Broken hands

I'm very sorry for my long silence. I thought it would be shorter than it was.

The short version is, I lost the use of my hands for two months.

Sometime before Christmas I told you all on this blog that I had hand pain and needed to take a break. I had not only stressed and inflamed many of the muscles of my forearm, but also one or more of the tendons that connect those muscles to the elbow. Unfortunately, I was pretty stupid in dealing with it. The story of my stupidity is pretty boring, I suppose, but basically I kept making what I thought were radical, difficult changes in my routine and they kept turning out to be too little, too late.

The last of these changes was to stop using my right hand entirely. I not only used the mouse with my left hand, I typed with my left hand, and I chopped up vegetables for supper with my left hand. You can see this coming, can't you?

I got tendonitis in my left arm too.

I barely know how to tell you what it feels like not to be able to use your hands. It feels like death. Because, I think, death—not a loved one's death, not a stranger's, but my death and yours—feels like helplessness. Death is the moment when it doesn't matter if your life's work is sitting unfinished on the desk, when the world doesn't care. The moment when you can't do anything about it. The moment that most of us, deep in our hearts, don't believe is coming.

I remember the sensation of stopping. The impatience in my soul, the forward momentum—I have to finish this edit I have to clean the house I have to start working on the new farm and show these people what I can do I have to plant my garden I have to—it died hard. Several times. The first time was at Easter. April 1st. I thought I'd be out for a month then. I thought that was a huge deal.

I didn't want to stop.

We found ways. I stored my laptop outside our apartment, bringing it in once a day to deal with urgent email using voice-to-text, manipulating the touchpad with my chin. My husband started doing all the dishes, and chopping vegetables for me when it was my turn to cook. I tried to come up with recipes with little or no chopping. I told my son gently and continually that I was sorry, I couldn't move the little car around, or build the Lego train with him, or get his wagon out of the shed. I accepted not planting my garden—and then my husband offered to plant it for me. I accepted things being done other people's way or not at all. I watched weeds grow, and did nothing. I watched dust thicken, and did nothing. I watched grass grow up around piles of split firewood that needed stacking. I could not change the world. I could only accept it.

I learned to sit. I learned to let my mind wander, and not try to force it into important and purposeful paths. I couldn't do anything important and purposeful, anyway; thinking about it only hurt. I learned to sit and accept the world, let it come into me, whether it was important or not. The movement of the leaves in the wind. The tiny flowers in the grass and the bumblebees visiting them. The ants, the woodlice, the holes in that dead tree that the woodpecker made. I learned to sit in the woods and let them breathe around me. I learned to sit among the trees and not tell them over and over that I was wasting my important time by being with them. I learned their names. I carried my field guides in a bag I could sling around my neck almost without using my hands, and I learned what an ash tree looks like, and an elm, and a basswood. Once I started seeing the shapes of leaves, I couldn't stop. I know so little still, but I feel like I've learned so much. I know where there's a spring now, two slender tunnels opening out of the clay inner structure of a hillside, one slightly larger, one slightly smaller, like mother and daughter. I go to that spring every day. I pray, some. I also just sit. I watch a chipmunk run up and down, or a bird whose name I'm not sure of in the fading light go about its peaceful business. It doesn't have to be something important. Several times I've seen a pileated woodpecker—rare in these parts—but I don't go there to see it. If that was why I went, I wouldn't go. Not after the first time it failed to show up on my timetable.

I don't know how to explain what has happened to me. There was a time when I loved the woods, yet when I could have gone to them, I stayed inside on the computer, reading funny stories about other people's bad books or bad behavior. (You may not be familiar with this particular pleasure; it's relaxing, because it tells you it's all right, at least you're doing better than someone. Might be best if you don't give it a go.) I'll tell you the truth: I never once got angry with God about what was happening to my arms, and that's not because I'm a good person. It's because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I had done it to myself. Yes, I partly did it to myself writing Flame in the Night. But if I had finished my writing and gone to the woods instead of sitting at the computer, clicking on little pictures of cards or scrolling and scrolling while laughing at somebody, I would be fine.

