keeping abreast | keeping a breast

Do you remember, those first weeks and months of the pandemic, the examples of nature – the animals really – reclaiming their spaces? The half-joking comment always attached to it, “nature is healing, we are the virus.”

The juvenile mountain lion wandering a sidewalk in an empty San Francisco neighborhood. Bats roosting for the first time in over 20 years at Timpanogos Cave National Monument in Utah. Sea turtles returning to the Greek Isles. Bison and bears remembering that their old migratory corridors were though now-abandoned parking lots and picnic areas. With cleaner air and more insects to eat, swifts laid more eggs in their clutches. After traffic across the north Atlantic quieted to nothing, right whales could hear each other again, singing across ocean basins to their cousins, not needing to pause and let a ship pass by. Javelinas took up on street corners in Phoenix. Mountain goats wandered down from their high altitudes into Welsh cities. Water quality improved around some coral reefs, with snorkeler fins gone and no sediment getting kicked up. So did the abundance and diversity of fish. Sparrows could sing more quietly, expend less energy, live longer lives.

Yet, it wasn’t all this positive. We humans having created a real mess of moving species from one place to the next, feeding them, overharvesting them because our food systems are brittle, disrupting the natural order of things in our attempt to control the natural order of things, to have power over, to forget that ultimately, we, too, are animals. In a kingdom that wasn’t created for us, depending on what you believe, but that we keep trying to create for us. We keep trying to burn it, shape it, mold it, slash it, cut it, raze it, bomb it, dig it. We now have fire storms, thunder snow, extreme heat, and atmospheric rivers alongside dry riverbeds, expanding deserts, snowless mountain caps, and thinning ice.

My dream for all those winged, feathered, furred, finned, scaled, and legged animals is to go. To outrun us. To outlast us. To outsmart us. Like the camouflage of the cuttlefish, projecting their millions of neurons onto expandable pixels in their skin, fading from visual definition and discernment into the depths of the rocky sea bottom. Or the leafy sea dragon wrapping itself around the vivid green seagrass, gently, casually, swaying as one being in the ocean current. The snow lotus up in the sky, nestled among the clouds, thin air and ice of the Himalayas, muting its brightness to live another day. The eyelash leaf-tailed gecko merging into the tree trunks of Madagascar. The sand crab. The ghost mantis. The stone flounder. The snowy owl. The mossy frog. The leaf katydid.

I want you to take inspiration from them all.

To adapt.

To survive.

To take flight, in unison.

No time to look back.

I just want to say go. Go fast. Go while you still can.

I heard the word awakening. It sounds like a warm hug, soft blanket, restful, gentle. Being jolted awake though is the same thing as awakening, if you think about it. The end state the same.

What I wouldn’t give to awaken. No set time but rather, when my body was fully rested. The cells gone through their complete loops of repair, rejuvenate, rebuild, rework, rewire, regard. They’re fully quenched. Drinking from the cup of a steady oxygenated breath, a cortisol leveled, a body stilled.

The cobwebs of the day, week, month, year, life dusted out of the dark corners of my mind. Processed, filed away after a synapse or four makes meaning out of them, makes a story that sticks, makes the dreamer murmur quietly in profound awe

at the speed of light,

at the geranium seed unfurling to the heavens stretching its roots to the earth’s core,

at her first breath,

at his last breath,

at the moment the asteroid cratered the moon.

In this moment of more and race and critique and hustle and responsibility and perfection and mobs and loneliness…

Don’t you just want to crawl into your own sleep? Nestle there, in the hollows surrounded by soft green moss atop decaying redwoods, being rocked in the blue of the sky, the blue of the night, the blue of your soul.

Where time isn’t measured in any clock but, rather, the place you’re at on the curve of the earth. The angle it bends towards the sun. The ice. Where whole peoples and cultures emerged on the head of a pin, their stories etched on cave walls, in footsteps buried below layers of leaves, tons of clam shells, in tiers of canyons.

This poem, it’s about awakening.

To awaken though needs rest.

