Hold Everything Dear

     

I watched George W. Bush’s final State of the Union address in the winter of 2008 with a sort of blistering rage and worry about the state of the world. I don’t remember, now, what the seed of the trouble was—maybe Iraq, maybe climate change, maybe the sort of dread about nothing in particular and everything all at once that overwhelms me when the world seems to be floundering and slipping away from the all things bright and beautiful and fair. I felt, deeply, a sense of wrongness in the world that I was powerless to combat. When I think of then, of myself at that particular time of life—twenty-five, and maybe too old too be so adolescently dramatic and naïve—I imagine my fingers to be more like dry wooden twigs than flesh and blood, grasping at a world in winter.

Regardless, watching someone I believed then to be criminally idiotic speak about my country, I was crying and sputtering with rage. The friend I was watching the speech with got up, walked across the room to the bookshelf, and tossed a small white book at me. “There,” he said. “Read that and you’ll be fine.”

It was John Berger’s Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. I read it, and the world as I knew it, changed. I liked the quiet crackling of Berger’s rage, that he wrote of how the cramped crook of a boy’s body shooting marbles in a Palestinian settlement spoke of an undefeated despair and familiarity with unkindly small spaces. I liked the image of an old couple, crossing a check-point, holding hands no matter the age—a conspiracy of two against the world. I loved Gareth Evan’s poem at the start—where “the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat for the journey.”

I fell for the way of seeing the world that came through Berger’s words—here was love and fury and a seething peace within it all. The dead were among the living, and living smelled of the gasoline of motorbikes as much as the freshness of hay. The despair had grace and teeth, the ghosts had blood and bones. My own writing, when I’m reading Berger, is more bodily—I leave muscle and heart and bones and teeth and hands and skin and hair and blood on the page to a degree I’ve never come to from anyone else. His writing makes me aware that I am alive, mortal and physical, while tattooing an eternal, earth-bound mysticism and immediate humanitarian outrage into my being. The blinders are off, the gloves are off, and any shred of artifice joins them—butchered and beautiful—on the floor.

After Hold Everything Dear, I devoured everything that I could borrow from my friend, find in libraries, or otherwise get my hands on. I love, particularly, the Into Their Labours trilogy and To the Wedding. Into Their Labours are loosely connected stories about three generations in a small village in France, but the story, I think, is the same as small-town anywhere. The binding love, the sense of place, the dirt and reality rather than a sanitized Euro Disney history—this is the world I believe to be real. Each one of those stories opened something within my heart and worldview a little more, made me believe in the stubborn strength of humanity to lurch forward. When I didn’t like the ending of the trilogy, when I cried at how the heirs of a pastoral village end in the slums of a nameless city—this colors how I see the present world’s migrations and crowdings and inequities. Berger’s writing, gently and ferociously, reminds me who we are, and who we may be.

The same in To the Wedding, where the wedding reads like some frothy fantasy of a quaint village—except for the politics that almost keep a father out of the country and the disease that stalks the bride. To have harsh reality and fairy tale idealism holding hands on the page…this burnt something about tradition and mystery into my being that no church service or religion could ever have done.

I’ve sobbed in public while reading several of his books—And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos while sitting on the bench outside an underwear outlet, Here is Where We Meet while sitting in a shack at my job as a ski patroller, most memorably. Arguably, I’m hysterical and dramatic and like to draw attention to my literary loves. It’s partly true. I’m operatic in my reactions to what I love. I cry, sometimes a lot. Because I’ve found that Berger’s writing touches something like my bones, the reaction seems authentic. I’ve checked myself, many times, to make sure that I’m not in love with the idea of someone moved to tears by words on a page. I don’t think I am. The emotional reaction slows me back down to the pace where I can absorb the weight of the words, of the world as Berger points it out. Beautiful words that renew my faith in the world also change the beat of my heart and the timbre of my breath. It makes me wonder just how razor thin that faith must be if each renewal tingles my spine.

