Every summer for years my husband and I have gone to the twin islands of Chincoteague and Assateague off the Virginia coast. Chincoteague is tiny, tucked behind the much larger barrier island of Assateague, which is home to a wildlife refuge and the famous wild ponies. The first seven days of our retreat this year saw plenty of wildlife of the grandchild kind: six of ours, plus one: two teenagers, one 8-year-old, and a 3, two 2s, and an 8-month-old. Lots of building--and smashing--sand castles, examining mole crabs, holding hands for dear life in the breakers, applying endless coats of sunscreen, eating only slightly gritty sandwiches on the beach. We cooked and grilled seafood, kabobs, chicken and hotdogs in our little rental cottage with its small backyard, and ate our veggies too: fresh squash, peppers, and corn. We had a solstice fire (solstice being a season) with some drumming, rattles and shakers, a story, and a dance. Thanks to a bubble machine, we attracted lots of fairies and even some trolls and made joyful noise and a little bit of good trouble...
Our sons and their families have returned to Tennessee and North Carolina now and I have had two days of recuperation and a chance to spend time in the wildlife refuge. The marsh mallows are blooming at last, delicate pink and white blossoms waving in the bushes and brambles. Killdeer explore the grasses, ibis and egrets hang out in the pools; cowbirds and cardinals claim the middle air, while the terns and ring-billed gulls circle and swoop above. The pelicans prefer flying like pterodactyls over the ocean; the ospreys and the cormorants claim the coves and inlets; the eagles lord it over everyone. Then there are the ground-dwellers: snapping turtles, box turtles, black snakes, Delmarva fox squirrels, bunnies, and deer. Not to mention the frogs and multitude of insects all singing their hearts out.
Of course I know that since I've been on Chincoteague and Assateague 28 children just like my own died in the Texas floods, 83 adults, and counting. Of course I know that the administration's cuts to government as well as the lack of funding for systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods contributed to the death toll. Of course I know that the budget bill signed into law while I've been here boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as children everywhere are threatened by extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like this. Of course I have known for years that the world we have built cannot stand. But the so-specific suffering of its rapid collapse into utter ruins is excruciating to witness.
Confoundingly, on a morning bike through the refuge, past the loblolly pines and wetland grasses, I pedal to the music of a resounding, jubilant chorus: clicks, whirrs, buzzes, rat-a-tats, and trills under the piercing descant of the gulls.
I think of the closing lines of a poem by the Iraqi-American poet Dunya Mikhail written in 2019 entitled "My Poem Will Not Save You":
My poem cannot return
all of your losses,
not even some of them,
and those who went far away
my poem won’t know how to bring them back
to their lovers.
I am sorry.
I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.
Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm,
and when we need to touch the soul
to know it’s not dead,
their songs
give us that touch.
In October I will be helping to lead a weekend retreat on “Creative Resistance: Weaving small paths of beauty in a heart-rending world,” with Jim Hall and Cheryl Hellner. We are sketching it in and keeping space for what may be needed come autumn. It’s a chaotic time. As we plan, there is much we do not and cannot know.
But there are some things we do know.
We know that the fecund, teeming, cacophony of Earth offers herself over and over: the songs of the birds, and the insects, and grasses, marsh mallows, oceans. Storyteller Martin Shaw says of this symphony, “It is utterly, overwhelmingly sumptuous. Even as the world rages and bombs and betrays and subverts, this, also, is happening. Even as historic time and its terrors are upon us, this, also, has its hand raised to us, beckoning.”
We know that seemingly small things have tremendous power: in an old tale, a tiny hummingbird brings back the sun. In another, an ancient woman re-creates the world by simply weaving, fashioning a cloth of transcendent beauty.
We know that stories like these, with their songs and cloths woven of beauty, touch us. We know that the chilliest times, the truly heart-rending times, require souls who have been warmed and touched like that. The soul brought back from near-death is the one with the grace to be completely undone and awakened to the imagination of the Earth, to the things that are beyond us, to Mystery. We know that only then will we have the courage to be the elders and the ancestors our grandchildren are waiting for.
We know these things, but we forget. That’s why and when we need liminal spaces and times of kairos in which to remember--and not only remember, inhabit: be surrounded, connected, celebratory, joyful, recognize ourselves again coming home to some vast communion and unfolding that we cannot fully see or comprehend.
Come in October; or if you cannot come, gather some friends in a woods or a field or a back yard; light a fire, tell a story, sing, dance, weave, wander… join the Creative Resistance.