Baby Raccoon, Revisited

True compassion takes perseverance.  This became especially evident when I rescued a stranded baby raccoon.  True compassion means listening to a subtler voice urging you forward despite the voices of fear and self preservation banging in your ear.

And when I mean self preservation, I really mean selfishness.  I had no time for a stranded baby raccoon in my life, not with two-year-old toddlers to care for and a book to publish, not to mention professional development endeavors that I signed on to do.  But everyone has the "no time" sob story, and it certainly becomes tiresome after a while, so tiresome one wonders if it is actually legit.

So it goes like this, I climb the last hill of my route in Phillips Conservation Land and I note how out of breath I am, that I am never in top notch shape to take this hill comfortably.  Josie has her ball and is content with being the lead, stopping every once and a while to put the ball at my feet and then snatch it just before I kick it.  (This Lucy-Charlie Brown scenario seems to amuse her).  I get to the top of the hill and there in the leaves beside the trail is this little gray ball of fluff.  I look closer and it's squirming, trying to swim up an incline into the woods.  It's got those tell-tale markings: raccoon eye mask.  There's mosquitoes whining about me and it, circling its tiny pill-size nose.  My heart cleaves; it is adorable.  Beyond adorable.  I ask it if it's okay.  Of course it's not okay, it's stranded and scared.  But it doesn't look sick.  It looks well-fed.  Its fur is thick and there's no blood, nor any damage that I can see.  Mother raccoons keep their dens high up in the trees, away from predators; perhaps he had a fall and is internally wounded.  I look up and see nothing conspicuous, no hole, just the verdant canopy.

When I bend to observe him more closely, coo to him to comfort him, Josie's ears perk up.  She starts to sniff the air; she's got wind of him.  So I grab her harness and latch her to the leash.  We walk back to the car.  Due to lack of time, I don't immediately go back.  My husband has to leave for work and I have the twins to care for.  Also, I remember the drowned baby squirrels in the Kleinhoffers' yard, under the big pine tree.  I was five at the time.  My brother and I had found the fallen nest and observed how one of the squirrels was twitching.  It was still alive.  So we showed our dad and he contacted a softball buddy who rehabilitated wounded or sick wildlife.  Later we went to see the now healthy squirrel in a cage.  I need to get in touch with one of these people.

I make a dozen calls to wildlife organizations and animal hospitals.  I either get no answer or a rejection; they don't take raccoons because raccoons are infamous for having rabies.  I remember that people who contract rabies get painful stomach shots.  When my sister was a toddler she attempted to feed bubblegum to a squirrel.  It bit her, not because it was aggressive, we found out later, but because squirrels don't focus on what their eating; they are too busy looking for predators.  So the squirrel bit my two-year-old sister and my parents flipped out.  We had just moved to northern New Jersey from Long Island.  The kids next door said the squirrel was actually one of four that was bottle-fed and raised by the former owners of our house.  My parents were never informed of these tame, yet ambitious squirrels, probably because the owners thought it might discourage potential buyers.  Jerks.

The doctor told my parents that in order to be sure if the squirrel had rabies or not, the brain needed to be examined.  So my parents hired a wildlife officer to shoot every squirrel he saw and for a few days, it was raining squirrels.  I don't know how many squirrels lost their heads, but somehow it was determined that my sister was fine, probably because she exhibited no symptoms whatsoever.  This is the story I have on my mind when I go back later that day to visit the baby raccoon.

Turns out he was moved.  A girl with a nose piercing that resembled devil's horns wrapped him in a sweatshirt and transported him across the woods, away from the trail.  I tell her I need to move him back because his mother will not be able to find him if he is so far away.  She leads me to him and he's backed up against a fallen tree with his hand-like paws in front of him, as if he's taking a stretch.  At this point, I'm terrified to touch him.  We guide him onto my sweatshirt and I take him to the place where I first found him earlier that morning.  I leave him behind a tree with a conspicuous black gash down the middle of it, say a prayer for him, and trek out of the woods.