With Berger, I know I’m not alone in this breathless wonder. When I worked at a school library, the drama teacher and I found that we both love To the Wedding and stood in the hallway beaming and almost teary-eyed, each putting a palm over our own hearts and gesturing at the air with the other hand while jointly saying, again and again, “It’s just…”

Out of the last nine years that I’ve known about John Berger, I have feathered my bookshelves with copies of most everything of he’s written. Often, I check the “B” section of a bookstore first—not that I’m necessarily looking to buy more of his books, but I like to see them there. It’s my iteration of a rosary or a station of the cross, I suppose. My Berger collection is separated from most of my books, surrounded by the poetry and the other books that mean the world to me.

Yet, I thought today, about how long it has been since I’ve read any of the books. Certainly I still carry them around like totems—I spent this last summer with an abbreviated book collection and am sure at least Hold Everything Dear was saved out from storage. But I haven’t read them, any of them, for at least a few years. The poem I wrote in response to Hold Everything Dear fell out of my copy, dated January 30, 2008, along with a letter from my original Berger librarian, sent to my first Montana address that September. I know I’ve read the book since then, but can’t think when.

All the same, I was shaken to hear that Berger passed away yesterday. He was ninety, I never met him, he did not write back when I tried to write him a letter once, and he is not mine, personally, to mourn. Grief, I believe, is for those who knew him as the man, rather than those who knew him as the Writer. Nevertheless, I’ve been stumbling on something between gratitude and grief about his passing. I met Berger, as it were, when the world seemed dark with a government I did not like or trust. My worries and sadness about the world going forward now, rather than nearly nine years ago, have suddenly deepened. Between refugees and ISIS and Russian hacking and climate change and a President-Elect with climate deniers and white supremacists as confidants and advisors, I keep coming to the sense that the dark side is winning.

Lazily, selfishly, I wanted Berger and more like him to see me through this patch of history. I wanted his older world gravitas and someone who stole art supplies and made love to a woman he called Oslo (because it rhymed with First Snow) in the London Blitz to light the way for me through this modern mess.

But then I return to why I haven’t read Berger in a few years: I haven’t needed to. I used to need to, like needing a bandage over a wound, like an invalid heals in stages. I needed both the healing and then the proud badge of the scar. There are no scientific realities—other than death, digestion, decomposition, and the trading forms of released molecules—where fur and feathers become flesh, where flesh becomes bone. But that was the image that struck me today, still musing about why the death of a man I did not know causes such a hiccup in my heart—Berger’s books gave me something I needed, something I could hold, until the words slipped under my skin and into my solid, mortal bones. His writing helped me become who I am, and now that I am this creature with those particular tattoos on my bones, the only way forward is to be the incarnation of all that blood and passion and light and critical love and championing of this world.

Understanding the Uncomfortable

I’m a white cisgender able-bodied straight woman in New England. I am unlikely to get shot by cops, harassed for my religion, deported, drafted for a nuclear war, or, really, have much worse happen to me under Trump’s administration than have more job prospects disappear, the planet melt, and my access to birth control further limited. My chances of being sexually assaulted are still about one in five, although that may increase if Trump’s ascendancy makes sexual predators feel more entitled. So, largely, I can write safely and compassionately about understanding the white working class frustration that fueled Trump. As I find myself saying frequently, understanding is not the same as condoning.

It’s not, exactly, that I am surprised that Trump won—just stunned and saddened because the rhetoric of his campaign was so vitriolic, and I hate that so many people found resonance with that anger. I suspect that the anger of many of Trump’s almost entirely White voters has more to do with a fear of losing identity, of wanting to make sure that, in a growing and changing and browning and gender-changing America, there is still a place for them, for the life and the values they know.

That fear of being left behind, of losing your place, losing a place, in the world, I understand. My father once stood up in a crowded bookstore, in an almost entirely female audience, to ask Terry Tempest Williams a question. Williams was on a book tour for When Women Were Birds, about her relationship to her mother and the women in her family, and my father’s question was, “where is your father in all of this, does he have a place in this story?”

Williams answered warmly that her father did, and my dad sat down, and I deeply regret that I can’t remember now if I ever told him how proud I was of that moment, what I learned in it. To me, that exchange, crystallized my understanding that as movements for social change go forward, that as Progressives work for equal rights, representation, and opportunities for women, Black, Brown, LGBTQ, immigrants newer to America than ourselves, and non-Christian people, we cannot overlook that to change the country—as I believe we must—this is going to intrinsically make, particularly, straight White men feel like they don’t have a place anymore. That lack of inclusion is a disservice, and as it turns out, a disservice that is dangerous to everyone.

