirst for.

Not a day passes that I don't conceive of a hugely bloated humankind laying waste to all the wild on earth till that waste undercuts most of our lives and doings, leaving just a scrawny remnant of society or no one very much, compared to now, eking out their nourishment. I feel overwhelmingly grateful and solemn, if not quite sad, to live in the time when I live, and in this region of poor soils, swamps and long winter nights, fishable fish and a large vestige of the native plant community that has held sway here since there were people to document it. I go and find what living treasures stand before my eyes and make as much of them as I can in images of praise, with a full heart and electrified soul. Thanks be!

Indian Paintbrush - native U.S./Canadian wildflower on blank note card is listed here: 
       https://www.etsy.com/listing/242511136/indian-paintbrush-orange-wildflower-    on?ref=shop_home_active_3

Habenaria psycodes or Smaller Purple Fringed Orchid is here: 
https://www.etsy.com/listing/242519700/habenaria-or-rein-orchid-purple-fringed?ref=shop_home_active_1

The Eternal Forget-Me-Not

In these times of U.S. terrorism at home and abroad, of an estimated 60 million displaced people (per the United Nations) around the world, land and sea confrontations in regions that overlie mineral wealth and persistent speech denying that there is a climate crisis, I reflexively feel like earth's advocate more than that of any particular people. A week ago I stepped backward in time once again, on my own among family ghosts (not seen, though felt.) There still are on earth rocky, thin-soil places with dark nights and extremes of temperature where you can still lose yourself in the manner of a lone, last survivor, the experience facilitated by doing without a phone or other electronics. My sister and I are heirs to a piece of shoreline known most of all for cliffs, boulders and cold water. Any neighbor was at least a mile away while I was there estimating the scope of roof repairs, wandering among trees and rock outcrops, renewing familiarity with the nature all in all of June, and ultimately painting the flower called true forget-me-not, Myosotis scorpioides. The plant crowds the borders of our up-and-downhill road full of seeps and swarming puddles and mosquitoes. It fills the crown of the road with early summer blossoms the size of your smallest fingernail, most sky-blue, some white, with a yellow pore in the middle like an eye-hole.  My acquaintance with this region goes back to early childhood.

When we were growing up, the cars of family and friends came and went here, especially in August. For years our Daddy, our uncle and cousins sawed fallen trees for firewood with chain saws and hand saws; an engine would be squalling or puttering some time or other--alternately a saw or either household's gasoline-engine pump. Our pump filled two fifty-gallon tanks from the lake with water that for years was fit for washing and drinking, provided we treated a pitcherful with halazone tablets before we drank from it. Neither of us middle-aged sisters runs that equipment now; we don't want the bother of spark plugs, oil and gas, chokes, filters and small-engine repair because the mechanisms steal precious time from us and highlight our incompetence. We carry our water, and there is a whole variety of benefit for me to hand-saw and split firewood with the exact same saw, sledge hammer and wedges our dad used to ply before we had the chain saw, even down in Indiana in the 1960s.

Everything in the house or its distant, mouldering shed, and all the wavelets lapping or the surf, the Swainson's thrushes' song with the tonal quality of breath blown through the stem of an air mattress, the red-eyed vireo or the warblers in the tree crowns is a throwback to the 1960s and 70s for me. Now I feel I'm one of the last human beings left hearing it. The songbirds seem fewer in number than in those times, even if the same variety is still around. I don't crave civilization but how did I get to be this single person free to talk to myself, read fiction and essays, wild plant handbooks and the French-English dictionary? I have moved on to a lifestyle more than ever innate to me, leaving behind a man or two whose priorities will only ever differ from mine. Is this much independence really the choice of the many single women and men moving through, then beyond, their prime years? Often there would seem to be no choice, and an unmated state can become our destiny alongside many creatures larger and smaller than ourselves:

                                      The spoor of a moose


So often I find I'm living in the glow of memory as much as anything else, with family lingering in my heart, and wondering what's to come, and what course my inevitable dwindling process will take. But I have a youthful sort of zest yet, an oblivion to the sorrows of aging. The forget-me-nots were my best focus for new spring floral art, upon completing a root system for my illustrated miterwort, a less than common plant growing on the land of my neighbor Deb in Minnesota. The drawing of the miterwort, or bishop's cap, is bordered with sprigs of forget-me-not.