The next morning, I continue to have no luck with finding a wildlife rehabilitator who is willing to take a baby raccoon.  The one person on the North Shore who does accept raccoons already has thirty.  She tells me to call animal control and have him euthanized.  I tell her I am not going to do that.  I call another animal hospital who takes in wounded or sick wildlife and the vet tech tells me adamantly not to touch the baby raccoon.  "But he's not sick," I say.  "He's plump.  And has nice fur.  No mange."  She tells me I shouldn't risk it.  But I do risk it.  I go back later that day with a makeshift syringe filled with Pedialyte and topped off with a baby bottle nipple.  I had read up on how to care for a baby raccoon; the first thing you do is hydrate it with electrolytes.

 Raccoons are just so damn cute.  Songs, poetry, books have been written about them.  In Japan in the 1970s, a cartoon called Rascal the Raccoon inspired thousands of Japanese families to buy raccoon babies and have them shipped from North America.  These families soon realized that raccoons can be very destructive and opted to release them back into the forests.  So thousands of raccoons were released into the forests of Japan where they had no predators.  They took over.  They damaged 80% of the Buddhist shrines and temples found in the forests by scratching, urinating, and defecating all over them.  Japan has since implemented a zero tolerance policy regarding raccoons and tens of thousands of them are destroyed every year.  The Buddhist monks, ironically, are in full compliance with this ruthless killing.  I can't quite wrap my mind around this idea, because Buddhists believe in compassion for all sentient beings. 

So, I go back into the woods in a raincoat and jeans carrying a bag of Pedialyte solution, a syringe with a baby bottle nipple secured with a bread bag twisty tie, and gloves.  It's raining softly and the woods is in a full burgeoning green.  I am alone and scared and praying that the mother had come back for him.  But she didn't, because there he is, curled up on my sweatshirt, his fur undulating with breath.  I circle him a few times and he rouses, backs away from me, growling.  I try to assess whether this is erratic behavior or just fear.   I have rabies on the brain.  I position the nipple near his mouth and squirt it.  This pisses him off.  I try again and get some in his mouth.  Mosquitoes are biting me mercilessly, through my jeans, on my fingers and face.  One last squirt and the nipple pops off.  It starts to rain.  He growls and I jump.  I am doing him no good whatsoever.  I leave him downtrodden, a failure.

That night I go to a dinner for adjunct professors and meet up with my friend Joanne.  I am so despondent about the baby raccoon and the fate I bequeathed him, I just mope at the table and talk to no one but her.  I share my endeavors with Joanne and she tells me her own raccoon story. I take it as a sign.

Joanne had come to know a raccoon couple who lived in an old rotted-out tree in the conservation land behind her house.  They were her neighbors.  She saw them from time to time, gathering food.  Knowing full well that raccoons were vulnerable to rabies, she tried to get a vaccine for them, but no one was willing to help her do this, because the vaccine was produced in Vermont and she was living in Massachusetts.  So the raccoons both contracted the disease.  One of them died instantly and the other came to her door, looking for her, as if he were a friend in distress.  She was powerless and had no choice to call animal control.  The officer secured the raccoon and kicked him into a cage.  "Don't worry.  It will be destroyed tonight," he said.  "It's a living being," Joanne said to me in the parking lot before we parted ways.  "Where's the compassion?"

I thought about this; I thought about the value of a raccoon's life.  Is it a precious life or is it a dispensable, subordinate life?  Most people would think it's a subordinate life and be on their way.  It has a smaller brain; it isn't as intelligent as a human.  Well, human beings can be pretty dumb, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons.  It takes a significant lack of foresight to construct even one nuclear weapon because nuclear weapons are like termites: if you've got one, there will be others and before you know it, you have an arsenal that can destroy the planet ten times over.

Speaking of intelligence, raccoons are climbing the evolutionary ladder fast.  They are naturally more intelligent than other mammals because they spend nearly a year living with their mothers; animals that spend a long period of time with their mothers are smarter.  Also, there is a link between an animal's ability to manipulate objects and its intelligence.  Their hand-like paws can manipulate food sources quite deftly; this is an evolutionary adaptation from prowling around river beds and reaching into the mud for food.  Raccoons are now successfully living in cities with Toronto being the city with the highest raccoon population.  It is a fact that city raccoons have different brain structures than country raccoons and that these city raccoons are becoming smarter.  In fact, we are making them smarter with our different security devices to deter them from food sources; they are outwitting us and debunking our contraptions.  These clever raccoons survive and pass that gene of cleverness on and the rest is history. 