I don’t believe that White America is under an assault, that we need to let straight WASP dudes be in charge again forever because they get sad (or dangerous to everyone else) when they don’t get all the seats at the table, but I do think that, as Progressives, we have been narrow-minded and unkind when it comes to this issue. We have not embraced diversity that did not agree with our ideals. We have not been open-hearted, we have not understood that shifting the balance of power is as out and out shitty for some as it is bold and beautiful for others.

That said, it is an unacceptable response to our liberal idealistic ignorance to have misogynistic, climate change denying, White Supremacist billionaires running the country.

I don’t know what to do about it, exactly, but I do know that I am open to almost all suggestions. I think that Progressives like myself will have to change our tactics, because all of the pot-luck rallies, listening sessions, membership drives, candlelit vigils, direct actions, writing letters to Congress, laboring for policy changes in a corrupt system, Black Lives Matter marches, bike lanes, and all the rest that we—that I—have put such idealistic faith in, believing that by doing so we were curving the arc of history so sharply to justice, these activities have not been enough, this time.

Which isn’t to say we should cease to do whatever both feels good for our souls and is socially effective. My faith in that arc of history is shaken and I am appalled at my own ignorance at how long the arc is, how hard progress is to come by and sustain, but I’m not giving up on justice.

How we go forward has been the grief soaked question of Progressives this week. Real things—a registry for Muslims in America, a climate denier at the head of the EPA, a tacit affirmation of White Supremacy at the highest level of national government, Trump selecting Supreme Court justices—are happening. The fox is in the henhouse, and no amount of good intentioned hand wringing will take it out again. For a hopeful people—Idealists, Liberals, Progressives—we need to grieve, and accept reality. Not submit to it, but accept it.

As an environmentalist, I have long been reconciling myself to the reality that we cannot go back in time, that the damage of climate change is irreversible, that all the best energies and efforts cannot hold back the tides already risen and still rising. We can mitigate the damage, we can build for a more sustainable and resilient future, but we cannot erase what we have done. And, we have done this, but failing to understand the perspectives of those who see the world differently. Everyone can embrace the alternate realities of Harry Potter and Westeros, but we cannot understand our own families, our own fellow citizens, and how they world and their eroding or aspirational place in it differently than our own values and experience?

We cannot change the past, we do not get a do over. Instead, we go forward with the best that we can, we do all the things—protesting, rallying, running for office, stepping down from privilege to let others step up, listening and understanding. And this includes understanding why Trump won—because many people were scared of losing what they have, losing who they are, and finding their beliefs unrepresented in government.

I believe that same fear of loss of identity and power is at the root a lot of the Progressive angst and sorrow this week—we thought the world was leaning one way, our way, and it tilted over “against us.” This may be the most uniting force in our country at present—if we can remember that most of us aren’t evil, we just want to be seen and heard, to have a place and a purpose, and the pride of our families. 

How It Happened, What Happens Now

I do not excuse or explain Donald Trump's vitriol, ignorance, violent misogyny, terrifying stances on racism and immigration, or climate denial. He is a nightmare to every tenet of my belief in what a leader of this nation ought to be and do and say. However, I dislike when people speak against his supporters as if all are the same. Here is what I think happened in a lot of hearts and minds, although I am horrified that personal fear came out stronger than any other priority in the voting booths of America:


According to the news and reports and commentary I’ve seen today, Donald Trump won the election because he tapped into the deep frustration and anger of citizens who have had their expectations of their own lives and identities severely shaken up in the past few decades, and got these people to take a chance on him, because the status quo hasn’t helped a lot of people in a long time. 

My sister gently pointed out that these people, who chose a very different president than who she or I wanted, are really not so separate from us, from me. Not in the “we’re all humans, we’re all Americans” sort of way, but in the feeling of having been baited and switched between preparing for and living adult life. I’m not of the political storybook about this—there are no generations of me, relying on the local industry for a guaranteed job at a living wage to buy a house, raise a family, send my children to something better.

