Patricia Damery's Blog, page 4

The Beginning of the Writing of Fruits of Eden

Fruits of Eden: Napa Valley 1991-2021 has been copyedited for the final time and is on the way to the typesetter at Dancing Raven Press, an imprint of Analytical Psychology Press. I now have to summarize the book in 2-3 sentences (for the back of the book), a little longer in 4000 characters (for Amazon), and a more extended version for the publisher’s website. The book is entering yet another passage into the world of publishing.

I began writing the book six years ago in Guanajuato, Mexico, visiting Dianne, a dear friend, former writing group member, and an expatriate. Dianne and her husband Sterling built a beautiful, whimsical home on the hillside, which descends into the city center with plazas and outdoor dining. Each morning we would get up and write together, each typing away silently, and then read to each other before making the descent to meet Sterling for lunch. After a leisurely meal with a salted limeade that I came to love, we would climb the many steps back to their walled garden and home and then write through the afternoon. Each evening we returned to the city center for dinner.

From the roof looking into the city center.

Of course, there were comical crises. We had to take a taxi to pick up a neighbor’s almost feral cat at the vet, which Dianne had trapped and had neutered, unbeknownst to the neighbor. She rationalized this act by claiming he ate at her home half time anyway, not realizing that the cat would need aftercare of antibiotics for a week. This meant the cat had to be sequestered in the bathroom next to my bedroom. When we had to rush the cat back to the vet (I can’t remember why), we had to herd him into a carrier, which she insisted I carry as we walked down the stone steps past his other home—just in case. After his treatment, we returned with him, again sequestering him. One night I heard a terrible commotion only to discover that the cat had bitten Dianne when she tried to give him the antibiotic. She did not know if the cat had been inoculated for rabies, which spawned another crisis. After many calls to the vet and her doctor, she decided not to pursue rabies shots (for herself).

We laughed a lot that week. It was a relief from the story’s content, a story that really started five years before. A new neighbor had bought the ranch next door for more vineyards and a winery. A portion of the land was in an easement that the former neighbor and we had placed to protect an ancient oak savanna from development.

That is the beginning of the writing of Fruits of Eden. I will tell you more about the book in time… but I want to say it began in a retreat with an old writing buddy during a week of joi de vivre. One of my greatest lessons these last years is that you better enjoy the ride because it will be a long one! We save what we love, not what we fear.

Does that bode well for the story? Time will tell. I left Guanajuato and flew to Las Vegas and on to Bryce Canyon for another project. But that’s another story!

We are in a fight for the continuance of life on earth, and this is my personal version of that, lived out in the Napa Valley. I hope you will read Fruits of Eden when published later this year, and I hope you too will join this activism for our planet.

The post The Beginning of the Writing of Fruits of Eden appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Guardians

Mishewah Wappo descendent Alyx Howell said that his people call poison oak “guardian oak” and, as a result, have a better relationship with the plant. When you call it guardian oak, you are less likely to get an itchy rash. Alyx knows stories about the oaks that I have not heard from any other source. 

But I remember this about guardian plants from biodynamics too. Thistles and prickly plants are plants that come in when soils are disturbed and need to rest. “Thistle is inherently discriminating,” a commentary on ARAS (Archives for Research in Archetypal Symbols) states. “ Evoking one who is barbed but has a soft heart, the thistle’s prickliness is associated with self-protection, impenetrability, austerity, and resilience.” Starthistle is an example, invasive as it also is. If we listen, the message is to stay away! I never thought of this with poison oak, a plant of great abundance on our property.  Who among us would argue with such a plant? I won’t. But as is so often true, I also know this poisonous plant is also healing. Homeopathic medicinal poison oak, or rhus toxicodendron, is characterized by impatience and irritableness. Stay back! It is used for inflammation and to cure the rash of poison oak itself. 

On our ranch, Guardian oak is also one of the first plants to lose all color but red. This year it happened in early July. By the beginning of August, many of the leaves will have faded to brown, then crinkled and dropped from most of the stalks. I thought again of its guardianship functions. Without leaves, is it less flammable? That would be important this year. Elizabeth says plants have 30% of their normal moisture. The giant valley oak in the pioneer cemetery has curled its leaves for the second year in a row. They do this to conserve moisture, an early fallowness. In the 2017 fires, the lemon tree in our courtyard lost all its leaves. Is the guardian oak doing this, prematurely dropping leaves to preserve the moisture it has and also offer less fuel in the case of fire?

