How I Learned to Ski

(Skiing with my dog, photo courtesy of L. Zummo)

Somewhat unfortunately, I still find myself in that particularly irksome group of people who, when skiing is mentioned, I must make it clear to those who I converse with that I am a Telemark skier. But, I swear, I’m not one of those snobby cooler than thou people who Telemark and talk about it just to show off. I happen to ski like a stick-insect learning ballet because, after a very long and painful process, it is one of the few things I do gracefully. And because it is humbling how hard it was to learn.

Because it sure as shit didn’t come to me naturally.

For the unfamiliar, there are three basic types of skiing: There is cross country skiing, in which fit people on very skinny skis traipse and race about the fields and woodlands, going both up and down hills as encountered. To do this, the toes of the foot-shaped boots are attached to the skinny skis and the heels remain free, allowing for normal foot movement and such.

Second, we have downhill or alpine skiing. This is what is generally considered skiing. Your foot is in a big boot, the boot is attached at both toe and heel to a wide ski, and you ride the chairlift up and careen down the snowy hillsides. You turn, at these velocities, by sort of dancing sideways, throwing your weight from left to right, hips to knees. (There are variations, and specialized gear that allows for alpine skiers to also traipse up hills, through fields, rocks, and forests in search of better opportunities. These set-ups are called alpine touring (AT) or randonnee.)

Thirdly, in this short litany, we come to Telemark skiing. In this variety, the toes of your big boots are attached to the ski, but your heel is not firmly affixed to the wide ski. To make the turns recommended for descending the hills, the skier lunges into something akin to warrior pose in yoga, with weight balanced on outside little toe and much tension and body weight held in quivering quads.

Tele is hard, it requires specialized gear, it demands absurd combinations of musculoskeletal movements, and it is such a precise set of postures that it is extremely difficult to fake doing it correctly. If, say, you simply cannot figure out how to keep weight in the tippy-toes of your back ski, the ski will skitter totally out of control, cross your front ski between your knees, and you will ragdoll down—to the horror, concern, or amusement of anyone in range.

On the other hand, when you get it right, you become this utterly improbably cacophony of moving angles coalescing into a graceful economy of movement.

No doubt, the appeal of Telemark is clear.

When I was learning, while at college in the early 2000s, Telemark had a particular cache—it was understood to be the purest and most bad-ass way to access any sort of backcountry ski opportunity. There was a strange aspect of Zen snobbery and of being outdoorsierly more holy than the next underwashed Environmental Studies major if you took up tele. Bumper stickers on the Toyota Tacomas and Subaru station wagons outside the Outing Club read “Free the Heel and Free Your Mind” and “Randonnee: French for ‘Can’t Telemark.’”

In Bossy-pants, Tina Fey wrote about how the Weekend Update writers are the scary coolest of the SNL writers, who are already cooler than the average anybody. It was sort of like that, with me and the upperclass outdoor program and club people.

The winter of my sophomore year, I decided that I needed a winter sport. Having just spent an entire semester living in a yurt on the edge of a lake, I was feeling ethically uncomfortable with spending so much time inside buildings and around normal American life. I wanted to be in the woods all the time and to become a master of both the quiet ethos of the woods, and to be nonchalantly supreme at the woods’ skills and sports that embodied that. Besides, lift tickets are expensive, so if I could be primarily a backcountry skier, it would be more budget appropriate.

So, officially, that is why, even though I hadn’t been on skis of any kind in about ten years, I decided to sign up for a Beginners’ Telemark ski course offered through the college outdoor program. And it is mostly true.

The other piece, though, is that one of my best friends and I each had a gigantic crush on the two students who were teaching the course. If we’d had crushes on the ice-climbing guides, this would be a different story—I might have gone a different route in search of peace and snowy glory.

This friend, who I’ll call Pete, and I had met the first day on campus when, as he put it: “I was wandering around the dorm looking for girls, but I found you instead.”  Aside from the occasional flare-up of a crush on my end after we had a particularly good chat about Edward Abbey or something, Pete and I were decidedly platonic. And somehow, having a dude-friend’s assistance in how to attract a dude seemed like a real stroke of genius and good fortune. By Pete and my logic, going on Rachel and Bill’s course and learning to tele ski, that was clearly the best path to love or whatever college kids have. 

Plus, I really did want to learn to ski and to be as cool and in touch with pure wilderness as the tele skiers seemed. The trouble is, of course, that no one is as cool as that. And certainly not me, at age nineteen and in a particularly dewy-eyed idealist phase.

I had my first inkling of the reality of this endeavor when I went over to the gear basement on Friday night to collect my skis and boots and poles for the Saturday lesson. It was snowing, because in February in Canton, NY, it is almost always snowing, but is certainly snowing—heavily—if you have any trudging around to do. The school gear was a general hodgepodge, and I left with very long skis, slightly small boots, and a pair of poles. I had seen people carrying their skis around, slung up on one shoulder and the boots and poles tucked neatly up, and had a vision of myself smoothly walking across campus—just a graceful and competent lady, confident and at peace with the wildness of a snowstorm.