Instead, I was raised in the middle class, somewhere on the fringes. I went off to college with a solid student loan debt. It was naïve to borrow so much to go to the school that felt right, rather than the school that was priced right, but this wasn’t a part of the conversation in the late 1990s—you borrowed money to go to college, and your college education would give you the enhanced job opportunities to pay that debt off, within a decade or so of graduation. That, at least, was the deal I understood. There was no talk—with my parents, with the school, with the loan officers—that it might be prudent to pursue studies in fields with more economic potential. I was part of the generation that was told: “do what you love and the money will follow!”

So I did. I studied Environmental Studies. I spent my summers working in summer camps, and then at one of the largest and oldest environmental groups in the country. Although I wasn’t pursuing the straight and narrow path towards immediate student loan repayment, I was still in the field. After graduation, I struggled to find work that both paid my student loan, life expenses, and bore some connection to my education and training. Nothing really bit, and I wasn’t one of the twenty-somethings who know what they want to do and where they want to be, so I wandered a bit—partly because I was sure that somewhere out there, a job that fit my education and paid my loans existed.

I believed that because it was the story I’d grown up with.

Eventually, I decided to attend graduate school because on enough occasions, I’d been passed over for jobs for someone with a graduate degree. Not only was I interested in the material and of continuing to study, it seemed like a better job market would open up.

Again, in hindsight, none of this makes much sense, and I feel like I’ve been duped by a system that favors wealthier people. The thought that only rich people can afford to passionately study something that may never make them any money but is fascinating and beautiful fills me with a white hot fury. That education is, more and more, a means to an income and not a marriage between income, interest, and opportunity is equally maddening.

But, I fell for it. I fell for the idea that education improves prospects, that it is worth the interest rates of student loans, to be able to find a discipline that improves your understanding of how to be in the world and provides employable skills.

And, now that I’ve finished graduate school, I’ve often found myself in the bizarre donut hole of being “too educated” for some jobs, while not having enough “hands on” experience because I went back to school. Meanwhile, the student loans really don’t care if you are working in the field you’re educated in—they just want their money back, which is fair. But there is a distinct sense of failure, personal and systemic, in that I have yet to earn a full-time, year-round, living wage within the field of my degrees.

It’s been twelve years since I graduated from college, six since I got my Masters degree. The economy has gone up and down, and the availability of environmental jobs is closely tied to both the economy and politics. I also have some geographic and family limitations that keep me in the highly populated Northeast. So, yes, of course, I have brought some of this lack of job security on myself through poor choices, bad luck, and the errors of being a human with multiple priorities.

But, some of the reason that I am thirty-four, deep in student debt, unlikely to purchase a home, or save wisely for retirement for a very long time, is because the system I believed in, the system I bought into with my financial and professional future, this system no longer exists. Because of my parents and my degrees, I am not counted as a Detroit autoworker, a Berlin papermill worker, a Rust Belt or Blue Collar anything. All the same, I know very well the exhaustion and fury and frustration that things have shifted, that you are not living the life you were groomed for, that the rules changed while you were mid-play. And I have to think that this is the rage and fear and discontent that Trump tapped into, because it is a potent fuel.

The feeling that what you have been educated to give the world is not wanted, will not feed you, that is one of the worst I know. And I can understand how, for someone with a different worldview, friends, library and social media feed, the answer to this deep sense of identity betrayal would be the loud angry rich white man who looks like Presidents have almost always looked, and says he’ll fix everything.

Other than what connection my personal employment and identity struggles give me to fellow citizens who I might be tempted to further disregard in a liberal fear-fury panic—I find myself today not caring about that as much. Of course, I want to do the work that I want to do in the world, but more than that, I want to keep the country safe for everyone—all colors and faiths and genders. I want healthcare to be affordable. I want there to be jobs that people want to do, that pay enough that the economy doesn’t crumble. I want climate change to be addressed on a personal and policy level, across the world. I want sexual harassment and discrimination to end. I want marriage to be available for anyone who wants it. I want everyone to have the time to enjoy sunrises and sunsets.

And all of that wanting doesn’t go away, regardless of who is in the White House, in Congress, in my local government offices. And if the wanting doesn’t go away, neither does the burning call to action—on all levels—to build the world the way we want it to be.

I believe we can do this, uphill though progress will be. It begins with understanding, and this is my hope of that start. Because I don't know what else to do. Giving up on America isn't an option.

