Plan B (9 page)

 

E
veryone has been having a hard time with life this year; not with all of it, just the waking hours. Being awake is the one real fly in the ointment—but it is also when solutions come to us. So many friends died or got sick this year, watched their children go through terrible patches, or lost a lot of money, but on top of it all, like a dental X-ray apron, was the daily depression of life under the Bush White House. “It's hopeless,” my boyfriend muttered now and then. One of the savviest political and spiritual people I know said recently, “We will be at war in Iraq for a long time. It's that simple. Resistance is
futile.” But I decided it was only nearly impossible, and I'll take nearly impossible over futile any day.

Veronica said, in a recent sermon, that you can keep bees in jars without lids, because they'll walk around on the glass floor, imprisoned by the glass surrounding them, when all they'd have to do is look up and they could fly away. So, I thought gamely, we'll look up, we'll get off our asses, or if we are like bees, off our glasses. But this friend who said resistance was futile, who is usually a crabby optimist like me, was terrorized. She was trying to imagine the end of life as we now know it, under a paranoid right-wing government.

She was talking about life in shelters and caves.

Now, this would not work for me. Shelters would be bad enough—a dinner party is already a real stretch—but I don't even remotely have the right personality for cave dwelling. I need privacy and silence most of the time. Also, I hate stalactites. They make me think of Damocles, cave-camping.

Like most people I know, I stepped up my do-good efforts in the weeks before Bush took us to war in Iraq—I spoke out against the war, registered voters, went to demonstrations, sent money to environmental groups, signed petitions, went to visit old people in convalescent
homes, flirted with old people on the street, read
The Nation
and Salon, sent more money to the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders, Clowns Without Borders, the Middle East Children's Alliance, the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance, to anyone who helps kids and poor people. And I planted bulbs, which is a form of prayer.

But the jungle drums grew louder, and nothing seemed to help. What could possibly help during this administration? God only knows. But in any case, we should try to stay on God's good side. It's not hard. God has extremely low standards. Pray, take care of people, be actively grateful for your blessings, give away your money—you're cool. You're in. Nice room in heaven, flossing no longer required—which is what will make it heaven for me. Oh, I mean that, and Jesus.

And then, the rains began again.

I usually welcome the rain, when I'm tired and stressed. Rain suggests that you should go inside, rest, try to stay dry. The scent of rain is fresh and earthy, clean and woolly, of leaves and dirt, wet dogs. We get whiffs of our animal smells, of feet, sweat, and the secret smells of the earth, which she often keeps to herself. Rain gives us back something that has been stolen, a dimension we've been missing—our body, and our soul. Your mind can't give
you these. Your sick, worried mind can't heal your sick, worried mind. Well, maybe your mind is lovely and pastoral and you do not suffer from paranoia, hypochondria, a bad attitude, and delusions of victimized grandeur. That is very nice, but we don't want you in our cave after the bombs fall, because you are going to annoy us to death.

It poured.

Hard rain makes a mess, but it also fills in space we usually walk through without even noticing. It makes the stuff we can't usually see—air and wind—visible, and a lot of what we can see catches light. We get wet and cold, and then we get to dry off and be warm again. But with this rain the power started going off and on, and food went bad, and black grosgrain ribbons of ants arrived, and the winds picked up, and suddenly everything was whapping at us.

The storms made life feel like a cyclotron; everyone was mildewing and emotionally ragged, and war was breathing down our necks. At church I heard that the Marin Interfaith Council was sponsoring a peace rally. At this point it was hard to imagine going to the store, let alone into the rain to protest possible war in Iraq. The universe was pulling out all the stops—torrential rains and power outages for days—and it made me crazy,
especially when acquaintances would enthuse about how they were enjoying the lack of electricity, how close together it was bringing their families. (Thank you for sharing, but you can't be in our cave, either. You and your families will have to be in solitary, with your little board games.)

It didn't stop raining, and the wind didn't stop blowing, as if there were too many flies and they were beginning to bother the skin of the universe. The universe was flinching and flailing. And you couldn't fix anything. All you could do was help people. You could set up MASH units in your own life, and tend to people through the sacrament of cocoa and videos, and you could send money, and pray. Things were taking their course—I hate that! But you had to let them. I tried to slow down. Then I needed to nap so often that I concluded I had leukemia. Everyone had had such worry and muffled tension for so long, and the exhaustion of held breath, and I felt rashy and overwhelmed, like Harvey Fierstein with poison oak.

The Marin peace march was to be a candlelight vigil. I was frantic to be alone and curled up in bed reading
The New York Times
. I didn't think anyone would show up besides the loyal leaders of Marin's churches and temples and mosques, putting feet to their prayers.