Everything I was carrying slipped and slid and I was constantly off balance going through the snow. Probably, because it was that era in my life, I was wearing a new pair of Carhartt overalls, which were like cold wet stiff cardboard while walking through the deep and falling snow, but made it look like I belonged in the woods. Add in the layers of sweater and down jacket, and the frustrating exertion of managing this new jumble of gear literally on top of my hopes and expectations, and I can still feel the horrible sweat on my lower back and the burning shame in my face.

I was at college, a student, in an inherently process-focused situation. And yet, the culture I was surrounded in seemed to be made entirely of finished, flawless product. Even as I took a course in how to be an outdoor program guide, even as we talked about the importance of making safe spaces for everyone to crawl out of their comfort zones and chrysalises and into new experiences and skill, even then, no one talked much about how it felt to be the sweaty student, embarrassed at not being skilled. 

However, because I was deep into an era of naïve idealism and surrounded by other budding young environmental educators who talked about the power of learning, I thought that perhaps I might still be able to do this double-pronged ski mission. That somehow, my persistence and willingness to try to learn an almost completely new sport, this would further endear me to all those cool tele-skiers with their bumper stickers and gear of high enough quality and heavy enough usage to be patched and uncracked veneer of perfection.

Needless to say, things did not go as smoothly and perfectly as I had hoped, as Pete and I had plotted.

Snow under skis, even on the slight incline of a baby slope, is slippery. If you haven’t ridden a J-bar ski lift in ten years—and you are a college student who is too proud to ask for advice—it is tricky. So is mounting and dismounting a chairlift. My ski bindings were adjusted for much larger boots, and—not knowing how this sort of gear ought to work—I had my foot jammed into the toe part but the heel wire was flapping inches behind my heel, so that whenever my foot pressure changed, the ski came out from underfoot and down the hill I spun in total disarray. My skis flew down the hill on their own. Pete, helpfully, retrieving one, commented that: “I think your ski knocked that little kid down.”

After a quick morning of instruction with the gorgeous guides, we new teleskiers were left to roam the mountain and practice alone. I was told that if I couldn’t master the turning and body-bobbling and balancing and all of a Telemark stance, then to just plant my feet on the skis and I could Alpine turn.

Would that I could. When I was little and took ski lessons for a few winters, I never learned to turn and would just bomb down the mountain. Perhaps I had subpar instructors, perhaps I just didn’t listen or choose to learn, but the upshot was that I had no other ski skills to fall back on.

So, of course, I just fell. I remember, particularly, skidding to a halt with my skis sideways, my right hip grinding into the snow, my arms trailing behind me, and my hat sloppily over an eye. Naturally, I landed almost at the feet of Bill, who at that time I found to be the most beautiful person I had ever met. He asked if I was okay.

“Oh sure,” I said—I remember being very perky so that no one, except maybe Pete, would suspect how being this blatantly terrible at something hurt on the inside too, so that no one would see the tears of humiliated rage—“this is great! I think I’m sort of getting it. Like, I can almost remember everything I’m supposed to remember to do, now I just need to do it and not think about it. Sort of like some Zen thing, I guess. So all I need to do now is practice, and that’s just going to be a lot of skiing, so that’s actually kind of awesome, right?” 

I don’t remember his response. I know that it wasn’t to sweep me up and carry me off the hill out of love and admiration for my bad-ass good looks and Viking-goddess skills. In fact, I can’t fully remember his face, just that he was gorgeous, and was kinder than he could have been. A red-faced, teary-eyed naïf speaking too fast and too cheerily while slumped in the snow in a pile of mismatched ski gear is not, I gather, the most alluring of ladies.

It would have been all over after that day, except that I found—under the layers of awful—that it was sort of fun to hurtle down a mountain. I was transfixed by the speed and power and grace of the people who could tele. They were snow cranes and I wanted to be like them, even as I felt like a grubby field mouse.

Besides, I liked, so much, being out in the cold air and the mountains, with friends. Rachel—the ski guide who Pete had a crush on—was one of my other good friends and between the ministrations of the two of them, I managed to survive the entire day. (So, importantly, did everyone else on the mountain.) I like to think that my mishaps allowed them to spend enough time that they did date for a few months, so our experiment wasn’t a total bust on the romance front.

All that winter, I went skiing whenever I could time and money afford to, with whoever I trusted. That turned out to be key. I couldn’t go with anyone I wanted to impress, only with people I could laugh and cry and fall and swear with. Which, really, isn’t a bad way to go about doing anything ever. I was covered in bruises—I remember one in particular was bigger than a grapefruit, and just enough between my hip and my ass that I couldn’t show it to everyone, but I wanted to. Based on the best advice I got from Pete—“if you’re not falling, you’re not learning”—my bruises and cuts and ice-burns were all part of the adventure of learning. I was still personally mortified at how hard it was for me to learn—I seem to lack natural grace and some basic physical coordination—but I almost had myself convinced that the struggle was as glorious as anything else.

