Yesterday evening I rode my bike along the river here in Eugene. I re-listened to our Cohort session from last week with Leonore Three Stars. Many things she said resonated with me and brought back memories.
She talked about the idea of not killing creatures that come into your home by mistake. I remember being at a friends’ wedding and the ceremony was delayed because there were wasps up front where the bride and groom would stand. The groom came in to help remove them because there was no way he was going to let them get killed. I hadn’t known that about him before and wouldn’t have guessed it, and it left a mark on me. I’ve gotten to the point where I will remove spiders (even big gruesome ones) and release them outside of the house. I haven’t gotten to that point of compassion with water-bugs (those giant cockroaches) in New York. But I am trying to see kinship in them too… it doesn’t come easily.
When I moved to Oregon we rented the house first and then “bought” it a year later. I have always felt like a steward and caretaker to this place. Maybe because we rented first, and it’s so different from anywhere else I’ve lived. The gardens and growth around was so beautifully cared for by people who owned this place before us that I felt a sense of responsibility to the beauty that they cultivated and was afraid that we might destroy it if we didn’t take care. Having grown up in a big city I realized quickly that I didn’t know anything about plants and gardens and houses and that made me reverent and humble towards it in spite of myself. Listening to Leonore I realize that this attitude that I slipped into was, maybe, an attitude worth expanding.
As I listened to her, I realized that I grew up in a place that is the embodiment of humans imposing themselves violently on nature and building over it, on top of it and in spite of it… and owning it. New York City’s concrete, bricks and steel seems to scream, “we’ve dominated this land.” And yet, having grown up there and having lived elsewhere, I also know that that’s not the whole story. There are aspects of my home city that are great and important too… aspects that have to do with the incredible mixture of humans being thrown together.
When I moved to Oregon, though, I found the always-surrounding presence of the giant evergreens austere. Eight years later I cannot imagine living without them. If I end up moving somewhere else I will miss them more than anything. Leonore made me realize how real that relationship is and has become, that it’s not just something that I imagine and I don’t need to shy away from acknowledging it and cultivating it.
And when she spoke of the weather being a relative to welcome, I have since begun to try and incorporate that into my welcoming of the rain and the moody grey skies.
Last night, however, the weather was easy to welcome. As I rode and listened to Leonore speak, every plant, all of the shimmering sunlight off of the Willamette river, everything came alive and seemed to carry me along.
And then my earbuds became silent. The recording ended. Beyond the words that were spoken, it was the silence after the words that was the most profound. The twilight sky spread out before me and appeared so vast… and the purplish clouds expanded and breathed. I suddenly remembered these words “There will always be the sky”. When my mother passed away in 2010, a close friend of hers told me about one of his last conversations with her. She often had philosophical/spiritual conversations with him. He told me that he was talking with her about the fact that everything perishes and is passing in this life. They were outside in Riverside Park, in NYC, by the Hudson River. She became quiet and answered “No, there will always be the sky.”
As I rode my bike, having just listened to Leonore Three stars… I allowed my spirit to open to the sky and I felt connected to my mother and connected to the sky in a way that was new. In the last years of my mother’s life she was always very active, but she made a point in the Spring and Summer to take the time to sit on the grass by the river in Riverside park, sometimes daily, and for hours. She would work outside on her writing or reading. She would tell me often “I can’t get over the sky, how it’s constantly changing and always new, and giving us so much”. I think she was, in her way, connecting with these relatives, these friends, even in New York City.
When I lived in Paris, I lived in an apartment for many years next to the Jardin des Plantes where there was a zoo. A small part of the zoo could be seen from the busy boulevard that ran along it. When I would ride back late at night on my bike from a rehearsal or a dinner, I would stop sometimes in front of the bars that separated the park and the zoo from the street. There was no one around. Through the bars I could see the ostriches. Big, awkward looking creatures that seemed so out of place in Paris with the nighttime traffic and headlights wizzing by and all that noise. I felt sorry for them having the Parisian traffic rush by all night long. I would stop and talk to them and sometimes sing to them.
I suppose there’s something in me that has always known and longed for this connection with our relatives – the animals, the land, the sky. Hearing Leonore name these things in the context and traditions of peoples who have taken care of this land for centuries has given me a beautiful and powerful framework to help understand and practice what has only been whimsical intuitions until now. It not only legitimizes these impulses, but grounds them in a whole world and in traditions and cultures that I know so little about, but to whom I am beholden. It feels like she opened a window to a whole new world that I have somehow always known.