A Great Sadness

I woke up with it one recent morning, this sadness. Like the innocent but Godly man in Arthur Miller's The Crucible who is being executed by having extremely heavy stones placed on his chest in an effort to make him recant: when the executioner asks him if he has anything to say, the man answers, "More weight". He dies with his honor and conscience intact. I don't intend to portray myself as either innocent or Godly, however the sadness I felt was like a tonnage of slate slabs on my person - my head, my chest, my legs, my heart, mostly, my heart. I'm sure the reason why is obvious to many of you as will the symbolism of the three hour dream which preceded it .Someone very dear to me is not here. Don't know how or where this person is. So. I very much doubt I'll write many more sad ones. That is not the purpose of my blog. Its original title was Growing Older. I re-named it: MY FIELDS/MY STREAMS/MY WOODS/MY HOME. Mostly, that's what I intend to write about. Some of it follows.

 After I awakened, I walked around feeling as if I had taken a hard punch to the head, much like one I took years ago during a sparring session with the Police Olympic Heavyweight champion. It's a strange feeling. Unlike a body shot, which makes you want to crumble & die, a head shot doesn't really hurt, but it separates you from reality, as if there is a space between you and the real world, and you can't quite get your bearings. That heavyweight punch knocked me out, but I stayed on my feet, walking around the ring wondering why everyone seemed so concerned with how I was. They knew I was out. I didn't. I just knew that people were asking me questions, and I was answering them, or so I thought. Mostly I was asking, "Huh?" & "What?" & "What?" & "Huh?"

So this dream I had. I was walking around Pasadena, near All Saints Church and old hotels, through wide streets and cobblestone walkways, looking for my car - a plum colored, Mazda sedan. I looked and looked and could not find it anywhere. I asked parking lot attendants to help, hotel workers, nada. I just couldn't find it, and I knew I had to. I had to get some place important. Where, I don't know, only that it was very important, and I needed to get there but couldn't because I couldn't find my car. One old lady, a guest in the hotel, asked me, sourly, what was the big deal? I got angry and told her I was Obama's speech writer and had to get to Washington. When she criticized me for supporting Obama, I told her I'd been Bush's speechwriter as well. That shut her up. Then I went back to looking for my car. At some point I remember realizing that I no longer had that plum colored Mazda, had not had it for years. Oh, wow! What a relief! But, then, the dream instantly kicked in again, and I had to find that car. I remember hitting on a crazy girl with black hair in the hotel lounge. I ditched her after a phone call from my mother - just her disembodied voice - hysterically begging me not to marry a goy. I kept on looking for my car with a feeling of dread that I had lost it forever until I finally woke up, woke up with this space between me and the real world, and a great sadness.

I went for a walk up my mountain in the back to shake this sadness. I struggled with the thought that if I could defeat this sadness did it mean that I would no longer care for this person so very dear to me, that I would have let this someone go? Does that mean I have to hold onto it? This sadness. Keep it?

When I walk I amble. I meander. There are ancient words for what I do: "dander", to stroll leisurely, Ireland;  "doddle", to walk slowly and pleasurably, Northern Ireland; "nuddle", to walk in a dreamy manner with head down, as if pre-occupied, Suffolk; "soodle", to walk in a slow or leisurely manner, stroll, saunter, "Cambridgeshire/poetic". And then there's "spurring", following the track of a wild animal, Exmoor, something I've done countless times. I look down a lot. I look for the small things because there are so many worlds we do not see, and I want to know them. Moss, for example. Who cares? Well, if you look at moss under a scope every bit is as original and intricate as a snowflake. It is a jungle unto itself that transports water, locks in seeds, waxes and wanes green and brittle brown with the moisture in the air. What follows is a quote from a book specifically about moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I wish I'd written it.

"The beauty of mosses in these forests is much more than visual. They are integral to the function of the forest. Mosses not only flourish in the humidity of a temperate rain forest, they play a vital role in creating it. When rainfall meets a forest canopy, its potentials routes to the ground below are many. Very little precipitation falls directly to the forest floor. I've stood in a forest during a downpour and been as dry as if I had been holding an umbrella. The raindrops are intercepted by the leaves, where they slide off toward the twigs. At a junction, two drips meet and then two more, forming tiny rivulets at the confluence of branches. Like tributaries of an arboreal river, all flow toward the stream running down the trunk of the tree. Foresters call this water coursing down the tree 'stemflow'. 'Throughfall' is the name for water which drips from branches and leaves."

Seeing this, knowing this makes me feel better. Sometimes I become disgruntled with myself because, after all these years, I don't know the name of every living thing out there. The scientific name. But neither did the Native Americans. They knew what things did and when they came, and I know a lot of that as well. What I do is look for the words to describe what I see. For instance, this morning I saw bunches of tiny, white, bell shaped flowers. I thought, "Tiny as a baby's tooth." I walk like this and try to live like this because it gives me a sense of wonder. I look down, and then I look up, like the psalmist said, "...to the hills from whence cometh my help." This sense of wonder enables me to deal with everything else. I cannot defeat this great sadness, but I can bear it because of the wonder of "soodling" through my world.

When students ask me why I write, my standard answer is, "Because I have to. I can't not write." While this is certainly true, it's not the whole truth. I write to re-create that sense of wonder, the feeling that "tiny as a baby's tooth" brings to me. It helps. It brings me peace. The sadness remains - it lurks in the background - but not quite so much.