Fire is on our minds these days. Fire and Water. Both teach us about living more respectfully within earth resources.

The post Guardians appeared first on Patricia Damery.

A Fantistical Opossum Story

The story starts with taking out the trash about 8:15 pm Wednesday, an unusual thing for me to do. In fact, when have I taken out the trash in the evening? It involves driving the 3/4 mile driveway to the trash cans at Dry Creek Road, and who in their right mind would do that on just a whim? But it is part of the story.

I passed the first curve when my cell phone rang. I answered it on the Prius screen (so strange!), and it was a mayor of a local community. Could he put a journalist in touch with me about what our local Napa Vision 2050 group is doing about water security in Napa County? But suddenly, right before me, was the sweetest little opossum, staggering on the driveway. “Wait!” I exclaimed. “There is an opossum in the driveway!” and then I saw it was moving very slowly. It was injured. “I will call you back!”  I said quickly and hung up.

The opossum was young. Not a baby, but not an adult either. And closer examination showed that it had talon marks on the back of its head and neck. I called two people I knew who had dealt with Napa Wildlife, got the phone number, and called. The woman on the other end, Leah, told me to throw a towel over it and pick it up, that it wouldn’t bite. “And don’t let it get into the blackberries. You will never get it out,” she coached.  I found a pad in the back of my car to throw over it. But alas!  It had shuffled off the road into the blackberries and was disappearing uphill into the undergrowth. “Put food out and wait,” Leah instructed. I dug through the garbage and found an aging avocado.

Being impatient as it was getting later, I decided to get a long PVC pipe and my daughter-in-law Lisa and her mom Pam, who was visiting, to help. We would rustle the brush with the pipe and scare it back our way.

They couldn’t believe it. Pam thought I was kidding. “I really need you,” I underscored.

“She’s a wild woman,” Lisa explained.

We returned to the site. By now, it was getting dark. Yip, there was the opossum by the avocado, but as we stopped, he struggled up into the brambles again. I went up after him, trying to differentiate between brambles and poison oak, trying not to think of rattlesnakes. We shined a flashlight under the brambles.  We kept thinking we saw his white body, then realized we didn’t. I rustled the brush with the 10-foot pipe, but the opossum had hunkered down. So I gave up and drove Lisa and Pam back to the house, returning with a banana. I peeled the banana, placed it where I last saw the possum, turned off the car lights, and waited.

And waited. The night was dark, even though there would be a full moon rise before long. There was not a sound. As I sat in the car, it occurred to me to meditate. I imagined a root sinking deep into the earth, sinking, sinking, and an opening above that expanded into a sphere of love, pink love. I was the quiet, expanded, and in this peaceful state, I said (internally) to the opossum, I will help you. I will not hurt you, but I will take you to get help. When you are well, you can return here. But if you want me to help, you have to show yourself.  I heard thrashing about further up the hill. Finally, I decided I had done all I could.

But what was most shocking was that as I rounded the last curve to our home, there was the possum right before me! I grabbed the pad, threw it over the possum, and gently lifted it. It squirmed a little, not much. It was skinny. How long had it been injured? I caught sight of its long snout and saw-blade teeth, wondering what made Leah think it didn’t bite, put it in a box, and called Leah. “I got the possum,” I told her.

She was surprised, given everything. “But we are closed,” she told me. “Put it in a box with a towel and bring it to Silverado vet tomorrow morning. It will just curl up and go to sleep. We will get it there.”

Of course, Lisa, Pam, and now my son Jesse were beside themselves with concern. “You are going to get bitten, Mom,” Jesse insisted as I transferred the little body into a larger box, punching air holes in the sides. I reassured them Leah said it doesn’t bite. Jesse insisted that we place the handle of the refrigerator truck over the top of the closed box so the opossum didn’t get loose in our basement.