Every day I'm reminded that what doesn't want to be forgotten is not really lost, even as its form duly passes into memory--this is the nature of change. In spite of calamity and outrages that fill news pages, the greatest share of death or breakup in this world, wrenching though the experience was, even past the weeks when it was fresh, ends up taken as a parting of the ways based on foreseeable causes. One soothing realization for me has been that the sharpest grief need not be equated with depression, which I think grows out of aggravating circumstances such as anger at long-term fate. Grief as I have known it is a packet of feeling that can swell, not necessarily crippling but grabbing hold on the inside of a person, wringing the tear ducts in the next moment. It seasons the present with a powerful tang from the past.

                                                           The miterwort, Mitella diphylla

My forget-me-not is featured this way on the newest of my cards:

                                              See the 'Card Images' page at www.epiphaniesafield.com



The text on the back is: Forget me not, though I recreate myself. It took me a while to decide between that wording and ...though I regenerate myself .

Days, weeks, months and years after the loss of someone dear, any one of us may still be thinking of the departed: 'if you could only know what I'm up to/who I've become/what happened to me/her/him/them' ...in light of all the many things that may happen to re-shape each soul under consideration.

Why I Joined 5,000 Citizens, Marching for all we Hold Dearest and Most Hopefully

All too often, whether child or adult most everyone gains something by being thrown into a role that is barely suitable for who they are; it often devolves into a tale of misery, or at least tedium, lasting for a while. In the abstract, it's 'getting out of your comfort zone.' One of my oldest friends down in St. Paul signed me up for a chant leader, even though I had already said I would come to yesterday's Tar Sands Resistance March, since public events, especially ones this relevant to health and well-being here on earth, are best enjoyed when two together can double the pleasure. I came unpracticed, had never used a bull horn, and felt my level of resistance to the task of leading chants mounting since I at any age I've backed down from becoming anything like a cheerleader. Moreover, eighteen years ago a long, severe bronchitis seems to have thinned out what yelling voice I have, the same kind of thing having happened to my mom in midlife, causing a huskiness in her voice forever afterward. I'd argue that chant-leading is a job for someone intensely motivated by a crowd and once and for all endowed with vocal cords suited for an ancient forum.
     Demonstrating is a practiced skill like anything else, I see that now. I could, after all, hold and flip around the little scripts bearing the words of call-and-response while holding the speaker of the bull horn and pressing the button, even if I rebelled against using the exact script--let's have no vagueness or unintended meaning like 'Tar sands oil has got to go!'--because that could be read as 'tar sands oil has got to go down the pipelines to the refineries, it can't be avoided,' etc. I kept grousing to my companion that I can't do this, though I didn't like hearing much of that out of my own mouth--what else for heavens sake had I come to these long-familiar streets to do? Frustration gripped me down our course between police barricades with the sense that I was a terrible slacker, a charade or a dummy marcher with my silent megaphone. My companion, also given a bull horn, muttered his qualms about how un-vocal our whole block of marchers was coming across, though he had no inhibition about his own chanting that lacked all sense of tempo much less tonal clarity. To the entertainment and awe of others around us he evinced all possible raw youthfulness deliverable from a geezer (his own term as he approaches 64 years of age, his boyhood volume and zests intact) along with a dreamful imperative to witness the people united, never defeated. There were times I had to chime in with him only because I saw I could and should. When I did we became a pair with bull horns, other voices to the sides and rear joining ours.
     'LOVE WATER, NOT OIL! Love water, not oil!' the chanting proceeded till individually and together we chanters could feel the words going stale. Up the line would be strains of something else. 'LOVE BICYCLES!' he began chanting, and then the response 'not oil!' would come back in a murmur. 'Love bicycles!' I chanted along with him, then changed it: 'LOVE HYBRIDS!' which remained our chant alone, no sharers. I still took pride in my little old 2002 hybrid car, the vintage Prius as we'd sometimes called it; he and I had done maintenance on that car. Some of the much younger marchers around us seemed comforted by having a chant leader but wanted to do chants either known to them or of their own making. We listened to them and then, through our bull horns, amplified at least one of their chants, whether someone had conjured it on the spot or not; 'Hey! Obama! It's hot out here! Hey! Obama! You talked the talk, now walk the walk! No Keystone pipeline!'
     As I listened to our disharmony at the outset and strained against my own revulsion at our scriptedness, I thought: we need rehearsals and orchestration...this needs to be carried off by people who have a feel for performance, better organized so the effect is maximum and elegant for all to hear and see...  But this is for heavens' sake a people's march, I am missing the beat and everything. It's for anyone and right now. Anyone can do better than I'm doing including me.
     What if though, in a state like Minnesota, rich in big choirs thanks to the German-Scandinavian heritage which gives rise to such music, there were an endowment for a street procession, costumed and sung in harmonic parts, miked to ultimate glory, danced and be-sloganed with upheld signs and the most evocative of T-shirt art on the torsos of huge opera singers trained to the limberness of dancers as they capered to the capitol or city hall--in towns all over the state, into neighboring states and provinces? What if? This could be done; we don't lack for theatrical people and composers who could collaborate for the cause of a climate that keeps us as beautifully as ever...
     We were doing the best that we could, getting better as we went. Demonstrations are normally ad-libbed a lot, the training and preparation led by brave souls like Patti, whoever she was and wherever she had gone, and others of mixed generations, unflappable-seeming people with dedication worthy of as much reward, I felt, as a city engineer's. Demonstrating at its best is an attempt to shout (or sing) out a vision of something that will inevitably develop as it goes, according to the inspiration that hits the different personalities caught up in it.
     I inferred that demonstrations can become a habit, or avocation, in which a person's own style gains a value that should not be overlooked in the planning stages: don't let anyone else sign you up for a role best expressed through someone else's unique energy. Know what your own is and go in prepared. Somewhere--I remember where now--I had written myself a note for a sign I could draw up that reads from my own heart and soul--I just didn't prioritize it soon enough to get the durable materials and put them, two-sided, on a flat wooden stake so I could hold it up for everyone far and wide to see.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Then I could have marched, even carrying my own megaphone if I wanted to invest in one, and been