I am determined not to let the raccoon die.  That night, after the dinner, I go to Pet Life in Danvers and buy a bottle feeder and kitten replacement formula, the next best thing to raccoon milk.  I tell the woman at the counter that I am going to feed a baby raccoon, but we are deathly afraid of one another.  She cheers me on.  "You can do it," she says.  "Everything's going to be all right."  She had rescued all sorts of animals, raccoons, skunks, birds.  I tell her he's plump, but the vet tech said he could be sick with rabies.  She shakes her head, as if she knows all the hullabaloo about rabies and raccoons and doesn't buy it.  "They don't get sick as much as you think."  I ask her if I could bring the raccoon to her the next day, if I am having trouble feeding him, and she gives me her hours.  "Sure," she says, "I'll get it down 'em."  I leave feeling hopeful.

The next morning I wake at 6:30, dress myself in jeans, a sweatshirt, a raincoat, boots and stock my bag with a hand towel, Pedialyte, the bottle feeder, the syringe and gloves.  I douse myself with Off and take Josie with me for moral support, packing three tennis balls to distract her.  We enter the woods and the air is musty and humid.  We walk toward the tree with the black gash and when we are close, I tie up Josie and leave her with her balls.  I carry my bag over to the raccoon, who is there again, curled up on my sweatshirt.  I put the bottle of milk near his nose, and he perks up.  I wrap him in the hand towel and take him in my hands and offer him the milk.  He coos and chirps.  He tries to grasp the bottle with his hands.  At one point, he even purrs.  I can feel his feisty heart thumping between my fingers; he is light, barely a pound.  It is just like holding a kitten, a thing with paper bones and air for muscles.  But that thumping heart, it tells me he wants to live.  I get some milk down him and it starts to rain, so I pack him into the reusable shopping bag with the towel and sweatshirt and take him home.

I found a wildlife rehabilitator in Wrenthan through Tufts Wildlife Clinic.  These people are hardcore animal lovers, real Saint Francis types.  He's doing fine now, I hear, and nursing like a champ.

I'm not sure where this love for animals comes from; perhaps my paternal grandmother, who once found a baby bird and nursed it back to health by feeding it spaghetti and meatballs.  Or perhaps I've just had my fill of suffering.  Thich Nhat Hanh says "suffering is always there, around us and inside us, and we have to find ways that alleviate the suffering and transform it into well-being and peace."  In this world where suffering, like water, is the path of least resistance, I want to be the pump.  You don't see water flowing uphill; it flows downhill.  In order for water to flow uphill, you need to add energy, a pump.  This will get the water to people on higher ground.  In order to combat suffering, you need a spiritual pump; you need to exert your own time and energy to bring well-being.

The Brain is Wider Than the Sky

I am still having unsettling dreams.  In these dreams, I become characters, some of them I have consciously created beforehand, others were spur of the moment, a persona-du-jour of my subconscious.  One night, I was a construction worker at a site and the ceiling fell on me.  I was the man and then I was not the man; I was an observer from above watching the doctors frenetically working to repair the mangled body.  I can pinpoint the moment before the ceiling fell; it was like a scene in a movie.  Will I feel it? I ask someone off camera.  Will I feel it when it crushes my spine?  No, you will not feel it, the obscured director says.  The ceiling falls.  The body is pulled from the rubble.  The doctors rush to the scene.  Why do I need to become the man with the mangled body?  What is it that I want to know?

I use my imagination to go there, to the unthinkable.  I plunge the knife into a lover's heart.  I plunge the knife into my own heart.  It is a thought, lightning fast.  But I am only imagining what I have heard on the news or saw on the television.  It is a scene from somewhere else and has nothing the do with me; I have no desire to kill anyone or anything. 