But then I noticed through the windows that it was barely raining and the wind had died down. Some shafts of sun trickled through. Without overthinking things as usual, I got into my car, drove to San Rafael, and pulled into a parking space.

The rain had stopped. I could see a crowd gathering for the march—old and young; middle-aged people with whom my brothers and I had gone to school, who marched against the war in Vietnam and cleaned up oil spills in Bolinas; babies in strollers, dogs in rain gear. It was noisy, and I know a small-town peace march of a thousand people won't change anything, but I swear I could hear God in Her big-mama guise. She said, “Get out of the damn car already.” Still, I sat there. I wanted to go back home, and get it together first—get anything together, even dinner for Sam. Was that too much to ask? But here's what Veronica said during the sermon on bees: God doesn't want or expect you to get it together before you come along, because you
can't
get it together until you come along. You can spend half of your time alone, but you also have to be in service, in community, or you get a little funny.

I got out of the car and walked toward the crowd. The grass was wet and my shoes got wet, but I'd forgotten:
You can get wet, it's okay. Our parents said, “Don't go out in the rain, you'll catch your death of cold!”—as if we'd catch dreaded Japanese river fever if our feet got wet. But our parents were wrong. If you march against war when the war is for shitty reasons—oil and reelection and profit—your shoes might get wet, but maybe fewer people will die in Iraq. Somebody handed me a candle. I found an old schoolmate, friends of my parents. I found my pastor, and other people from my church.

It didn't rain again until the march was over. Two thousand of us eventually gathered, and we milled around until night began to fall. Then we lit our candles and marched, talking and singing. When I said I was hungry, someone gave me a hard butterscotch candy. It was so biblical I could hardly bear it. I couldn't see the front of the procession, it was that far away, and I couldn't see the back. It looked like a Bob Dylan concert. The march was quiet, both somber and joyful. Marchers made plans to meet in San Francisco on a day of mass national demonstrations. This was the happiest I'd felt in a long time. Later that night it rained again, soft, slow, silvery rain, but I was at home by then, warm and dry. In the morning when the sun came up, the light of the new day was faint and clear.

 

T
here is the most ancient of sorrows in the world again, dead civilians and young soldiers. None of us knows quite what to make of things, or what to do. Since the war started last week, the days feel like midnight on the Serengeti, dangers everywhere, some you can see, but most hidden. The praying people I know pray for the lives of innocent people and young Americans to be spared, for peace and sanity to be restored on the global field. Everything feels crazy. But on small patches of earth all over, I can see just as much messy mercy and grace as ever: yesterday at Sam's school, for instance, the kindergarteners and first-graders were outside when a dozen
military planes flew overhead. The children knew we were at war, and were afraid, but when their teacher, Miss Peggy, told them that they were safe, that the planes were going to the Middle East, far away, the children relaxed. They watched more planes fly over. Then one smart child began to worry that there might be children in the Middle East, too, but that maybe these pilots didn't know that. The children started to fret. Miss Peggy could not lie and say there were no children in the places where the planes were going. So she and the children got a giant sheet of paper, and the kids drew a huge peace dove on it, flying over children. They got some older kids to help, including Sam, and they all signed their names. The kids kept telling Miss Peggy that the pilots must not have known—otherwise they would never go to a country where they might accidentally bomb children.

What are you supposed to do, when what is happening can't be, and the old rules no longer apply? I remember this feeling when my mother was in the last stages of Alzheimer's, when my brothers and I needed so much more information to go on than we had—explanations, plans, a tour guide, and hope that it really wasn't going to be that bad. But then it
was
that bad, and then some, and all we could do was talk, and stick together. We managed
to laugh at ourselves and at her, and at the utter hopelessness of it all, and we sought wise counsel—medical, financial, spiritual. I prayed for her to die in her sleep, I prayed that I'd never have to take the cat out of her arms and put her in a home. A nurse summoned from the Alzheimer's Association entered into the mess with us. We said, “We don't know what we're doing. We don't know if we should put her in a home, and if so, when. We don't know what's true anymore.” The nurse asked gently, “How
could
you know?”

That one sentence, more than any other, saw me through, every step of the way. We kept hobbling forward, able to do only the next right thing. I remembered a decal I had once seen, of a gorilla, with the caption: “The law of the American jungle: Remain calm, share your bananas.” That's what we did—tried to make one another laugh and stay calm, and shared our bananas. And when the time came to know what to do, we did. I took the cat out of my mother's arms; we put her in a home. It was a nightmare. It killed something in us, yet we came through.

A friend called today and said that since the war has begun, she finds herself inside a black hole half the time. “What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget
to the world's poor,” she said, “and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?” Good Lord: What can you say in the face of such innocence?