The unsatisfying

Lack of closure

That comes from

Being killed in an instant

Heart attack

Brain aneurysm

Car crash

Catastrophe

Leaving without saying goodbye

So many things unsaid, undone, unknown

But I’ve seen the other side of this

The long goodbye

Over years, nearly a decade

The daily murmurings and gratitudes shared

crescendos approaching this procedure or that chemo regimen

The what-you-mean-to-me letters written and read just in case

The long, drawn-out hugs before driving to the airport and at the airport

The wave and nod back over my shoulder, this time my left shoulder, in three months my right shoulder

The one dark afternoon snuggled up hearing about his wishes for me

The marathon of a life with disease that toys with being fast growing and slow growing all in the same day

So many things said, done, known

And, to have learned, it’s never enough

There’s always more

We always want more

What happens when your friends live

When they manage to eek out time, to create stories from the wreckage rather than succumb to the wreck

This being after

When you rush in

Show up

Deploy, rapidly, the wartime analogies

Gather your troops

March into battle

Fight, fight fight

In the form of care packages of kleenaxes and cozy socks, long phone calls of listening, furious text exchanges and weekly hand-written letters, the mealtrain, maybe even a trip across the county, a weekend together to getaway, to escape, to misplace and disremember and ignore the wreck

If even for an hour, a moment, a breath

Taking turns on the merry-go-round of supporting in, doing the shift work of living in our mutuality

Until the energy dampens, fatigue sets in, even for a moment

There’s the stepping back and watching

And, sometimes, stepping back further

Taking a break, letting your own life’s foibles and dips fill in the space

For who can sustain this marathon?

Who has the endurance?

But the patient

The person

The one without a choice

It doesn’t feel fair to say that caregiving, being a lifeline, being a friend, is exhausting

But it is

And now, it is easy to forget

Because there are so many of them

So many friends who have this and that, that and this

One too many crises

And besides, we all breathe differently

We are all half-destroyed instruments anyway

Finding the bits and pieces left from our brokenness

Each one of us carrying our brokenness and that of the world within us

Reaching out through the blue, green and black air

With hands that endeavor to suture and stitch ourselves back into a mind and body

As we wait, hope, pray, dance, do

Until, then, the breakthrough happens

A shimmer, a glimpse of hope

If it’s a promising new treatment, durable weight gain, stable housing, a restraining order, whatever the “it” is when the metaphorical city on the hill arrives

And gives more time

More living

More life

Then what?

What is in the long haul of showing up?

What happens when your friends live?

You read the history of prey

Scattered about

The silt and sand of a slot canyon

Stacks of leaves sculpted by the force of water

From when the spring rains come through with a velocity that

Is louder than a freight train

Slippery sandstone

Painted the colors of sunset

Like a Georgia O’Keefe original

Craggy towers

Layers of history, of oceans, of lava

sandwiching sun, heat, and altitude

A hip joint of an elk, laid bare on the wash

The hip bone connected in a lock and key to the thigh bone

Still able to move, back and forth

Harkening back to an elegance

that must be akin to freedom

bounding over this landscape

The threads of sinew now curling away from the bone

Dancing in the winds at 5000 feet

Walking quietly now among the smoothened river stones

And the two of them, ahead of us on the trail

As it curves right, almost out of our view

Gasp in for air and grab each other’s arms

Backing up slowly

My knees weaken, heart starts racing as they yell

Stop!

And I think

Are we next

What bones and dust will be left

In the high desert sun

For others to stumble upon and touch with delicate, curious hands

Wondering at what wildness ran out

It was not the mountain lion

I had immediately envisioned

Padding down the canyon with confidence or

Curled up in a patch of sun

Tail flicking, casually, waiting

It was instead a gopher snake, no rattle

Thick, black and silver stripes

Eyes alert

Stretching itself across the trail

Body languid

Awakening after a long winter

Flicking its tongue in and out

Tasting the air

Feeling the wind

In the end

Wondering if the worst is almost over

The sand saturated with enough history

For today

For ever

It’s a nagging kind of beauty, when I walk outside of the UCSF medical building, having taken the elevator down from the adult cancer center, having walked out of the surgeon appointment, having been given more decisions and the news of more surgeries, having been asked if I was an Olympic-level rower or maybe a climber, because how else can someone’s implant flip onto itself spontaneously, buried under the pec muscle, threaded with part of the latissimus muscle and a football-shaped-flap of tissue from my back, cradled by cadaver skin for so many years now as my chest rose and fell a million times over, as I flew on planes and stopped medications and buried my father and lived through a pandemic and brought a child into this world and started at the beginning, started over, again and again.

The rains had stopped, taking their darkness further east. And now, over me, those dramatic swollen clouds coming in from the northwest, the warmth of sunshine bolting through the empty spaces, hitting my face.

A woman complimented my plaid winter jacket as I stood there, still.

Looking up at the sky.

Looking around.

People – all the people – whole selves, half selves, former selves, future-unwritten selves – coming and going, on wheels, with canes, with oxygen, in casts, me, on two feet today.

The nagging kind of beauty that comes when I realize that darkness is temporary and that I should welcome it, all of it.

