My mother’s eyes could freeze water with a glance.
And she knew it.

Just a sharp look from those gray eyes and we’d stop whatever we were doing,
if we saw them in time.
She’d have to yell sometimes to get our attention,
but once we looked at her
it was like looking at Medusa
and we’d be afraid we’d turn into stone.

I know this must have intimidated my father, too.
Not right away of course.

Their wedding photo:
Mom in her rosy suit, a little black hat on her head with one of those tiny veils,
just some black beaded threads,
like tiny coiled snakes, not lace,
curling down over the brim of her hat above her eyes.

Her eyes were soft then,
full of dreamy hope, loving, naïve, young.

Dad in his Army uniform,
glowing and smug like the cat who’d caught the canary.
This was days before he shipped out.

Mom’s eyes could laugh
or give me a look like she knew the whole story.
She didn’t need to roll her eyes, the look said it all.
She could read my expression, asking “what’s wrong?” before I’d said a word.

But when she told my dad that she was leaving him,
he flew into a rage
he put his hands around her neck

She didn’t flinch.
She just glared at him.

And he collapsed in sobs by her feet.

“And that was so much worse,” she said.
“That’s when I almost gave in.”

But she didn’t.
Her eyes saw all of us through the next 20 years
until all of us were grown.

Once when she was mad at me,
I must have been 4 at the time,
I told her:
“I love your eyes, mommy.
When I was up in heaven waiting to be born,
I asked God to give me a mother with eyes like yours,
and He did.  Thank-you, God.”

She laughed every time she told me that.

Sleep and winter.
Deep waters and frozen earth
Silence

These things heal us, even though we may dread them.
Taking the time to walk in the darkness,
To hold that dark space within me
To hold myself in tenderness
Even when I am full of rage and despair
Sometimes I forget how profoundly important it is for me
To sit with this.
To just be.

On the 28^th of September, 2020 I read that the ACLU had won a lawsuit in Montana
that was about voter suppression of the Native peoples there.
They won, so now the tribes will be able to vote again.
The article listed the names of the tribes that were included in the suit
and there on the list was the Assiniboine Sioux Nation, my sister’s people.

The darkness of grief was the only thing that held me
Back in the days after we lost her
The darkness of grief
Like a deep pool in the forest
Which I had tried so hard to avoid

I sought it then
Clawing my way through the wet branches of the trees,
Rushing over the sodden mulch of the earth
The stinging nettles and clinging blackberry vines
Tearing at my skin and hair and clothes

I stumbled into the clearing, fell over a log covered in moss
Pulled myself up again, muddy, bruised, stung and scraped
And there was the pool.

Dark water silent
I wanted to dive in and go under
But when I got to the lip of the pool
Something stopped me

An owl feather floated on the water
I fell to my knees again, weeping

Then the rain came
Not a hard rain, but steady
Hammering the leaves
Pattering the top of my head
Like so many fingertips touching me
Still weeping
Weeping
Until I gulped in the clean dark air.

I was soaked.
I got up slowly and looked at the water
Rippling now as a breeze crossed the surface
The sticks and logs poking in, or out from it
Like the arms of a ships wheel
Mossy and glossy with dark slime, but peaceful.

My feet squelched in the mud when I tried to move
I looked down and saw that my feet were both 3 inches deep in the mud
This made me smile

A frog began chirruping
Not a chorus of them, just one
And I drew breath.
Whole.

The smoke from the California, Oregon and Washington fires has lifted now in the Pacific Northwest, and the season is changing abruptly from summer to autumn.  I am grateful for the clearer air, which seems to have been cleansed by our collective tears as we grieve the loss of our beloved Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  I paddle out across the water to breathe.

Before I can give my full attention to the moment, to the challenges and chores facing us in the days, weeks and months ahead, I must pause to reflect on the phenomenon of healing that some of us have experienced recently in sharing our common and uncommon stories.  This thought comes floating toward me like a message in a bottle.