It took more than the one winter of weekends to make me an acceptable skier. There were other college ski days and trips where I felt like the uncoordinated slow kid who struggling miserably to keep up with the professionals, where my lack of skill was worrying and probably dangerous. The winter I ski-bummed with my big sister in Colorado, there were falls that had her calculating the distance to strange hospitals before I’d even come to a stop. I still often feel like a hot mess on skis and I have been on the brink of tears because I’ve been out of my depth so many times that I am hesitant to go skiing with new people, to go in trees and backcountry I haven’t seen, to jump off anything. I dislike that feeling of emotional discomfort, of seeming to be the only one babyish enough to be scared or slow or disorganized, more than almost anything. 

And yet, that moment in a tele turn, when your weight is transferring between knees and toes and you pop up to float for what cannot be more than a second but feels like a scrap of forever, this is something to work for. The soft ripping noise of a good turn, the pleasure of pivoting perfectly around a pole. Being able to teach other people and come at it from purest empathy. When I ski patrolled, one of my greatest pleasures was making tidy turns on steep sections, while carrying a giant drill or a cup of coffee or an armload of bamboo. The more awkward the load, the more fun it was to shoot down the trail before the mountain was open, just to feel that I could and have a good laugh at how far I'd come. 

Usually, of course, then I'd fall, but such is the price of learning. 

Progress is a Humble Rebellion

(My dad's stonewall, Dimond Hill Farm, Concord, NH)

When the climate talks were in Copenhagen, my graduate department was incredibly generous in funding several students to attend. My application for a slot was an enthusiastic medley of Humanities-based, qualitative musings about why I—an Environmental Studies writing student—would be as appropriate a candidate for a ticket to Denmark as students of environmental policy, international law and energy science.

As tends to happen when quick academic decisions are necessary, more scientific and quantitatively focused students were selected. I don’t doubt that they were excellent and good choices, that their presence in Copenhagen has honed their outlook and driven many actions since that time. However, I remain impatient with the pervasive idea that numbers are some how more valuable than words. Yes, it is hard to determine if a heart has been spoken to, awakened, and what that newly beating tempo may set the body and brain off to do, but precisely because of that immeasurable potential power, the Humanities earn their name.

What I wanted to do for Copenhagen, what I have always wanted to do and sometimes I’ve gotten closer than others is to help people to fold humbly inwards to act boldly outwards. This is harder to explain than a policy paper or an emissions report.

What I mean like this—with my apologies to any Danish historians and I may have lost some facts in the poetry: Geographically small Denmark was disproportionably a world leader for several hundreds of years. Then, their navy was beaten soundly in 1801. This shifted not only the world order, but also Denmark’s ethos and national identity. There was some internal reckoning and identity crisis on a national level, and the result was the country uniting behind the idea that, if not the most powerful country in the world, they would certainly be the greatest Denmark in the world.

And now they are a leader in environmentalism and have a largely peaceful and functioning society. While there have been undeniable violent racist issues within Denmark in the last few years—relating to cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—we are in no position in the United States, with our guns and racism, to discount the larger lessons of Denmark’s ethos.

When my father began to struggle with the idea of retirement, with who he would be if not the “large and in charge” charismatic and effective bully of a community re-organizer, I talked with him about the history of Denmark, that they too had to humble, revision, and came out slightly reinvented, but changed only for the better.

In semi-retirement, my father built a stonewall at a nearby farm. He—envious of the craftsmen at a wooden boat show—had determined that in this next phase, he wanted to work with his hands. The farmers, wonderful women, encouraged him that it was good for his soul to get in touch with the earth. And he was fantastically happy, and even a little healthier drinking water and walking to work.

It was all too brief a retirement, but I’ll be forever proud of how my dad tried to be something new, yet was still building something for a community, albeit on in different dimension and different scale.

I’m sure that there are other nations who have, when faced with collapse, folded inward and re-birthed a more feasible ethos, but I have yet to find any country that has done it on the scale and with the ethics that makes Denmark an environmentally progressive leader. I hoped, when the climate talks were in Copenhagen, that something of this progressive humbling would rub off on the delegates, on the press and the scientists, that people would come streaming home with the seed in their hearts that things need not be as they always have been, that there are other ways of being than bygone identities.

To me, it was as significant and promising that the 2009 talks were in Denmark as it was that there were talks at all. In the disappointing aftermath of Copenhagen, where nations who must poured out their hearts and the policies of the powerful did not change, I clung to the comfort that, at least the world was talking about the climate. At least what I know to be as true as my bones, at least there is a sense that this is a global struggle, that we are not just a few crazy people watching tides rise and songbirds disappear and crops dry up and forests burn.

To know how many people do care is at once comforting and galvanizing. Who, we might ask, are so selfishly scared of change that they do not listen to this beautiful assembled symphony?

Who is it that ignores such vociferous passion?

Answer that, and it becomes clear that this struggle for a better world does have real adversary, villains with corporate stationary and billion dollar investments in the status quo.

Of course, with our phones and computers and cars and televisions and microwaves and jet-fuel heavy passports and plastic disposable everything that runs off dirty power plants and pipelines, we are each also part of what ignores the passion, part of what must pause to examine our own lives and choices, part of what must be humbled towards greatness.