whoever it was most natural for me to become in a march. But there will be future marches. As more than one of the spokespeople on the state capitol steps yesterday said: we have a lot of work to do.

     The photo above was of a sign I spied at Lambert's Landing beside the Mississippi River, the gathering point for the march before it got moving, where we all felt about as disorganized and miscast as we were probably going to feel. I wished then that I'd had a sign like this lady's, since hers expressed the out-and-out danger facing us if we do not face down, undercut and replace or reorganize the corporate interests whose main interest appears to be doing whatever they deem most profitable, no matter what the most basic science shows will happen to our one and only planet and our offspring.

     It would be useless in a way, then or now, to add to the list of further threats that we can't escape as a result of our overpopulation: soil depletion, mineral depletion affecting all industry and urban expansion, water depletion, the increasing strife among the desperate. The idea that nothing grows without limit besides a cancer is too grim for politicians and business modelers to include in their public statements. We are each of us coming from where we're coming from. The focus of the day, of the decade and coming ones, is climate change.

     I took up global warming or climate change as a personal threat even at ten years of age or so, on first hearing of it on a TV program, probably a National Geographic special, somewhere at the beginning of the 1970s. Because I have always loved winter and chilly windblown landscapes where snows are abundant and welcome and so are all the wild animals, I was affronted even then that we all, collectively, could inflict fever on this earth, even leading to the death of all life from that fever. Now that I'm past fifty years of age and able to live year-round in what's left of the boreal region with its tamarack swamps, aurora borealis, long winter nights, porcupines, bear, moose and the apex predator the wolf, I'm doing as much art as I can dedicate to this realm,

Freshet from a Ghost-Marsh - original watercolor/mixed media painting about 18 x 32"

even though my watercolor/mixed media landscapes have been slow to sell. They are gloomy I suppose, to a lot of art buyers, barely if at all familiar and symbolic of the cold and unwelcome, the dank and the repressed. But for a lot of art pieces, the right buyer has to come along.
     The work above suggests the real landscape's dissolution by melt; an icy lakelet is offset by the river in the rapids of early ice-out, a flock of red-throated loons--which nest on Arctic shorelines--washing their way into the foreground. A sole wolf looks over his shoulder back beyond upheaved root systems, snags and stumps that characteristically trigger, in the imagination, the vision of a beast or carcass, or a defunct cannon or other manufactured throwaway. From the shoreline a waterlogged lean-to exposes its flooded-out interior with an old coat billowing forth on the rivulet that has blasted out two walls.
     This semi-forbidding community of plants and fish, birds and bugs all adapted to summers' long light and winters' long dark, undergirded by rock and habituated to watery seepage, is one of many kinds of places that will succumb, at least at the latitudes where we see it now, to a hotter climate worldwide. 