I'm not saying it was a punishment, either. It was a kindness.

Oh, it felt plenty mean sometimes. Like being pushed down and down. Every time I began to feel the joy of recovery, to believe I would be better, I relapsed. I let the joy tempt me into doing too much. Putting a few books away. Taking some notes by pencil. I felt the pain come back, and sat there watching my son play, wondering how many days I had lengthened my sentence by, and trying to look like I wasn't about to cry.

It was two months, in the end.

And it was worth it.

There are practical things. The benefit to my son, of having been called upon to be kind and gentle with me, to see that I'm not all-powerful; of having had to do things himself that he'd rather depend on me to do. The garden, which in spite of the weeds is a family endeavor now, my husband and son proud of what they've done for it—no matter if I go back to doing it all in time, I will remember and so will they. The bonds of need and help and kindness reaffirmed between me and my husband; I have felt so loved. But beyond even that, something has happened to me. Sitting in the woods; reading books, real books, at times of the day I used to spend online; not really wanting, anymore, to read about what's wrong with other people. (I'm not saying I never will again. But you know how they say that if you stop eating sugar, you stop craving it? It's like that.) I'm better at waiting for others now, not trying to fill every minute of my important time. I notice things more. I let the quietness come into my mind, the silence I used to run from so hard—I don't quite remember why. I think there were bad thoughts in it, regrets and fears—or I thought there were. I guess I've found some. They weren't so awful, once I stopped running.

Or I wonder if the silence itself frightened me. Nothingness, emptiness has always felt like my enemy. Doing nothing, being nothing. I wonder if it looked a little bit like death. I'm not saying I'm not scared of death, or even that I'm less scared. But I do know that it will come someday, and that seems like a step in the right direction. And in the silence--would I have run so hard if I'd known?-- is not nothingness at all. In the silence, where I die a little from my quest to be and be and be something, where I open myself, the lives of others come in. The lives of trees, humble people who stand where God planted them and drink sunlight, and make air. The small, humble animals, rummaging around the woods for their daily bread. Perhaps the silence will let the lives of other people in better too; I haven't had much chance yet to find out. Maybe that's not what God had for me this time. I already knew that listening to people was important. I could have spent two months doing that, and felt I had justified my existence. But there are very few people here now, and what they need from me is work. So I went to the woods. I went to the woods and sat at God's feet, instead of running around and around looking for something to lay at them.

I'm starting to use my hands again. A little. The other day I pruned back a potted heliotrope, scraggly and distorted from a winter of neglect. I cut it back hard—within an inch of where it comes out of the soil, sparing one bud to become the new stem. I layered good compost all over the soil around its roots. We think of these plants as flowers, but the life is not in the flower. The life, the strength, is in the root. I watered it deeply, let the nutrients from the compost leach down to where the roots drink. I prayed, You've cut me back, and You've nourished me. Help me grow straight now, and flower.

A different kind of hard

So I was talking on the phone with a dear friend the other day, and I found myself saying this: "When you're doing the work you're called to do, it is hard--very hard sometimes--but it's a different kind of hard."

It made sense in the context of what we were discussing--work that's driven by guilt, or the guilt of not doing it, work that crushes rather than fulfills. But afterward I kept thinking about it. What did I really mean? How could I explain it better?

See... I'm lucky. I get to do the work I choose to do. Due to some choices I'll discuss sometime, I live an extremely quiet life where I stay on the same land basically all the time because I can't afford a car. In the same bargain (so to speak, and leaving out a lot) I also received three or four quiet hours a day in which to write. I think I got the good end of the deal. But I didn't realize just how true that was till halfway through writing this book.

It's a long story. Maybe I'll tell it to you sometime. But in writing this book I found my calling. Found that I'd been writing, not because it was my skill, but because I was supposed to. It came out of nowhere. It was... really hard to explain.