And early the following day, I drove the opossum in its box (yes, it was still alive) to Silverado and waited in the car for the tech to come to get it. When she finally arrived to take the possum, I tried to tell her the miraculous story of getting the possum. I told her that he really wants to live, but she was in a hurry and was not interested in my story. She peeked inside. “He looks roughed up,” she said. “We will warm him up.”

Later that morning, I called Wildlife Rescue again. Leah was on duty. I asked how the possum was. They had told me that they have to euthanize a number of the animals brought in. Leah took some time looking at the records. The possum wasn’t listed yet. But later that afternoon, she texted me. He’s being treated!

On the way home that morning, the phone rang in the exact place that I had first seen the opossum the night before, the same place that I had hung up on the mayor. It was the mayor. We continued our conversation. He gave me a list of information that the journalist would need. I can get that, I told him and hung up, feeling oddly hopeful.

The post A Fantistical Opossum Story appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Go-Bags and Exit Plans: Navigating the New Normal

The ranch is fresh green, the Mexican daisies and Spanish lavender in full bloom, and the birds courting. We’ve had a fraction of our average seasonal rainfall. I find it harder to enjoy the brilliance of April, one of the most verdant months here. The valley oak leaves are large and still that first green-gold. The grasses have yet to burn off in even the sparest spots. The winds that ripple the grasses in great waves and shake the boughs of the ancient oaks are not yet worrisome—but they will be.

Climate change is here. The winds are reckless, the land and vegetation drier than it has been for a long time. We’ve suppressed fire for too long. The forest is overgrown with brush and too many trees.  Downed trees have died from infestations due to lack of fire and lack of water.

Fire and water.  We paid too little attention to both, and now here they are, Zen masters. Last week Cal-Fire and Firewise predicted that 1/3 of Napa County would burn with 20-foot flames. I can’t help but think of that this afternoon. In July or August, September or October, a windy afternoon like this will scare us. There will be red-flag warnings and possible Public Safety Power Shutoffs, and even if there are no fires here, there will be north or south of here–and smoke.  We’ve been through this too many times, and we know that this year has the worst of fire conditions so far.

How can I  learn to live with such uncertainty and danger? Is there any safe place? How can I adapt to this new normal of making go-bags and exit plans from the ranch for us, for the goats and llama?

April 14, 2021, our governor signed SB 85 into law, appropriating funds for fire preparation. Assemblyman Jim Wood stated, “We need to prepare for fire season like we are preparing for an impending hurricane.” The law provides for emergency vegetation management. What is the appropriate preparation for the magnitude of changes we are facing? In California and much of the West, these changes involve drought and fire alternating with flooding and mudslides. Our state’s measures will help clear vegetation in the short run but could also poison our waters and wildlife with herbicides. And thinning our forests while keeping our carbon-sequestering old trees is a critically important activity, done correctly. We need to also consider the resilience of the ecosystem in the way we do it. Our future depends on it.

I find myself hoping for a significant freak rain in May, that this upcoming fire season won’t be as bad as they predict. But the truth is, it may be worse. We may well be entering a megadrought. I guess the important thing is to stay steady in this panic and keep working to reduce forest debris on our ranch—and then, to enjoy life. Despite it all, this April is bursting with beauty. Apprehending the magnificence of life while also packing the go-bag may be the new normal.

 

 

The post Go-Bags and Exit Plans: Navigating the New Normal appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Arrival of the Beloved Dog, Bramble Berry

We picked up our labradoodle Bramble Berry three years ago this week, on April 16, 2018. He was just 8 weeks old. He arrived at a difficult time for us, with several challenges initiating me into overseeing everything my husband Donald used to do as his health declined.

Donald and I drove to Fair Oaks, California, to pick Bramble up. We had had to fill out forms that would rival any human child adoption process; the breeder chose which puppy would best suit us. She said Bramble Berry was the calmer of the puppies, liked to cuddle more than the others, and had wavy, versus more course hair, suitable for the ranch and foxtails.

