Diary

‘I have the milk of human kindness by the quart in every vein,’ My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins claims in “I’m an Ordinary Man.”  And what does ordinary mean to him? It’s someone “Who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance/ To live exactly as he likes and  do precisely what he wants.”

Of course the song highlights the stodgy professor’s cluelessness about what would actually make him happy.  It takes a shabby flower seller in Covent Garden, with none of the qualities Higgins thinks he values, to show him how wrong he has been.

I’ve been thinking about kindness a lot lately, as the reckless and lawless bludgeoning of America goes to greater and greater extremes.  The president and his hatchet man (I don’t even want to type their names) are taking a line from another of England’s memorable protagonists, Hamlet, who tells his mother “I must be cruel only to be kind.” It’s going to hurt, our two contemporary villains tell us, but they assure us we will see in time how their  patriotism has rescued America.

Kindness is so deeply engrained in the human psyche that everyone, except those with certain mental diseases, wants to believe they possess it, even when others question whether they do. Confronted with their cruelty, they say they are misunderstood, their critics lack context, their victims will see in the end the value they gained from suffering.

No.  I don’t think it works that way.  Kindness isn’t complicated. It’s not a long-range strategy hiding behind meanness.  It is just a way of seeing what’s wrong, or what  could be better, and trying to do something about it right now. 

The issue of kindness, and how much of it is natural to us, was highlighted a few days ago on a day trip out of Manaus, Brazil. On the way back, we saw a juvenile sloth come down to the water to drink and then fall into the river. It wasn’t clear whether it intended to get in the water, but once it was in, it started to swim out deeper. We all watched for a while as the boat idled, but at some point, the crew decided the little animal wouldn’t be able to save itself.

It’s simple enough to rescue a drowning sloth.  You just have to put out a pole and as soon as its body touches it, instinct takes over and it curls its arm around the pole. One inside the boat, the guide carried it around so we all could say hello before they took it back to shore and put it back in a tree. 

Every one of the people on the boat had the same reaction: instant love for this sweet creature. We were gentleness and kindness personified. But how much kindness do we show when the drowning is more abstract? I imagine on that boat we had no such unity of feelings about those who are drowning in debt, addiction, grief, lost love, betrayal. I suspect we would disagree more about what we owe others than what we owe a sloth.  

The Gallup World Poll asked people in 2019 if they thought people would return a lost wallet, and found that people are much too pessimistic about the benevolence of others. The number of wallets returned after being dropped in a street  in one experiment was far higher than  those who were asked to guess about the number had predicted. The respondents didn’t have much faith in human kindness, and that’s sad because apparently they should have had more. Even sadder because it would be so nice to have more.

Interestingly, the Nordic nations, including Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, whose people always rank among the world’s happiest, were among the top places for expected and actual return of lost wallets, the same Gallup World Poll determined. “The wallet data are so convincing because they confirm that people are much happier living where they think people care about each other,” explained John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report.

We have so many opportunities every day to be kind.  We like ourselves more when we are, and I don’t know why that isn’t enough to make us try to be phenomenally better people.  Or maybe just a little better. Happiness doesn’t lie in the shallow egocentrism of Henry Higgins.  I don’t want to be ordinary.  I want to be better than that.  I want other people to live as they like and do what they want too, not just me. I will always return a lost wallet, and maybe I can do more to return others’ lost confidence, lost hope, lost feelings of being cared about and loved.  There’s not much in this awful time I feel I can do anything about, but there’s that old saying about lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. I’m going to give it a try.

Yesterday I went on a tour out of the Chilean port of Puerto Montt to go to several villages on Lake Llanquihue, the second largest lake in the country.  Its backdrop is Osorno, one of those perfect cone volcanos that make Chile so unique in our beautiful world. 

I’ll spare you all the little signs that this was not a day that would go exactly as planned, but suffice it to say that my travel companion Megan and I were laughing most of the way through the first stop in Frutillar about how just buying a take-out empanada became a project that took the first half hour of our one-hour stop, and that was not the first glitch. 

Then the fun really began when our bus broke down. We were stranded on a side street of one of those towns you would barely glance at passing through. We were told our new bus would be there in a half an hour, but anyone who’s travelled much knows that in many countries people are so unwilling to disappoint that they give pleasant assurances that have no foundation in fact. Since the nearest town big enough to have a bus available to send was an hour away, I knew this was one of these times.