But here's the thing. It was hard. Very hard. When I entered the phase of the book where I was truly doing my real work, here was my routine: Sit at computer playing digital Mahjongg, trying to force myself to get up and go to my writing room. (A small bare room in the empty apartment next door. While our friends still lived in the upstairs part, I got my husband to sabotage my computer's connection with their wireless. No internet.) Go over to my writing room, berating myself for not going sooner. Sit down at the desk, open my laptop.

Stare at the screen for twenty minutes, scared to death.

Start writing.

The writing wrung me out, mentally and physically, exhausted me. I felt the story in my body, my characters' tension and fear, the hard spiritual work of making choices that they could never step back from, choices in the dark. It was like wrestling. In my mind I stopped calling the little bare cave my writing room. I called it my battle room.

If I was saying it now, after thinking about it, I would add this: it's a different kind of hard. Like battle, or surviving in the wilderness. Not hard like being abused. It's completely different. Work you're not called to, done out of guilt, can crush you. Beat you down with your inadequacy, your failure to ever measure up. Because how can you measure up, when it's not your work?

(I mean, when we're failing to do our true work, when we're procrastinating past the point of shame, when we've let that beat us, we can feel like that sometimes. But when we're doing it--never.)

I think of the descriptions of wilderness survival in Hatchet and its sequels. You're very rarely comfortable. (Mosquitoes. Everywhere.) You have to put your whole strength, your whole mind, into what you're doing. There's hard work and discomfort and pain and fear and sudden danger. There are continual small joys, the deep, ever-fresh pleasure of food for real hunger. There are also breathtaking, transcendent moments of beauty and awe that you wouldn't trade for anything. And you can't decide when those moments will come--you have absolutely no control. They are given you--by a hushed lake under the stars, by a sunrise, even by a wild animal leading you on your path. They come from outside--from God.

And the whole time, in the good moments and the bad, you are alive.

It's like that.

There's something else it's not like, too. I've been listening to the Story Grid podcast recently, and Tim Grahl, who's starting a nonfiction book on how not to let procrastination and shame overcome you in creative work, describes a terrible moment in his life. It was the moment when he had gained everything he'd been working toward. He'd struck out on his own as a writer and book marketer, he'd built his business, he'd marketed a book into bestsellerdom, he had made it.

And it turned out he was completely miserable.

Now I've already made this pretty long, so I'll cut to the chase here. Doing the work you're called to do is also not like being on drugs.

"Success" is a drug. And what I mean by that is fame is a drug. I mean, I wouldn't know, but I can darned well guess. Because I know that even attention is a drug, at least in the form of "likes" and upvotes--anonymous attention, not flowing back and forth face-to-face, just a little signal in a vacuum that says you are now a little bit more worthy.

You get a "hit." It feels incredible. It fades.

You want another.

I read an article on Cracked.com (just so you know there's language & stuff) about stupid things we believe about rich people. The writer says money doesn't make rich people happy, which we all know and few of us believe. To make her point, she gives us a sentence about "Rich people never have to worry about money, they have so much money they don't have any real problems," etc, and suggests we replace the word "money" with "cocaine."

Because money, in that kind of quantity, is also a drug.

And what do drugs do? Weaken you. Destroy you.

I know it in myself. The mood in which I go to the internet looking for a hit is a terrible thing. I can well imagine why Tim Grahl wasn't happy. You work and you work towards success, and you think that you will make it and then you can bask. But you can't bask. The hit fades. And you feel miserable.

Human beings weren't made to bask.

I don't know everything about how, not having read the book he's just starting, but I gather Tim fought his way through from that bad place. One of the things he says he wants to tell everyone is that meaning and joy are found in the work itself. In the doing, in the struggle. And that's what I find too.

You're rarely comfortable. There's hard work and fear and failure and having to start all over again. And there are transcendent moments, unforgettable, unexplainable moments.

And in the good and the bad times, you are alive.

(But at least there aren't any mosquitoes.)

Makes me think of G.K. Chesterton's poem The Hunting of the Dragon, about how beautiful the world is in the midst of the struggle, and how it fades in our eyes when we've been too long at rest:

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride...