We met the breeder at her door. Bramble’s mother met us as well, leaping almost to eye level, the breeder commenting she was usually not like this. There was one other puppy left. The others had been homed the day before. We played with this 7 pound, wavy-haired pup for about 15 minutes as the breeder gave us an amazingly effective schedule for feeding and toilet training. We were to put his sleeping crate right next to us the first night, take him out to pee at 2 am, and then, over the next week, slowly move the crate. As it happened, that crate has moved no more than 18 inches.

Donald held Bramble Berry on his lap in the front seat during the 2 1/2 hour drive home. Bramble yipped pitifully. I felt like we were dog-napping him. When I glanced over, he was always watching me out of the corner of his eye. His eye color is unique. In some light, his eyes are golden; in some light, green. Even the puppy class teacher remarked on this. He is called “chocolate,” although, at age 3, he’s more like his mother, “lavender.”

We drove to our ranch, where my grandsons Wesley and Sabien, aged seven and five at the time, were waiting. Bramble was ready. He chased them around their yard until he collapsed asleep. This was the end of the pitiful yipping— except he still cries when he rides in the car. Still, Bramble is always ready to go but then accentuates whines with sharp barks the whole time the vehicle moves. This disturbing behavior increases when he anticipates that I am about to get out without him. The trainer we got when Bramble was a year old suggested we get a calming hood, which helps some. He can’t see to bark at dogs and bicycles that we pass. But he still whines unless Donald constantly offers him treats.

He jumps at feathers, frogs, lizards, and anything else novel, including, after this pandemic isolation, anyone he doesn’t know. He’s afraid of snakes, as I am. Yet he also is one joyful beast, happy, an alpha (yes, I know, it doesn’t sound that way, but he is.) His best dog friend is my son Jesse’s dog Toby, whom Bramble loves to stalk and wrestle with and chase. Bramble is the fastest dog I have ever seen.

He’s smart. I like a smart dog like I like a smart goat. This is a challenge for me as I am not a gifted trainer. That is why Bramble spent two weeks in a boot camp two years ago at Fit and Furry, a program with lifetime access to his trainer Jen by phone or e-mail, which I take full advantage of. He loves my grandsons, his feeding time, butter, and his ball. Honestly, I think that’s the next hurdle: he’s become obsessive about his ball. (Note to myself: e-mail Jen about this.)

And then the butter: he’ll do anything to get it. The first time I knew he was thieving butter was when a friend Jimalee was fixing dinner for our writing group at our home and accused one of us of using it. It turns out that Bramble ate it, paper and all. He then learned to remove the china butter dish’s cover and lick it clean without breaking anything.

But he is our beloved dog, an intelligent, high-strung companion who arrived at just the right time in our lives. Bramble Berry reminds us daily that life is also full of pleasure and intrigue and can be very, very funny.

The post Arrival of the Beloved Dog, Bramble Berry appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Arrival of the Serpent: A Treasure?

Before this all began, I dreamed of snakes again. In one dream, a fat black, rather short snake was above my closet on the wall and fell to the floor. I was considering putting a laundry basket over it so it didn’t escape into the house. Ten days later, I dreamed a snake had woven a small house of snakes for me, and in the confounding way of dreams, the snake was then a man doing the weaving, the house the size of a basketball, woven of small snakes. Five days later, I saw a serpent on our bedroom wall as I was falling asleep and realized that I was entering those other realms. This was all in February before I heard Covid-19 virus referred to as a “snake” virus. I decided this must have been the collective stimulus for the dreams and forgot them. 

The next week we began sequestering: first, gatherings of friends and family canceled, even for Donald’s 88th birthday, and then the cancellation of our monthly writing group and the decision to carry on on Zoom. My daughter-in-law Melissa decided to no longer go to work driving tourists to wineries and then Casey and Melissa announced they were sequestering, even from Donald and me. 

When you don’t fully take in the meaning of a dream, the unconscious often ups the ante. This was when the physical snakes started coming. First there was the large garter snake, at least three feet long, to my horror, slithering by one of the western doors of our home! Bramble Berry saw it first through the glass of the door. A small gopher snake was nearby, tangled in our laundry rack stationed outside the door. Karen, Donald’s helper, had stopped by to make a delivery and removed the gopher snake to the forest.  But the garter snake slithered on, past the outside table into the landscaping. Donald would see it later basking on our kitchen doorstep.

