When you are outside enough, you will bring pieces of nature into your home. A leaf on a shelf, dried in autumn fragility. Five or five thousand redwood fronds in corners or stuck to a canine paw or ear like jewelry. Beach sand in bed linen.
Several months ago when playing piano, I became diaphoretic, nauseous, had palpitations and my face started tingling on one side. Certain it was not some transcendental reaction to my unpolished Bach, I was equally certain I was having a stroke. I laid down on the couch and touched my cheek, brushing away the craziest, neon yellow, black-spiky caterpillar. It had left a rash where it tread upon my face. I took it outside and wondered what it all means anyway.
When you enter the home or life of a sick, vulnerable human being, you will bring pieces of that vulnerability into your heart. Methamphetamines sit on a a counter near a plate of cookies. The cat crawls in through an open window. Someone cannot breath. Something is infected. However the epigenetic fallout of systematic racism makes the idea of going to the ER or hospital more terrifying than death.
You chart the winding paths of attempted healing. You know the right answer to every test question but they never taught you about slumlords or the pushers that deliver drugs to the hands of elders. Penicillin is magnificent. Unless the disease is grinding poverty, abysmal despair, multi-drug-resistant hopelessness. The tobacco is so thick that the carpet blows smoke rings with each step you take. You will have to change your clothes later.
You run so many miles on trails 6, 8, 13.5, thick with mud from the rain, the rain. Quick steps grip the curves made by mountain bikers, like the periphery of the Indy 500 track. Dancing, one foot on each rim, over that root, skipping that stone. Passing families with tired or curious children, and passing unwashed homeless men out on their various walks.
High tide pushes you away from the shore to the hilly dunes. Saw grass slices your ankles and calves. Your son cried about this once and you gave him a hard time about it and maybe that's why he is in prison. That thought like the sand collecting in your shoes and the ticks hitching a ride on the dog sticks to you and follows you into the next morning when you lay in the still dark, separating from sleep. In those dunes a burrowing owl runs by and you carry that with you too. It brings back your first date with your beloved, a long walk by a bay punctuated by little man-owls puffing their chests out, running you out of their neighborhood because you do not belong.
Cars crash, helicopters fall out of the sky, hearts break, people make it or they do not. You smell the destruction of Eucalyptus trees driving down the highway to work and wish it was scented this way always.
You sweep your floor today
Redwood needles wait at the door
To replace their binned brothers tomorrow.
All this falling apart, this disintegration of order, of what we need it to be, is not like JS Bach.
Bach JS like not is, be to it need we what of, order of disintegration this, apart falling this All.
My parents had a coffee mug that said "May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead." Even at age 6 I thought that was one fucked up Irish blessing.
Being part Irish myself, I propose this:
For those in pain, may you feel loved.
May our homes be open to the dubious gifts of nature.
May our hearts hold space for kindness in this mean and meaningful world.
And may the disorder turn upside down and all around like the most clever Bach fugue of all.