And now, again, what parts of the world who can out of luxuriant responsibility and/or who must direst need are converging in Paris to again discuss the scourge of climate change. And, of course, each time there is a summit or major decision or action about climate change, the dramatic hype makes it seem as if the world hangs fully in the balance, that we will all drown, burn, starve, freeze or live on what happens with that single event.

This is absurd. The drama is chronic, the moment is every single one we have on this sweet earth with each other. The world is always in the balance, always teetering, and the fires, floods and famines are already here. We are living in the time of greatest crisis—climate change does not watch the news and get better or worse because some people sit down together and try to cap emissions or create public transportation. One climate conference, two, three…these will not alone turn the tide. We must do that, in between the headlines, in all our acts and actions.

I am at least as spotty on France’s history as I am on Denmark’s. But, even in what I have gleaned from Joan of Arc, Dumas and Dickens, Casablanca, Les Mis and Stéphane Hessel there is an invigorating lot of revolutionary resistance to and takedown of over-gilded and corrupt systems.

Also—and this may be the strongest piece—what has come out about French culture since the terrorist attacks of November 13^th is that, simply, French love life. That rooted, determined joie de vive, this is something that the climate movement too often overlooks. We are full of facts, of statistics, predictions, carbon counts, horror stories, and fear. All of those have some place, but what we forget—at our own peril—is why we go about this business in the first place.

Why? Because the world is beautiful, because we love each other, because it would be simply rude to not protect all that is wonderful for all who have yet to come to fall in love with as well.

If I hoped that Copenhagen’s turn at the climate talks could bring humility, then it is my even deeper hope that Paris will teach us to bring joy to this work, to be brave and fierce.

These brighter tools, I believe, are sharper and stronger than any other for all that lies ahead.

Blood and Oil, Beauty and Use

(Goose print, with my compliments to Mary Oliver and her wild geese)

With the UN Climate Talks opening in Paris on Monday, and with Paris freshly symbolic of joyous resistance against terror, I have been trying to articulate the link between the two. Others, of course, have already found it and written and done magnificent work in highlighting the connection. But, never mind preaching to the choir—we are all part of the choir and singing out in our own times and ways and voices has certain merit in this necessary revolution on personal and global scales.

This morning, the morning after Thanksgiving, I found the most recent New Yorker hunkered down under the circulars and ads for Black Friday sales that came in the newspaper and mail. In it, Steve Coll writes: “The Islamic State is an oil-funded descendant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a branch of the original Al Qaeda, which was formed in 1988.”

For years, Black Friday has made me spitting mad. That our nation goes to sleep full of gratitude and turkey and pie and love on the small and human scale that transcends politics, full from a day of focusing on the bone-deep values of our lives and national ideology and wakes up to shop until we drop…this makes no sense. And when what I believe to be at stake with this pressurized American overconsumption—merely the life of our singular and beautiful planet, the authentic vibrancy of our human relationships—is further threatened by the discounted, disposable merchandise produced in decidedly unclean conditions, built with the energy of heartbreakingly filthy power plants, well…I turn into a snarly Charlie Brown about the commercialization of the holidays.

But this year, knowing that more pointedly anthropocentric threats than climate change are also tied to the blind overconsumption of resources, I have a slim hope that the madness of Black Friday and absurd Christmas consumption can be reduced. If we are, as a culture, hugely reliant on oil, and much of that oil is purchased from governments and states that fund terrorists, then, aren’t we, through our energy misuse and selfish purchases, funding conservative zealots with dreams of suicidal jihad and fueling the storms and droughts that ravage everyone?

In 2001, President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to fight back against terrorists by continuing to live our ordinary lives. Taken out of context, this message was watered down to “fight terrorism by shopping.” Which is absurd. When we shop, when we consume without thought for the back story of what we are buying, without an understanding of where our hard-earned dollars will go—my suspicion is that not only do we contribute to the changing climate, but we may very well be funding those who would hold a hotel hostage, gun down a concert and any other number of acts against humanity.

Rather than that, let’s rebel against terror and slow our destruction of this lovely world by living more ordinary lives. We can live smaller and smarter, and in this, we will be more connected to the rest of the world. In being wise and humble and aware that our voices and choices and actions do matter in this world, we grow magnificent, we become limitless. Rather than scrabbling to reach some nebulous and hollow ideal of enough and what a good life looks like, we learn to live how it feels right. The Socialist and artist William Morris wrote “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

I love this. They seem like good words for living by, for revolting from normal destructive pressures and connections, for embracing the holiday season with, and saving the world through.

Roses

Especially for the babies of my friends and the friends of my parents

From V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Today, I packaged up several baby blankets to send to friends’ babies. While it is far from a traditionally pastel and bland baby greeting, as I write cards and addresses, as I tidy up edges and seams for these unknown little babies, I have the doomed prisoner Valerie’s letter from V for Vendetta running through my head as a sort of cheery promise and blessing to them:

“It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it or sell it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don’t know who you are or whether you’re a man or a woman. I may never see you. I will never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.”