Gary, who does some gardening and helps clean the goat and llama barns, discovered a very large gopher snake in Hilo’s shed (our llama) while he was cleaning it. Casey and the boys saw the snake again that evening as it disappeared into what appeared to be a hole in the shed’s wall. The next day Gary caught the snake as well as two more small and probably just hatched gopher snakes and removed them to other spots.  The big one, at least three feet long, wrapped itself around his arm as he walked it down the driveway to a new location. One of the smaller ones, dangled between his thumb and forefinger as its tongue sought answers for what was happening. 

The most shocking experience occurred when I walked into the dining room to discover a ring-necked snake on the floor. I screamed. Bramble Berry went after it. My son Jesse, sequestering with us with his wife and newborn Grace, was on the phone, working from home. He immediately hung up. The startled snake crawled down the register. Both Jesse and I have that midwestern horror of serpents, and he wasn’t about to pick it up, nor was I. Were Casey here, and he wasn’t, he would have. Jesse killed the snake, apologizing to it over and over. It would have died in the vents. Besides, he explained, I would have forever thought of that snake in the vents. And he is correct.

And then, a few days later, when I went to feed the goats their evening meal, the large gopher snake was back, lying on the threshold of the goat barn. Casey tried to get it in a bucket to remove it to his yard (he would welcome it. The gophers are having a heyday.) However, the snake, slow and gentle as it also was, had no intention of being caught and instead slithered along the wall of my studio, right through my expensive Snake Guard pellets, and then into a hole in the stone wall of the path. He/she reappears daily at about 3 pm in the afternoon just before slowly heading out toward the goat barn. 

I have had dreams of snakes at other times in my life, times always of great transition. We are there again. There is the collective transition that is so mysterious and, yes, frightening. We have no idea how long this virus will run its course and what the economic impact will be over time. We are truly in a dangerous time, a time the split between the haves and the have-nots appears to be broadening. Questions of personal rights versus the common good plague the conversation, and misguided people storm statehouses with automatic weapons, protesting shutdowns, and impingement on their freedoms. When did we stop caring about the whole? When did our ideas of personal rights and freedoms become so perverted to warrant this kind of display?

I ponder what is my own, individual transformation?   I am of the age group most vulnerable. My husband is even more so, at 88 and in compromised health. My actions impact him. They impact anyone of us sequestering together. And I feel this great turning, see the clearer skies, the quieter environment. What is my task now? What can I do to assist this movement into a future in which we can coexist with our planet in ways we all thrive?

Snakes shed their skin to become larger. We as a nation have the opportunity to grow larger and more compassionate. To think about life in a bigger way, about others as much as ourselves. There is a dispassionate quality to snakes: no sentimentality. Just the life force, pushing forward. Governor Newsom’s budget has that dispassionate quality: so much has to be cut because we don’t have the money. Are we in a time we can champion the common good beyond all else, even beyond our own needs and wants? Can we do this for climate action?

The virus has been good for the climate, temporarily reducing carbon emissions by 17%. Skies have cleared over cities worldwide. We see what driving less and flying less does. This is the direction we have to go if we are going to spare the planet the worst of climate disruption. If humans continue on our planet.

For the time being, I accept that I need to coexist with the gopher snake. Friends and Casey tell me all the good things gopher snakes do. They eat gophers, rats, and mice, which reduce tick populations, and Lyme disease. They don’t bite. Better to have them here than dangerous rattlesnakes. A friend went so far to e-mail me, “Sounds like you have a treasure.”  

Okay. I am careful when I walk out of my studio, and he/she is almost always there at 3 pm for 45 minutes. I live with the gift of the question: why this visitation? It is a mystery to me, this time. Amidst the economic and physical suffering, the planet is doing better. Will the snake, this charging life force, help me/us dispassionately shell old ideas and attitudes and grow into our larger selves?

