I wrote the following essay around winter solstice, after feeling "clammed up" for the months preceding and following the election. Snow days last week offered me time to revise a bit . . .

Dear 2016:  I have some regrets. It's not what you think, though--I am glad I voted for her.
      My regrets stem from other, long ago choices. I won't say that I feel sorry, and calling them "regrets" may be imprecise. In many ways they were good choices, fitting who I was and always will be: a sensitive introvert who finds deepest connection to life and humanity in nature.
      Still, the long-term, isolating effect of choosing to live in a small, homogeneous community of "back-to-the-landers" has troubled my mind of late, particularly given where we landed in 2016--the big WE, that is. This past year brought to light the consequences of my move, 32 years ago, to a 100-acre-wooded reserve in rural Piedmont NC with my partner and nine other families.
      For one thing, it meant I could keep some distance between me and the busy, loud, often conflict-filled world. My expectation, back then, was that it would offer the time and space in which to think and write. Come to find, I did more of the former and less of the latter.
      The truth is that I could have chosen to engage more consistently with the larger world. But I had convenient excuses: too much driving needed to get to events, gatherings, political actions (and of course I was against using much gasoline). My time was needed at home anyway: the chores of rural life, such as wood to cut and haul, gardens to weed, water lines to fix, house to build. My partner and I embraced a kind of voluntary simplicity, so although we had jobs, we didn't strive in the manner of people with serious careers. Our salaries reflected that fact, too. The natural extension of that choice was to limit expenses by doing most everything ourselves, and to restrain our travel ambitions, at least those requiring airfare. This, of course, had a further isolating effect.
      Consider this: we rarely interacted with service people—that is, the regular, working-class folks who live in our larger community. One example: I viewed it as a big luxury when, a few years ago, I started paying someone to change the oil in my car!
      I assumed that living with like-minded and -backgrounded people would feel easy, safe, and low-stress. And it has been all of these things--though, to our surprise, not consistently intimate. As it turned out, everyone likes their privacy. Some of us did pursue serious careers, and of course, there were aging parents and more to pull us away from our DIY community. Happily, though, we all know we will be there for each other when need arises--as it has many times: new babies (food, childcare), cancer (food, visits, transportation), ice storms (chainsaws), hurricanes (chainsaws), old age (food, visits). Painful transitions, too, have touched our community and pulled us together over 30-plus years, including that big transition: death.
      Some of us are more connected to the folks that live beyond our 100 acres--nearby neighbors on the local back roads as well as residents of the town 5 miles away. Some participate in local boards and commissions or volunteer, as I do now. Still, I think we mostly "hang with our tribe."
      Is it true that Election 2016 taught us that we need to overcome our tribal tendencies and wade into the waters of other lives? I certainly recognize that my White privilege gave me the freedom to make this lifestyle choice. I had the backing of my parents--themselves upwardly mobile children of immigrants--when my partner and I purchased the land, and then again when we wanted to send our daughter to a Quaker school. Privilege is the water I swim in, I cannot deny it.
      Others are more eloquent than I in analyzing where we Americans have miserably strayed in recent decades and what we must do to make a better nation and world. I know that something feels askew as I sit here on a winter day, free and essentially without a care on this peaceful land.
      I have immersed myself for more than 30 years in the restorative beauty of this place, not so far in miles but far in other ways from the madding crowd. Here are the questions that now arise: How can I care more about others' well-being?  Where am I needed? Difficult questions, indeed, for an introvert! For all I know, the answers involve going further inward before stepping out. But I am glad to be at least asking them.

We are so far into spring now that it feels like summer. I was sick over the weekend so missed my morning and afternoon walks. When I emerged yesterday, I wondered if we had turned seasons. Dry, warm air. . . leaves waving in a wisp of a breeze . . . green all about. Time to water again. And the sweet slightly spicy smell of tulip poplar blossoms was on the air.
     I wrote a sort of prose poem back in early-middle March when signs of spring were lighting up my imagination. You can take it as a meditation on what it might be like to be a perennial (perennial plant, that is):
 
Imagine being a perennial:  every March a revelation! 
    But first imagine days thinning and you letting go, slumping from your full-swaggering height and—even more strange—receding underground, morphing into a slight nubbin of a plant, a root tangle, a bulb . . . .
     Then imagine missing winter altogether. Being blind to trees whose once-shaggy heads now wobble stiffly in the cold. Tucked among tree roots, would you sense what happens overhead? Stillness—so many birds gone away—and the occasional clanging of people trudging.
     Surely you’d be oblivious to blankets of snow, their dazzling blue sheen in certain lights, and to etched prints of birds and coyotes or the bellowing of owls in starry darkness.
     Just imagine sleeping for so long . . . and then later, months later, something tickles: an awareness of fatter days? a curious desire to push up, up through mole-tunneled dirt? 
    And then there will be the cracking of crust—that is, you spearing soil with what appear to be tender shoots but surely are not: shoots that push aside pebbles, sand grains, clay clods with seemingly small effort, all while prettily dressed in greens, reds, purple. 
    It is you pressing skyward: your leaves at first crimp-folded and maybe ruby red but in the next moment unpleating and greening, reaching up and out on a March day that now notices you by bathing you in light.
​   That might be what it's like.