Boredom has been the impetus to all of my makeshift horrors, and I am speaking here more of an ennui.  I believe these disturbing and perplexing thoughts are jolts to my consciousness, to wake myself up.  So sitting on the beach one Sunday, I think of these mind states, of boredom, of imagination, and I think of Dickinson's poem, The Brain is Wider Than the Sky:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound— 


I am not my mind.  I am the "you" beside, as Dickinson says.  And the brain is wide and deep and it contains storms and sunny days and currents and trenches and self-illuminating fish that troll the depths.  And the mind is a god itself, deciding this and that, creating this, destroying that, loving, hating, like a mini Zeus or a compact Athena.  But is the mind The God?  Like it or not, it is our god, and temperamental at best.

Buddhists speak of this temperamental inner god and recognizing it for what it is: a drama queen.  There is a place inside all of us where equanimity lies.  And this equanimity has more to do with life and death, than anything else we've known.

A Compilation of Ideas That Have Since Passed

I write this blog to keep track of the ideas that in one way or another change my life for the better.  It is also a place to be spontaneously creative and nonjudgmental.  But lately I've tried to write and the inner critic - that reptilian part of the brain - has shunted my ideas.  No, that's not good enough, no that's solipsism, no that's too personal, no, no, no.  So fuck that; I'm going to catch those evasive fish, despite the Godzillas in my head.

Let's start with the Shamanic journeys.  First let me say I am not sure if these are indeed spiritual journeys with telltale guides and oracles.  I know my imagination and its tricks.  But I shall keep these "emergences" here, in this trove, and tell their stories nonetheless because their effects on me were positive.

(Tangent:  Regarding the dreamlike images of the dead...are they visitations or reflections, and does it matter?  I think the key word is emergences because the images quite literally bloomed or emerged inside my head.  Again, I need to reiterate my belief here of archetypes and symbols, of images and mind ghosts: if DNA is the cell's way of communicating with the environment, then the archetypes/symbols/images might very well be the spirit's way of communicating with the mind.)

I am a lover.  I love deeply.  I have recognized that same love in Walt Whitman (clear and sweet is my soul ...and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul).  I long to hear the voices of those who have left me; I long to see the familiar shape of their bodies and faces, watch their mouths laugh.  (I tend to feel isolated; I have a brain with deep trenches).  So...I journeyed to find those people who have moved on in one way or another and I found them in the valley of blossoms, a world in eternal half light.  And they were indeed there, under the trees, with countenances I remember, with clothes too, I remember.  My father in his office garb, a capped pen in his pocket-- I felt the pinch of his fingers on my elbow and I threw my arms about his thick neck.  My aunt was there in bell bottom jeans and bangs, my grandmother in a long, ethereal gown.  Their message to me...we're always here, in this place.  We still know you and you, us. 

The second time I journeyed, I was a member of a procession moving through the valley.  I saw footprints in the mud, my own foot, Ralphie's pawprints.  The procession sought the flatlands where a fire could be tended, a focal point for dancing and singing.  A deer appeared then, nimble-footed and graceful; she danced and in her doe eyes, the fire danced.  The leader handed me a piece of the fire and a flame burst from my palms (before it had been a flock of birds).  This was the symbol for creativity, a constructive and destructive force.  I accepted it hesitantly, and as I did so, was yanked backward into the sky by a flock of crows.

Both journeys were products of my imagination, yes.  Some of it was contrived, yes.  What was not contrived was the eradication of my loneliness.  I felt genuinely accompanied.

Last week, I saw my first ovenbird.  I did not know this small, sweet choirmaster from his song.  I had to chase him into the wood, where he rustled among the leaves, observe the stripe of auburn at his crown and his speckled breast, then look him up in Audubon.  What an illustrious song; what a lovely gift.  I remembered Frost had written a poem about him:

The Oven Bird

By Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The thing diminished is now winter.  The thing diminished is the school semester, and it saddens me.  Oh the swan song of the oven bird is a beautiful thing.  It is the song of time passing.