...For the hunting of the Dragon,
That is the life of a man.


There is no heaven on earth, no nirvana-like state of resting, unchanging bliss. There is only the struggle. But if we are blessed to be given the good struggle, in which the work itself is its reward, let's not flee it. It is the good. It's a gift to us, a gift of meaning. It is the kindness of God.

Elderberries, and seeking your food from God

I biked a couple of miles to the Hennepin Canal this week, to pick elderberries. (Not actually for exercise; if I'd had a car I would have driven, but I don't and I wanted the berries. My carless condition is a story for another time, but I'll say this for it: it's easy to stay close to the earth when you don't have a choice!) I've been getting my manuscript in shape to send in to the publisher for the second time after some revisions—one reason I'm not up to any other really heavy writing this week—but elderberries wait for no-one. It was now or never.

Elderberries like to hang out over water. In French they're called sureau, which literally means “over water.” I noticed this year, picking some of my harvest from the bushes beside the road near home and some from the bushes hanging low over the canal, what a difference water makes to them: the road berries are puny, mostly seed, which I used to think the natural condition of elderberries—but the canal berries are fat and black and shiny, and when you squeeze them you can feel the juice. I'll be making that canal trip again next year. The berries hang so low over the water that the fattest clusters tempted me right into the canal—but it turned out to be barely ankle-deep at the edge. I'm in.

There aren't actually that many wild foods I regularly gather. More than the average person, I guess, but less than most enthusiasts. Elderberries for syrup; nettles for nettle soup (a French country recipe) and nettle tea (which tastes rather like spinach tea but is an excellent natural iron supplement); fiddleheads and ramps one time each spring, stir-fried together; and once, a solitary morel. (Maybe it'll happen again someday!) I hope to try acorns this fall—I'll have to look up the process, but I believe it involves soaking them and discarding the water to leach the bitter tannins out—largely because in playing with the Boy I once split an acorn open with a knife to show him the inside and I swear it smelled exactly like brown sugar. I couldn't stop smelling it; I still have it around somewhere to take a whiff from every now and then. I just have to find out how they taste, if only once.

There aren't that many wild foods I gather, but they're important to me. The process is important to me. There's something about the haphazardness of it, the searching—gathering rather than picking—that suits my notions of how life truly is. There's something about the wild itself, the unplanted place, whether woods or ditch or hedgerow; there's something about that unplanted place holding out food to you, for you to pick. Food out of the ground already seems a miracle to me, even when I work hard for it; I can't make a pumpkin or a raspberry, and the fact that they swell and ripen on the plants at all seems like a bounty and a gift. But foraging goes a step beyond: in the place God chooses, not in the place I choose, grows the thing I need. My only work is to search.

In my favorite psalm, Psalm 104, it says “The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God.” I've never hunted, but I can see it. Foraging is like that too, and I'm sure hunting is even more so—especially if you do it for hunger, not for fun. There's so much hope involved and so much chance. You seek for the gift, but in the end the gift is given. There is no certainty. We walk out to seek our food in a world we don't control. Even if it's only a gallon or two of berries, it's a reminder of sorts: that our food, and ourselves, are not products of our making. That the earth and the Lord are the matrix of our lives; that we are creatures and not gods.

Every year in September I make elderberry syrup. The berries are reputed to have immune-boosting properties, and I believe it; if it happens not to be true, the syrup makes a truly delicious placebo (which you'll know, if you've read much about the placebo effect, is nothing to sneeze at.) I arm for the winter with elderberry syrup and echinacea tincture, the one from the wild and the other from my herb garden. Here's the recipe I'll be using for the syrup. Please note that if you ever try elderberries for yourself, it's important to cook them in some way no matter what you're making with them (some people dry them in an oven for instance) because heat rids them of some mildly toxic properties that can cause an upset stomach.