The post Arrival of the Serpent: A Treasure? appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Sheltering-in-Place Drama

Yesterday we had a near catastrophe with Bramble Berry, our pup, and Hijo, our guard llama. Hijo started it, managing to escape from the goat pen when the latch didn’t catch when I entered to feed him. He saw the opportunity and ran full speed out of the pen. When I walked back to my studio, he was grazing by the west windows. Bramble Berry was waiting for me inside to return to the house. I grabbed the tray with my teacup and teapot and  Bramble Berry’s leash to go back to the house to start the day, not thinking too much about the llama browsing nearby. But Bramble Berry knew! He jerked loose the minute I opened the door, upsetting the tray with my tea apparatus and charged full speed at Hijo. Of course, Hijo ran, Bramble Berry literally on his heels. I have never known a dog to run as fast as Bramble Berry, and Hijo was just as quick. They ran west, past the house, then looped back right by the window where Jesse was working in the basement and then on down past the greenhouse and into the woods. 

I was panicked. Hijo could kill Bramble Berry with those sharp hooves and has tried before when Bramble Berry got into the goat pen, and Bramble Berry could injure Hijo, causing him to break a leg— or worse. And how far could this chase go? And where? 

Jesse immediately ran out down the path when he saw (and heard) this commotion and jumped into the pickup to go after them. I grabbed my phone, yelling at Siri, “Call Casey!” Siri doesn’t put up with yelling, wanting me to speak more softly. I calmed myself enough to get Casey on the phone and sputtered, “We have an emergency!” I am not good at such times. 

I ran toward the house to get my keys, leaving the broken teapot and the cup with the deer head bedecked in jack-in-the-pulpits at my studio door. I tried not to think about this second teapot broken by my dear pup pulling me yet again when I open the studio door, but I remembered another time of misjudgment, also involving Jack-in-the-pulpits.  When I was ten my mother took us Girl Scouts to the Girl Scout camp in the spring and against our better judgment, some of us picked a Jack-in-the-pulpit. My mother was horrified and made it very clear to never do that again. Nevermind that her information about Jack-in-the-pulpits was flawed; it was effective. “That plant will never bloom again,” she chided. I have never picked one since. But on this day, I was in another Jack-in-the-pulpit moment, distressed that I had left the gate unlatched and then allowed the dog to pull away, again. What was I thinking? I hated Bramble Berry a little in that moment for being so instinctual and tried not to consider the frightful possibilities for them both. Grabbing the keys, I forgot my phone. I drove slowly down the driveway, listening for any thrashing in the forest. It was completely silent.

I missed the three calls from Jesse. He had found Bramble Berry on the driveway just before it makes its great ascent. I drove on, past Casey in the truck at the burn pile who said Hijo had just passed, fast, and was headed on down toward Dry Creek Road. When I got to Casey and Melissa’s, Melissa stood near the tall grass of the pulled vineyard. Hijo was there. He raised his ears when he saw me, walked toward me, then into their yard. I attached the lead Casey handed me and started to walk him slowly back up the mountain to his pen, but not before he rested his head on my shoulder. His left hind foot had a blood spot on it but otherwise, he was uninjured. He was jumpy, though, when the wind wrestled the leaves at the curve of the driveway before we got to the goat pen, his safely enclosed space.

And Bramble Berry? Well, it’s back to boot camp for him. This was the final straw. It’s easy to add up his recent infractions: the piece of smoked salmon he took off the counter when Jesse turned his back; the two pounds of hamburger in the bag just delivered by Raley’s; his leaping at Wesley when Wesley approached me sitting in the chair on Mother’s Day, Bramble Berry on my lap watching out the window for quail or turkeys. I can see he’s gotten the upper hand lately. Now it is my job to get it back.  

The post Sheltering-in-Place Drama appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Masking up for Earth Day 2020

A dear high school friend makes a Facebook dare: Post a picture of yourself in a mask. Her smiling eyes peer over her navy blue, star-studded mask, her head wrapped in a scarf. She is currently undergoing chemotherapy but her spirit sparkles.

I scroll down. There are men and women, all of a certain age, some with masks improvised from scarfs, most homemade. We were very young adults that first Earth Day 1970, and now we are of that group they say are most at risk should we contract the virus. We are told masks are less about self-protection than the protection of others. Worldwide, people are covering noses and mouths to protect others, and in the process, protecting themselves from the spread of infection.

