Going Deeper

The earth seems to be giving up its secrets. It has been a week of uncovering. In northeastern China, scientists have been looking more closely at a skull unearthed in 1933 that is now believed to represent a human group that lived in East Asia at least 146,000 years ago. It is apparently part of a long-separate lineage which evolved in the region for several hundred thousand years and eventually went extinct. More recent, heartbreaking, and horrifying, 751 unmarked graves of indigenous people, mostly children, have been found at what was once a residential school in Saskatchewan, Canada. Meanwhile, in Florida, rescue workers are still digging for victims beneath the rubble of a crumbled building whose sudden collapse may itself be indicative of rising water tables wrought by climate change, warnings ignored, and wisdom disregarded. Will we finally heed the exhortations of the past? Can tragedy somehow lead, in its meandering way, to learning? Can learning lead to betterment?

Here in Gaviota land, the earth is dry, and the green grass of spring has given way to brittle stalks, the color of straw. I press my finger deep into the soil of the toyon seedlings we are tending in pots, and I know it is time to soak their thirsty roots again. The beach, its sand at one point scoured away by pounding waves, yielded a strand of fossilized whale vertebrae embedded for millennia in rock. On a different beach walk, we came upon a large chunk of coal, most certainly from the cargo of a four-masted ship called The Gosford that was on its way to San Francisco from Liverpool in November of 1893 when it caught fire; it attempted to anchor at Cojo, and the coal that tumbled into the sea still turns up on the beaches to this day. In yet another example of story remnants materializing, my neighbors discovered an old copper penny wedged tightly and deliberately into a crack in a backcountry boulder. And while carrying buckets of water to the oak saplings, I looked down and beheld the newly shed skin of a rattlesnake on the trail, silvery and translucent, just beyond my step, and I realized suddenly that even surfaces are speaking. The casting away of that which is no longer useful implies renewal, but we must be willing to understand.

We look and look again, more deeply. As Kunitz’s nimbus-clouded voice directed, we must live in the layers, not on the litter, writing our book of transformations. It’s a multi-mantled world, and we have seldom glimpsed the bedrock, but we teeter at the top, plodding along plane to plane, deficient in dimensions, short on imagination, insufficiently schooled.

Even on a personal level, some archeological digging has occurred this week. I found three letters, two by my father, written nearly a century ago, when he was a young boy. He was writing to his own father, who was on the road, retrieving mail at some general delivery address in Kansas City, of all places. “Dearest Father,” he began. “Did you forget your son all of a sudden?” Another letter, by my mother to my father in 1946, in her very best penmanship, from a home for unwed mothers: “Believe me, my darling, I can’t wait to see you again.” I felt the heat of the yearning in these letters, the heartache of what was unspoken, the weight of things I knew were yet to come. Too many tears in this deepness.

One of my favorite quotes is by the poet Richard Blanco: “Every story begins inside a story that’s already begun by others. Long before we take our first breath, there’s a plot underway, with characters and a setting we did not choose, but which were chosen for us.” To the extent possible, I like knowing some of the tangibles of these stories we are born into. That’s part of living in the layers. But I also believe it is our duty then to try to write with love and decency what follows. I don’t want all the struggles to have been in vain. I’m not sure how to proceed with this grandiose aspiration, but it’s stitched into my being. I could not otherwise survive.

And now we begin to emerge–tentatively, and at the risk of backsliding–from a global pandemic, and oh, what truths have been unearthed! In our standing still, we were forced to go deeper, to see what has been happening all along. It wasn’t even secret, but circumstances have illuminated and exacerbated and drawn lines that cannot be ignored. The questions emerge again: Will we finally heed the exhortations of the past? Can tragedy somehow lead, in its meandering way, to learning? Will learning lead to betterment?

The earth is speaking, the truths are uncovered, but I am hopeful and resolved. I don’t know any other way to be.