Small Wonder Read online

  Some of these changes I've witnessed in my lifetime. I began first grade in a segregated public school, in a state whose anthem--which we children doggedly belted out each morning--contained the line "'Tis summer, the darkies are gay!" That unsettling declaration would be quietly revised many times, for many reasons, over the next ten years. Time and again, the bear they had sworn would rip us limb from limb was begrudgingly allowed a place at the table, and behold, it used a fork and a spoon. The natural laws we have believed in and taught our children have sometimes been found to be not natural laws at all, but rather fearsome constructs of our own making, undermined by the evidence. And among those mistakes there is this: All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.

  With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation. We are in no position yet to declare the moral of our story.

  "But how," a friend in New York has asked me, "do I live with the anger? On my street, where every night I smell the incinerated towers as I walk the dog, there is inescapable pain and rage. In this city we bear the brunt of the struggle to figure out what it means to have our hearts cut away by hateful violence that the whole country somehow engendered."

  I hardly know how to answer that for myself, let alone for anyone else, and yet that struggle is for so many of us the currency of everyday survival. Most of us can't know how it feels to live in the shadow of those murdered towers. But nearly all of us care, because we ourselves know what it means to have our hearts cut away by life: We've borne physical assaults, lost those we loved best, lost our own souls, our physical wholeness, the future we were counting on, had days we could not see how to get through. I understand that we'll have lost everything if a hateful enemy can crush us and reconstruct us in its angry image, but what other door may lead out of this dark room? I've felt outrage I was sure would burn me alive. Some nights I've lain awake wondering how to keep on living while someone, somewhere, despises me and wishes so many of us dead because of our faith or nationality, assigning to us transgressions I can scarcely grasp. I wonder how to stay calm with so much beauty at stake, being scorched from my line of sight as trees fall and sacred places are ground to dust. I find it insufferable to bear silent witness to the flesh-and-bone devastations of war, and bitterly painful to be cast sometimes as a traitor to the homeland I love, simply because I raise questions. I find myself in a strange niche, reviled by some compatriots because I can't praise war as the best answer, and reviled everywhere else because my nation does. Each of us inhabits his or her own strange niche, I suppose; we've engendered animosity for many things that most of us never contrived to do, perhaps never even knew about. Many of us can't fully believe in all the imperatives that have been pronounced the will of our people. One problem with democracy as it plays in our country is that the majority rules so hard; we seem bent on dividing all things into a contest of Win and Lose, and declaring that the Losers are losers. Nearly half of us are routinely asked to disappear while the slim majority works its will. But the playing field is the planet earth, and I for one have no place else to go.

  The closest my heart has come to breaking lately was on the day my little girl arrived home from school and ran to me, her face tense with expectation, asking, "Are they still having that war in Afghanistan?"

  As if the world were such a place that in one afternoon, while kindergartners were working hard to master the letter L, it would decide to lay down its arms. I tried to keep the tears out of my eyes. I told her I was sorry, yes, they were still having the war.

  She said, "If people are just going to keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born."

  I sat on the floor and held her tightly to keep my own spirit from draining through the soles of my feet. I don't know what other mothers say at such moments; I suppose some promise that only the bad men are getting hurt. I wish I could believe in that story myself. But my children have never been people I could lie to. My best revenge against all the dishonesty and hatred in the world, it seems to me, will be to raise right up through the middle of it these honest and loving children.

  I asked her, "Do you really mean that? You wish you'd never known Daddy or me or your sister? That you'd never gotten a chance to hug us, or have us read books to you, or tuck you in at night? Never gotten to take care of your chickens and gather their eggs, never seen a rainbow?"

  Of course she said, soon enough, that she was glad to be alive. And I'm sure that's true, as I watch her throw her heart and limbs into a mostly unburdened life. But I understood that day that we are all in the same boat. It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.

  It used to be, on many days, that I could close my eyes and sense myself to be perfectly happy. I have wondered lately if that feeling will ever come back. It's a worthy thing to wonder, but maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grief," as Shakespeare put it. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things.

  My parents, before raising me, first had to spend every day of their lives from infancy to early adulthood coping with a great depression and then a war. As a consequence, they reared me under the constant counsel to trust spiritual values ahead of material ones, and to look to the land for shelter. "A house can burn down," they said, "but a piece of land will always be there." These words came back to me profoundly on the bleakest day, when we watched those two shattered towers billow smoke.