Coronavirus has done for the world what nothing else could have. For a while, it has crossed political divides and united us in our will to keep alive. A chorus of health professionals’ faces just off duty from crowded ICU units, all with painful mask-marked indentations, greet us between verses of newscasts as we witness the sacrifice of those dedicated to our care. Our job, they say? Stay home. We watch the impact of staying home on cases reported, the flattening of the curves of infection. 

I love to hear the positive side of this staying-home on our environment. The atmosphere is cleaner than it has been in decades in many areas. CO2 levels over our cities have dropped. The skies are bluer; the freeways, quieter. Can we keep this going as our economy recovers? On this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for the world to respond to the current coronavirus crisis in ways that also solve [his word] the climate crisis. He lists six steps to this end, including funding green jobs in recovery packages instead of subsidizing the fossil fuel industries.

I did post a picture of myself in a mask I got in 2017 during the California fires. I suspect that washable mask and I are going to see a lot of each other in the days, weeks, and months ahead. I grow fonder of it when I remember its function. Yes, it’s harder to breathe wearing it, but it also protects others, should I become unknowingly infected. Maybe masks carry not only a concrete function but also a symbolic one, an attitude that may save us. Caring for the other, whether that be another human or the environment, is our own best hope of survival. Maybe the mask is also our best symbol for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day 2020.

The post Masking up for Earth Day 2020 appeared first on Patricia Damery.

The Span of a Life

Donald has been obsessed with mandalas for as long as I have known him. In fact, mandalas inspired his book, The Geometric Wholeness of the Self, a book that is brilliantly creative, although almost unreadable. He is a retired architect and philosopher and has sought the meaning of life in every structure he has designed, including our home. Even as dementia claims his brain, a mandala still catches his eye.

He told me that he wants to grind down and sand the old stump of the huge valley oak that fell next to the little house on our property where we used to live. Our son Casey and his wife Melissa, and our grandsons Wesley and Sabien live there now. The beloved tree fell several years ago, missing the house but smashing the car of our vineyard manager who was living there at the time. Donald says that he wants to then take a picture of the sanded cross-section of the stump, count the rings, and then mark what was happening each year that the tree grew, like marking the height of a child on your wall, year by year.  Donald claims this tree was 400 years old. 

Dementia does that with time. Time becomes irrelevant. There is only the truth of the present. But even knowing this, I find Donald’s estimate of the tree’s age annoying. Several years ago while the tree was still standing and Donald was struggling with the loss of the many functions of the neocortex, he accused me of exaggerating when I said the tree was probably 300 years old. It was one of the largest oaks that I had ever seen. Those days he countered almost everything I said as if making me smaller made him bigger. He had never done this before, and he hasn’t since, but it was part of accepting that he was losing his mind. At the time we didn’t know that we were in a precipitous drop.

When the tree fell, I did count at least 240 distinguishable rings. The tree was old, not that old for an oak, but certainly for a human. And compressed in those rings was the growth during years of Indian wars, of the Russian occupation of California, and then of the Spanish and Vallejo. Families built the little house near the oak when the tree would have been at least 100 years old and then built a shed within its drip line that became its demise. These families, who came to California from Ohio in covered wagons, lost ten children, marking their graves with redwood tombstones in the little cemetery up the driveway. Day in and day out they lived next to those who passed on to the next dimension.

So at age 88, Donald’s mandala research has turned to tree stumps. The span of a tree’s life held within that mandala of growth connects that which is deep in the earth with that which reaches high toward the heavens. His memory, the richer the further back you go, is like the tree rings: The mansion his father lost in the Great Depression when Donald was 3, and his bedroom there; the Sunday morning the men stood outside the church, silently smoking cigars, as they learned of Pearl Harbor; the kindness of his one-room school teacher whom he was in love with when he was 6 and 10 and 11. The trajectory of his life rounds into a pattern he seeks like Dante’s Beatrice, compelling, whole, something he knew once and will again. 

Now he aims to grind down and sand the cross-section of the stump so he can count the rings.

The stump is an important structure for my grandsons, and particularly Sabien, aged 7. Having begun to return to earth, the tree harbors lizards and salamanders and a little snake, all who live in cracks and hollows within its stumpy trunk. Sabien rappels up and down its height daily by grasping a cord that he has fastened to the tree’s heart. He knows the lizards individually.

