I'm waiting at home this morning for the thrift store to deliver my new love seat. I'm drinking my morning coffee at my living room window, looking out at a dry and windy morning. Brown, brown, brown... but the very tips of some branches are in fresh bud, I saw as I walked to the lake yesterday.
I took the path through the bird sanctuary, and bird-watchers were out too, looking through high-powered binoculars for the bright flashes of little birds who migrate in spring.
That was the longest walk I've yet taken on my still-healing knee, and on top of clearing my apartment, moving stuff out onto the curb to give away, it was a bit much--my leg throbbed through the night. In fact, I'm thinking that after my couch is delivered, I'll take the day off and sit on the couch and rest my leg.
The learning in patience continues.
I. Ladies Who Carry On
I want to grow up to be like the Indomitable Old Ladies I know from the thrift store. Most of them are tough stock--grew up during the Great Depression on farms.
I saw the oldest of the original cadre-–Doris, who turns ninety-nine this summer--at the annual Appreciation Dinner yesterday evening. She is one of the few surviving founders of the store. Though she no longer volunteers, she is still going strong, getting her own plate from the buffet without help, still talking your ear off.
"I'm praying for you," she said.
"That's powerful," I said.
The next-oldest, Geraldine, rather shocked me by admitting she "isn't doing very well". These women rarely admit to a weakness unless it's deadly serious.
I got a ride with my work pal, Volunteer Abby, to the Italian-American restaurant across the river, where the dinner is always held.
I've always found the upper management to be stingy and unimaginative, and it's a low-rent affair:
a buffet of pasta without enough sauce and Caesar salad with too much, set up in the windowless, concrete party room.
This year, though the stores are earning more, our free drink tickets had been reduced from two to one. I bought a second drink for Abby and me, and prices were not as low as the surroundings suggested-- a glass of wine and a can of beer cost $25.
But I felt better when I won a raffle prize for the first time:
$50 worth of coupons to a breakfast place that's been around for decades.
My constant disappointment in management aside, it's a good idea to gather the large and scattered group of workers, volunteers, and board members, and I was lucky in my table mates.
The new cashier had brought her girlfriend, both in their mid-twenties, and they were good conversationalists. We talked about the tattoos on their arms--mostly media references, including a peach from a book I loved in fourth grade! James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.
The girlfriend works in IT for the insurance company whose CEO was murdered in December. "I used to run into him in the cafeteria. It was so weird, the sadness at work compared to the reactions on social media."
I said I hated that some people rejoiced in the assassination.
I understand the anger and frustration--I share some of it! I felt a little surge of happiness when I read the news. But I won't go that way.
Returning to the Wild West, shooting each other down in cold blood, in public?
Such a symptom of social rot is not cause for celebration.
II. "The river is healing itself."
Is the rot so far gone that it can't be reversed?
No.
Life comes back.
This morning I read a BBC article about salmon returning to Oregon's Klamath River last fall, soon after four dams were removed following a campaign by tribal communities.
Fish biologists had thought it'd take years for the salmon to return, their numbers had been so decimated since 1912.
It took weeks.
bbc.com/future/article/20241122-salmon-return-to-californias-klamath-river-after-dam-removal
We don't have to keep descending into barbarity.
We can think different.
Not like Apple, but, for instance, like Lyla June, a Diné musician and cultural historian. Below, from her 2022 TED Talk...
"Much was made last year about the positive environmental
effect of the [COVID] pandemic.
As more people stayed home,
pollution levels dropped, animals began to reclaim habitat,
and the logical leap
that many observers seemed to make was that the Earth
would be better off without humans.
"The Earth may be better off
without certain systems we have created, but we are not those systems. We don’t have to be, at least.
"What if I told you
that the Earth needs us?
What if I told you that we belong here?
"What if I told you I've seen my people
turn deserts into gardens?
What if these human hands and minds
could be such a great gift to the Earth that they sparked new life
wherever people and purpose met?"
In her TED Talk, "3000-year-old solutions to modern problems", Lyla June elaborates on four indigenous land-management techniques.
1) Align with the forces of nature:
"Why try to control the Earth
when you can work with her?"
2) Intentionally expand habitat:"Why put plants and animals
into farms and cages when you can simply make
a home for them and they come to you?"
3) De-center humans:
"Why hoard for your own species when you can live
to serve all life around you?"
4) Design for perpetuity:"Why plan for just the next fiscal quarter when we could plan
for generations not yet born?"
Even if the murdered health-care CEO represented the forces of domination that "plan for just the next fiscal quarter", we will not succeed in creating new and incorporating old good ways by damming our own souls like rivers, until the only way we can imagine change is to kill the messenger.
I am always interested in this very real question:
What is to be done?
How do I/how do we remove the dams in my/our hearts, minds, souls,
when we, even we who don't like it, are complicit (inevitably) in a profit-motivated, death-dealing culture?
How to protect and restore the rivers of my/our own lives?