Standing Rock

(Image from JustSeeds.org)

I’m not in Standing Rock, North Dakota. I’m not planting my feet on the ground that contains my ancestors, placing my flesh and blood between the land and our culture’s insatiable lust for oil and the incomprehensible power of profit. I haven’t been arrested, held in a jail cell or a dog kennel. I haven’t screamed at the law enforcement of collected states and departments and representatives of governments and corporations.

And I have been wondering why I’m not there. I know these things matter. I do not want oil to spill into any landscape, upon the bones of any ancestors, into the waterways of the living, into the endocrine systems of the unborn generations. I do not want the dangerous patterns of our consumptive lives to continue unchecked, unchanged. I want the sovereignty and dignity of Native peoples—in North Dakota and across the globe—to be upheld and broadened, not beaten down further and ignored yet again. Colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism—all of these forces have pushed peoples out of homelands and towards the marginal land and seascapes that are now most at risk from the climate change brought about by lifestyles less grounded and intentional that many that were displaced. I don’t treasure an image of indigenous peoples as noble savages—that lack of nuance and excess of Romanticisms covers up far more interesting realities and prevents humans from seeing each other with empathy, and as the hot messes of contradictions we all are. However, I do believe that there are societies that have much more sustainable values than the majority white, post-Industrial Western Capitalist one that destroys landscapes to find the oil that, when burnt in power plants and refineries and gas tanks, destroys the air, the water, the seasons, the planet.

I’m still here in New England, though, not in the Dakotas. I daydream about these actions, these times of solidarity when bodies come together to block pipelines and trucks, but I never go. I stay here because I need to pay my rent, feed my dog, repay my student loans, tend to my family, because my life is here and I feel enough binding me here that I can’t imagine going without creating more, or maybe just different, burdens. Am I just making lazy and selfish excuses to stay comfortable? Do I not believe enough? I wonder these things in the middle of the night sometimes. If I really cared so passionately about climate change, about being in solidarity with a cause I believe in, wouldn’t I be there, linking arms and marching and standing and holding firm despite the consequences, rather than going to the grocery store or making mundane appointments for my car inspection or looking at the container ships come into port and knowing that their oily effluent is mingling in the sea with my father’s remains, and I am standing on the beach, throwing a tennis ball for my dog.

If I really wanted the present and the future to be brighter, better, cleaner and kinder than the patterns of the past, shouldn’t I, shouldn’t we all, be out on parade and picket lines?

I don’t know. It simply isn’t practical—if everyone is arrested, who bails us all out, makes soup for everyone, takes care of the young and the elderly, installs solar panels, plants gardens, negotiates climate and human rights agreements. I admire those who are putting their lives on hold and on the line to stop pollution from crossing national boundaries and poisoning the land and water and sanctity of the place. Similarly, I admire the people who labor through zoning board meetings, who figure out how to live off the grid, who temper their egos enough to carpool or take an inconvenient bus, who raise kind children who love vegetables, who run for office with integrity and practical idealism, everyone who does the thousand quieter jobs that transitioning away from fossil fuels truly require.

And it is not the same to do this small work. I was sitting in my apartment, prepping for a job interview by researching grant writing and best practices for sustainability in higher education, while watching friends on Facebook check in at Standing Rock. And I wanted us all to be there, for real. To be all together, fists high and smiles wide, walking into the fray and saying, firmly, that this dirty way with pipelines and trampling lives and beliefs for profit and out of a lack of imagination of how to implement a cleaner world will no longer be. I wanted the drama and the Romance and the certain solidarity of such direct action.

Because doing the quiet necessary work is hard. Not in the way that having red raw marks on your wrists from zip-tie handcuffs or being violently intimidated or beaten by law enforcement or being a civil disobedience felon or living in a protest camp is hard—and I do believe those are hard things that people chose to do—but because you have to get up every day and find a balance of practical action while navigating life.  It is hard, it is not glamorous—movie stars and Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry are not going to join you in signing up for a CSA or doing an energy audit of your home or going to a meeting of the water board—but it is perhaps as vitally important.

Which is what I’ll keep telling myself, as I do what work of the world as I can in Maine, while it remains Facebook official that I’m in North Dakota. 