I awoke last Sunday to Christ's face impressed in the shadows and highlights of my suede bedroom curtain.  I could not not see him.  It was the face of the crucified Christ, twisted and hollow, the face of the dead Christ.  Oh great, I thought to myself what does this mean?  Do you have something to tell me?  No answer.  There is never any answer, at least one that comes definitely and immediately.  I told my meditation teacher this: I suffered for them, my children.  All my ignorance, my illusions, for their sakes.  I don't mean to sound like a martyr, but there's got to be a purpose other than my own painful enlightenment.  O the suffering of middle youth.  I'll recognize the signs; I'll try to make it right, because as a mother, that's what I do.                                                                                                          

Easter Thoughts

Alleluia!  Mary, Light burst
from your untouched
womb like a flower
on the far side
of death.  The world tree
is blossoming.  Two
realms are becoming one.
Alleluia.

- Hildegard of Bingen, Hymn

Tam Marin Fowles of Hope in the Heart, an organization that promotes peace and compassion, talks about that moment when darkness is first infiltrated, when the a pinhole develops in one's consciousness to let in new, constructive ideas.  We recognize this as hope, in its truest form, and Martin Fowles and her crew aim to create a library of images of hope to help people overcome adversity and live richer lives.  I have been thinking about this pinhole moment when enlightenment occurs; I've been trying to pinpoint how it occurs and what I've come up with is this: it is an alleluia moment, a mini Easter, a resurrection of spirit that is kindled within the hearth of compassion.  Here is a sample image:

Credit: Hope in the Heart at http://hopeintheheart.org

The Bridge to Shamanism and Other Archetypes

Last year at this time, a dove made a nest in the evergreen tree outside my kitchen window.  This coincided with a burgeoning depression and seeing that dove land on the sideview mirror of my truck in the mornings gave me hope.  When another dove landed on the fire escape railing outside my therapist's office while I was in the midst of dissecting my demons, it seemed more than a coincidence.  When it happened again for a second visit, I started to suspect something was up.

The portal to shamanism for me was meditation.  During the first session, I listened to the drum beat, and my feet sank into the earth, but it was nothing like being buried alive.  It was a trap door to my unconscious and the myths and archetypes that live there.  I touched down somewhere in the Salem Woods, where I used to roam with my dog, Ralphie, and that's just who showed up to greet me.  I thought about a kinder, more nurturing god then.  Crows coagulated around me and the light in the sky was squashed by gray clouds, but it was nothing ominous.  I felt at home.

Shamanism began with the primitive hunting people; their work can be found in caves in France, drawings that depict a person wearing an animal mask, dancing joyously in front of a troop of animals.  The shaman was drawn with an erect penis--an emblem of desire and passion: he was the animal master in charge of sending and receiving animal souls.  He sent them to the tribe to be hunted and killed, then raised them up to linger in the underworld.  It is the first religion we know of.

For the second journey, I touched down in Sedona, at a chapel in the hills.  I had visited this place on a cross country trip with my brother and mother.  Ralphie greeted me again, only this time he was panting anxiously.  What's the matter old boy?  I asked.  I followed him down to a room excavated in rock and bones; he lay down on the cool dirt floor.  I went to sit in one of the pews to pray and noticed an altar at the front with candles burning.  After a few moments, Ralphie got up and went toward the altar and I followed him.  My father was sitting there behind the altar in the dark, and he looked worried.  What?  I asked him.  Anything not of the Church is of the devil, he said. 

I left my father and followed Ralphie, who was still panting anxiously.  He lay down a second time to rest and shed his coat.  There before me stood a nobleman-- at least that's what I interpreted him to be-- a man with a robe and a papal tiara.  The nobleman turned into a copper statue of a robed figure with birds around his head.  The drum stopped beating and I left, apprehensive.  Is this shamanism or is my imagination's prowess getting the best of me again?  And when the hell am I going to stop caring what my parents think?

That night, I had a dream I was in my parents' basement with their friends, the Schmidts.  I told them our house was haunted and proved it by sitting cross-legged on the floor and allowing myself to be pushed from one room to another by an invisible force.  It was a queer thing to be manipulated like that, to be powerless for a few moments; I felt as if I temporarily blacked out.  Afterward, I went upstairs to tell my mother.  It's the shamanism, she said.  You called them into this house with that devil magic of yours.  And then my mother started to levitate and move across the room as if she were flying.  I chased her around the dining room  (which was not our dining room at all, but one from a catalog or maybe a movie) shouting into her face, GET OUT!  The words were difficult to say, and somewhat jumbled, as if I were pushing them through water.  I was trying to exorcise the fiend from her.  And that's just how I woke myself up, shouting GET OUT!  