I don’t know many of these new humans who are still discovering their fingers and toes. Some, it may be years and years before I meet them. They may never know me, or I them. Some, of course, are closer by and easier to be on friendly terms with.

But it doesn’t matter. I love them all, seen and unseen, hugged and unhugged. And I hope with every word I write and each daily decision of how to be in this world as terror and climate challenges ramp up and up, that these children will grow up with love and roses. And, if I have anything to do with it, they will.

With each new human my friends produce, I can more easily appreciate how lucky I and my family are to be loved by different generations of these non-blood aunts and uncles. When I hope that nothing devastating ever happens in the lives of all these new bright babies in my friends’ arms, I can imagine my own parents’ friends feeling the same towards my infant self and sisters. And, that when the troubles do come, it is these people who never wanted hurt to touch your life who will best cushion the sharp parts.

When my dad was first in the hospital, one of the only useful things I could think to do was to get in touch with my mom’s friends. As long as I live, I will be my parents’ child, so there is a sense that they are always more adult than I or my sisters. In trying to figure out anyway to help my mom, the best thing we could do was to call her friends.

And they showed up in force. With texts and emails and letters and visits and food and prayers and vacuum cleaners and hugs, these women and men swooped in with a ready willingness to be adults and do anything that could be done. Friends hold us up, so we can hold others, so we do not have to hold everything and everyone in only our two little hands.

Similarly, I was thrilled every time I walked into my dad’s hospital room and saw his friends visiting, saw their cards and notes and pictures and flowers. I have loved hearing their stories about my dad since then, have loved joking with them about all the ways in which he was irreverent, absurd, and wonderful.

There is nothing quite as wonderful as seeing other people love your best people. That is part of what I want to send to these babies—the promise to help take care of them and their parents when the going gets rough, a promise that nothing needs to be done fully alone.

This Thanksgiving, I have been cringing and snarling at the greeting card gratitudes of being thankful for health and family. That bare human minimum has been rocked for me. My family is like a smile missing a tooth and no one’s health can be taken fully for granted I have learned. But, alongside being terribly absorbed with what is missing, what is absent, I am grateful on a level deeper than grief for all those who are present, who love me and mine and who I love with the boundless ferocity that does make the world turn, makes things better, and bring roses again.

Thank you, friends. For everything.

(Rosebud found behind my house yesterday.)

Refugees and Pilgrims

When I was little, we read Barbara Cohen's book Molly’s Pilgrim every fall. It was a Thanksgiving picture book and came trotting home from the library with my mom, my sisters or I every November for many years.

Molly is a little girl in an elementary school class. For Thanksgiving, the class is making a large scale diorama of a Pilgrim village. Each student is told for homework to take a clothespin and make a little Pilgrim doll.

Molly’s Jewish immigrant mother loves this assignment and makes Molly’s doll for her. The doll does not have a dark dress and white collar. There is no cute little white hat or apron. Instead, the doll is brightly colored with scarves and shawls, like she dressed out of rags in a hurry. The mother explains that of course the pilgrim lady looks like her—they are the same.

Molly hates this and feels that it is the wrong answer, but takes the clothespin lady to school anyway. She is bullied by some other girls in the class, all of who have perfectly predictable Pilgrim clothespins. Some are wearing fancier cloth than a Pilgrim would be, but the colors, the shapes, the style is recognizable and correct. This being a children’s book, where endings are tidy, the teacher naturally loves Molly’s odd-ball doll, and explains that this is what pilgrims truly were—outcast immigrants searching all the world for a place to be safe and free to live and worship as they pleased.

Thanksgiving is a holiday of immigrants, grateful to be together and to be free. It is a day of being thankful for surviving, for coming together. Add in that it was one of the all too few high points in Native American and interloping European relations and it does celebrate a beautiful and unique set of values. Values of grit, survival, freedom, unity, acceptance, abundance, and sharing. At our best, as a country, we can remember that we were born from those ideals.

We are not at our best. We are shuttering borders to refugees who truly need solace from the sort of daily horror and violence that has never been known on this soil.

Since the attacks in Paris, I have had a small pang in my chest. I am afraid. What the fear feels like is similar to the horrible creep of dread I felt last spring—lying awake every night for two weeks, afraid that the phone would ring at night and the hospital would say that my father had died.

In the end, of course, he did. But for all that I wish he were not gone, there was a hollow relief in no longer waiting for that worst to happen to my family.

I feel this dread again listening to the news of violent hunts for suspects in Europe, for France being in a state of war and Russia joining in a coalition, for the root causes of the refugee crises in the first place. People everywhere are living with this sort of fear and anticipation that the worst is about to happen, with the nightmare solid sick that the worse is happening. It feels selfish for me to have this sort of nebulous dread and sadness lingering in my heart. But, there is enough rage and grief in this world without me beating myself up for worrying that this beautiful world is being ripped to shreds.

Living with fear, I find, feels a bit like standing in the back of a moving pickup truck, or in an elevator that has just dropped. Everything feels a bit off kilter, and you reach out to regain balance.

