Considering
that most access to really untamed nature is at least a solid hour drive from Sacramento,
the outskirts of Davis can be a decent spot to imagine your life is
less stubbornly citified than mine is. There are horses out there, and old
barns, and open fields, and, if you ignore the obscene number of cyclists, you
can almost imagine you’re really out in the country. There is also Putah Creek,
which is where I often go because I’m not yet of the envious class of people
who owns any of the rest. The Reserve, the property-less man’s access to the Creek, is
nothing special, which is just the way I like it. The Creek – well, was there
ever any body of water that wasn’t astronomically special? The Reserve is off
of County Road 98A and if it didn’t have the Creek and the peace, I would still
love it anyway, simply for being attached to a road not special enough to
have ever really been named. Functionality - that’s what a numbered road is
named for, and I have a high regard and reverence for those types of things
that are too busy doing things to
worry with poetry. Ironic, isn’t it, since poetry is my prayer and my
profession and I am one of those people who worries almost exclusively about it?
There is
almost always a restlessness and excitement and thankfulness in my soul when I’m
on my way to Putah Creek. I go because I need space and solitude and God, and
the drive to Davis, and the horses and fields along the way all lead to my
anticipation, to the gentle, freeing release of my soul when my feet hit earth
and my eyes first light on the mellow, golden glint of creek water.
But also on
Route 98A, on the way to the Reserve – a delightful, barely-there turn-off into
a gravel lot before the bridge (What bridge? I don’t know; perhaps it is
sweetly nameless) - you must pass by the UC Davis Primate Lab. I can always see
it, looming up to my right, with its strangely pleasant buildings and its high
fences, an uncomfortable blend of interesting architecture and cold, scientific
cruelty. And it always brings a lump to my throat, just before I see it. But, imminently I search for it every time, anyway. To face it. To not let myself get
away with pretending it’s not there. Every time, I think of a quote I read and
saved when I was younger and the cruelties of the world were much less
stomachable than they have become: “Think, sometimes, of the suffering from
which you spare yourself the sight.” Always, the monkeys in the lab remind me
of this, a stark contrast to the still, graceful beauty I am seeking out
at the Creek. And it is right that way, I suppose, to remember the sufferers in
the midst of being grateful for your blessings. Painful and right and just.
How many
million times a day would a heart break if it could face all the suffering in
the world? And how long could a person survive it? (These are questions, by the
way, that Sue Monk Kidd begins to answer in her book The Secret Life of Bees – one of the many great triumphs of that
novel).
But the
opposite question is also valid, and one I think about a great deal: How many
million times a day would a heart break if it could fathom all the blessings in
the world? And how long could a person survive it? “Dazzling and tremendous”
(as Whitman said) “How quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now
and always send sun-rise out of me.”
There is a
lot of minutia in the day-to-day – something adulthood hands you on a steaming
silver platter that you take before you realize that you’d rather just have had Mac
‘n’ Cheese. Meanwhile, suffering and blessings abound as though they were only
trivial things amidst all the monstrous importance of the minutia. It’s strange,
the way life can get flip-flopped that way. Or maybe just the perspective of
those trying to cope with the great importance of existence. Like succumbing to
the minutia is a flippant joke we are making to avoid facing the perpetual enigma
of eternity. But me, I like the enigma (like, being, of course, far too bland a
word). I revel, seek vitality in it. It is the makings of my religion, a
necessary portion of my happiness, grounding and liberatingly terrifying at the
same time. Like being cut loose from the ground and flying helter-skelter,
powerless, tumbling through the air and then bouncing gently down on your own
two feet and finding you are safe. Like tacking a tiny sailboat in a full wind,
with sails taut, that moment just before you know if you’re going to capsize or
if your body weight and the lines in your hands and the grace of the universe
will keep you up. And not only up, but soaring through the water in an exultation
that cannot be separated out as purely physical or purely emotional, but that is wholly
both simultaneously.
And so it
is the minutia of adulthood that wears me down, not the complexity. Exhaustion
billows in on those days when I recall neither great sadness nor reeling joy,
but just am, like a perpetual stapler of paper stacks, hearing the changeless
thump of the stapler, looking up only when my staples run out and then only
long enough to recharge my stapler and continue. Thump. Thump. Thump. There are
always mild frustrations, of course, even as a perpetual stapler, bangings of
your thumbs against the stapler head, papercuts. And always some laughter, a
glimpse of humor on a page, a rogue bee that upsets the progress of the
mundane. But these are only side effects of the real world – peepholes onto the
shoulder of the Great Enigma that I cannot stop to investigate within the
confines of my minutia. They could lead me out, but I don’t follow. Because I
am an adult, eating from the proffered silver platter.
Minutia is
not the small stuff; it is the extraneous stuff. I teach, for example, to
improve lives; to provide respite, offer alternatives; to share ideas, and
curiosity, and inspirations. Not, as it seems I spend half my time doing, to
analyze state education standards; or give tests (or analyze scores); or
grapple with misguided parents; or attend meetings that are either purposefully
useless or that enable students to be weak and wretched and entitled. And yet,
I do all of these things more frequently than I teach to my intentions, or sit
by Putah Creek, or talk to my grandfather, or think about the primates at the
lab, or the rape victims in Africa’s latest upheaval, or the cold, mindless
bums on New York subways.
This is not
the universe’s fault; it is my own. Yet I see so many people doing it. Why do
we have this novel concept of “living like you were dying,” when we could just
be living like we were living? I can’t speak for others, but I don’t desire
minutia as a distraction. I want to be burned by the sun-rise and send it back
out. I want to feel my heart in the grips of despair. I want to laugh joyfully
and sob uncontrollably. I want those to be my daily, to be my exhaustion. Not a drained feeling of denial, of neon lights and air conditioning and
forgotten computer passwords, but the well-earned, bedtime exhaustion of being active in the universe, of being constantly, thoroughly used up, of being tarnished and polished and hopefully tarnished again by the great stuff of
life. Who has time for minutia in the midst of all this wonder...and horror? Will the growing pains of adulthood pass and leave me with an answer, or is this a question of a lifetime: How to indulge in the everything and leave the busywork behind? How?
-R.E.A.