Elderberry syrup

2 quarts fresh ripe elderberries
¼ oz grated ginger root
½ tsp ground cloves
Honey


Put the elderberries in a large pot with ¼ cup of water and simmer on low heat until they're soft. Strain out the pulp and reheat the juice in the pot; add the ginger and cloves. Simmer till the liquid is reduced to half its original volume. Measure the liquid and add an equal amount of honey. Stir the hot liquid and the honey together till thoroughly combined. Let cool.

This syrup will keep 12 weeks in the fridge, or all winter in the freezer. (The great thing about the honey is, it stays runny in the freezer, so it's very easy to dole out the freezer syrup a few spoonfuls at a time.)

When you're fighting a cold or flu, take 1 or 2 tablespoons of the syrup several times throughout the day (on pancakes if desired!)

Buckskins and brains

And now for something completely different!

I'd like to share my strangest hobby with you. Interestingly, although it used to be a traditional feminine occupation (at least among some peoples), every single practitioner I've met online, in the course of learning it, has been male. I'm referring (of course?) to tanning buckskin.

It all started with the deer in the woods here at Plow Creek. They get hit on the road sometimes. And sometimes (in season) they get hunted. I learned from an experienced guy here how to field-dress and butcher deer that have fallen victim to cars (I have very high standards though--it needs to be still bleeding) and we've gotten some high-quality organic free-range venison out of it. (Mm, deerburgers.) One step in the process was burying the parts we weren't going to use. I always felt a little twinge at burying that big, soft, beautiful pelt in the earth.

So one fall and winter, when I needed what Jane Austen would call "useful occupation" due to some plans not working out, I started a web search about how to tan that beautiful fur.

The first thing I found out: it isn't fur. No matter how nice and soft it feels, it's hair, like a cow's or a goat's, which means it's hollow and will fall out after a few years; there's a reason they don't sell deer coats. Apparently wanting to tan a hair-on deerhide is a mistake all newbies make, in the interesting world of tanning forums, so I duly listened to my teachers. They said: you have the skin of a buck. Why not make buckskin?

So I did.

Buckskin is a fascinating material. It's not leather. It is technically its own, entirely different substance. It's softer than suede, strong as canvas, light as, well, probably denim, and stretchy. It's unbelievably comfortable to wear--as leather definitely isn't. The only thing wrong with it, as a garment, is that it absorbs water like a sponge. But other than that, it's light, strong and beautiful.

And it's made with brains.

What I don't do. Those lacings would be the end of me.

There's a certain oil in brain tissue that's crucial to the tanning process. (It can be found in other things--you can approximate it with egg yolks, for instance.) It's wackily enjoyable to imagine just who discovered this and how (and it must have been dozens of people, because native peoples all over North America and on almost every other continent have done it), but no doubt about it, brains do something special to hides, and it's said every animal except the buffalo has enough brains to tan its own hide.

I searched and searched the web for different methods, mostly for the sake of avoiding that incredibly arduous-looking process where you lace a skin into a homemade frame to scrape or stretch it--and I found what I wanted, and happily learned something called the wet-scrape method. Here are the steps.


1. Soaking (aka bucking)

You put the hide into a barrel with just the right mix of water and wood ashes, or water and lye. (If you're using lye, WEAR GLOVES. Don't ask me how I know.) After a few days, depending on the weather, the skin will swell slightly (in a non-stinky way) and the hair will start to come out. I can also attest that if you accidentally leave it for three years, the hide will literally dissolve. But then Coca-Cola will do that too, or so I hear.

 2. Scraping

What I do instead. That's not me though.

You lay the hide over a log or a PVC pipe, placed on a sawhorse or stump or something so that one end is up near your stomach. With a blunt metal edge of some kind (I used the handle of a long metal spoon), you scrape off, first all of the bits of flesh and fat from the side of the hide that used to contain, y'know, the deer; then you flip it over and scrape off the top layer of epidermis (and hair, but that's just a bonus) from the outside. (You can scrape the flesh earlier, especially worthwhile if it's freshly skinned, but the bucking mixture prevents rot, so you can afford to wait till this step.)