About half of us piled off the bus and hung around for a few minutes while the rest stayed on board. Then after arranging a time, we should all be back, a group of us set off to explore and maybe, if we were lucky, find someplace to have a cup of coffee. Honestly, what ensued in the hour and change we spent together before the new bus arrived will probably go down as one of the highlights of this entire trip around South America. 

Objectively speaking, I suppose you could say we didn’t find much—not even a cup of coffee—but subjectively the time was filled with discoveries I loved about typical small-town life in Chile. We discovered that pretty much every shop leaves their “abierto” sign lit up all the time whether they are open or not. We found one shop after another so small our group of eight couldn’t fit in all at once. We saw one dog so bored he didn’t look up when we passed, and another who snarled and lunged at us against his fence in the spirit of the proverbial junkyard dog.  We found a little odds-and-ends store that had a pile of embroidered pillow covers for $2.50 apiece and a few of us bought some as souvenirs (from India, I suppose) of our great day. Someone found a bakery and bought a bag of eight pieces of bread for what seemed like pennies, and we all shared. Throughout, we were all laughing at how anyone who encountered us must have been perplexed as to why a group of gringos suddenly descended on them in their little corner of the world. 

When we got back to the bus we, of course, heard another half hour had been added on to our rescue time. We continued to hang out on the street, a few of us spending some time recasting Gilligan’s Island with the people on board the bus. They all agreed that obviously I was the professor. We even had a redhead to be Ginger. There was an air show going on at a nearby base, with flyovers we all agreed it was cool we hadn’t missed.

I got back on the bus at some point and felt blasted almost immediately with an energy that was radically different. Those who had sat on the stuffy bus all that time were in a state. Grim faces said it all. A few were demanding to go straight back and skip the rest of the tour. I am trying very hard not to judge people, so I suppose there were some who really did count on being back on time.  It was noon by then, and I know some people have medical issues around missed meals and dosages that must be taken, but still it was hard not to contrast the pleasure in the moment happening outside and available to anyone who wanted it. 

I am indeed rambling towards a point here.  It’s hard to stay positive in these bleak times, but it’s always a choice, whether facing a broken down bus or a breaking down country. I suppose the simplest takeaway is the old bromide that we can at least control our reactions in situations we can’t control, but to me the better, and more hopeful lesson was about how optimism and resilience win in the end.

Laughter matters. Kidding around is important. We need to treat these as precious gifts we give to ourselves and others.  The world is huge, but at any given moment we are only on a speck of it and it is up to us to make that speck a good one.

I started this blog in September 2008 to coincide with the publication of my first two books, The Four Seasons and Until Our Last Breath. It evolved fairly quickly from primarily promoting my work as an author, to sharing my experiences and ideas as a person. Now 440 posts later, I think of it mostly as a means to bring my thoughts into focus, and to share what I think might be of value to others as we all find our way through the complicated puzzle of our lives. 

I haven’t posted much for the last few months because I, like so many, have felt the bucket of cold water we call the news poured over my head several times a day. To say that the worsening onslaught since the inauguration makes it difficult to put together coherent thoughts about the meaning of life  is an understatement so huge it’s hard not to laugh, however bitterly. I  am so busy just trying to manage my thoughts and protect my spirit that I have little room for anything more. 

Those of you who have known me, or followed this blog for a few years, know that I sometimes look  back at my first marriage to a narcissist for insights about what is happening in the present. Since the rise of the current occupant of the White House, I have seen so many parallels between the way my ex-husband treated me and our children, and the way the current president treats everyone. 

To go deeply into this would take volumes and serve no purpose except to upset me, so I am going to stick with one point:  narcissists don’t see other people as real.   Malignant narcissists might enjoy causing pain and distress, but the garden variety like my ex simply don’t take into consideration the flesh-and-blood nature of other people. Our feelings are irrelevant, our needs trivial, our well being inconsequential.

It really is that simple, but with the person America elected to lead it, this plays out on an unimaginable scale. He slashes away at will, or permits others to do it, without the slightest awareness that people care about themselves. They care about their lives, their children, their livelihoods, their future. Healthier people find his and his cronies’ behaviour incomprehensible because how in the world could anyone be so clueless? Surely this must stop somewhere! Well, narcissists are that clueless, and it won’t. We are left now to predict future disasters by asking ourselves, “what would someone who doesn’t see other people as real do in this situation?”