And that is what I want to do with bad news, with fear. I want to reach out and hold on, to bring my people, any people together and make them warm and safe.

Which seems to be the direct opposite of locking borders and denying visas and establishing lower and lower quotas of refugees, all with higher and higher degrees of paperwork. I do not know how we can keep all violent extremists out of the country. I do not think we can, and we are throwing thousands of real babies out with fear-of-terrorist-bathwater.

These denials of human need are based on fear, based on wanting to keep what we know and love safe and alive. I know that. But, it will not work. And I believe that willful inability to interact with truth—the world is fraught with the violence of different beliefs, of intentions misunderstood, of resources too growing more and more scarce—is akin to burying our heads in the sand or not speaking Voldemort’s name.

A few Facebook friends posted earlier this week that Anne Frank and her family had been denied entrance to the United States at the start of World War II. Similarly, there were ships of Jewish citizens who fled Germany in fear and sailed around the world, willing to take any port in a storm. No port would have them, because some of the passengers were suspected of being Nazi sympathizers.

So, for the suspected or possible crimes of a few, hundreds of people were denied help and doomed to persecution, concentration camps, and death. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and mortifying. And we are supposed to learn from the past, from our mistakes. We must.

The world will never be perfect, or perfectly safe. I walked by a coffee shop yesterday and looked at the tables outside, knowing that people sat down at tables just like that in Paris a week ago and were mown down by machine guns. However, I’ve also sat at a café in a tiny mountain town and had a logging truck plow into the sidewalk very very close. Several of us could have been killed.

We cannot control the actions of others. What we can do, and what does allow the fear to bleed into a useful, thoughtful empathy, is control our own actions. If it were American refugees streaming into Syria, what sort of welcome would you want?

It is a mistake to believe that the world can be only one way. So, instead, let us catch our balance by reaching out and holding on to each other, even if, especially if we don’t all look alike. If Thanksgiving is a truly American holiday, then this act of care, of welcoming is the American thing to do. Beyond that, it is the human thing. In combatting inhumane-seeming actions, holding fast to our humanity is the most crucial tool of all.

Single Ladies at the Circus

To open, I happily admit to fiercely loving every one of my friends’ babies. Furthermore, each and every partner or spouse my friends have found is a wonderful addition to the circle of people I love. And I am friends with some of the greatest people on earth, and there are more in my tribe every year. I have learned more about what to look for, work for, wait and hope for, in a good partner from my nested-pair friends than I’ll ever be able to explain. Similarly, as my generation begins to re-people the world, I am breathlessly grateful to witness what soft-stern molten forms love must take to raise a mewling infant into a kind human.

I am constantly amazed at how the heart expands to hold all that we cannot help but love.

Nevertheless, when I am cranky and my calendar seems heavy with baby due dates and weddings, I am full of a strained combination of irritation and disgust.

Of course this unkind and selfish sentiment covers fear, of course it covers loneliness, of course it covers my most terrifying nightmare that as the cast of my world shifts and changes, my role in it all disappears.

There are countless ways in which I am lucky. For most of the life I have been responsible for, I have stitched in and out of beautiful pocket communities, all filled with other adventurers and seekers of something. In some ways, everyone ran away to join the circus, but what we found was not lions in cages and fat ladies singing on Ferris wheels, but each other and ourselves.

And perhaps, to the world outside the circus, outside the woods and waters, the summer camps and mountain lodges and matatus and travelers’ hostels and tight communities of seasonal jobs, we were the sideshow freaks, the ones who don’t quite fit, who allegedly lack linear drive or profitable ambition or understanding of civic duties, gender norms, and grown-up responsibilities.

But it didn’t matter, then, because we all had something like each other, and the knowledge that we weren’t alone in scampering from place to place, person to person, purpose to purpose trying anything and everything that might fit. We had that, and we had the smug and gleeful comfort of being modern Kerouacs and Abbeys and Caulfields—wandering and not letting the best parts of ourselves be devoured by the somnambulant phonies outside our circus tents. We were—we are—kind people and responsible citizens, even if our resumes are eclectic and our moral fiber suspiciously unmainstream.

Life at the circus itself is frequently terrifying—choices yawn up and demand to be made and all the hungry tigers of emotional insecurity are barely caged. There is also, in that rawness, a sort of wildness—perhaps just selfish adrenaline—that is beautiful. And, with nothing else to tie any of us down, we spent hours agonizing and analyzing and dreaming up the next thing. Several friends and I used to sit down regularly for life crisis meetings. We’d get out our lists and scraps of paper with ideas and just talk everything out for hours. It was exhausting, it is exhausting, but it is rarely boring in the way that mature life patterns frighten me with the specter of living in a rut—even a cozy one—for the next seventy years.

What I miss, what I fear will disappear under the nests and onesies of my lovely erstwhile circus folk, is both the willingness to adventure and the support of fellow wanderers. For very good reason, the circus is emptying at a distressing rate.

When there are a lot of us marching around outside the box of normal adulthood, we were a community of gypsies. When there are few, well, it does begin to feel like one is a freak.