3. Braining

You blender up the brains with some warm water and soak the hide in them. Should I claim it's not as gross as it sounds? It's... well, it doesn't bother me, anyway. And what it does to the hide is fascinating.

What I'm told is: the oil coats the matted fibers that make up the core layer of skin, so that instead of holding tightly to each other, they begin to slip. You have a piece of hide (it's gray-white at this point and fairly thin) that used to be as unstretchy as canvas, and now you can grab its sides in two hands and double its width just by pulling. It doesn't spring back, it just stays that way. Then you can grab it in the other direction and double its height. (It doesn't just keep getting bigger; when it gains height, it loses width, etc.) It's kind of a magical feeling, like being a kid discovering a new material for the first time--mud, or play-dough, or water even...

Till you do it all day!

4. Stretching

You wring the hide out very thoroughly (there's a special technique) and then you start stretching it. You stretch it over and over, in every direction, till it's dry. You can do it solely by hand or stretch it around something--a cable, a post, even a small tree. This can take three hours, or it can take all day, depending on how thick the hide is and how dry the air is. It's kind of grueling. More than "kind of," if you've got a big, thick hide of an older buck. (I still have a hide in the freezer that I know I don't have the muscle strength to stretch, actually. It was, I forget, an 8-point buck? Maybe more. Even scraping it was hard.) I can only imagine how strong Native women used to be as a matter of course, doing this on the regular to clothe their families.

This part is where you hope you scraped all the epidermis off. Any pieces you missed will become little hard patches on your hide, like bits of it have been laminated.

If you've scraped and stretched it properly, on the other hand, when it's all dry it will be soft like cloth, mildly stretchy like a heavy T-shirt, and pale.

Then you smoke it.

5. Smoking

This "fixes" the tanning chemically in some way. If you don't do it, a good washing will undo your tanning and return your hide to rawhide.

Smoking's a bit complicated, and looks ridiculously picturesque--definitely the photo-shoot stage of buckskin tanning. You set up a little tipi or frame of short poles, and hang your hide from it, all sewn up (or, modernly, glued with tacky glue) into a sort of balloon shape that only opens at what used to be the neck. Under the neck you place a coffee can full of hot coals, and onto those coals you crumble dry punky wood, like you find in the woods in fallen logs full of dry-rot. It makes this lovely fragrant smoke, which goes up into the hide and out through its pores, "fixing" it and giving it its final color. The color is subtly different depending what kind of wood you use--from red-brown to dark brown to golden-brown.

(Although to be honest, I don't know what kind of wood I've used, as I'm not great at identifying rotting trees. At a guess it was probably oak, maybe maple, and as a great connaisseur of subtle color shadings I would call the color I got out of it... brown.)

I've never made buckskin clothing yet, having tanned all of three successful hides in my life so far, but maybe someday! I've made only small things, mostly gifts. My two favorite projects so far have been a pair of custom-fitted gloves for my mother and a pair of moccasins that were my kid's first real shoes. I've also made a couple of nice small purses.

If you want to learn more, a good intro page that includes both how-to and some interesting history is www.braintan.com. And here is the best series of forum posts I have ever seen on how to do wet-scrape brain tanning, with thorough science included.

Eden

I remember the cooing of the doves, in the town in France where I grew up. They were collared doves, and they roosted up among the rooftops of the town, like pigeons do in other towns. I had forgotten about them, the way they used to coo when the sky started to grow soft with evening. I remembered it the other night and almost cried.

I don't know if I can explain how it is. How you can see one thing like that, those doves, and for a moment that is everything. It fills your vision like God's final word. Doves among the rooftops.

I almost cried because I wanted the cooing of the collared doves to be the gentle meaning of everything.

Sometimes I can't be rational about all of this. The world is so terrible. There has always, always--almost always--been so much death. There is so much scorn, so much loneliness, so much hatred. We are told God gave us a garden, made us fresh out of earth in the light of a young world no evil had touched. The world is old now, and we have invented tortures not fit to be written of. We have invented elaborate reasons why everyone unlike us is lesser than us. We have invented machine upon machine designed brilliantly to destroy.