Dear Anne Frank

I spend a lot of time thinking about the scrap of Anne Frank’s diary where she writes that:

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

I think of that, hoping for the kernels of goodness in all our hearts to flourish, and I read and re-read Jill McDonough’s poem “Accident, Mass. Ave.”, where I recall again and again that underneath anger is fear. I do not believe we can address violent anger unless we address the causes of fear at the roots. I think of Dr. Martin Luther King’s words that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”And then I wake up and read that more American black men have been killed by police, that police have been killed by snipers, that no country welcomes refugees with open hearts, that LGBTQ+ friends no longer feel safe, that fear and hate and ignorance are louder than love and patience and wonder, that rather than unifying, everything seems to be fracturing.

I have spent the last fifteen months crawling out of grief, my understanding of the world irrevocably shaken by the loss of my dad. It boggles my heart than so many people are dealing with the shattering logistics of fresh losses—the families of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and the Dallas officers, along with the Orlando victims and so many others, must face the somnambulant hours of determining what to do with their loved ones’ bodies, what sort of service their loved one would have wanted and when and where to have such a thing, what to do with the coffins or ashes that were the hands and eyes and voices of their dear ones, which of the deads’ clothes to save and which to give away, and then how to go forward into the world without someone who they love, who has always been there.

Of course it matters how all these people died—these were violent and sudden deaths, explosions in a bitter thicket of entrenched hatred and racism and lax gun laws—but in another way, what really matters, is that they are gone today, and did not have to be. Lawmakers who do not work for gun control, individuals and institutions that perpetuate racism…I imagine many have lost family and friends, have had to call mortuaries and write obituaries, scatter ashes and pray graveside, have had to wake up every morning and freshly recall their cast of characters is altered. I can think of no reasons but laziness and greed that personal grief does not translate into wiser actions to prevent unnecessary deaths by violence and desperation. And neither of those reasons are good enough for me.

I want to believe in everything that I have ever believed in—that love is stronger than hate, that the beauty of the world outweighs, outlasts, the pain we cause it and each other, that so much does depend on red wheelbarrows and slants of sunlight on oceans and mountains and lovers’ faces, that the Zen monk who is chased off the cliff by a tiger can still savor a strawberry he plucks while falling, that all of the passion and love and effort and determination to be kind and foster joy that virtually everyone I know pours into the world every damn day in a thousand ways and scopes really will make the planet better and more habitable for all people. I want to believe this, and suspect that underneath the shock and sorrow and tears, I always will, but the evidence of the world does not easily point that way. 

Maybe it’s faith to keep going on this hope in the face of devastating news, maybe it’s stupidly, willfully naïve. And maybe it's all of that, and the best thing we've got.

To run away, to turn off the news, move to an island or deep into the woods, to live in beautiful isolated simplicity, this is tempting. However, the selfishness of the action galls me. So does taking the long view, and forgetting that each statistic is a person, with a network of loved ones. Somewhere between getting your heart broken by following every horrible event to the hilt and fleeing to the comfortable cocoon of divorcing the unpleasant, there must be a shambling balance in how to go forward.

Because, going forward, being mundane with flashes of the normal brilliance of being a human, having the ordinary ups and downs of daily life—this is the stuff of life. This is what the dead are missing. This is what we need to be doing—going on with our lives the way we want the world to be, come hell and high water and both will come. Some of going forward is staring at the sunset and falling in love with the world, and some of going forward is facing the harsh truths and remaining in love with the world.

And yet, I don’t feel better writing this. Maybe because I am still hollow-eyed and teary from recent days events which are rushing in like a too fast tide, maybe because I don’t quite see how pounding out some words fixes any of the holes in the world or my soul, maybe because I’m doubting my faith in humanity and that gives me a pain in my chest because if that goes, I'll be lost. Regardless, I still believe we have to gone on trying, straining, striving, failing, falling short, and howling into the abyss because, goddammit, people and the world deserve the best we can muster together.

My Our Town

In the rainstorm, just before the wedding, someone forgets their line and whispers, desperate, fuck just loud enough to be heard. And suddenly, all the costumes and makeup and lighting melt away and there is just one nervous little human begging with his eyes for someone to help him.

And the others onstage do, and the show goes on.

I am sitting in the almost empty theater, watching my high school students do their final dress rehearsal of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The students directing know that I love the play like no other, and have asked me to be one of the participating audience members, asking a question about Grover’s Corners in Act One.