     Being out on that land normally quickens me, the way a weekend outing does when we feel its brevity before the long work week. What shy thing might I see through there that I've never seen before? But in my soul these familiar ragged horizons will live as long as I do, even if I'm denied a lifelong view of them. 

     This is not true for many of the native inhabitants, certainly not for the Ojibwe and the Hidatsa, within Minnesota and to the north and west into Alberta, or assorted people whose lives, as they say, are the land that would be crossed by and fouled by the inevitable leaks in multiple oil and gas pipelines. The First Nations' spoken language, their names when uttered, convey a kind of foreign lyricism to my Euro-American ears; their language sings a bit of other ages, a lost adaptiveness and intuition and built-in rhythms that took direction from earthly behaviors, those of animals and wind and water currents, that I know on my terms but probably not in that wholeness that unifies everything that ever mattered since creation.
     Somehow, in ways all put together, there will need to be ongoing resistance, changes in profit base, changes in the whole economy, our diets, our modes of transit--everything we do--if we are to keep the generations of humanity alive within the land that bore our ancestors. Yesterday was one of the rare few days when I and a lot of people of so many, many different origins who convened in St. Paul could feel a sense of collective will toward making the best of the coming crisis, whatever it will look like. If you enjoy lessons out of aboriginal legend, one I have been told of says if you see a hawk or an eagle it means you are on the right path. As everyone yesterday sat hearing the speakers on the capitol lawn, a red-tailed hawk dipped over us in spirals, then coasted away, and back. I then thought I saw it tuck itself into one of the slots on the far edge of the capitol dome, making do with the altered natural environment much like so many wild creatures in this new, Anthropocene era. All the creatures cope, sometimes in noticeable ways, much as we'll keep seeing it's time that we do.



   

All the Haunted, to the Farthest Edges of the Earth

It's coming to me lately that, just as older friends have said and just as written, it's probably enough to contact my dead kinfolk inside myself, where the dead live on, even if nothing happens to the person's departed soul except disintegration. It's enough, to think and say that the dead live on because, intact, the character of the departed person lingers in the memory of the fond survivor (me,) and acts upon the survivor by force of my innermost thought. What I see from my folding chair in a wooded swamp, of a would-be limitless profusion of tree-tips, clouds I first remember seeing, sunlit yellow, in the presence of my mom, is enough movement by way of my sight to animate what is left of her in me. Similarly, my sight of her hanging portrait done in pencil by an unknown friend in her community, and similarly anything I see, hear or consider that sparks my memory of her are all agents for her continuation past death. This adds up to the least deniable kind of experience, true as long as living memory retains the soul of someone who died.

The most defining traits of the dead person's character, whatever they were, could hardly help but shape that person's influence on us after death. The yearning fantasy that follows from this admission is: do those personality traits still cohere to act in one or another dimension, even right in our world which is, after all, a forest of membranes that may admit or obstruct an unknown variety of energies, whether packaged together in an incarnate soul or free-flowing. If personality, or emotion-driven force, operates in the world freed from persons who once were incarnate, charismatic agents, do components of those personalities still, with divine or evil intent, work within the living organisms today, traveling via the sensory rigging? I trust that in a widespread manner they do.

All the currents and cross-currents of sensory recognition, deliberate and subconscious action and all that goes on below our senses, vestigial or vanguard, adds up to a haunted world, or, moreover, a haunted universe. All who have ever exerted personal will in the world and their successors, all the intentions united or at cross purposes with each other, all the birth and dying across the fan of living species have a role in the formation of what clutters the earth. How the living and the once-living impact the whole universe is a matter, we all know, open for eternal speculation. In the wild, the tightly-interwoven forces of creation and destruction might be conceived of as parallels of good and evil in the realm of our own society where good and evil bring reward, enhancement, fertility, profusion or else downfall. Enough evil in the midst of our own affairs brings retribution and ultimately collapse of society. Plague, volcanic upheaval, flood, landslide, fire and typhoon or tornado are the parallels, results of imbalances, in nature. Where human evil, shaping up as excess, is imposed long enough on nature we can expect to see cataclysm, drawn out as likely as not through many human lifetimes.

