Cellos & Wildfires
on dreams, drought, and resiliency
I woke three times in the night dreaming of wildfires. Despite how that sounds, my subconscious mind is not being overly anxious or paranoid; there have been three brush fires within several miles of my house in the past week. One spread to ten acres and was uncontained for over twenty-four hours. The others burned five acres of nearby hill.
My anxiety, I remind myself, is intelligent. My anxiety knows the bone-brittle leaves surrounding my house; the leafless trees; the deep layers of brush and understory that have never burned, or at least not within my lifetime.
I lay in bed telling myself that as soon as I woke I would attach the hose and water my gardens, fruit trees, and yard. I would saturate the earth surrounding my house, create a protective ring of well water.
But when I attached the hose this morning I discovered we had never drained it before the freeze, and so the hose is frozen, and so I cannot water my yard, and gardens, and trees.
*
For the past week I have been listening to Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Cello Suites nearly nonstop, piped straight into my brain via my new AirPods. I don’t listen to the first track—that poor oversaturated melody—but the rest, after years of pause, are deeply nourishing.
Sorrow and yearning; complexity and grief; loss and beauty. No thing is one thing. Every thing is connected to every other thing.
I listen while walking down my brittle-dry road; I listen while cleaning and cooking; I listen while reading student work.
So many times in the past ten years I have joined the fight. I love a good fight. I have long resisted authority, hierarchies, and unjust power structures (just ask my parents and elementary and high school teachers).
And I am good at fighting—just ask the enemies I have made along the way, and about the things I’ve fought for, and won, while making those enemies.
But this time I am not fighting. Not yet. Not until I know exactly what I’m fighting for, and what the stakes are, and what the game plan is.
I will not join a rip tide of panic or adrenaline or rage. I am too intimately familiar with the physical and emotional costs of those things.
This administration, these fools, this country, will not take away my health, my autonomy, my belief in benevolence, my peace of mind. Not until there’s no other choice anyway.
Because there may very well be a time when I need to fight. When we all need to fight. And our bodies and spirits will need to be healthy, and nourished, and well-resourced when that time comes.
*
The sun is out now, and shining on the hose in my yard, and I am hoping that by this afternoon the ice will melt; that I will not have ruined the hose by letting it freeze; that I will be able to water my gardens, and scrappy yard, and fruit trees. I want my garden to be healthy, nourished, and well-resourced if, by chance, a brush fire comes.
I will listen to Yo-Yo Ma’s cello while I water. I will feel the sun on my face and let the Vitamin D soak through my skin, strengthening my immune system.
I will think of the plums that will (god willing) grow on my plum trees come June. The peaches that will grow on my peach trees. The tulips and daffodils that will pop come May.
I am a mother. A mother of a twelve-year-old and a sixteen-year-old, and my job, my primary job, it seems, in this moment in time, is to remain steady in a sea of unsteadiness for them.
I don’t remember reading this part of the parenting book. The part that said you will never be able to lose your shit or mind or compass again because others will depend on you to be their compass and so you will have to stay steady, and if not that, pretend you are steady, for the rest of your life.
And maybe that’s a gift—this need to stabilize oneself. To find the root. The earth. The center. To go out there and water the drought-stricken November garden. To take in the sunlight. To nourish oneself, so that you might nourish others, and by doing so—become strong.
Sending all of you nourishing moments—no matter how small—throughout these days.
Robin