They are in Act Two now, my line has come and gone, and I can’t seem to tear myself away from the story both on the stage and off. I am not Mrs. Soames—a character who weepily gushes that she just loves to see young people happy, that to be happy is the most important thing. I am not watching because I love watching my young students be happy.

I am watching because, to me, the words of this play knit the air together until everyone watching and everyone performing is held in something invisible and tensile and, of course, eternal—the tie that binds, as it were. My heart feels softer watching this play, reading this play, discussing this play. Like most good art, it gives me a better sense of how to be a kind human.

“I didn’t realize. So all of that was going on and we never noticed,” says Emily at the end, after she has died and gone back to revisit her life. The that that she sees, I believe, is love—invisible, tensile, eternal love that holds us all together.

The students who miss their lines, who speak perhaps too quickly, as if they are afraid of forgetting the words spinning off their tongues like manic silk from a spool, I see the color rise in their faces, their eyes get wide in a small panic, and I think: in their stumbling and in the way the other actors catch them, pick up the thread and move along, the play is proven. I love the mark of effort, of the off-script exchange of help perhaps even more than something flawless.

Last summer, for the 250^th Anniversary of my hometown, the town put on a remarkable production of Our Town. Act One—“Daily Life”—was on the Town Green, under the flagpole and a Civil War statue and within sight of the two churches, the local grocery store, the Town Hall and the old cemeteries. Act Two—“Love and Marriage”—had everyone hustling away from a thunderstorm and into one of the churches.

Act Three was in the cemetery. 

And, as Emily comes to terms with the afterlife, as George buckles at her feet under the weight of his loss, as Mr. Gibbs lays flowers on his wife’s grave, as Simon Stimson breaks my heart with his unsung melodies and regret, as the thought that the Webbs have lost both their children—it always slays me that siblings Emily and Wally exchange no words beyond the grave—I looked around at the audience in my small New Hampshire hometown.

We, the audience, are living out the same stories that our friends and neighbors and relations on the other side of the lights are telling. As we always are, but sometimes it takes a shift from normal everyday to see what is going on, how held we each are.

I hope that this holding love is eternal, outlasting death and encompassing even the imperfect. Because the line from the play that I ask is “is there much drinking in Grover’s Corners?”

As the daughter of a man who loved New Hampshire’s history and small towns and died of alcoholism, I feel like this convergence of pieces must deserve some sort of particular prize. The students, I don't think, know that my father died recently and certainly not how he did. And so I ask it, and then spend the rest of Act One worrying about Simon Stimson, the church organist and town drunk. I know the play—I know that the answer to the question other characters ask of Simon is that it ends with him hanging himself and leaving a musical phrase as his epitaph. I know he’s supposed to have seen a peck of trouble, and I know that I feel furious and defensive when the character is played for a laugh as he rolls about town.

But I take heart when Editor Webb offers to walk home with Stimson one night, and when Mrs. Gibbs—as she sits eternally in the graveyard—hushes and comforts Stimson who remains hard and bitter in death at all that he regrets doing and not doing in life. Kindness is a lifeline.

I don’t think that I believe in an afterlife, but all the same, when my dad was dying of a failing liver from years of alcoholism, I didn’t want him to die angry at himself—if he did have to go, and if there is anywhere else to go, I didn’t want him to go there angry or hard or bitter, because that just made worse what couldn’t be made worse. And if the afterlife is nothing more than releasing the molecules that made him into the world to be remade, well, no need for those to go out with self-loathing and sadness either. 

One of the last times I was alone with my dad—that I know for certain he knew it was me—I held his hand and read silently Our Town while he slept. Not because of Simon Stimson or because of the beautiful father/daughter moments in the play or because of the way Emily says goodbye to the world, but because through the binding love and the eternal and seeing the unseen that and life being too wonderful to realize, I find enormous comfort, like another might find an official holy book. And because I couldn’t bring Dad to the Seacoast or to an autumn maple tree or Mt. Washington or a stonewall or lilacs, but I could bring the New Hampshire of Grover’s Corners to him.

And now, all of that is going on whenever I read or watch this beautiful play. All of these ties that bind me to these words now makes it harder to watch, puts more at stake but also reaffirms my belief that we’ve only got the short time we’ve got and the people we’ve got, and far better to make the most of all of this wonderful life than regret a second.