  I've internalized my parents' message in a way that is not precisely personal; after all, ownership of farms per se provided no safety for the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps during World War II, many of whom lost everything. But I understand what they meant, and have spent a lifetime learning to believe in things that can never burn down. I can invest my heart's desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me. Although it grieves me that houses are burning, I have fallen in love with a river that runs through a desert, a rain forest at the edge of night, the right of a species to persist in its own wild place, and the words I might assemble to tell their stories. I've fallen in love with freedom regardless, and the entitlement of a woman to get a move on, equipped with boots that fit and opinions that might matter. The treasures I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own: the curve of a five-year-old's forehead in profile, and the vulnerable expectation in the hand that reaches for mine as we cross the street. The wake-up call of birds in a forest. The intensity of the light fifteen minutes before the end of day; the color wash of a sunset on mountains; the ripe sphere of that same sun hanging low in a dusty sky in a breathtaking photograph from Afghanistan.

  In my darkest times I have to walk, sometimes alone, in some green place. Other people must share this ritual. For some I suppose it must be the path through a particular set of city streets, a comforting architecture; for me it's the need to stare at moving water until my mind comes to rest on nothing at all. Then I can go home. I can clear the brush from a neglected part of the garden, working slowly until it comes to me that here is one small place I can make right for my family. I can plant something as an act of faith in time itself, a vow that we will, sure enough, have a fall and a winter this year, to be followed again by spring. This is not an end in itself, but a beginning. I wo
rk until my mind can run a little further on its tether, tugging at this central pole of my sadness, forgetting it for a minute or two while pondering a school meeting next week, the watershed conservation project our neighborhood has undertaken, the farmer's market it organized last year: the good that becomes possible when a small group of thoughtful citizens commit themselves to it. And indeed, as Margaret Mead said, that is the only thing that ever really does add up to change. Small change, small wonders--these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. It's a workable economy.

  Political urgencies come and go, but it's a fair enough vocation to strike one match after another against the dark isolation, when spectacular arrogance rules the day and tries to force hope into hiding. It seems to me that there is still so much to say that I had better raise up a yell across the fence. I have stories of things I believe in: a persistent river, a forest on the edge of night, the religion inside a seed, the startle of wingbeats when a spark of red life flies against all reason out of the darkness. One child, one bear. I'd like to speak of small wonders, and the possibility of taking heart.

  Saying Grace

  I never knew what grand really was until I saw the canyon. It's a perspective that pulls the busy human engine of desires to a quiet halt. Taking the long view across that vermilion abyss attenuates humanity to quieter internal rhythms, the spirit of ice ages, and we look, we gasp, and it seems there is a chance we might be small enough not to matter. That the things we want are not the end of the world. I have needed this view lately.

  I've come to the Grand Canyon several times in my life, most lately without really understanding the necessity. As the holidays approached, I couldn't name the reason for my uneasiness. We thought about the cross-country trip we've usually taken to join our extended family's Thanksgiving celebration, but we didn't make the airplane reservations. Barely a month before, terrorist attacks had distorted commercial air travel to a horrifying new agenda, one that left everybody jittery. We understood, rationally, that it was as safe to fly as ever, and so it wasn't precisely nervousness that made us think twice about flying across the country for a long weekend. Rather, we were moved by a sense that this was wartime, and the prospect of such personal luxury felt somehow false.

  I called my mother with our regrets and began making plans for a more modest family trip. On the days our daughters were out of school, we would wander north from Tucson to revisit some of the haunts I've come to love in my twenty years as a desert dweller transplanted from the verdant Southeast. We would kick through the leaves in Oak Creek Canyon, bask like lizards in the last late-autumn sun on Sedona's red rocks, puzzle out the secrets of the labyrinthine ruins at Wupatki, and finally stand on the rim of that remarkable canyon.

  I felt a little sorry for myself at first, missing the reassuring tradition of sitting down to face a huge, upside-down bird and counting my blessings in the grand, joyful circle of my kin. And then I felt shame enough to ask myself, How greedy can one person be, to want more than the Grand Canyon? How much more could one earth offer me than to lay herself bare, presenting me with the whole of her bedrock history in one miraculous view? What feast could satisfy a mother more deeply than to walk along a creek through a particolored carpet of leaves, watching my children pick up the fine-toothed gifts of this scarlet maple, that yellow aspen, piecing together the picture puzzle of a biological homeplace? We could listen for several days to the songs of living birds instead of making short work of one big dead one. And we'd feel lighter afterward, too.