 In the past few days, a handful of acolytes are attempting to destroy the capacity of the government to pay debts because people who rely on government entitlements and services aren’t real. Entire agencies are shut down and people are fired or furloughed because neither they nor the people they serve actually have lives. Today’s great idea is to move two million of the not-real out of Gaza so he can fashion it into a new Riviera for that special group of not-reals from whom he can extract money. What does it matter where the Gazans go? What does it matter what they think and want?

And what will it be tomorrow, and the next day?  Whose lives and human dignity will be inconsequential next?  He may be erratic and perhaps a bit mad, but our being unreal to him is one thing we can count on. 

On January 20, I set sail from Fort Lauderdale on what is undoubtedly the biggest single adventure in my twelve years of cruise lecturing. I am traveling all the way around South America and will arrive back in Fort Lauderdale on April 1, for a total of 72 days aboard, during which I will give 28 different talks—like a semester at sea for retirees!  

My assignment is as a destination speaker, which means I am responsible for informing guests about all the places we will visit, but what excites me more is the opportunity to go beyond that and pull in other things I have learned from my decades as a professor of humanities, and wherever else my lifelong curiosity has taken me. It is so fun for me to have a built-in and eager audience for things I love to talk about.

I am a natural early riser—for me 9 to 5 is more like a sleep schedule than a work day.  One of my favourite things to do on the ship is get up before dawn and head for the lounge on the bow of the ship, get coffee from the machine and watch the sky lighten and another day begin. My perch is what you see in the photo above.   As the ship glides through the darkness, I feel most akin with the people below me on the bridge, who have guided us through the night and whose expertise keeps us safe and on course. 

I poke around on my iPad, looking into what my friends are up to, dabbling carefully and cautiously into the news, playing a few word games, and seeing what else there is to know about the world.  Around 6:30 or so, a few other people start coming through, most just to get coffee and stagger back to their suites, but a few to settle in as I have. 

The spell is broken with the first human voices—mostly people doing business on the other side of the world. The ship is not solely mine anymore, and I start to think about my day.  Today at 10 I will speak about Alexander von Humboldt and his time in South America, one of my all time favourite talks.  After that I will change into shorts and flip flops and check out what’s going on around the ship, followed by lunch outside.  Then, who knows?  

When I come back, the suite attendant will have made up the bed, and honestly, forget the food, forget the ports! Seeing those brilliant white million-thread-count sheets, so crisp and tight on the bed, is one of the biggest thrills in cruising for me.  It tells me I am being taken care of in the loveliest of ways, and I am free to relax and enjoy my time as I wish.

Is this my life? I shake my head every day in wonder. True, I work very, very hard to be ready (five months of work for this assignment), and onboard, I put a lot of effort into being worthy of the privilege, but if it were possible to melt into a puddle of gratitude, I would have done it long ago.

I love living in Victoria, and when I am away I always look forward to coming back home. That’s why I have always been surprised by how returns bring with them a touch of depression. 

I have attributed this to many things, most obviously jet lag, which makes me so unlike myself for a few days.  Occasionally on leaving a ship where the crew have made it feel like a second home, I feel a bit bereft. And then there’s the need to figure out how to manage the complications of a life where I am not being taken care of hand and foot, day and night. It’s amazing how quickly I can forget where a light switch is, or where I keep the coffee filters. And now, all the things that had to wait until I got home suddenly need to be scheduled and done. 

This time, add to all that the horrific results of the election, the vestiges of a touch of food poisoning, and the brief loss of my luggage, to make this return additionally besieging. But this morning, around 4am, my typical wake up time during jet lag recovery after bedtime at 8, I put my finger on why, even with easier returns than this one, I feel so out of sorts. 

I have written here many times in the past about my decision to uproot my life and move to Canada in 2020. For any readers who didn’t know me then, in order to do this, I sold my condo, got rid of all my furniture and any possessions that wouldn’t fit in my car and drove to Victoria, sight unseen and knowing no one, trusting it would work out. I now live in a furnished heritage rental, with the world’s best owners living upstairs. I own nothing now except my clothes, jewelry (lots of earrings!) and my car. I don’t own a lamp or a throw pillow. Nada.  Zip.  To my way of seeing it, this is working out very well indeed!

But still, there is something about returning home to an environment filled with the identity of a whole life—from the knickknacks, to the art, even to the favourite dishes, that I no longer get to experience. There’s a moment where you open the door coming home and say “this is my real life.”  I don’t feel that way in part because my real life is also on ships half the year, but largely because any place I live now and for the rest of my life will never really be mine in the same way it was before I flew the coop in my car. 

