I had no idea I’d been bitten by a tick because the bite was in the middle of my back, just at the level of my heart where I could neither reach nor see it. Priscilla’s massage found it.
Ticks are clever that way; they somehow know the physiognomy of their hosts and stay out of reach and sight to do their feeding in the dark, like vampires. Wily little devils! My own tick is currently in a lab being tested for the Lyme’s bacterium and I ought to have results in a few days.
It’s been one thing after another since Herb’s death almost three years ago, as if some malevolent trickster wants to keep me in pain to prevent me from writing about the bigger-picture positives in a time of so many negatives. Do I believe in actual malevolent tricksters? I don’t really know – but there you are.
I’m scared, but I’d say all of us are scared, especially as the screws tighten, our President gets ever more dangerous and the heavens move inexorably towards a Solar Eclipse. The dark will cover the light for awhile then, mostly in our own country.
It feels as if I’ve been preparing for this time in the world since I was young, sensing I would one day have to take on the spectre of fear itself and trace it to its source. For years I was scared of my own shadow, hiding deep inside myself from everyone and everything, shrinking against the walls, even in my own house. Only my little dog Dukie felt safe.
At nineteen I decided it was time to try to understand my own fears, so I took off for France to study the Hell Scenes in Medieval Art, hitchhiking to every 12th Century church I could find that had sculptures and frescoes of the Last Judgment, with their images of the ‘Good’ going to Heaven and the ‘Sinners’ going to Hell. I wanted to understand what part fear played in the psychology of religion.
Believe me, you didn’t want to be one of those sinners being pinched and prodded and tossed upside down into boiling oil!
Very scary stuff!
My conclusions were that it was a deliberate way of controlling believers into submission. ‘Do it our way or your soul is condemned to the Eternal Fires of Hell. The guys in robes call the shots, and you’d better behave!’ I had to be careful because I was the only American Jew at a school in a Catholic country and my ideas were, well, heretical. What became clear to me, though, was that people have been manipulated for thousands of years to be scared out of their wits because if we are kept frightened, we are controllable.
And we still are.
Right this moment, days before the Solar Eclipse, the Moon is spiraling its way towards the Sun before they coincide directly across the great expanses of Space, blocking the light to the Earth for a brief moment in Time. In the darkening time the animals will prepare for night: the birds go quiet, horses and sheep sigh in their sleep and nocturnal feeders come out to hunt.
In fact it was the animals that reassured me, as a child, that the whole world wasn’t crazy. I read and re-read books about dogs – Albert Payson Terhune’s stories about Lad were my favorites – and then there was my own precious poochie, Duke. It was through dogs that I learned about the love that passes all understanding, even when I was terrified.
“Perfect love casteth out all fear,” Terhune writes when Lad rushes into a burning house to save his ‘people’ and succeeds in getting them out of the flames in time. Brave Lad, who rescued all the people he loved, also rescued my own childhood.
Love casting out fear – that’s the trick.
Have I ever loved anyone enough to plunge into fire for them? Fortunately, I’ve never had to, but I did go through the fires of birthing my beloved three children. Has anyone loved me enough to brave hellish fires for me?
Well, I have one possible story, although it was a voice rather than a live person, an insistent voice that kept me alive when I would have died.
It happened in the Galapagos Islands, where I was accompanying a geological expedition in order to write a book about it. The Director of the Darwin Research Station, who had become a good friend, reluctantly gave me permission to camp alone for a week on the shore of an uninhabited island, with the stipulations that I was never to go inland, I had to stay well away from the flightless-cormorant nests and would I do the Research Station a favor by counting pairs of breeding penguins on that stretch of the coast?
I agreed, of course, but after a few days under the equatorial sun and the incessant barking of the sea lions on the beach, my curiosity got the better of me and I disobeyed.
I figured I was too smart to get into trouble, so I clambered over a spatter cone behind the cove and onto a smooth section of ropey lava, and stupidly strode out towards the volcano. Actually, for about a half mile I kept up a good pace and who knows how much farther I’d have gone if I hadn’t been stopped short by the remains of a rusted bomb lying fins up on the lava!
That’s when I crumpled, all the air knocked out of me and I lay there dehydrated and exhausted. The sun beat down and I all but passed out there alongside the bomb, but a voice not my own shouted in my head, “Get up!” I only barely heard it and again came the voice, louder, “Get up! Get back to the coast!”
I don’t know how long I lay there before my body obeyed the summons. Finally, I dragged myself up onto shaky legs and stumbled back towards the distant blue line of the sea. Each time I fell and gave up, the voice pounded more insistently in my head, prodding me onto my feet again; when I sank back into sleep, it kicked me awake again.
“Get up! Get up!”
It was merciless. But it eventually got me back to the coast, across the spatter cone and onto my camp at the cove and the sea-lion colony nearby. The huffing sea lions barely bothered to notice the other lurching creature who tumbled in amongst them, drinking her water bottles dry.
What remains most clearly in my memory, though, is the humble gratitude I have felt ever since towards the loving care of whoever or whatever saved my life. My heart took in its love for me, letting me know I was worth saving even though I’d acted with arrogance and stupidity; that my life mattered, even though I’d blindly almost done myself in.
That’s how I know I am not alone and that I am loved enough to be protected even when I don’t have the sense to protect myself. Even when I’m judgmental, even when I’m a pain in the ass and think I’m better than anyone else.
It was love that saved my life that day out on the lava. I can never forget that nor that it is my call in this life to pay the love forward to whoever happens to be hurting, whether I agree with their politics or not, even when they repulse me or I cannot bear what they stand for.
If I am worth loving, at my worst, then so is everyone else.
I am often surprised, in fact, that I learn something from such people that I have not expected to learn, especially when their outrageousness has the effect of pushing the rest of us into action despite ourselves – as the President is doing right now; as the alt-right is doing; as the neo-fascists are doing.
We’re moving and doing our part, yes we are! They, also, are doing theirs.
Whether they mean to, or not.