The loss of social connection has been one of the most persistent challenges we have had to navigate our way through during these times of Covid.  I know that the isolation is nothing compared to the illness itself, which has now taken the lives of 200,000 Americans.  But the smoke from the fires along the west coast exacerbated our sense of isolation.  It wasn’t just that we couldn’t go out for coffee with our friends, we were used to that, but suddenly we couldn’t even go outside to enjoy the waning days of summer.  We couldn’t see the stars.  We couldn’t navigate.

Others have written about the effects this pandemic has had on our global economy, the environment, our freedom to travel, and the inequity in our socioeconomic, political, healthcare, and justice systems.  Others have written about how the police violence against black men and women was brought into sharper focus due to the fact that more people were stuck at home front of their televisions.  There are many heroes and villains these days: people risking their lives for the sake of others and people expressing levels of selfishness, hatred and stupidity that are truly astonishing and incomprehensible.  Many of those important stories are still to be told.

What I want to notice here, out on the water, is our ability to connect with each other through writing together and sharing our stories.  I pull up the paddle and drift quietly on the open harbor to think, and the waves slosh gently along the side of the canoe, rocking me forward.

I have witnessed, as many others have noted, a disappointing shortfall in connecting with friends.  We have grown weary, we have fallen apart, and we have been deliberately divided up through a disinformation campaign based in fear, blame, greed, and the lust for power.  We are not only socially distanced to keep the virus from spreading, we are socially isolated from friends and family who seem to drift away from us, not on barges but on disparate icebergs built out of lies: icebergs which are rapidly shrinking in the overheated waters of the Bering sea, even as the people standing on them shout “Hoax!  Fake news!”

But there is something more here.  We are not alone on these waters. I have also experienced the deep and surprising connection of writing with strangers.  Strangers who are now dear to me.  We are navigating new waters with our old bones and sinews, and telling our stories with an urgent fresh perspective. The act of writing and sharing of ourselves, and the act of listening respectfully to each other brings our hearts and minds together in a safe unknown harbor.

I question this even as I lean into it, pulling the canoe forward again, gliding on the silver water as the day grows old.  How can I feel this connected already?  Is it the same way we engage with characters in a story? Or in a dream?  Are these conversations the first buds in a blooming orchard of new friends, or are they more like a false and fragile spring, whose blossoms wither and blow away like smoke on the salty Chinook wind?  Or are we creating a new moorage together, fueled by our mutual need and strengthened by our mutual respect, the depth of our sharing, and our commitment to show up week after week to write, share, and listen?   I wonder about these things.  Another rower across the water from me heads for the boathouse in the fading light.

After we write, we read and we listen, respectfully, without comment.  And when we finish up I don’t want to chat too much, for fear of breaking those gossamer threads of connection, for fear of disappointing others by the plain everyday self of me, and for the fear of being disappointed by a sudden slip of their judgement, revealing a subtle condemnation which might escape through their words.  I might misinterpret a look or a gesture, like the person who wiped their face with a middle finger after I spoke a few weeks ago.  Did they flip me off?  Really?  Or were they just rubbing their face?  It seemed to be the latter.  I am cautious, but optimistic.  Paddling back to shore.

What I don’t understand is how strangers can be so deeply present for each other when our long cherished friends and family members cannot or simply will not.  Our capacity to share our hearts has not been diminished.  Our mutual need for this kind of connectedness has also not diminished.  But time, that’s the thing, isn’t it?  Time stops them.  So these hours of writing together with strangers has cast my other relationships into sharp relief, most noticeably by their absence, by their standoffishness.  We’re all so busy these days.  I don’t blame them, they are massively overwhelmed.  But something is lost by this frantic pace we are all trying to keep, and the constant pressure to adjust and adapt to change.  What’s lost is our willingness to take the time to slow down, to listen, to breathe.  And with that we have also lost our authenticity: the willingness to be fully present, and fully human.  As though time isn’t the most precious thing we have.