In recent weeks I have found myself reading and re-reading the following remark from Bill McKibben:

“As individuals, there’s not much we can do. We can change our light bulbs—and we should—but doing so won’t change global warming. It’s a structural, systemic problem that needs to be addressed structurally and systemically. The most important rule for an individual in this fight is to figure out how not to remain an individual, how to join a movement big enough to change the politics." (2014 New York Times interview)

What does this mean for me? I keep wondering. Discernment, I find, is challenging.

In this second week of the UN Climate Conference in Paris (COP21), I notice that my mood and behavior are erratic. I can’t stay focused. I feel unsettled. Some of this agitation is clearly connected to the levels of heat and energy in the public sphere right now: so much talking, staking of positions, slinging of opinions, anger, retaliation, complaint; and deeply hurtful rhetoric. But there are many meaningful actions, too—folks acting out of well-reasoned intention and with integrity; this balances some of my agitation.

Still, I circle and pace—in mind as well as body. Nothing satisfies, nothing holds me to the moment. This is counter to my usual practice of mindfulness and concentration, but so it goes. Honesty, it feels a bit like gulping down three cups of strong coffee in a short stretch of time—but I haven’t.
It is vertiginous to live in a time of so much public imbalance. I want something to resolve. Today is the last day of the Climate Summit, and I fervently want to see a strong commitment from ALL countries, especially mine. I search the Web greedily for news, bouncing between The Guardian (with live coverage), to Harpers (reports on the ground from Rebecca Solnit), to the New York Times. What will we do? Will we really commit to decarbonizing our future, against all odds and shameless pressure from over-empowered corporations?

On Sunday November 29, the day before the UN Climate Conference began, I took a special meditation walk with 80 other people in the woods of Carolina North in Chapel Hill, NC. The walk was planned under the banner of the Global Climate March 2015, a worldwide event organized by 350.org to send a message to world leaders and delegates attending the Climate Conference in Paris (COP 21, November 30 – December 11) urging them to make a historic and binding commitment to a low-carbon, sustainable future.

The warm day was perfect for our silent walk. Surrounded by pines, we were there to demonstrate solidarity with people engaged in creative, nonviolent demonstrations in the wounded city of Paris and with people already suffering the consequences of a warming planet. By the end of the weekend, there had been more than 2,300 events in 175+ countries, with more than 785,000 participants!

Walking mindfully together with others from my community deepened my awareness of our interdependence with the Earth and with all beings, human and nonhuman. This awareness--deeply sensing that I am not separate from nature or from all of humanity--is a precursor to engagement.

There are those who still do not accept that the planet is on the verge of human-caused catastrophe. I suggest that no more time be used trying to persuade; that we get on with the work. Wendell Berry put it this way: “even if [the experts] are wrong about the alleged human causes of climate change, we have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by trusting them.”
​
Perhaps we in the “first world” have managed to put off feeling empathy for people already affected by a warming planet because thus far, they are primarily people in poorer nations and marginalized communities—-be it folks on our own Gulf Coast, Alaskan native communities, or inhabitants of tiny Pacific islands. But I am certain that if we really pay attention, and deepen our awareness of our interdependence, we will trust what the science tells us and understand that acting now is the right thing to do.

​I am still walking every day. Most trees have by now dropped their leaf load, which lays in a brown, desultory layer. I scuff through this crunchy layer on my walks, and the resultant ruckus is deafening. One can’t even carry on a conversation with a friend when walking this way, at this time. In a few weeks, though, trampling feet, rain, and other vicissitudes of weather and time will compress the leaves to a point where footfalls elicit merely a whisper, a sound that won’t disturb the welcome quiet of winter woods.
 
Our mood is somber—appropriately so, I suppose. Some people may be turning inward, feeling a need for quiet in which to inquire as to the nature and root of disturbing and destructive forces at play in the world. Others are pontificating about WHAT MUST BE DONE, AND NOW!!  Who is right?
 
I recapture the serenity and safety I am privileged to enjoy when I notice illuminated red leaves, the last-hangers-on kissed by low-angled light of November.  I also know we are capable, yet, of perceiving what is kind, generous, compassionate, and beautiful in this world.
 