 I’ve written in the past about nesters and perchers—those who need a comfy place to call home, and those who are fine wherever they are.  I am a percher to the core, but there are those moments when I remember how good it felt to  come home and see everything waiting for me, reminding me of the sum of my life. I don’t have that anymore, and I guess somewhere deep in the gut, it affects me. 

This life isn’t for everyone. For a small percentage of my head and heart, it isn’t for me either for a day or two, while I adjust to the wonderful, unencumbered reality I have made for myself. I made my choice, and I must be at home wherever I am. That soft nest to fall into must be inside me, where my fundamental identity and my most important memories live. The rest is just stuff. I’ve got the right outerwear and good winter shoes, money in the bank, and friends who are there to welcome me home to my life in Victoria, where I already feel much more settled just by writing this. 

These are the words on the tombstone of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and many other works of fiction, poetry, and philosophy. When I was in college, I inhaled every word he wrote and even now, more than half a century later, I still remember his challenge to take on the heavy intellectual and spiritual work required to have a life of true joy and deep meaning. 

The photo below is of me laying flowers on his grave when Jim and I were there in 2008. It was the number one thing I wanted to do when I first visited Heraklion, Crete, where he is buried.  The one at the end of the post is of the epigraph on the other side of his tombstone, carved as he wrote it by hand.

I can’t say I’ve always lived up to the challenge of his words.  I haven’t always tried that hard to do so. But I still think that those few words are the best guidance I ever received. 

Kazantzakis wasn’t arguing against optimism or faith in the future, only against being wrapped up in expectations of favorable outcomes.  Likewise I think what he meant by fearing nothing isn’t that he shrugged off real threats, but that he wasn’t cluttering his mind with imagined unfavorable outcomes.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Kazantzakis was a great admirer of the Buddha, for their philosophies are both grounded in the idea that attachment is the source of suffering. We hope to get what we want and we fear we will get what we don’t want.  We want to keep what we like and get rid of what we dislike. Both are burdens, and feeling burdened is the antithesis of feeling free.

So why am I thinking about this now?  Like pretty much everyone, I am losing  my sense of well being over this election. I am emotionally exhausted with both hope and fear. 

Kazantzakis’ book The Saviors of God was at one point like the Bible for me, and one line has stuck in my memory all these years: “We shine like humble pebbles as long as they remain immersed in the sea.”  I’m sure you have picked up a wet pebble and admired the beauty of its colors, only to pull it later from your pocket to find it grey and dull. Maybe humans are like that too. Forces we cannot control bring out the best in us, revealing our true colors only when we are most caught up in them. 

This is a good time to remember that. The only answer to this terrible political situation is to accept that we are always immersed in the sum totality of what simply is—good or bad, favorable or unfavorable, scary or comforting. Our hopes and fears are tiny and ultimately meaningless battles with the future. Whatever happens, our life’s purpose is to continue to shine. 

Any writer is a word nerd, and I plead guilty. Finding the perfect word or making up a new one lifts my spirits in a way unlike anything else. Another category of word fun is dictionary digging—playing around with a common word that has many meanings, preferably contradictory. 

The other day I was reading an article explaining the world views of Plato and Aristotle. The author, one of my favourite columnists, Arthur Brooks, explained that the fundamental difference between the two philosophers was Plato’s view of reality as a fixed entity and Aristotle’s view that reality is characterized by change. Applying that to people, Brooks’ point was that to Plato, there is a fixed core that defines us, and to Aristotle every individual is perpetually in a state of becoming.  

My guess is that it’s a bit of both. There are ways in which I don’t think I have changed at all.  My desire for social justice, my optimism, my belief that most people are decent and trustworthy are things I have carried throughout my life. And yet, I never have the sense that I have finished evolving into the whole person I am meant to be.  The thing I like most about my life is that I am still growing. 

The Brooks article got me thinking about the word “becoming.” Maybe it sounds a little old-fashioned now, but I grew up hearing it used for appearances and actions. “That dress is very becoming,” someone might say, or the opposite, “that behaviour is not very becoming.” What in the world is an article of clothing or an infraction of manners in the process of becoming?  How can that word possibly apply?

Online Cambridge and Webster say “becoming” is an adjective that means attractive and suitable, and that is pretty much the end of the discussion. Nothing of philosophy at all in the word. I looked up the verb “become,” and I found a much longer and interesting history. Old English “becuman” meant “to come (to), approach, arrive, enter, meet with, fall in with; happen, befall; befit.”

