Bewildered

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings. (Wendell Berry)

I am bewildered.

Last night I walked with my grandson and his father to an athletic complex for Felix’s swimming lesson. More accurately, I followed as he ran down every street, thankfully well trained to stop and wait at corners. The street lamps cast halos of misty light, an illuminated playing field was iridescent green and bordered by blue, and we heard the whack and click of hockey sticks, the murmurs and the shouts, as we walked by. When we approached the building, Felix instructed me to remove my shoes and socks and wait at an appointed bench. I sat there and watched him in the pool, where he suddenly seemed small and tentative, but I think he did his best. Later in the evening, we drew pictures with his new marker pens of beaches and palm trees, a red hammock, children digging in the sand, and a blue-green ocean filled with fish, while Monte bottle-fed Alice. “I like this baby,” Monte says. “She makes sense to me.”

I love the things that still make sense. I keep on checking news and updates from my homeland, despite the anger, sadness, and helplessness this prompts, and I tell myself that the same old truths are true, and I try to de-fog the lens of sense and proceed accordingly. People not far removed from me have lost their homes, and hard times await in a milieu of malice and vindictiveness, and on Inauguration Day, a cabal of oligarch thugs and a despicable felon, so breathtakingly unworthy and unqualified, will be paraded before the American people, committed only to corruption and control, and yes, it is nauseating, disillusioning, and bewildering indeed. It will be a day of brazen desecration, ironically imposed on a day that honors Martin Luther King, Jr.

Eight years ago, I peacefully protested in Washington D.C., along with half a million others, and never did I believe we would be seeing the rise of this criminal again, but here we are. My Besties are marching in Santa Barbara this weekend, a symbolic statement, singing to the choir, I guess, and I’d be there if I could. 

But I am here in Oxford, and where I am becomes my home. Today I will walk first to the Botanic Garden, a place I dearly love. I enter the glasshouses, one by one, inhaling familiar citrus scents, arid desert air, and the steamy tropics, each in its window-enclosed realm, then stroll along paths lined with noble trees and pugnacious little flowers already poking through the earth. Lewis Carroll spent many hours in this garden, said to be the source of inspiration for his Alice in Wonderland tales. I can sense the confluence of stories in this oasis not far from where our own little Alice has made her entrance into the world. 

My poet-mentor Dan, whom I often mention in this blog, has advised me to command my thoughts to heel and heal, and I will try. He also prescribes smiling, as the actor does at the conclusion of Perfect Days, our favorite movie.  Messages from friends consistently boost me too. I thought about the women hiking in the mountains Wednesday while I walked the streets of Oxford, and I thought of our Ranch neighbors tending to things, and we have a date on the calendar for our next writing group, and I know this little world within the wider and bewildering one is real.

My daughter gave me a  copy of David Whyte’s new book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Wisdom of Everyday Words. It’s a book to browse through slowly, taking time to contemplate, or open and read passages at random. This passage resonates with me now: 

“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”

Yes, let us choose to inhabit our vulnerability as generous citizens of loss. Let us risk, bravely walking through the door. May our dissolution and transformation cast a light that shines brightly, may our outrage at injustice fuel defiance and courage. Of what use is our vulnerability if not to cross into a new domain?

My dear friend Jan writes to me from home: “I’m thinking more and more about our community and how we will fortify ourselves in a country hostile to the life of the mind, selfish, and indifferent to art and values. We have our work cut out for us.”

We do indeed, and our hearts are sinking, but I see clearly now that we have been thrust onto a frontier.

As Whyte puts it, we inhabit the borderland between our deepest internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. Those revelations are particularly daunting lately.

But the mistake, Whyte says in “Everything Is Waiting For You” is to act this drama as if we are alone:

after a while you realize

you don't actually want to keep that old static identity, 

you want to move the pivot of your presence 

from this thing you think is you 

into this meeting with the future, 

with the people you serve, with your family, with your loved ones 

and it is in this self-forgetfulness where you meet something other than yourself 

and all kinds of astonishing things happen 

My tiny granddaughter is just beginning life, and my rambunctious grandson bounds ahead, impossible to keep up with, and I walk in winter’s garden where a worker puts a spade into the hard mud and I linger in a glasshouse comforted by its humid breath and familiar fragrance, and a centuries-old tree stands tall against a blank sky, and empty boats are lined up in the river waiting for summer.

My homeland is shrouded in the dark of night right now, and I am bewildered, but also emboldened, and perhaps I will be wilder in my being. I hereby resolve not to come undone in my undoing but to try to forge a new way forward, and to remember I am not alone. We have come to our real journey. Like baffled and impeded streams, let us sing.