The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way—a way that a government or agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.
—Wendell Berry
If we are to be properly humble in our use of the world, we need places we do not use at all. We need the experience of leaving something alone. We need places that we forbear to change, or influence by our presence, or impose on even by our understanding; places that we accept as influences upon us, not the other way around, that we enter with the sense, the pleasure, of having nothing to do there; places that we must enter in a kind of cultural nakedness, without comfort or tools, to submit rather than to conquer. We need what other ages would’ve called sacred groves. We need groves, anyhow, that we would treat as if they were sacred—in order, perhaps, to perceive their sanctity.
—Wendell Berry
You will see how we bear / children in ruins.
—Wislawa Szymborska
The fox stops, half turns, half stays. The way a fox will, being two things at once and daring both. Mottled coat, those delicate fairy tale feet, one poised as if to point the way, a way for me to follow. As if to say I know another shapeshifter when I see one. Those dark deep eyes which never leave the forest which carry trees with them, in them. I let the curtain fall closed. Walk my bare feet back to the kitchen. The kettle whistles. A train passes. Oh, the welcoming call of the train whistle waking a world, setting the air a-hum. Iron wheels chugging east, urging, reminding, breathe, keep moving on and on and on. Oh, the sound of that train whistle fading in the west, warning, times a-wasting, work, play, love, echoing its call all the way back to a simpler symphony, soft rain whispering, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s all okay. Ease. Reprieve. All of it reminding me I am alive and still of this world. This world that slaughters children in the streets. All the Palestinian children, Ukrainian children, Vietnamese, Sudanese, children, children, children, dead in the streets. While I, old woman that I am, lived on. And now this latest child. Countable blocks, walkable, from my own backyard. A thirteen-year-old with a pellet gun, made, by some unscrupulous manufacturer, to look like a Glock. What does a Glock look like? And why should a thirteen-year-old know? And the big policeman who chased, tackled, punched, and then, they say, fearing for his life from the gun he did not know was not the real thing, shot the boy dead with a bullet into his small chest. While I slept. With birds nesting in the trees. And the bunny tucked under the front stoop steps. This world. That we’ve lost.
If we ever held it.
Split apart, it seems, at its seams.
Those old ties, family, home, community, land, church, sundered.
The binding of mattering.
When my husband left, just when the kids were grown, and we had before us all that time to be together, just us, to see some places, to come home, I felt as if my skin had failed. That my veins and organs, the flesh of me, was floating, without anything to hold it together. Just the way the world feels now.
Everything drifting off.
Away.
Change, I know, is part of life. If it weren’t there would be no life. Stasis surely equals death, sooner or later. I don’t want to be one of those old women yearning for youth, the way things were, whining about today, I decide, and pour the rest of my coffee down the drain. Rinse out the breakfast dishes and stack them in the rack.
I stretch and shower and dress. Deliberately.
Somewhere in its wanderings my mind has made a decision.
It has decided to do….
—Ruth Ann Dandrea, Eckleburg No. 22
Purchase Eckleburg No. 22