I have thought a lot, in recent days, about my grandparents—all four of them immigrants to this country, 100 years ago, more or less. To make their various and arduous journeys to Ellis Island, they left behind places where survival was dubious and made more so by prejudice that dogged them and their families. I wonder what they would say if they could witness today’s “conversation” (and I use that term generously) about refugees? The meanness and politicizing I hear makes my head hurt and my heart ache. I wish my grandfathers and grandmothers were alive so I could ask why they left, what they experienced on their journey and upon arrival. I did not ask enough questions when they were alive.
 
I did ask one question, however, and vividly remember my grandmother’s response. “Did you ever think about going back to visit Poland? With a shocked, indignant expression on her 90-year-old face, my mother’s mother answered this way:  “Never. Never!  I could never go back to that place!”
 
Imagine saying that about your childhood home.  Imagine feeling that unsafe.
 
Imagine.

 There is something so blastedly beautiful about a seed!  At this time of year, I am quite happy to sit down under a good lamp and pick apart seed heads of Mexican sunflowers, or separate fluff from the achenes popping out of a milkweed pod.  It’s a process that only requires patience, maybe a pair of tweezers, and closed windows so nothing blows out of reach.  It goes like this: focus, notice, wonder, sort.  Then stash some away for next year’s garden, or for potential gifts, or even just for no particular use at all (inevitably, I discard a portion of my carefully stored seeds every year).

Something about the positiveness of the gesture.  Optimism.  That there will be a day when these seeds come in handy, that I’ll be around--come spring--to unfold the paper envelope or pop open the film container (remember those?) and pour a few into my palm to tuck into a flat of dampened potting mix or toss into a fluffed-up garden bed.  Optimism that the gesture has its own inherent value, and that even without witnesses, it is good for the world. 

I was plucking and sorting seeds recently, on a day when I knew that I had taken in too much news. I had allowed the tragedy—no, the catastrophe—of another mass shooting and the terrible reality of people leaving their homes in great numbers to weigh on me, heavily.  And worse, this had stoked the fire of anxiety that forever sits as a glowing ember in my belly: my ancestral inheritance, the roots of which stretch behind me, possibly even back beyond the grandparents I knew, refugees themselves in the first decades of the twentieth century.

We can’t keep absorbing the sorrow, the “bad news,” without taking breaks like I did that day, under the focused beam of a lamp—breaks to rest in the astounding fact of a seed, ingenious package for another year of life, for continuation.  At least I can't.

​There is only one thing that keeps me from writing.  My self. That is, the one who thinks things must be just so before I can start.  Just the right pen.  Just the right number of chores completed.  Just the right mood and just the right time.  Just the right blogging app.  Just the right laptop, or should it be a notebook? . . .
 
Hello: there will always be something that is not just right.
 
In late September, I take to the hills for a walkabout on Yom Kippur, day of atonement, the finale to the Jewish High Holy Days.  We are expected, on this day, to review our year and ask for forgiveness—or at least understanding—for sins committed.
 
I am in the mountains.
 
After some aimless wandering, I take a seat on a forested river bluff, far up enough that I can’t hear the river’s slick bubbling.  Leaves fall, especially yellow ones, most of these coming from birches.  I can tell that other colors and the rest of fall are not far off.
 
Because I am alone and can, I listen:  a donkey is braying from the other side of the river, and there is the whine of a saw coming off of another ridge.  Crow cawing, dog howling.  Acorns accelerate toward earth with a pleasing rrripping sound as they pierce the canopy and then land with a thwack on the wet duff—whereupon my own “duff” rests. 
 
After a time, my bottom grows damp, but never mind.  It is good.  A wood thrush visits, so briefly and in so shadowed a place—alighting for no more than a second among the overlapping stems of rhododendrons—that the only visual impressions left on my brain are a distinctively round unblinking eye and a spotted white breast.  It is a presence so brief yet so stunning, that the words “thank you, bird” pass through my mind after it is gone.
 
Boisterous chickadees acrobatically explore the canopy.  I crane my neck, trying to discern their black and white markings. They know that I am here, blinking into the green and yellow mosaic of leaves. Light leaking through tricks my eye into perceiving the birds as small dark silhouettes.  Still, I recognize them by their scolding voices.  Titmice are here as well:  one comes close and cocks a shining black eye at me.  I don’t want to be perceived as an intruder.
 
Earlier, on the way up the steep hill, a large grape leaf lying in the path made me stop.  It was flipped over, its velvety underside serving as a generous plate for silver pebbles of rain: an appetizer of condensed early morning light!  Why ask for more than this?  Farther along the path, I paused again for a long-shafted brown-and-white-striped feather:  hawk or vulture or turkey, all of which I have seen before in these hills.  I left it on the wet ground, there being no need to possess it.
 
My sin this past year?  It seems to have been my long-standing habit of worrying--and letting worry hold me back, keeping me from becoming.