  These are relevant questions to ask, in this moment when our country demands that we dedicate ourselves and our resources, again and again, to what we call the defense of our way of life: How greedy can one person be? How much do we need to feel blessed, sated, and permanently safe? What is safety in this world, and on what broad stones is that house built?

  Imagine that you come from a large family in which one brother ended up with a whole lot more than the rest of you. Sometimes it happens that way, the luck falling to one guy who didn't do that much to deserve it. Imagine his gorgeous house on a huge tract of forests, rolling hills, and fertile fields. Your other relatives have decent places with smaller yards, but yours is mostly dust. Your lucky brother eats well, he has meat every day--in fact, let's face it, he's corpulent, and so are his kids. At your house, meanwhile, things are bad: Your kids cry themselves to sleep on empty stomachs. Your brother must not be able to hear them from the veranda where he dines, because he throws away all the food he can't finish. He will do you this favor: He's made a TV program of himself eating. If you want, you can watch it from your house. But you can't have his food, his house, or the car he drives around in to view his unspoiled forests and majestic purple mountains. The rest of the family has noticed that all his driving is kicking up dust, wrecking not only the edges of his property but also their less pristine backyards and even yours, which was dust to begin with. He's dammed the river to irrigate his fields, so that only a trickle reaches your place, and it's nasty. You're beginning to see that these problems are deep and deadly, that you'll be the first to starve, and the others will follow. The family takes a vote and agrees to do a handful of obvious things that will keep down the dust and clear the water--all except Fat Brother. He walks away from the table. He says God gave him good land and the right to be greedy.

  The ancient Greeks adored tragic plays about families like this, and their special word for the Fat Brother act was hubris. In the town where I grew up we called it "getting all high and mighty," and the sentence that came next usually included the words "getting knocked down to size." For most of my life I've felt embarrassed by a facet of our national character that I would have to call prideful wastefulness. What other name can there be for our noisy, celebratory appetite for unnecessary things, and our vast carelessness regarding their manufacture and disposal? In the autumn of 2001 we faced the crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its aftermath, as our nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness rear its head I felt even more ashamed. Some retailers rushed to convince us in ads printed across waving flags that it was our duty even in wartime, especially in wartime, to get out and buy those cars and shoes. We were asked not to think very much about the other side of the world, where, night after night, we were waging a costly war in a land whose people could not dream of owning cars or in some cases even shoes. For some, "wartime" became a matter of waving our pride above the waste, with slogans that didn't make sense to me: "Buy for your country" struck me as an exhortation to "erase from your mind what just happened." And the real meaning of this one I can't even guess at: "Our enemies hate us because we're free."

  I'm sorry, but I have eyes with which to see, and friends in many places. In Canada, for instance, I know people who are wicked cold in winter but otherwise in every way as free as you and me. And nobody hates Canada.

  Hubris isn't just about luck or wealth, it's about throwing away food while hungry people watch. Canadians were born lucky, too, in a global sense, but they seem more modest about it, and more deeply appreciative of their land; it's impossible to imagine Canada blighting its precious wilderness areas with "mock third-world villages" for bombing practice, as our air force has done in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta Range. I wonder how countries bereft of any wild lands at all view our plans for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the world's last immense and untouched wilderness, as we stake out our right to its plunder as we deem necessary. We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.

  In our country, we seldom question our right to burn this fuel in heavy passenger vehicles and to lead all nations in the race to pollute our planet beyond habitability; some of us, in f
act, become belligerent toward anyone who dares to raise the issue. We are disinclined as a nation to assign any moral value at all to our habits of consumption. But the circle of our family is large, larger than just one nation, and as we arrive at the end of our frontiers we can't possibly be surprised that the rest of the family would have us live within our means. Safety resides, I think, on the far side of endless hunger. Imagine how it would feel to fly a flag with a leaf on it, or a bird--something living. How remarkably generous we could have appeared to the world by being the first to limit fossil-fuel emissions by ratifying the Kyoto agreements, rather than walking away from the table, as we did last summer in Bonn, leaving 178 other signatory nations to do their best for the world without any help from the world's biggest contributor to global warming. I find it simply appalling that we could have done this; I know for a fact that many, many Americans were stunned, like me, by the selfishness of that act, and can hardly bear their own complicity in it. Given our societal devotion to taking in more energy than we put out, it's ironic that our culture is so cruelly intolerant of overweight individuals. As a nation we're not just overweight (a predicament that deserves sympathy); I fear we are also, as we live and breathe, possessed of the Fat Brother mindset.