We are told God gave us a garden. In it was the tree of Life. I believe it. Its seeds are still everywhere, tiny leaves unfurling slowly into the light. I don't know where the seedlings go after that, what happens to them, what blight strikes them down. I only know that I only see them young. But so real.

They are real. The cooing of doves in a window. The sun's light through a perfect young oak leaf, the color green come alive. The light that can rest on a face, come from no lamp or sun--you've seen it, I've seen it, the light in the eyes is real light. In the eyes of a laughing child or an old woman touched with joy. The light lies on the water. The swallows come in spring. Again and again they come, in spite of all our sins. The apple trees forgive us, and bloom.

And I can't take it sometimes, with the wanting, the wanting for these to be the meaning of things, the light that fills your vision, God's final word.

I don't want the world to end in a burst of light. God's final word is God's first word too. I want Eden. I want it painfully, the end of the road, the promise, the day the seed becomes the tree. I want the terrors we have made wiped away. I want the earth we have trodden down and paved over made fresh and new as in the first spring sunrise, and us all there looking at each other wide-eyed in the new light. I want it. I want it sometimes till it hurts.

I have seen the seeds. I have heard the promise. Now is the waiting. I can cry if I choose. But I must go to bed, and get up, and try my best to love my neighbor. Ask God for the strength to treat my neighbor, in the meantime, as if we stood in that new light. As if, if I look again, I'll see the uncreated light resting on his face and shining like a glory in his eyes.

Stay with us, O Lord Jesus Christ
Night will soon fall
Then stay with us, O Lord Jesus Christ,
Light in our darkness.

____________

The grass is still singing
The words I will say
When I walk with You barefoot
In the cool of the day

The coyotes don't know

I was lying in bed on election night, much later than I had planned, and I heard the coyotes howl. That far, high, mingled joyous yipping made me pause in my whirling thoughts (I can't believe it it actually happened I can't believe it) and breathe.

I thought, “The coyotes don't know.”

It's not the first time I've thought that. In the midst of conflicts that embroiled my whole local world, with fresh news of someone's latest lie or outburst on the lips of everyone I met (and mine, I'm no saint), I've gone down into the woods and found the tracks of the coyotes in the mud, and I've breathed deep of a cleaner world.

I realize the irony of the word clean here. When we've just started to make progress in not befouling our world quite so much, Trump's election—even beyond the human cost—could be a huge blow. The earth is fragile. What's going to happen? I don't know. The coyotes don't know either. They are howling, hunting their mice and rabbits, bearing their young. I thank God for them.

I remember sitting in a city backyard with the man I was falling in love with (my husband Paul), looking at the houses around us while he pointed out what would become of them without continual human effort. I could see it so vividly in my mind; all that winding mess of green, climbing, climbing, the insects burrowing and eating as all the human colors turn the earth-brown of rot and rust. The cracking of the pavement as the green comes through. I don't want people's houses destroyed, and neither does he—and yet my heart rejoiced. Because we forget, we forget the power that is in the earth. We think ourselves masters of it. God laughs.

It never ceases to amaze me, the cracking of a seed, the pushing outward, the reach toward the light. The opening of the power enclosed within. It's like creation itself: out of a hard little pebble, a tiny grain of dust or sand, comes Let there be life. It makes me want to worship. I believe it is the power of God. In times I've been shaky with Him on other matters, times my worship did not easily connect, I've called Him in my mind Creator of Seeds, and the awe has come.

I study history. I study occupied Europe during World War II. I'm trying not to use foul language here, but let's face it: the human world is an unholy mess. This is not the first time it's gotten worse and it will not be the last. People will suffer from it. We need to keep our eyes open for what each of us can do. I want to talk about that here, and I hope to do that soon.

But out in the night the coyotes are howling, this week same as the last, singing the song of what they know: Life is fragile. But it's very, very hard to kill. There is a Power beyond the power of arrogant men. It is enclosed within the smallest of all seeds. It is with us.