A Numb Fury

Lately, when I hear about coral reefs being bleached, or particles of carbon in the atmosphere, or rabidly migrating invasive species, or any and all of the other news about our changing climate, I find myself a bit numb.

Which is odd. I’ve been so long on the side of the passionately hopeful, believing that if we care enough and act humbly and wisely enough, we can yet pull of this grand trick of saving the world.

And I can still say and write the right the words, but they have an ashy hollow feeling now. I don’t seem to be able to work up a lather for presumed demise and resurrection of the abstract as well as I once could.

What has changed?

Just that I am learning to live with loss and I no longer believe all wrongs can be righted with enough love and elbow grease. My father died in April, my uncle died in December. The shape of my world is vastly altered without these wonderful men in my life.

I hate it. I miss them every day and may never believe that I’ll never speak with either again, never hear my dad’s laugh or make terrible puns with my uncle. I’ll never hug them again.

It is unmooring, to have beloved constants there one minute and then going, going, gone forever.

This, somehow, makes the presumptive loss of life on Planet Earth at once easier to comprehend the scope of and less acceptable to allow to happen unchallenged.

We cannot repeat the past. We cannot turn on a dime to restore old-growth forests, pump crude oil back in the ground, unbleach the Great Barrier Reef, or grow back eroded coastlines. We cannot bring back the dead or live in the past.

Speaking historically and climatically, the past wasn’t perfect. The past was where we learned to haul oil and coal out of the ground and burn it, before we knew what damage it could cause. We learned to put it in our cars and airplanes and factories before we knew it could get in our lungs, before we knew that more isn’t always better. We hunted species to extinction and poisoned our waters. When we talk about protecting and preserving, about re-growing former environments, it starts to sound like an idealized past we are trying to recreate. We’d like, please, a second chance, to hit reset with all of the rainforest, but none of the pollution.

My personal past wasn’t perfect. My father had alcoholism. Living with and loving him was a lot like being in a hurricane zone—the erratic storms of his moods were unpredictable, regular, and unnavigable. I don’t know why he drank—other than addiction is a sort of emotional and chemical parasite that, inside people we love, creates a need greater than any other for whatever substance feeds the monster of the disease. I don’t know if there was anything more we could have done to help him to stop before it killed him. The part of me that may never heal over Dad’s death is that it was preventable, but between his disease and our furious loving ignorance at how to help him, the disease won, rather than all the brilliant and kind and creative and big-hearted parts of my dad. The monster won, not our love. That will always sting.

I don’t want that past back, fully. I want the good parts, with our lessons learned all around, so that we can go forward whole again. I have thought, so many times, that “I get it, I’ve learned how much I love my dad, how fragile and brief life is and how much people matter. I’d like him back now and I know that the man he was in the week before he died learned his own lessons and would like to come back too, please!”

But we don’t get that. No one, no place or species or ecosystem or weather pattern gets to hit restart.

The last thing I heard my father say—almost exactly a year ago—was “it’s going to be okay, it’s all going to be okay.”

As last words go, they aren’t bad. Sometimes I find them comforting, other times so infuriating that I’ll scream. Because it hasn’t been okay, it isn’t okay, and it will never become okay that this was how my father left the people and the world he loved so much.

It has also, with a terribly normality, become okay that he isn’t here anymore. Not always, but the unimaginable has become the daily and the real, and we are all adapting but surviving to this new world.

If my father could have been treated for his disease before it was too late, he would still be here. If there were a treatment for my uncle’s rare and aggressive cancer, he would still be here.

When I think about climate change, I can’t help thinking that we do have all of the information and the science and many of the solutions staring us in the face. And yet we are choosing, with our inactions, not fix the problems before us. I have seen people die for lack of treatment and intervention, and I can't fathom that we're as people letting the world waste away when we have enough of the answers to be smarter.

I think that my numbness at re-hearing the same but worse climate news may just be sleeping fury that what can be salvaged in this world with its biological prerogative for life and survival, adaptation and resilience is not being treasured. Treatments to the causes of climate change are well-known (use less, think more), the science is in that we are doing this to ourselves as a people, life is short and the world beautiful…what else do we need to know in order to act?