So when Grandpa tells him his plan, Sabien panics, in tears. I reassure him. “Don’t worry, Sabien,” I say. “There’s no way Grandpa is going to use power tools, and certainly not on this tree stump.”  Later I tell Donald, “The stump is too rotten to sand. Besides, lizards are living there.” 

Donald looks at me, concerned. “You will need to tell me that again,” he says. And then, again, as he has many times over these last years, he confides that this tree was so big that no one ever saw it. 

The post The Span of a Life appeared first on Patricia Damery.

Thoughts While Sheltering-in-Place

We have been through emergencies before: floods, the earthquakes of 1989 and 2014;  the devastating fires of recent years which burned whole towns, shrouding us in smoke for weeks. Now each late summer and fall we live with days of no electrical power as PG&E proactively turns off major power lines to avoid another fiery catastrophe.

But the Corvid 19 pandemic is different. There is no literal shaking of the earth, nor flames, nor smoke. We have electrical power. Things seem almost normal. There is only the unseen threat so minuscule we only know its impact. This virus is so new that none of us on the planet has immunity to it. 80% who catch it will survive, but 20% of us, once thought to be mainly the elderly and physically vulnerable, will not do well and require hospitalization for fluids, oxygen, and ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators will die.

As mandated by Governor Newsom, we shelter-in-place, Donald and I fortunate enough to live on a ranch that offers a mile of social distance. The meetings which I still attend, I attend on-line. I am reassured to see my colleagues’ and friends’ faces. But it’s spring, and I am also happy to spend my days sequestered, walking the trails through the searing beauty of fresh leaves and of stretches of painfully green grass. I try not to avert my eyes: such beauty has always had that effect on me, perhaps because “… beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure…”(Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies).

Have beauty and terror always been paired? For me, beauty opens the door to the eternal, paradoxically reminding me of carnality, temporality, and death. The predictions and worse case scenarios of this pandemic seem incongruent with the stunning verity of nature’s first green, of her tassels of beaded blooms on coastal oak, of the trills of bird courtship. Nothing is different here, or is it? The question lives in me like a melody that won’t let up. This is the spring I have known on this ranch for 26 years; in this life, for 71. Yet I can’t help thinking, is this the last time I will witness this rite of life as expressed in green? 

The virus appears to be good for the planet herself. We hear that the atmosphere over China has cleared and that the CO2 over hard-hit New York City, reduced by as much as 25%. The canals in Venice, Italy, are clear again. You can see to the bottom.  Our industrial-driven lifestyle has had devastating impacts on the natural world. The fact that Earth can begin to restore herself so quickly is a huge relief.  Let’s not rush back to air travel and cruise ships and driving and driving and driving. Do we need more proof of what it all is doing to our planet?

Living within what feels like a bubble of safety here, I receive reports online.  Three cases of Corvid 19 in Napa County now. There will be more. We are told that the shelter-in-place mandate in California may already be “flattening the curve”, giving time for our hospitals and healthcare systems to come up to speed to treat this pandemic. If we don’t do this, the governor predicts 55% of Californians will be infected.

Yet four-fifths of the country are not sheltering-in-place. Our president says that it’s almost time to go back to normal activity, despite all warnings from the Center for Disease Control and those who understand pandemics. 

We are in a time of becoming conscious that what we do not only affects us but everyone else. It is the big lesson of this era that we have entered, and, this round, the virus is the teacher. As Dr. Emily Landon stated in an Illinois governor’s press conference, unless we sequester, “the strong and healthy will doom the vulnerable” (press release). Unless we act for the common good, we all will go down. It won’t matter what the economy is. It’s a shift, for sure, into what Thomas Berry called the Ecozoic Era and  “the new story”,  that evolution of consciousness that humans are interrelated with everything, human and nonhuman. Our consciousness of this fact and the necessary ethical commitment to it are not only evolutionary but also critical to human survival on our planet. Earth will recover, one way or the other.

The post Thoughts While Sheltering-in-Place appeared first on Patricia Damery.