And wow, what a gift.

The canoe crunches along the gravel shore in the twilight, and I climb out and hoist it up onto the bank.
As I do so a refrain from the old Quaker hymn comes to me. It’s the third verse from Simple Gifts:

Tis a gift to be loving
Tis a gift to be kind
Tis a gift to wait to hear
someone else’s mind
That when we use this gift
we might come to believe
It is better to give
than it is to receive.

When true, simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend
we shall not be ashamed
to turn, turn, will be our delight
til by turning, turning
we come ‘round right.

The stars are coming out now.
Listen, can you hear them?

I have a scar on my left thumb, right where the thumbprint it, from a cut I got chopping cauliflower one evening when my boyfriend was over.  I was 22 years old.  The cut bled like crazy and he thought we should go to a clinic so I could get stitches, but I refused and for the rest of my life I’ve had this scar.

The scar should have been him.  He was nice enough, just a twit really.  I loved his music but he was faithless and drifty, even though I’m sure he was fond of me.  It wasn’t like he could ever settle, he was just a boy.  I was so vexed with him.  I didn’t know then how lucky I was not to be stuck with him longer, not to be married to him or to have children together and be entrapped and attached to him in that way that would have hurt so many other people.

Instead, I got a deep scar on my left thumb.  A sort of shot across the bow, a warning not to take cabbages and cauliflowers too seriously but to pay attention to the knives and what I was doing to myself.

I hated that apartment.  It was soulless, a rabbit warren.  It was new and cheap and a mile from the airport, nearby to NOTHING and there wasn’t even a good place to walk there.  I had my first car, though, so I could drive to my first job: after school daycare for the YMCA, but it was a ghastly time.  I moved to a shared house in the U district that was more interesting, but also disgusting.  It was dirty and the people there stole my food.  I don’t miss those days.

Cabbage is OK though, and I still like cauliflower.  But I’m more careful with knives now.  And people.

Crack your skull and time stops
the stars whirl in front of my eyes

where was I?

In the upper lot, above the rockery.
I was walking fast, sunhat on my head, lowered over my eyes, thinking,
looking backward in my mind about the wonderful morning I’d had.
I was back in time, not far back in time, but not in the present

CRACK

My skull collided with the low branch of the mirabelle plum tree
and the stars whirled and everything stopped.

The pummeling plum we call it now.
The pummeling plum tree has been removed
but the bruise in my brain kept reminding me that life is shaky.
that all my thoughts can be scrambled by a tree.

When we went to visit Stanford University a month later,
I found a new hat for me, with one of the Stanford mottos:
“FEAR THE TREE” it says.
I laughed when I saw it.

Not so funny the time it took to heal
the brain would work and then get tired, remember, and then forget.
Thoughts would crack like a clock, like a stone, like ceramic.
The words came apart and floated on the grey sea of foam and blood.

It wasn’t serious, the doctor said.  Only a mild concussion.
But something was lost, wasn’t it?
For a time
Time was lost

The bruise didn’t show.
I looked the same, but there were days when I was dizzy
and days when everything was clear,
clicking orderly like the inner coils and gears of my grandmother’s faithful clock
ticking away on the mantelpiece,
saying:  hurry up, hurry up, hurry up
you don’t know how much time you’ve got
until the words fall quietly onto the ground
like leaves off the plum tree in September,
brown and sodden in the autumn rain,
forgetting themselves as they dissolve into mulch.

Crack on now
crack open the new notebooks, click open the pens, write as if your soul depended on it
today the herons stand along the shore fishing,
but the white-crowned sparrows have finished their love songs and raise their young.
the summer is passing

Crack open you heart and let the words pour out
speak them aloud, too, if you dare.

I love you.
And I forgive you.
But that wasn’t easy, you know.
It was a choice I made.