And we’re not—those of us still a little unmoored at the circus—freaks or rejects or somehow emotionally or relationship-ally disfigured. We’re just not where the majority are, and that is a damn fine and damn scary place to be.

It seems like I blinked and when I opened my eyes most people I love have found something or someone or someplace that fit better than they’d ever found before, and their wanderings slow or change key. Suddenly, my people have started businesses, written books, built houses, had children, put on plays, fallen in love with a right person, become doctors, and all the rest of their kaleidoscope of talents. Whereas, I don’t find myself very much closer to solid guesses about the shape of my life than I had when I was ironing out scraps of post-it notes to share with friends across internet café tables. I don’t want to stop casting about for what fits and works, but I also don’t want to straggle when everyone else is somehow home.

It would be boring if we all went to the same places, is something that I tell myself when another shot of a beautiful engagement ring pops up, when another perfect baby arrives, when more houses are built and bought and made into homes, when more and more friends seem to get where they wanted and strove to go.

The home and the writing of books, I know that I want. The ring and babies I don’t know if I do. The person on the other side of the ring, the other side of the babies, to make the home with—that I’m much more sure of wanting. Before everyone began pairing up so solidly, I felt a little like we all belonged to each other in some way, a circus family. And, of course, there is the belonging to blood family and close friends that transcends all later-comers and all time. But it is different, being friends, when the nesting pairs start to cozy off. A dear friend reminded me last winter that those sorts of relationships take time and effort and can be very hard, but there is such reward for the time spent that free hours spool away to nurture that relationship above all others.

And I love that for my friends, that they have a person who will be their champion, steward, cheerleader, lover and boxing coach. I want to see those relationships work; I do not want my wonderful friends—or anyone—to feel lonesome and alone on cold nights. While I know that there can still be some loneliness in the richest partnership and that it is much simpler to speak patly and plurally as "we" than it is to merge independently minded gypsy selves into those two small letters, there is the sense of, hope of warmth and security amid the reality.

Of course I have bouts of bitterness, of jealousy, of insecurity, of fearful suspicion that—having been in love with a few good men and bruised my heart deeply in the process—my chances are all up, or that it is because of something deeply broken in me that I am so frequently the third or fifth or seventh wheel. Mostly, I worry that I missed a crucial developmental step that makes me unable to progress in any decisive and driven way, that I’ll spend my life as basically twenty-three years old and longing for gypsy friends, creative revolt, and a home in the wilderness, but somehow never committing enough to get anywhere and never being satisfied with where I am. Meanwhile, my friends will—as the heart demands—commit to caring for the life they’ve chosen or found and spend more and more time on their passion-fueled work and nests and hatchlings.

When I feel like this, I like to get in touch with my other un-nested pair friends. There are other people out there who do understand both loving the nested ones and the babies, and why being questioned about your local emergency contact can bring on an emotional funk. Who struggle with wanting to be held, but not hobbled. And that it’s fine and healthy to feel both. We are happy, being mostly free to do as we please—from eating ice cream for dinner to contemplating moving to Antarctica or starting a band or explaining our actions to no one—but we also have darker commiseration about how the world operates in binary, and that if one isn’t two-by-two, the mistake is transmitted as either a personal flaw or a fixed decision.

Being a party of one is neither. What looks like a yawning gap of lonesome unknown one day is the thrilling beckon of the wild another day.

Beyond the personal insecurity, I miss the feeling of belonging to a group of creative-thinkers and adventurous doers—revolutions and world rebuilding seems possible, over those confused piles of scrappy dreams. I believe that my nested-friends’ ideals are no less exciting and radiant than they ever were, but it is different to bounce ideas about writing books of poetry or confounding climate change around with people who are circumstantially more attuned to questions of bath time or if they should change their name after marriage.

I have learned, lately, more fully what happens when family changes demand the priorities of your energy, of your heart. All other things necessarily slip by the wayside when you are needed, when you need. We all juggle our own hearts unblinkingly for the deepest people in our lives people. I can readily see—emotionally and biologically—how dreams of a communal revolution, of a gypsy circus are subverted by the sweet and demanding realities of traditional adult milestones.

Perhaps fear of being pulled further from my wanderings is why I hold out at the circus: I am selfish and don’t want to find my passions subverted before they’ve been realized or to lose the vibrancy that there is with brilliant confused loved ones striving together towards something, even individual somethings. The force of will, the hunger, to not accept should and normal and anyone else’s expectation of your own behavior—this is a beautiful thing. I’ve been told it is adolescent, that I have some disturbing Peter Pan like tendencies, that I need to pull my shit together, accept—or just make—the necessary compromises, and the like. But I cannot see why growing up must follow a set pattern, why being an adult means leaving the circus, leaving the spark of imagining something different than what is behind.

This, all of this, is just a note to the others at the circus to say: you are not alone. We are not alone. 

Healing Hypothermia

(Frozen cairns at Madison, 2010)

Heading to a friend’s wedding recently, I almost didn’t go and turned around several times en route. Grieving for my dad, I have been in such a cold dark place that I was afraid that going to a joyful celebration of love would be the emotional equivalent of submerging frozen limbs in boiling water. The too quick, too extreme response to deep cold exposure can permanently damage the frostbitten. Things so warmed may never heal to a usable condition.