Okay, I get the connection with befitting, but the rest of the meanings seem almost comical. By this standard, saying an outfit is becoming is rather like saying “that dress shows you are making progress towards a sense of style.”  Or perhaps, in this throwaway society one could argue that the only thing an article of clothing is becoming is landfill.  Then again, to say slurping soup is unbecoming does get at the idea that such behaviour is heading in the wrong direction.

Ah, vocabulary.  The stuff of endless weirdness. Time to give up on the dictionary and go back to Aristotle and Plato. Maybe one part of a satisfying life is to have a clear sense of what about ourselves we never want to change—our core identity, as shown in how we behave and what we believe. Maybe the other part of that satisfying life is feeling that we continue on an exciting trajectory of growth and change. Josh Groban  said it best in “Let Me Fall”

Someone I am is waiting for courage

The one I want, the one I will become will catch me

What a great image.  We jump and the person we become in jumping is the one who catches us. There’s a Laurel waiting for me whom I haven’t met yet.  It may not be an easy path to her. There are occasions to rise to, choices to make. The Platonic side keeps me grounded, but the Aristotelian side reminds me that only if I jump can I find my wings.

Sometimes I get so busy that I forget I have a blog, and I’m surprised to see how long it has been since I posted. When the leaves are falling and the last posts are about springtime, that is quite a stark reminder of how time can pass.

I wrote what I am posting here over a week ago, when I had just arrived in Lisbon. A glitch had kept me from accessing my website until just now. I’m now at the end of the first leg of three, and have been to ports in Spain, France, and now Italy. Here’s what I wrote as I was just setting out:

I’m in Lisbon tonight, preparing to begin a month-long assignment with Silversea in the Mediterranean.  I travel so much that I’ve learned to let the bodily adjustments of crossing eight time zones in one day just be what they are. Now, in the predawn hours, I am predictably awake and have been for a while. I tell myself I’ll just take a nap this afternoon and then I’ll be fine.  Maybe that will be the case, and maybe it will take longer, but I don’t really care. 

As I lay awake, I thought of my son Ivan, now of blessed memory, and something he once said that has stuck with me for years and feels like a real gift. He said when he couldn’t sleep, he would remember all the times he had stood in an interminable line, or had to keep slogging dead tired through something, and all he wanted was to lie down. He would think about where he was at that moment, safe and comfortable between sheets, with a pillow under his head and a blanket keeping him warm , and being unable to sleep didn’t seem all that bad. 

On my flight over, I put in a bid to upgrade to business class and it was accepted. I don’t sleep well even with a lie-flat seat, but the coziness makes the long flight so much more pleasant. Except this time. The seats were bigger and more adjustable, but there was just a little extra space and no barrier for privacy between passengers.  When I laid the seat flat, it was about as comfortable as lying on a a mesh lounger by a pool—hard and with the hinge parts sticking into my back and ribs. I paid extra for this? Premium economy would have been 95% as good. Still, I channeled my son’s message and thought that at least I wasn’t upright in standard economy for ten hours. 

So here I am now, doing inventory as I wait for signs of light outside. I am done with the hard part, which is simply getting here.  My luggage arrived with me. Around noon today I will board a luxury ship and be taken care of for a month. I get to teach appreciative audiences what matters most about each of our parts—a little history, a little art, a little culture. I have a chance to dress up in ways that I never do in Victoria and that is very fun for me. I get to spend a day in all sorts of fun places—Barcelona, Palma, Monte Carlo, Kotor, Corfu, and on and on.  I won’t see a dirty dish in a sink or change a sheet for a month. I will make new friends among crew and guests. 

What’s a little missed sleep compared to all that?

If I were starting a band, maybe I’d call it The Grateful Sleep-Deprived. Doesn’t have the same panache, but I know the tune. 

When I was flying to England three weeks ago to begin a research trip before embarking on a cruise assignment, I found myself thinking about the most painful flight I ever took.  I was in Florence finishing a sabbatical in 1999,  when I got the nightmarish phone call that my son Adriano was dead. 

The struggle to get home at the Christmas season was horrendous. There were no flights from Florence so I took an overnight train to Frankfurt, the only airport where I could find a plane going to San Diego, carrying what I could fit in two suitcases and leaving everything else behind. A glitch at the airport  (I’ve forgotten what) resulted in a public meltdown I don’t think I have equaled since.  Then on the plane I spent hours  staring into space and crying quietly. 

