I Am Not Equal To My Longing

Everything everywhere is only dead if you don't have faith in time

The other day, walking in the park, my dog discovered one of the squirrels she’d been chasing for weeks dead at the base of a honey locust tree. I was hesitant to let her approach at first, but she made no attempt to bite or shake or eat or destroy it the way she had done when it was alive. She sniffed around its plump body nestled among the fallen leaves and nosed it gently, curiously. It struck me as tender, like a last gesture of respect between an old warrior and a worthy, fallen foe. We took our time before moving on.

I have been alive long enough to know that it’s risky business to ascribe human motivations to other living things. But I’ve also been alive long enough to know how foolish it is to pretend that other living things exist only by instinct, by base functions of survival.

Whatever the perceptions of the animal intelligences within it, the world continues its labors. With each passing day the edges of what was once that squirrel blur, and the line between its body and the earth becomes harder to see. The furry shell that once housed a curious and frightful mind molders on a bed of moldering leaves and the patient fungi go silently about the work of returning it to its component parts, so that it might become squirrel or acorn again someday.

Death is everywhere I walk. The autumn leaves have been stripped from the trees by the November wind and the branches reach upward, bare, while their gold treasures cover the ground. There is a bite to the air that was absent a few short weeks ago and the turning of the clocks has lent a new hour of darkness to the afternoons.

It takes an effort to remind myself that this turn is a necessary, temporary one. Life is still contained within those bare and ominous branches, silently and secretly persevering, waiting for the signal that only it knows in the deepest corners of its being. Time passes, and this is the curse and the blessing of places that experience the seasons in full force: the cruel austerity of winter must always come, but so must the promise of spring.

Last week I was in southern California, officiating a wedding near Palm Springs. At this late time of year it was still in the seventies, sunny and cloudless, every day. In the exposed rocks and slot canyons of the Mecca Hills Wilderness where we walked it was even hotter and drier. The groom, my friend D, asked: “How crazy is it that people decided to make a go of living here?” A place that jealously hides its few living treasures. A place where the seasons hardly change at all.

It makes me love people, in all their beauty and their folly, even as I lament the waste and catastrophe the choice to bring the western world here has caused. There have been green lawns here for two-thirds of a century and another two-thirds from now that will either be a memory or a joke, or both.

Because the things that thrive naturally in that place hardly seem of this Earth. The alien fingers of the ocotillo beckon above the cracked and empty wash of an ancient river. The splintered matrix of the smoketree a wisp of pale green above the land’s scorching vents. The spines of cacti impaling the dessicated seed pods of the palo verde as the dry wind carries them past. Nothing is tamed and everything is used. Perhaps even trying to experience a place like that in daytime is itself folly, as though it belonged to our human schedule. The desert is crepuscular and it is perhaps in those waxing and waning hours that it wears its truest face, like how cave paintings move the way they’re meant to when viewed by flame instead of flashlight.

Since I came across it in another newsletter a few weeks ago, Devin Kelly’s excellent Ordinary Plots, this section of Jane Mead’s poem “Concerning That Prayer I Cannot Make” has been stuck in my head:

Somewhere there should be a place the exact shape of my emptiness. Perhaps that place is the winding and windswept striation of the desert slot canyons that make me feel so quiet and holy. Perhaps it’s the furrows of earth and the drifting blanket of leaves beneath which the mushrooms do their work, which is also quiet, also holy. Perhaps it’s somewhere else, depending on how expansive I allow my soul to be in a given hour or day: the top of a snowcapped mountain with all the earth spread before me. The cathedral of a redwood forest. The ring of chairs around a fire, full of my friends, encircled as though forming a magic charm against the darkness. Of course, of course.

I will wait for spring again and in the meantime I’ll keep looking for that place.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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