N.B., I wrote this while still living on the West Coast, on Wild and Radish Farm, before I moved to Vermont.
Last night I awoke from a nightmare in which I was nowhere and knew nobody…there was a sad and frightened man I brought to the ocean; a moaning girl in a dilapidated house up many stairs. Strangers from another world. I awoke with a pounding heart, and knew I’d have to face my own ancient sorrows sooner rather than later.
It seems that we each have to confront our deepest fears before we die; the ones long buried but still festering out of sight as we age. Mine still haunt me and I hope I have the courage to bring them up from deep down, know them as my own and perhaps even be grateful for their lessons before I can release them.
The task seems huge to me now—the ocean in full spate, the sorrows of a lonely girl crying in her bedroom—but if not now, then when?
An early memory: I am probably about four, awakened at night by loud knocking on our door and a gruff voice ordering us to get out. My father scoops me up and we are prodded down into the street with the rest of our neighbors as masked men search our apartments with flashlights. We huddle outside in the dark, too terrified to speak. When the lights and the men leave, we still know nothing, but here and there I hear people whisper the word “Germans”…We were at war, I knew that. We were Jews I knew that, in New York, I knew that. We at last creep back inside and my parents put me back into bed pretending it was nothing. “Go to sleep,” they say in fake voices, telling me not to cry.
Apparently it was the local Bund—German-Americans in league with the Nazis in our part of New York during World War II—although it was not until I grew up that I learned about the horrors of that war I was born into.
Today, I walk the trail by the San Pablo Reservoir, our neighborhood’s fake “lake” that reminds me of the true mountain lakes I loved so much on the other side of the country with vistas to the Adirondack range; morning mist upon still waters, the mournful cry of loons.
But the reservoir here is already starting to shrink in our drought, with lengths of dry beach already lining the shore. As the dry season continues, our ‘lake’ will become a muddy puddle in the middle of the valley and my deep fears of drought and fire will rise right into my throat while I long for summer rains like in the Adirondacks!
Drought and fire in California terrifies me and my whole being aches for mud puddles to splash in and streams bubbling over boulders into waterfalls that roar and foam.
Growing up in wartime with frightened parents, I dreamed of fragrant woods, mulchy and green, far away from my street in Brooklyn. In my house, it was dangerous to cry, I suspect because it made the grown-ups cry too. I learned early to swallow sadness down and hold it there hard, deep in my belly until I couldn’t feel it any more—couldn’t feel anything except a nauseating ache that I kept secret even from myself. But now, in my elderhood, the sadness is still there, congealed and rancid. Before I die I’d like to bring it back up, this despair of the child I was, and release it finally so I can remember what I felt then and know what eventually formed who I became. I have heard that, before the end of our lives we need to retrieve our souls from where they once got buried and own them as part of ourselves, grateful that at the time we were saved from taking on more pain than our young selves could handle.
I think I am ready now. I hope so.
I am told this process is called ‘tunneling.’ You let your memories come up and wander, feeling old feelings and recalling old stories, remembering people you’ve not thought of in years. I’ve been doing that during the lockdown, which has offered the time and space to wander deep, remembering the humiliated girl who wanted to dance but stumbled clumsily because she was so lost in her thoughts; the child who was terrified of the people she belonged to; the big sister who was punished for adoring her baby sister; the girl who was not allowed to cry out loud—or got taken to the doctor! Literally.
I cry for her now.
I remember my boy cousins, three rough and tumble loudmouths—all gone now—and the house in Brooklyn we all packed into with our crazy Russian matriarch who yelled and smoked and made chopped liver with a vengeance. But rarely smiled.
I remember, after the war, the blood behind my mother’s eyes still grieving for her brother, and my father’s pretenses at control; my grandfather crying by the radio even when we knew his son would not come home from the War, and my grandmother helpless in her wooden wheelchair in the Bronx, knowing her son was dead. I remember my own shame that they were my family. “Off the boat,” as my mother contemptuously put it.
Today, all these years later, I am the only one left of those people.
Now, they are mine to hide or mine to own and as I reach back and remember, I own them and even long for them. Like it or not, they are mine—the soil I grew in and the species I belong to, a limb from their tree that made it across a huge ocean twice, put down roots, grabbed hold and survived.
It is early morning here now at the farm, and I look out at a tall redwood tree, its branches tossing gently in the pre-dawn breeze. It is the first thing I open my eyes to each day and the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night. Last night the curved, bright sliver of the waxing moon lit up its crown, like the star attached to the top a Christmas tree, and I took it as a sign that the tree would survive this drought as it has had to do before—perhaps more than once.
I pray so, even though it is not doing too well right now, its branches thinning out and the duff beneath it dry as a bone. But in the ground its roots still spread out seeking moisture, branching invisibly into an unbroken network of fungi that is connected to underground root systems reaching out from every living tree on the planet, from root hairs to fungi to cellular structure… an underground mycelial network, without which plant life would not exist. Invisible, it has secretly always been there supporting an intelligent and complex network of living cells that inform every growing tree and plant on our Earth.
And ourselves, of course, because we and all creatures breathe the oxygen the plants give off, and eat their leaves and seeds and roots, which is how we stay alive.
This redwood tree—not to mention the thistle plant by its base and the shiny green poison oak thriving around it—fit together with us in the mix, all miracles of life and information in the incredible scheme of reciprocal life in this world. Like us, everything cycles through space and time and beyond, emerging and dissolving into the dimensions of our world through lifetimes and deathtimes, always connected to the ultimate Source, which is Consciousness itself. Or God, as some call it.
It is Love itself, everywhere, because love is the glue that connects it all, and there is nowhere else to go but Here.
So, for me, death is nothing to fear, really, because like every living thing in Creation we live and die under the sun and moon of our planet, coming into Being at birth and cycling out again at what we call death, always informed by the Whole Gorgeous Pattern that holds our souls intact through permutation after permutation of Being. There is nothing new under the sun, as they say, every bit of it a miracle following the same cyclic pattern of emergence and living and dissolution, the essence always there at every stage of Being.
Like flowers we push through the soil of the world, putting out leaves to photosynthsize the sun, getting watered by rain until we flower, adding our color and beauty to the world for our season on earth and then we slowly age, fading gradually after we have reproduced our kind. Our seeds lodge in soil and our essence remembers where it came from, resting awhile as we add our substance to the elements for our next incarnation, whenever that will be.
Again. And again…
I will. You will.
We will always be “alive” in one form or another, swirling into form and then out of form, again and again, informed by the Whole magnificent pattern of which we are a part.
It is by that certainty I know there is nothing to fear.
Woody Allen once wisecracked that for Americans, death was considered an option. That made me laugh out loud—but I suspect he was scared to think he would really disappear from all consideration once he was gone. Frankly, I doubt it.
And, for the record, this morning we awoke to rain! Real rain…windshield wipers rain! I tossed on clothes and took off for the reservoir, where I’m happy to report that I got soaked to the skin!
Yayy!