If there are ghosts of our own dead undetectable for the most part to ourselves, it is easily conceived that they linger, through necessity or vast preference, outside the dimension of time and space that we the breathing occupy, any access back to our zone being freakish or exceptional. So our lives with regard to this post-experience are at best round after round of hopeful conjecture spun off of tidbits, clues from what we witness, read or hear of. If castles, old battlefields, farms, mansions, hotels and boarding houses, theaters and more of our own construction hold the ghosts of unfulfilled persons, so must forests and wetlands hold some of the same elements--even where no one is there to conceive a vision of them.

To my imagination some of our Minnesotan and Canadian peatlands, which proliferate in this large county, look haunted by what used to live there during eons of a more abundant and diverse wilderness. What I'm seeing may be the same aspect that persuaded not-so-long-ago First Nations people that the Windigo and other spirits of the dead, not necessarily human dead, prowled those dank places. These were cannibal and misleading presences. Tumbles of wrecked trees, victims of storm winds and shallow frosty soil, subside into fantastic formations. A traveler today, playfully looking out, occasionally longing for whoever and whatever she or he may never see again can hardly help ascribing them character. The imaginary transition happens easily as you drive along the county roads.

This mixed media painting, nearing completion as we lose the grey and taupe of the winter landscape, is a vision of the far north where trees hesitate to grow, though a few have made their stand only to topple in the winds of the Arctic Ocean, the Bering and Beaufort Seas and parallel waters a-brim with ice. Soils are shallow and root systems are as a consequence flat like the feet of geese, ducks and the featured red-throated loons being flushed down a spate that suggests rapid melt from unaccustomed balmy winds. A lone wolf, like a sole survivor, peers backward in a remembered direction. Root clusters and hulks of once-living trees wield clawed arms and horns and prongs full of either menace or makeshift opportunity. The title is Spookage - the Liquefying North. As much as it is about anything, the work is about the amassed influences of all who have gone before us, faces and forms that we fear and animation that we yearn to have again, plus the beckoning Beyond--which mortal life as we live it is a tangled process of reaching into.

Consolation in a View of Crumbled Left-overs

As it turns out both my parents have died in the month of March, one late in the month, one in its first few days, though nine years apart. In the wake of my mom's passing on March 3rd I find myself reaching out again, the way I used to do, to the unseen beyond what I can even imagine to ask: where is she? out there? anywhere? If someone we loved with an unsurpassed depth has died it feels at the very least like an anticlimax not to know what, even though the personality may disintegrate, the individual's escaped energy has drifted into--if it's in some degree intact. Are they somewhere else or are they a part of the whole nearby surroundings or, as some people believe, are they reduced down to an essence and recycled into someone newborn? But I find myself in no hurry to get caught up in disciplines, or organized religious teachings, in pursuit of what must be indeterminable till we die. Knowledge, if there really is any on this topic, is intermittently my hope, yet it might come at a crippling price.

Old folks in the chilly latitudes have been said to die, more than at any other time, in late winter, faced with mounting hardships of the kind that prevailed during the era of widespread fireplace heat. Now, just upon the spring solstice the whole time period we're in has the feel, not to mention the look, of an aftermath, golden snow-mashed stubble out this window blurring into abstraction, an essence of late winter's colors blending, not the way mixed paint blends into a drab splotch, but into something dark yet luminous, winking multi-hued, no tone quite lost, the very emblem of a gentle accommodation of all strangeness. This vision itself might be Ruth, my mom. She maybe turns a little to and fro, like something hanging, with glints of color as if she remembered through me, the rememberer. This might be how she'll linger in my memory for as long as I live.