“You didn't stop taking those meds, did you?” I asked.

This made her laugh. “I just don't feel like I can get through the day. Even though I know I will.”

Like her, I am depressed and furious. I often feel like someone from the Book of Lamentations. The best thing I've heard lately is the Christian writer Barbara Johnson's saying that we're Easter people, living in a Good Friday world.

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates.
Now
you're talking.

In Jesus' real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don't have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus', and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves—poof! Like someone
opening an umbrella. It's often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives.

What is there to do in such difficult, violent times? I try to follow my own advice to take short assignments, and do shitty first drafts of my work, and most of all, to take things day by day. Today I am going to pray that our soldiers come home soon. I am going to pray for the children of American and Iraqi soldiers, for the innocent Iraqi people, for the POWs, for humanitarian aid, and for our leaders. I am going to pray for the children and youth in Oakland and East Palo Alto and Palestine and Israel. I am going to pray to forgive one person today—to give up a soupçon of hostility. Or maybe for the willingness to really forgive someone today—Bush, for instance, who got us into this mess—even though I do not expect it to go well. Forgiveness is not my strong suit.

You can always begin by lighting a candle. Since the United States went to war in Iraq, I've been thinking about A. J. Muste, who during the Vietnam War stood in front of the White House night after night with a candle. One rainy night, a reporter asked him, “Mr. Muste, do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?”

“Oh,” Muste replied, “I don't do it to change the country, I do it so the country won't change me.”

I am going to send checks to people and organizations I trust, including Oakland's progressive representative Barbara Lee, who speaks for me. I will ask her to send the check on to someone who is nurturing children in the inner city, because this nation's black and Hispanic kids will be the hardest hit by wartime deficit spending. I am going to buy myself a pair of beautiful socks, and my son some new felt-tip pens.

I am going to walk to the library, because my church is too far away to go to on foot. And it's so beautiful out. The hills of my town are lush and green and dotted with wildflowers. The poppies have bloomed, and as summer approaches, five o'clock is no longer the end of the world. I am going to check out a collection of
Goon Show
scripts, and a volume of Mary Oliver poems. Libraries make me think kindly of my mother. I am not sure if this will lead me directly to the soupçon of forgiveness, but you never know. You take the action, and the insight follows. It was my mother who taught me how to wander through the racks of the Belvedere–Tiburon library, and wander through a book, letting it take me where it would. She and my father took me to the library every week when I was
little. One of her best friends was the librarian. They both taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you're shortchanging yourself. They read to live, the way they also went to the beach, or ate delicious food. Reading was like breathing fresh ocean air, or eating tomatoes from old man Grbac's garden. My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you can find small miracles and truth, and you might find something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed, in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space. So this afternoon, I'll walk to the library.

I am going to pray for our president to believe that all people deserve to be fed, and to try to make that a reality. Bush believes in serving the poor, but only when they are the “deserving” poor. What on earth does that mean? If I were more spiritually evolved, I would mail him a friendly card, because if you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them.
I know that Bush is family, and that I am supposed to love him, but I hate this—he is a dangerous member of the family, like a Klansman, or Osama bin Laden. Maybe I can't exactly forgive him right now, in the sense of canceling my resentment and judgment. But maybe I can simply acknowledge what is true, spiritually—that he gets to come to the table and eat, too; that I would not let him starve. In heaven, I may have to sit next to him, and in heaven, I know, I will love him. On earth, however, when I consider that he is my brother, and I am to love him, I'm reminded of the old Woody Allen line that someday the lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb is not going to get any sleep. So I will pray to stop hating him, and that he will not kill so many people, today.

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring, and look up at the hectic trees. Amid the smashing and crashing and terrible silences, the trees are in blossom, and it's soft and warm and bright. I am going to close my eyes and listen. During the children's sermon last Sunday, the pastor asked the kids to close their eyes for a moment—to give themselves a time-out—and then asked them what they had heard. They heard birds, and radios, dogs barking, cars, and one boy said, “I hear the water at the edge
of things.” I am going to listen for the water at the edge of things today.

I keep remembering the inhabitants of those islands in the South Pacific where the United States air force set up a base of operations during World War II. The islanders loved the air force's presence, all that loud, blinding illumination from above, a path of klieg lights descending on their land. They believed it was divine, because there was no other way to understand all that energy, and after the air force left, they created a fake runway with candles and torches and pyres, and awaited its return. I am going to pray for the opposite of loud crashing lights, however. I am going to notice the lights of the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars, the lights of our candles as we march, the lights with which spring teases us, the light that is already present. If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever. And that, today, will be the benediction.