I looked over and saw a young couple playing with their baby, who looked a little like Adriano at that age, and it ripped my heart open. Shortly before we landed, I saw they had changed him into a cute outfit, presumably to meet important people on the other end. It was exactly what I would have done. They were clearly besotted with their baby boy, and it brought back memories that even in my grief gave me a moment of recollected joy.  That young mother was me. That baby was my baby. It hurt, but it also gave me a moment to experience something other than the horror of how my story with my son had  ended. 

 I got to thinking about how time passes, remembering  that plane ride so many years later.  That baby would be twenty-five now. That mother is probably having hot flashes and fussing over her graying hair. And what about all the other people I have interacted with in passing?  The mother with the two little girls who was struggling to get through a flight alone, whom I helped by playing with her younger one?  That little girl would be in her thirties now.   The young orthodox Jewish man who was headed with his young children to Israel  is probably a grandfather now. The man with whom I ended up having a year-long love affair was enough older than me that I don’t know if he is even still alive.

And i—well, I am that many years older now too.  

I was thinking about time on a much grander scale when I visited the archaeological site of the Neolithic village of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands a few days ago. This village was inhabited well over two millennia ago. At the time, every human being there was living in the moment, doing what needed to to be done, taking what pleasure could be had, and persevering through whatever pain life brought. 

It’s funny how relative the passage of time is. We are plopped into this world at a particular point and we go through our lives as if the only time frame that is relevant is our own.  I once heard someone say that for every person the year zero is when he or she was born and everything else is “the past.”  Likewise, I don’t think we can fully comprehend the reality that someday we will simply not be here at all.

That baby on the plane might be a father now, taking his baby to meet his grandparents, once the young couple on the plane. Their whole lives have been, and continue to be lived, while to me their reality is a moment frozen in time.   All the kids I went to school with are in their seventies now, if they have made it that long. I wonder if that’s part of the reason why people feel so ambivalent, or even negative about class reunions.  Perhaps it is too much of a shock to realize that other people have lived all those years too. 

There’s no lesson here.  We all just keep hurtling through space and time and occasionally we bounce off each other. Sometimes we contribute to the meaning that other people make of their lives. Sometimes we are lucky enough to make what feels like a lasting connection, even though in the  larger framework, nothing lasts. I guess we have to settle for that. 

A few days ago, my ship stopped in Cabo San Lucas.  I am not a fan of the noisy, characterless places that most big tourist ports in Mexico have become, but I wanted to get off the ship for a while, so I got on a boat going for a few hours to some bays that were at least less crowded. The other guests and I were having fun on a beautiful, sunny afternoon when suddenly we heard commotion from another boat near us. A man was floating, unmoving and face down in the water, and several people had jumped in to drag him back on board. 

On the deck, a woman immediately began furious CPR, which lasted what seemed to be a long time.  Nearby, someone—daughter? wife?— was sobbing in the arms of another. The woman giving CPR stood up.  It was hard to imagine how that could be a good sign, since no one was hovering around in the way they might if the victim had been revived and just needed help sitting up.  Very quickly, a marine rescue boat arrived, and from what we could see, they were getting the victim onboard without any heroic measures.  Then they roared off back to port.  I have no idea what happened after that, except what happened on our own boat. 

We were all quiet for a few minutes as we headed back to the pier, but when the crew of the boat put on some dance music and brought out an open bottle of tequila, the mood changed. By the time we reached port, it had gone from somber to downright rowdy—dancing, swinging around a pole holding up the awning, hugging, laughing.  It was quite a sight to watch, and it got me thinking about something I read years before in one of my all-time favorite books, The Immense Journey, by Loren Eiseley. I think about his beautiful philosophical musings on nature quite a bit, and I have quoted him more than once in my blog,  but I had forgotten this particular essay, “The Judgment of the Birds.”  

What called it to mind was the way in which the people on the boat were able to put aside what we had witnessed and pick up life again so joyously.  Eiseley remarks on this in connection to watching a raven snatch a newly hatched baby bird from its nest, robbing that little creature of its chance at life.

“ T]here on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak , [S]uddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. […] They cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. […] The black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable. 
     “The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.”

Exactly, I thought. Death is hard.  Grief is devastating.  Recovery seems, at least for a while, impossible. And then, there it is again, the need to feel alive, the desire to be joyous, even while the shadow of death hovers so close. 

Life is indeed sweet. The inevitable bitterness makes it sweeter still, when we can finally look away from the darkness. ‘Therefore choose life,” the Bible says. I hope I always do. I hope you always do too.