So by now I am at home again in late March, the look of the land comparable with other Marches and Aprils in a soothing continuum that, in the case of so many energetic people, impels them beyond that static-seeming prospect in impatience and boredom. My mother was a continuum the way emotionally stable people are who have absorbed a lot of cultural history and acquaintance throughout a career followed by retirement. In her last weeks as I took care of her and enjoyed final conversations, I went out on the net or outdoors and brought out bits of what I found there to distract and intrigue her however it might be possible. Through the need of movement I walked many circuits via the sidewalks, once taking a neighboring state park's trails, near her building spying a flicker browsing on a staghorn sumac still crowned with berries. The flicker was a tie with the growing springtime in the Midwest and Canadian border region where I'd be returning when this momentous interlude had run its course. Several evenings, as I explored the allegorical imagery of Angels in America on paired DVDs, I absorbed the background for the scene in heaven, an imaginary place seeming to have nothing to do with my mom, peopled with souls that appeared to have lived nowhere near as long as she did. Heaven in the movie had stone ruins and the kind of hush that is common to high vaulted places including California redwood groves, cathedrals, museums or even halls of government. Heaven's people were faded, at complete ease and in no hurry wherever they walked. Children there were giggling. My mom by that point was outspokenly impatient to die.

The sun-soft and misty portrayal of heaven in the movie followed me like a comfort down to New York City where I drove a load of inherited furnishings for Lea, my daughter, and back westward through Pennsylvania and the Lower Midwest and up the varying roads northward. The ruins in the artwork below, inspired by the movie, tell of places both missed and yet to be seen, since I've never been to Europe or to the pueblos or historic Spanish missions of America. Stone ruins affirm that not everything we've either alone or jointly effected in this world goes away but stays for ages, upholding the grace a few people envisioned for it in the physical designing, that is itself a part of our heritage. Cracks, broken edges and tumbling chunks bear evidence of our limits as the world goes on, incorporating all that we were and left of our handiwork. These ruins that I drew and painted were part of what I showed my mother in her last few days, and are everyone's history; the sumac is a tree of troubled, reworked soil and the flicker signifies ever-returning opportunity.

Flicker in a Crumbling Gateway

Heart Surgery, However it Happens

Since I've been sitting in my mom's terrace-level apartment for longer than two weeks now while she starves her sturdy old body of food and most fluids I figure I should, after all, be unsurprised at how long it takes for her process to run its course. Many, many people by my age have undertaken one or more death-watch, but this is my first.

It is at a few moments horrible; as often as not it's mundane, in the sense that we're all so equally mortal, on a par with rotting tree trunks. Even the beloved. But it's been gratifying, giving me days and days of opportunity interwoven with a long, dwindling goodbye.

We were a small family headed by mature parents, my sister and I their only two children despite their previous marriages and upheavals and re-beginnings. We thrived on our folks' loving gratitude for one another set against their memories of much less harmonious households. From my mom I feel I've received a lifetime of intentional and inadvertent gifts made most valuable by the remarks and adventures that came with and followed from them. Early in our lives we girls in our sheltered, gently disciplined, freedom-filled years must have sensed that we had a degree of family contentment, along with the trips and holidays we could always anticipate, that most of the kids we met through school were all in all lacking. We certainly had affectionate parents, especially our mom, who grew up missing affection from her mom, and so my mother's unique sweetness to this day pervades the mood of this apartment half-buried in Boston-area snow, like a burrow I have largely disappeared into. Today, again, I felt myself stepping out in the sun.

The harshest parts of this age-appropriate dying that I witness in its progress have been the dunks into bereavement coming after little respites ever since before mid-February when I arrived from Minnesota. It's up till now been as if she keeps dying only to reawaken when I come to greet her in the next hour at her bedside. My mom chose this destiny months, or even years, before turning 90 because the recommended surgical reconstruction of her heart's main valve would have meant an uncertain recovery, possible death in the operating or recovery room, long and likely incomplete rehabilitation with a short future of narrowed scope afterward not to mention major expense to the family. There was too much risk for too little reward. When she told me her decision in the beginning of winter she said, "I've done everything I want to do." She denied that she had been depressed, instead summing up her recent years and months as a period of contentment. Somewhere in the late fall of last year she wrote the following to share with her community of well-educated retirees many of whom continue to enjoy lives of privilege:

DECISIONS!  DECISIONS!

Have you ever noticed how often your days are governed by your  decisions?  Simple choices, such as when you will get up to start the day, activities in which you will participate, or whom you will join for evening dinner?  Gone are the days when we were governed by job or family obligations!  Now we organize our time by which day of the week it is, what times we are due for appointments, for participation in club activities to which we are committed, or for time alone to watch favorite television programs or read interesting books.  Or, if we don’t want to do anything at all, just sit and ruminate, we can do that, too.  We are free agents.

