Small, Wet Miracles

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Last week at the beach five-year-old Harper gave me a purple clam shell. And then another. Within minutes she had collected a dozen shells from the shore. Each shell was more beautiful than the last one. We spread them out and studied them. In the sunshine they glistened with the purple hues of amethysts and the white shine of pearls. In the background we heard the surf and when it surged close in surprise, Harper shrieked with glee, and bounded back toward the waves with delight. I sat awe-struck and as I thumbed through the bounty of her shells, I also thumbed through my memories.

When I was the same age as Harper, I took my first family trip to the East Coast. When I returned home, I kept envisioning the “nine-foot waves” hovering over me. I did not yet know that waves ten times that size existed. For days I labored to tell my dearest, oldest, best friend Jan about the ocean. “The ocean has more water than all the bathtubs in the world,” I explained. Then I threw my five-year-old arms into the air. “It has arms made of water that stretch up nine feet high, and when they crash down, they can knock you over.” Jan’s eyes grew wider than the gum balls we chewed. She had not yet been to a beach, but she understood. The ocean is another world and filled with inexplicable mystery.

Perhaps because the Earth began as a hot molten rock that formed oceans as it cooled, or perhaps because life sprang from the oceans, or maybe because the early life that migrated from the water to the land was initially drawn back to the sea, I still feel called to the water. My dad loved the ocean, and perhaps the pull is genetic–and ages old. Existential questions have always surfaced when I sit by the sea.

By the time I was seven or eight the beach had become threaded into my family life as a ritual and a way to see our cousins who all lived a thousand miles from my Indiana home. Each summer we loaded up the station wagon with a beach ball, suitcases, and a cooler packed with sandwiches so my dad could drive like a maniac for fourteen hours across four states until we landed in Ocean City or Virginia Beach. There we met up with my dad’s entire family and rented neighboring bungalows. In the days that followed we created some of the best memories of my life–telling jokes, riding of rafts on the ocean waves, covering my brother in a body cast of sand, and collecting an array of shells, especially sand dollars. I still have a jar of these treasures.

Years later when I read Rachel Carson’s writings on the sea, I realized that I was not the only one to have been awestruck by the wonder of the ocean. Her work undulates with a soft cadence of miracle after miracle found beneath the surface of the water. Before her poetic words I did not understand that the deep and dark depths of the sea are not silent but much like symphony. I discovered the seaweed and microscopic algae use energy from the sunlight to build living tissue and that tiny animals such as clams eat this and are eventually eaten by larger fish—and so begins the food chain that gives us our life.

On one of those beach trips many years ago, I suspect I posed my first existential questions. After a grand day of splashing in the waves and collecting shells, gorging on hot dogs dripping with mustard, and playing Monopoly with my cousins, we sat on the beach looking up at the dark night sky with billions of stars. I remember that moment because I was sitting by my dad, eating a chocolate ice cream cone, and I asked him, “How did all of those stars get there?”

I remember my dad saying, “We don’t really know.”

“How did I get here—on Earth?”

“That’s an equally puzzling question,” my dad said and laughed.

I am not sure how old I was. But I recall the moment because it startled me. I had come to the beach thinking my dad knew almost everything, but it was here I realized that he didn’t. That perhaps no one did.

At the ocean I would spend hours studying sand crabs, sand pipers, seaweed, and all kinds of small wet miracles. I studied the undulating waves that seemed to come relentlessly onto the beach, whispering to me all the while.  It was here I learned to listen to the water and the Earth. It was here that I learned to respect something much larger than I was. Something that connected it all. Transcended it all.

The ocean has taught me that the surf grounds rocks into sand and the shoreline is everchanging. Like the tide we slip into this miracle of life and like the tide we flow out. Like the waves we rise up, and we fall down. Suddenly, amid my beach reverie, a child in a mermaid swimsuit runs toward me waving her arms joyfully with a golden-striped cone shell. Life is as fluid as the seas and equally filled with small, wet miracles.