I do not want this for my heart.

I’ve studied hypothermia, and it seems as apt an analogy for grief as anything else. I’ve had frost bite, and know well how tender and vulnerable our damage-healed bodies remain, even after the surface heals.

Contrary to popular belief, hypothermia is not cured by stripping off the cold person’s clothes, popping them in a sleeping bag, and having a warm person hop in naked to share their body heat. Friction, in this scenario, is alleged to help. As nature abhors a vacuum, what happens in this situation is that the cold of one sucks out the heat of the other and you end up with two dangerously tepid people in a compromising and uncomfortably position, rather than two independently warm people who can then make their social arrangements from warm want, rather than icy need.

I’ve heard of some people becoming sex-crazed while grieving. There is undeniable solace in physical contact and I won’t judge another’s process, but I know that I would not find the warmth and comfort I seek in this equivalent of the naked hypothermia cure—one person needing more than the other can possibly give, and both ending up equally damaged.

How you do heal hypothermia predominantly demands that the heat of the cold person’s beating heart is the main heat source. Of course, this flickering warmth must be watched and tended with the same attentive effort as a lighthouse on stormy coast, a campfire in a snowy cabin, and other apt metaphors for dwindling flames in necessary wilderness.

But the warmth does and must come from within the cold person’s core.

However, the truly frozen cannot do this magical re-warming alone. Your only job, as the frozen, is to keep your heart beating. It falls to others to wrap you in layers and layers of blankets, to insulate you from the ground, from the elements, to place hot water bottles on your arteries, to feed you hot and sugary things to jump start your metabolism, to roughly rub your limbs to stimulate circulation, to help you walk on unfreezing feet as you start to thaw, to holding your hair back as your succumb to the screaming barfies (the most unpleasant nauseous sensation as warmed blood begins to circulate into colder-than-blood flesh.)

This sort of thawing is an enormous effort to ask of one’s companions. It is an evolving process, involving a total change of directions from whatever was planned. As I think on how so many people have both crawled out of the woodwork and stood in quiet readiness and responsive anticipation for whatever my thawing, grieving family needs—I am humbled with awe and gratitude. The wedding, which I did attend, was full of the consistent soft warmth and reassurance than only beloved community can provide.

Once you’ve been through anything hard, it is a duty to help others through. I think of this, of emotional hypothermia and comfort and love, as I make quilts for my friends’ babies.

I am coming to the point where it has been a long time to be sad. I even find myself being highly functional some days. I am at once impatient to fully thaw, and also only now awakening to how truly cold I have been with watching my flawed and wonderful father’s body cease to function. 

Doing grief yoga the other day, I was visualizing the areas—hips and heart—where grief is stored. I saw my chest, pelvis and legs as blocks of human-shaped ice, solid though and only covered with only the thinnest of skin.

I do not see how so much sadness could possibly be stored in me. And I am one of the lucky ones—an employed educated white American lady, who is only coping with the end of one loved one’s life. Refugees, child soldiers, adult soldiers, people who lost their loved ones en masse—these people are likely full of thicker ice than I, and do not have the luxury and leisure to bend and stretch and write and bloggingly chip away at the presumed wonder of their own being dealing with a common part of being human. 

With the time that has passed since Dad, I can see that things have gotten better. Which, on the rougher days, is hard to imagine. But it has been worse, and we have all survived it. So it can seem self-indulgent to wallow in this sadness, to speak of it now. Before, when it was at the worst, I couldn’t form the words, I think. 

Now, too, there is an impatient feeling of having been branded—very few things truly scare me at this point. 

What does scare me is the twin understanding of both how reliant I am on my community, and how fragile all our lives are. We are rich and loving and warm and there for each other, and we are each as delicate as an icicle. Our communities of support are woven of fragility.

I am also scared to let go of my grief. While doing the ice-chipping yoga—and I saw it as chipping with an ice pick, not a natural seasonal melting—and being advised to let go, I found myself wondering where released grief might go, and further, will I be hollow without my sadness? It seems to define the shape of my core more than my bones these days.

This grief is a connection to the last hours I will ever have with my dad, and, just as I try to square up the awful memories (he was no angel and would cringe to ever be thought so) with the best of him and everything in between—I do not want to let anything go because there will never be more. It feels disrespectful to his imprint on my being to let anything go, and it feels counter to his bold personality to hold onto grief.

I do not know how to go forward, and yet, every day, we all do.

A decade ago, I frostbit my nose—twice—in the space of a few months. It was fully frozen flesh with blisters and scabbing and a scar. The tip of my nose remains highly sensitive—sometimes white, sometimes red, sometimes purple and always running from November to April. My family—including my dad—responded to this freezing by giving me more scarves than I thought any one person would ever need.

And maybe that is something. The cure to the cold is our own beating heart, those who do the work of standing close to shelter the flame, and in our accepting the gift of their warmth and help.