Later that day I told my mother about the dream.  Well I don't believe any of that Native American spirituality is of the devil, she said.  Those people were healers.  And with this, I felt reconciled.

Is there a meaning to this story?  I looked through pictures of my trip to the chapel and found the green copper statue; it was an artistic interpretation of Saint Francis, patron saint of animals.  Saint Francis is the perfect bridge from Catholicism to shamanism.

I researched Saint Francis online and found the story of the wolf of Gubbio.  In the town of Gubbio, Italy, during the time Saint Francis lived, a wolf was eating the townspeople's livestock.  When the mayor of the town sent guards to slay the wolf, he killed two of them and wounded the third.  The mayor asked Saint Francis to go to the wolf and solve the problem.  Saint Francis went into the forest; when he came upon the wolf, he made the sign of the cross and the wolf cowered at his feet.  When asked by the saint why he was killing livestock and men, he told him he was wounded and his pack abandoned him.  He preferred to eat deer, but they were too quick for him; livestock were easier to kill.  What was he supposed to do?  He was hungry.  He ordinarily left men alone, but when the two guards attacked him, he let his instincts take over.  Saint Francis ultimately made a deal with the wolf and the townspeople: the townspeople were to feed the wolf and the wolf, in turn, would protect the town.  And peace was made.

So here we have a story within a story.  The dove, Saint Francis, the wolf, even the erect penis, all have secondary meanings.  The dove is the peace I longed for during my depression: it was an oracular consciousness of sorts.  If nature communicates with the the body's DNA through natural selection, then the divine --spirituality--communicates with the mind through archetypes.  The dove is an archetype, a universally-known model of peace.  Saint Francis is an archetype, the Catholic model for shamanism, the wolf is an archetype, symbolizing all that we interpret as evil is just misunderstood.  And the penis, well the penis represents rapture, what we feel when we are closest to nature.

The Art of Untying a Knot

You've seen them, knots, tight like a fist, complicated, seemingly impenetrable.  They tie boats to docks, keep hot air balloons from floating away.  They can be useful and yet they can be a nuisance as well.  When you touch them they feel as stiff as oak tree bark and you wonder how such a thing could possibly become undone.  Knots form in the mind as well.  Thich Nhat Hahn talks about such knots  in his book Peace Is Every Step.  Knots are "internal formations," problems our minds circulate around in the absence of clear understanding.

For instance, a person experiencing panic attacks at work may conjure up a hundred different medical diagnoses when the real issue is she is in the wrong career.  Her knot is the dissatisfaction with her job, and these other ideas are adding to the problem, making it more of a tangle.  TNH says of knots:

<They> need our full attention as soon as they manifest, while they are still weak, so that the work of transformation is easy.  If we do not untie our knots when they form, they will grow tighter and stronger.  Our conscious, reasoning mind knows that negative feelings such as anger, fear, and regret are not wholly acceptable to ourselves or society, so it finds ways to repress them, to push them into remote areas of our consciousness in order to forget them. 

If the person with the panic attacks is mindful, she might take some time off to let the underlying issue rise to the surface.  If she doesn't and continues to push until her nerves start to unravel, she might make that knot even tighter and create a bigger problem for herself: perhaps she might develop an ulcer or descend into a depression.  TNH says "our internal formations are always looking for ways to manifest as destructive images, feelings, thoughts, words, or behavior."

Lately I've been having anxious dreams; it's as if my younger, knottier self is governing my nighttime state of mind.  In one dream I am wandering the halls of my high school (which isn't really the high school I attended, but a surreal place with an Olympic size pool and a food court) looking for my trigonometry class.  The bell has already rung and every door is shut; I am not only lost but late.  In another, I am in the backseat of my father's car; my brother is in the front seat.  We are driving along one of those long bridges in Florida that connects a chain of islands.  In one moment I am looking down to the aqua marine water below and the white sand, in the next, I am looking through the windshield into the belly of a tsunami wave.