The Rocky Path

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Once a year my ritual is to unplug my computer and pack my bag. Then I turn my back on the writing and emails that beckon to me and head my steering wheel toward Sedona. I missed this ritual last year, and my soul felt I needed it more than ever.  I longed to hike the rocky red trails, but now that the mask mandates have been eased, a friend had warned me that the red rocks had been overrun by young tourists. But I have had my vaccines, and last Thursday I was determined to have my first get-away in a long time. I loaded my car and headed north.

As I drove to Sedona, I was still unwinding from the past week. It had been a wonderful week. After I taught my Mayo Clinic writing class, a student wrote me that her writing had led to an understanding of her estranged son. Nothing makes me happier. But it had been a hard week, too. I did a presentation to Intel employees in Chandler. It was supposed to be a well-rehearsed Zoom talk, but my computer with an Intel chip died at 12:17 pm. Thirteen minutes before the scheduled talk. The irony hit as I struggled to call up the hotspot on my phone and give my first talk via my phone.  While it worked, it was stressful!

As I arrived in the canyon, I was surprised by the dozens of cars parked along the roadsides. California license plates. Nevada. Utah. More California plates. Tanned and jubilant I heard many of the young people chatting gleefully as they walked down the roads, headed for the trails I love. I started counting the cars with out-of-state plates, and I was a bit unsettled.

Two hours later my hiking boots were laced, and I headed into Boynton Canyon. It was quiet, and I reminisced about the many times I have hiked these trails. It has often surprised me but never disappointed me.  It was here I once saw an oak tree fallen to the ground, roots half in and half ripped from the earth with arms entwined with the earth in what appeared to be a warm embrace. I remember thinking how wonderful that the earth and the tree are one.

Often as I navigate the rocky path and stare up at the canyon walls, I have contemplated how Native Americans lived here over eleven thousand years ago. I imagine how these ancients must have stared wide-eyed, as I often do now, at the natural canvas painted here, streaked in dusted pinks and red-oranges. You can see the holes in the canyon walls where these people lived.  I think of how their children must have scaled the mountain sides to the caves. Sometimes when I hike, I sense their aura, and feel I am being welcomed into their home. I love to imagine their voices echoing across the canyon—their chatter, their laughter, the squeals of their children.  I stare straight up and think of how these people probably scaled these heights with relative ease, for it was the life they had come to know—chasing animals and gathering wild plants.  From time to time, someone slipped or fell and there was no helicopter to navigate a rescue. Like the oak tree, these long-ago humans were completely entwined with the Earth.

As I hiked on, I was passed by a group of young hikers, several basketball players from North Carolina State. They were friendly and hailed me kindly. One called, “Good for you!” I am grateful he did not add, “old lady.” The path had become steep and rocky, up and down.  As I age, I find it harder to navigate, but I walk more slowly and deliberately.  Another group of young people pass.

An hour later, I paused to rest. Looking up I was overcome by the sight of the red rocks that pointed upwards like a stunning red cathedral and the shadows landing from the other side of canyon appeared to be the long-pointed spires shooting upwards toward the sky.  Then it appeared.   A kaleidoscope of light, brilliant color, and dancing shadows. The reds, the pinks, and the golds sparkled in the glow of the sunlight as the shadows of the oak leaves danced back and forth across them. Nature’s own stained-glass window. A stunning rose window. A magnificent, shimmering kaleidoscope of light and color illuminating the canyon wall.

I was silent for a time before I heard laughter and a group of four young women came charging into the space. When they saw me, they halted–surprised.  “Are you okay?” asked a kinky haired girl, the first in their line.  I nodded and pointed upward to my imaginary cathedral.

“Oh, wow!” she murmured, and her girlfriends were equally taken back. The five of us stood in reverent silence for several minutes. Then they silently mouthed their “thank-yous” and slipped past me on the way into their futures.

Unlike the girls, I was not in a hurry. I relished just being there and reflecting. While this does not happen often, I have learned to try and seize these special moments. It was then that all the stresses and craziness seemed to wash right out of me. It was there that a computer crash seemed insignificant. It was there that I was flooded with gratitude. To be out. To be here!