We do, however, have one more obligation, should we decide to accept it.  We need to decide how we want to end our days -- a gloomy subject to contemplate, perhaps, but that’s where we are in life.  We’ve fulfilled our family obligations (or not, depending on the circumstances); we’ve made our financial decisions; now we look to an abbreviated future.  And this is when one item rears its insistent head:  how willing are we to die?  Call it what you will -- meeting your end; going the way of all flesh; passing away -- the fact remains that sooner or later all life ends.  Energy flags.  When a life begins, it will one day end.

So, the question remains:  How willing are we for our lives to end?  If the idea is abhorrent, then we will go to all available means to prevent or extend our lives.  No medical treatment is too extreme; no daily routine too fatiguing; no diet too restrictive.  If, however,  whatever is is, then we become more philosophical. We accept our diminished energy; we perform as best we can the duties and/or activities to which we are committed; and we carry on.  No hard feelings; no extreme life-prolonging measures.  Just acceptance.  So be it. 
                      
by Ruth Katherine Beyer

By now she's lingered in her bed several intervals beyond what everyone expected. As I seize my daily chances to hustle outside for an hour or two I rehearse, again, dwelling in the knowledge that my mom is history, only a living presence I carry inside me, not a live person any more whom I can talk to. Unlike many survivors I've been given a chance to rehearse, since the likelihood has till now remained that I would go back into her apartment to share yet another conversation, if brief and repetitive. I walk in a madcap swinging manner in lug sole boots between the walls of snow and remember the character Prior Walter in the epic movie Angels in America which I was last week watching piecemeal each evening to my mom's amusement (she was no longer able to fix her attention on a movie whether she lay in bed or sat up to see the monitor.) Prior had climbed the flaming ladder to a godless heaven in order to confront death and plead for more life even in the face of all the suffering known in the 20th century and during the AIDS epidemic, to which he had fallen victim. He says of life that for him it's never enough; he can only, despite everything, want more of it. So, looking on the death that's most painful of any yet for me to behold, and most ever feared, do I.

This particular day I am watching her leave our realm of awareness; the nurse said the inevitable transition was coming soon.

To switch to another dramatic comparison, she reminds me of Sayward Luckett, the pioneer matriarch in Conrad Richter's novel The Town, unable to die yet even though she is days beyond being able to see or speak or gesture. She is a huge leftover tree from a virgin forest in territory that's been in her lifetime mapped and named Ohio, but is lying down, breathing, taking no sustenance. Her story was set before the American Civil War. My mom's is now, with upset of our climate set in motion. Live roots of her are tugging and snapping loose in my heart, and that's the heart-ache that's set me wandering between doorways inside her apartment as my sister and I keep the vigil with our mom's prescribed morphine and Ativan. Where a root pops free of my own live nerve endings, I console myself--having prayed as I'm skeptically not given to doing--a replacement petrified root will fill the empty socket, because there's no way so long as I live but that she will linger in her own established place in my heart. Devout people are correct: praying softens grief. Something nebulous comes to fill a void and then we merge into hugeness, where we find ourselves adrift but easier in ourselves.

The gifts borne to me via the energy currents of my mom have kept coming through life and through the approach of death. Conrad Richter's trilogy in paperback, The Trees, The Fields, The Town itself was a physical gift that lives on a shelf in Minnesota--I don't recall the year she gave it to me. Since I've come to Massachusetts to see her along I've reveled in the gift of time, to expand a website and set up a marketing newsletter in email, to learn to use this Apple computer for my various purposes that are beyond the uses she had for it. I've sat here by the big window that by comic accident lost its curtain rod and drapes, exposing sky and treetops and neighboring rooftops to my mom's wandering eyes in a way that was quickly a blessing for her, and begun on my third miniature watercolor in just two weeks.

Sometimes now I am for a few seconds afraid that I'll never get over this sorrow, it's so deep and chaptered back into childhood, but after all I'm still sitting here with Ruth, my mother, who hasn't died yet. She has that matriarchal body, with a hardihood that I'm sure she's passed to me. Out these walls I know of infinite unfolding stories that would shrink our particulars all to drops of water. This newest miniature watercolor she saw and enjoyed in its early development: it was due and proper to work on, given what the wide window shows of Massachusetts snowpack and what the bed shows of a woman's body shrinking ever deeper into slumber. The birds are a reminder of what has kept making people want to come back.

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