What is it about rocks

That draws us in

Rock collections, pet rocks, lucky rocks, rock skipping

Stones so smooth

As we turn them over in our pockets

Thumb to palm to fingers and back again

Hold them up to the light to see their colors change

Flecks of wonder

Of other universes

Lucky talisman

An object to remember someone or something or some time or some place by

A story

An origin

I think of all the ways

That rocks got their start

Have yet to get their start

As stars

As earth

As fault lines

As mountains

As volcanos

As hydrothermal vents

As avalanches

As floods

As rivers

As streams

As the moon pulls

As tides

As waves

As space

As time

As pressure

As young

As old

As dust

Through the years

The wear and tear of living

Smoothing out our hard edges

We tumbled down too

Maybe from the heavens

We rose up too

Maybe from the belly of the earth

A rock, after all

How many things do I bury without even a song, rather, instead, moving forward, moving away, moving on, moving?

A glimmer of hope, passed.

A bubble-gum-pink camellia blossom, overflowing onto itself, taken down to the ground by the weight of its own beauty.

A tear, running down my left cheek.

A reason to turn left.

A missing sock.

A ladybug, upside down in the windowsill, the sun’s heat quickly turning it to dust.

A family heirloom, shattered.

A species of grasshopper, extinct.

A treatment, failed.

A glass of water, spilled, in a drought.

A language disappeared along with its speakers and a whole way of relating to, understanding the world.

A fallen leaf at the end of its time on the mother tree.

A fire in my belly, extinguished.

A wetland, receding.

A sob, swallowed, as I look in my rearview mirror at her standing on the curb.

A daughter, never again being an infant.

Why don’t I sing to lift up, to give voice to my sorrow?

Why don’t I sing aloud my grief at the breaking as I go?

What if at the end of the day, I don’t want to cradle her for extra minutes

What if I want her to be independent, to fall asleep on her own, to somehow, simply, not need me, even as her mother

What if instead I want to go downstairs, get the day set for tomorrow, right down to the shoes and socks and washed lunchbox repacked in the fridge, ease the friction of the early mornings, and put the kitchen to bed for the night

What if instead I fold the piles of clothes, staring at my reflection in the window, my mind finding quiet in the soft repetition

What if instead I read post after post, screaming about the atrocities on children, innocents, bearing witness through a warm device that fits in the palm of my hands, until it is out of its batteries

What if instead of heading to bed to wrap myself in a novel or find more ways to avoid the sleep I promised myself would come earlier on this particular night, I’d open my laptop, wrap up the thing that was hanging over me at work, requiring more than two brain cells rubbed together, not a quick-just-jotting-off-kind-of-reply, a deep thinking that demands sustained attention, somehow, through bleary eyes

What if instead I come back upstairs after a few hours, use the regular toothbrush because the fancy electric toothbrush would take the full 2 minutes I didn’t have in me, and crawl into bed

What if I read that if you immediately fell asleep when getting into bed, it is clear you’re overtired, that it should take a full 15 mins to fall asleep if you are getting the sleep your body needs

What if I simply wanted more time for me

What if this is the days and months that turn into years then decades

What if this is the beautiful trudging, the devastating gallop, the despair of reminiscence, the longing for the humdrums of someone else’s childhood

What if of time

When my time is now, full well likely, less than the time I have already been here

What will be left of the miracle of the connection made cradling her in my arms

What if instead those arms are tired

What if instead they are heavy with regret

What if at the end of the day, I only want to cradle her for extra minutes

We were all three in our bed

Sunday night

The booms

Blasts up into the dark sky

Lighting up our room in their pulses

At

10pm

11pm

2am

3am

I was exhausted

Wishing they would stop

Angry

About ready to walk up and down the block yelling

At everything

And everyone

She was scared

The sporadic nature of these loud sounds

Their unpredictability

The way they rattled the windows

Then she became enthralled

When I told her

They were celebrating

Some people make noise when they are joyful

That feeling lasted for a few minutes

Until the next jarring sound

She doubled-down in her fear

I told her that she’s inside

She’s safe

We’re with her

We’ll take care of her

And then it gripped me

Thinking

Of the families

Halfway around the world

Exhausted

Weary

Holding each other through the night

As the booms and blasts go

On

And on

Overhead

The stories that the moms and dads and aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and brothers and sisters tell the little ones

While the sky rains light

Who do they say is celebrating?

When the final firework went off at 3am

She was alert

She grabbed both my cheeks in her small hands

And said

In a whisper

To the tear on my face

I’m safe