I told a friend about the dream of the wave and she said, "dive through it and come out the other side."  And I thought of Good Harbor Beach and the waves there, how in late July, they can be quite intimidating.  You watch other people do it, dive into that smooth place at the nape of the wave and blip out the other side.  They make it look so easy.  But with every wave, there is that lack of faith, that it will pummel you.  When I was younger, I was obsessed with the wave of anxiety inside me, with bodily sensations, tightness, fear and dread.  I thought of failure and death a lot and had very little faith in anything.  I tried therapy, but talking made me feel worse.  I tried drugs, crystals, alternative medicines.  I left my job as an engineer and became a catering waitress.  I dated the wrong men and  had very little confidence.  I wrote one thousand and one pages of terrible prose.  With every decision I made, I tied my knots even tighter.

But when you're young and naive, taut, convoluted knots are part of the journey.  In your twenties, your untied knots link with others' untied knots forming long chains of pain.  When you're older, you don't want to deal with this headache anymore.  You want to untie those knots as soon as possible.

Recently, I read an article in the Chicago Tribune about untying knots.  The journalist, William Hageman, interviewed a knot researcher and historian, Des Pawson, who runs the Museum of Knots and Sailor's Ropework in England.  He says of knots, "try pushing some slack into the knot" and "once you get some movement there's light at the end of the tunnel."

One would think this is an intuitive thing, pushing slack into a knot.

Well, slack is the opposite of tension.  Of stress.  Slack involves a sort of finesse, a confidence.  It might involve a tool or two and it most definitely involves compassion.  In untying a mind knot, one must be compassion with oneself and/or seek out compassionate persons.  For me, this person is my meditation teacher, who, through the mechanism of compassion and guided meditation, saved me from my own erroneous belief system.  I told her I wanted not to tie (tight) knots in my mind any longer.  I wanted to dive through the belly of the wave.  Whatever is churning in my unconscious, I want to identify it and be done with it.  I want to illuminate it with understanding and not obfuscate the situation with over-thinking.  Her advice was simple and complicated at the same time.  She said, "trust yourself" and "practice mindfulness." 

Here is the landscape: it is stark and gray, the trees are stiff, lifeless veins, the road is powdered with salt, the crows are haunts that ramble on, the snow has turned to old ice caked with sediment.  It is cold, still, but in the morning, the air is alive with light and the birds are drunk with spring.  I wake early in the morning from a jolt.  It has all the signs of last year's depression, but I've untied that knot.  Here is my blessed breath in a small box around my mouth; this is my sacristy.  TNH claims it is the Holy Spirit, (spirit meaning breath); God breathes through us.  This is why it is a sacred thing, to acknowledge the breath.  To be mindful.  It falls away in a few moments, the illusions, the knots, the waves, and there is nothing but the me I have always known, in stillness.

Reflections on Deviants and Virtues in Literature and Art

I was teaching a World Literature class one semester when a student raised his hand and asked why the stories we were reading were so depressing.  He seemed agitated by this, and I did my best to answer his question.  “Because there is a lot of stuff in sorrow and suffering.  Happiness is pretty straight forward.”  It was a stock, oversimplified answer and from the expression on his face, it seemed not to suffice, but we dropped the topic nonetheless.  Now some years later, I’m organizing the syllabus for my Intro to Lit class and I am having the same reaction.  This has me thinking of how art and literature are generated and the state of the ethos that receives them.

            It could be the snow, the cold, the winter doldrums, cabin fever, rendering me particularly impressionable.  Perhaps these benchmarks of literature (think: The Story of an Hour, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Lottery, Madame Savage) are all too potent to be read together when in the throes of a winter semester.  Most of these model stories were written during the late nineteenth, early twentieth century when there was a need for a good long wake up call from the facades of propriety.  But these days we’re constantly in the throes of human calamity and dysfunction; it’s lurking on every device we have access to.