The last year has been a rocky path for all of us. As we work to hoist ourselves up and out of the pandemic, we can learn from the oak trees and the Native Americans of long ago. I can look down the trail and see that it leads forward. I will find my way. The young people will find their way.

Indeed, when we stay the course, the rocky path often leads to the beautiful. The unexpected. Suddenly I was flooded with joy that so many young people had found their way here. For in this place we can connect with the oak tree, the ancient humans, with each other, and most powerfully, with something bigger and more beautiful than all of us.

A Crack in Everything

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There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

That’s how the light gets in
That’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

 

This song became stuck in my head last year as I prepared a keynote speech for one of my favorite groups of word lovers, the National Association of Poetry Therapists. Shortly before the conference last April, the COVID scare came smacking into our lives like a bird hitting the patio window. Conferences, workshops, and travel cascaded off our schedules and we began to try and find our way through a maze of confusion about  what we could do and where we could go.

About the same time, I was planning my mother-in-law’s, 100th Birthday party for relatives and friends from across the country. Amid the preparations, I had a startling conversation with Edna. “I am okay with a little birthday party,” she explained, “But when I die, I don’t want any party. No service. My friends are dead and there will be no need to talk about me!” she announced decidedly.

“What?!” I looked at her across the patio table where we sat. “We always have parties and celebrations. A service is not for you or for your friends who are gone. It is to help all of us who are left behind. We have to rewrite our stories to move forward without you. It will be hard for us.” She looked at me doubtfully. “Mom,” I pleaded, “we need the ritual of celebrations.” She shrugged and hugged me, but I sensed she was not convinced.

A strong-willed woman, Steve and I had cared for her in Phoenix for the last four years. I had met her when I started graduate school in California. She was caught up in her work as a high school librarian, and I liked her spunk immediately. Often I would eat dinner at her house and as she would simmer the marinara sauce for manicotti, she would tell me tales of her past. She had been an independent journalist during World War II to the point of flying in the war planes. When her children were born, she became a librarian first at UCLA and then at Narbonne High School in Los Angeles. She was so good at what she did, it was said that Steve Jobs stopped by her library to give her the first computer in the Los Angeles Public Schools. In turn she helped Jobs bring computers into the schools, hosting the first computer lab. When she retired at age 75, they named her library for her—the Edna Marinella Library.

Last June amid COVID, we hosted her 100th Birthday. While no one flew into Phoenix, we hosted her friends and relatives from all over the country in a huge Zoom party to honor her for her incredible spirit and the positive gifts she brought to us.  For days after this event she kept asking me how all those people crowded into one little computer screen, and she marveled at the many gifts sent to her from the Mickey Mouse sapphire necklace to the hand-knitted blankets to warm her legs. About a week later as she fingered her presents, she turned to me unexpectedly and said, “I feel loved.”

And she was.  Last week as I presented my long overdue keynote Zoom speech at the NAPT Conference, I shared the words of the Leonard Cohen anthem, “There is a crack in everything.”  I talked about how our words, our stories, and our poems allow us to touch, to see, and even to be the light. A few minutes after I finished, I headed to the home to see Edna who was now in hospice and nearing the end of her life. She wanted to hear how it went.

When I arrived, it was late afternoon, and the hospice nurse had pulled the blinds to keep out the sunlight. I helped raise her bed and fluff her pillows so she would be upright. Then we chatted. “I am going to leave here soon,” Edna explained to me. I told her I understood. “I am going to miss you.” Then she took my hand tightly, “Will you make one important promise?” I nodded.  “Will you please have a big party for me. A really big celebration?”

“Oh, yes,” I promised.  “We will have a party to honor you. A celebration of your wonderful life.”

“Please, it needs to be in California. That is my real home—and you can talk about me all you want.”

“I promise,” I said, tears flooding my eyes.

Relieved and smiling, she sunk back into her pillows. Then I opened the blinds just a bit and a stream of sunlight shot across Edna’s tiny, frail body, and we both marveled at the how it seemed the light was coming from her. From her body.

In the coming two days all her children and grandchildren arrived to visit with her. We shared stories and told her we loved her and held her hands as she passed. Indeed, that is how the light slips in.