Observances

November 1 2024: Let’s see what we can see

Driving through the Massachusetts woods, six-year old Raisa recognizes location by a rainbow-painted mailbox, a sharp bend in the road, a river crossing. Recently, she astonished me with such a noticing, able to detect that we were nearing home as we sped past a yellow bog.

“You’re so observational,” I said, finding an opportunity for praise. Such wordplay gives me joy, makes parenting – often so grueling – a lively delight.

“Dad!” she said urgently back: “Observational isn’t a word!”

Indeed, my lesson had landed.

But “observance” is a word: “the action or practice of fulfilling or respecting the requirements of law, morality, or ritual.” That’s a little dogmatic, but it will have to do. Secondarily, “the action of watching or noticing something,” as in the example, “the baby’s motionless observance of me.”

Friends, times are tough. The fascists – yes, the fascists – are on the march. So, allow me please to indulge in some observances, weekly or monthly or infrequently as they may come..

George Orwell said, “You want to know what the future looks like? Imagine a boot coming down on your face, forever.” Not an appropriate lesson for children, George. But we’re grateful for the prognostication.

So, as the boot appears to come down, and as the miracle of life continues to unfold nonetheless, let’s see what we can see, shall we? This, what follows, will be my Observances.

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November 6 2024: On the Fires This Time: Make of the earth a rain garden

We are the rainbed

In this land free of rain

Let him come down o let him come down

The night after the Trump election – the boot, descending, our faces gazing upward in horror – some friends invited us to a bonfire to commiserate, reflect and strategize. How would we come together to prevent the total erosion of civil liberties? How would we protect the trans people among our families and friends? Would we have the courage and conviction to throw our bodies in front of the mass deportations buses, when they come for the immigrants? What early warning systems could detect the coming storm when it approaches our front door?

The discussion happened – anxious, indeterminate, resolute – but the bonfire didn’t. Under the worst drought in memory, the town had declared a red flag warning banning fires. Indeed, as the election crowded our consciousness, brush fires were sprouting up all across the northeast, from suburban Boston to the Hudson Valley. (The joke that night was, at least we still have a dumpster fire to keep us warm….)

I’d moved my family east just three years ago in part to evade the wildfires that have become a feature of life in California – and now this. We all have PTSD, that is a given.

It’s been clear for years already that the old systems are inadequate to the times, and broken beyond repair, for good and for ill. The gender binary is being broken by every new kid whose body resists being defined by old norms; the old middle class norms of office work and worry-free vacation have been done for since the pandemic; the precarious, predatory economy works for no one but the oligarchs; wildfires, floods, droughts and unbearable heat rearrange geographies and render the mainstays of the American techno-capitalism – the insurance industry, for example – untenable. The global economy is on the road to ruin.

All of this is why we say, transition is inevitable; justice is not.

When my family moved to the northeast, I was struck that water was everywhere. This is not the arid west. From the fine mist that rises out of the earth at dawn in spring and fall, to the bogs and fens that course across the landscape, to the ponds and rivers that make New England summer glorious and almost worth sitting through winter’s ponderous hibernation. At the same time, there it was, nonetheless: the pervasive sense of dread: with all these bogs, when things heat up, will mosquito populations explode, incubating West Nile virus and malaria? Already the lyme ticks fill our lives with quiet anxiety – what happens when dengue fever arrives?

Some say the world will end in fire, the local poet wrote, and some say in ice.

There are fires to be put out everywhere, from the child’s bedroom to the Supreme Court. The tinder is dry, and the water low. One of my Buddhist teachers, perhaps it was Suzuki Roshi (my Buddhist teachers are all, mostly, from books, not from anything resembling disciplined sitting and listening) asked, “What is the first thing you must do when the house is on fire?” No, the answer is not, “call the fire department.” The answer is more fundamental: Get out of the house.

It’s a metaphor for meditation: when the mind is on fire with overthinking, quiet the mind. Empty the cup. Go into the dark and fertile bog of quietude. Let the aquifer fill.

So, as the fires grow up around us, what is to be done is to create the conditions for rain, to build swales, to turn the soil, to make of the entire earth a rain garden.

To make of the entire earth a rain garden.

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November 17 2024

            One of our great thinkers, Bayo Akomolafe, shares this continental wisdom from Africa: The times are urgent: slow down.

            It’s in that spirit, right or wrong, that much of this year, as the genocide in Gaza unleashes unspeakable horror after horror, as the flag of chaotic evil that is the Trump machine rolls on, I’ve been creating slow moments to read the poems of Paul Celan, a Romanian-born German Jew who survived the Holocaust and wrote for some decades in France before taking his own life in 1970. As a Holocaust victim and poet of the unspeakable, reading Celan in some way responds to both the frenzy of ethno-nationalist violence arising everywhere today, and also, moreso even, to the subversion of language itself which is central to the hateful, anti-humanist project of the Steve Bannons and Alex Jones’s. What we call “the big lie,” involves turning all language into lies, so the truth becomes unavailable, unbelieveable, and, they hope, unlivable.

For my observance today, early morning before the family woke, and after reading some poems of Paul Celan, and while seeing shadows all around, I wrote this:

observance: back through the gates

            The Jews of Treblinka

                                    are inside of us

            their ashes dust our heads, white

            like the receding snows of Kilamanjaro.

            To dismantle

                        the present time

            go back through the gates     

            go back through the dumb smells

– animal fur on wire

– fledged swallows half-frozen in dark mud

– the etched steel, the faces

– those stars, gray and beaten

go there, and start digging

Your father, gone silent

is inside of us

his combat boots standing still

in the volcanic mud

Did he escape?

            Did you?

Across the cold winds

            flags hoist themselves

                        prayer flags

                        curse flags

And beneath the flags

            our earth rises up

            etched in bone

            scrimshawed

What does it say?

What does She say?

The Arapaho of Sand Creek

            raise their lances in the farmer’s furrow

            in the deep peat

the ochre of their blood runs in your same veins

            The blackened stars are not ashamed

                        the twisted metal is not lost to time

– striped clothing hung on the concertina

– charred posts of old oak, unrooted

– rubble of mosques, rubble of synagogues

what was world remains world

go on, go

on