            In an art magazine I bought for a friend, there was a painting of a woman carving out her own viscera a la grand guignol.  Cathartic?  Perhaps if one has dyspepsia.  One has to wonder how a piece like this would be received: whether it would be novel and useful to a society over-staturated with gore.  Would it promote contemplation or desensitization?  And then there’s that picture of a young Adam Lanza dressed in camouflage with rounds of ammunition draped across his toddler legs.  The image is just as revolting as the grand guignol painting, but it is also heartbreaking.  We reached a new low with the Newtown tragedy; it is an indicator of a particular rampant mental lethargy and level of dysfunction in our society.

            I understand that artists and writers create art for personal reasons and I don’t want to dictate what they should and should not create.  What I am saying is that we need to be mindful of what we are releasing to the public and how it might contribute to this already dire ethos.

            This brought my thinking to the Renaissance and how, perhaps, we could use one right about now.  Just as the artists and writers of the Renaissance chose to revive Western Europe from its mental lethargy with ancient Greek and Roman texts on humanism, so too can we emulate particular works and redress our seemingly dire culture with new thought.  I’ve been compiling a list of works with the theme of compassion  because I believe it to be one of the most crucial of virtues, one whose power has been sadly underestimated.

            Just how, exactly does the mechanism of compassion work in literature, for instance?  Stories can inspire us. The writer presents a round, dynamic character with whom the reader can sympathize and draws forth the virtue through her actions and thoughts.  For example, the character Kitty Fane in The Painted Veil by William Somerset Maugham.  When we are first introduced to Kitty she is having an affair with a local politician.  Upon discovering the affair, Kitty’s seemingly stoic, intellectual husband Walter blackmails her into accompanying him to a cholera-infested village in China for her penance.  Here Kitty is transformed by witnessing her husband’s tireless efforts to better the lives of others and experiences the emergence of her own compassionate tendencies when she volunteers at a convent school.  She transforms from a shallow, immature woman to a model human being; one a reader can aspire to be.  A few months ago I had watched the movie version of The Painted Veil and revisited Kitty’s transformation.  My reaction was none other than relief; it is always a gamble as to whether someone will be open and aware to the good in themselves and the world and when one chooses it, it’s someone to root for.  And that’s what Kitty had brought out in me, relief and rooting.

            A second way the mechanism of compassion can work in literature is more personal.  I was about seventeen when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in an AP English class and saw myself in the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive boy vulnerable to the glorious and treacherous aspects of the Catholic Church.  I don’t recall any big sin prodding me toward the flames of Hell as Stephen had prodding him, but I knew I was similarly impressionable and imaginative and aware of the Church’s message: Be Good or Else.  I shared that yolk of guilt and shame when the conscientious Stephen bore the blows of the Fire and Brimstone Sermon given by the preacher:

The next day brought death and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair.  The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul.  He suffered its agony.  He felt the death-chill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs…No help!  No help!

            During a depression in high school, I had felt similar pangs of existential worry: No help!  No help!  The above paragraph depicts an impressionable and creative mind turning on itself; during my depression, I experienced just that.  Here is an example of empathy at its best, when a reader and writer (through the persona of character) commune over an idea and/or emotion.  One reads and one is not alone; one recognizes the suffering in another.  The alleviation of that suffering is compassion due not only to this “intimacy”, but also through any answer that may be presented.  Fallibility, according to Joyce, was part of artistic maturation:

            A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea.  She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird...Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.  Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call.  To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!  A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.  On and on and on and on!

            Stephen’s “epiphany” is the realization of his authentic self- the artist.  It was my realization as well, ultimately, and I had started to peel away at the skins of my suffering.  In this way Joyce’s masterpiece is an act of compassion.  Now, I can’t know if Joyce intended to be compassionate by writing A Portrait.  But he presented the empathetic arena in which I might find compassion for myself.

            The Renaissance had the printing press; today we have the Internet.  We have the ability to flash mob on cue, tweet on command, transmit a tome in the blink of an eye.  It comes down to this: do we assemble in the name of the good and think more critically of conflict, identifying more positive outcomes or do we grab that low-hanging fruit?  In this broken and deluded world, we need compassion.  We’ve always needed compassion.