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The Fortunate Fall: change the future in a blink
Aunt Mae could see the future. It wasn’t a big deal to her. She didn’t tell most people. Only a few family members like my sister and I knew. Some outsiders knew and she got letters with strange postmarks and stamps in her mailbox that sat beside the main road 2 miles from where her tiny home sat under the mountain. Once in a while a big expensive black car swayed and bumped up the narrow dirt track and neighbours wondered why. Chances are it was a politician, a leader in government, a big business man maybe. She had those contacts, but she never took money. She did take a bottle of brandy, just as a house gift and purely medicinal, of course. She told us, Georgia and me, that if we had the gift, we must never sell it.
Anyway, it- fortune telling- wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Sure she saw the mushroom cloud 2 years early and knew that nothing was going to stop that horror. She could live with it because she also lived with her Lord and her best buddy Jesus. When it came to individual fate, however, it was changeable. Sometimes she told what she saw in order to prevent it. Telling might galvanize the person into changing and changing it in the process.
So, yes, the future is changeable because human beings are. But sometimes change doesn’t happen until circumstances force it.
So she had seen this particular family crisis coming and cackled with glee. “It ain’t much.” But a woman of her faith could say that about the deluge, probably about the apocalypse, so I didn’t trust her. “You got to let your chicks out from under your wing. Let them out into the barnyard. They got to deal with that old fox theirselves.” And then I forgot. I put this “dire” warning out of my mind. Wouldn’t you? Besides she was very possibly just a batty backwoods hillbilly who’d made one too many trip to the brandy bottle and was stoned on Jesus.
Then last Thursday the event began to unfold. I booked passage. All our crises are transcontinental. Yes, there were enough airmiles. Yes, there was a direct flight. Yes, I could do 3 days planning and packing in an afternoon and leave in the early morning.
Of course I couldn’t sleep even after word came back that there was breath and life and a reasonable hope of complete recovery.
Sitting in a hospital room on the west coast, reading out loud to the patient from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, I remembered something else Mae had said. “You can change your future in the blink of an eye.” She meant one moment’s inattention, one sudden impulsive decision. She warned Georgia and me about that. That’s how people drive in front of buses. Reason, logic, all our careful rules and practices can fall away and we act suddenly and dangerously.
Now here’s the miracle. There is a whole support system that can catch us in our fall. And it always works even though in the process we leave the physical plane. We felt this last year when a family member passed away, long before her time, and seemed to open a door into a great love when she went.
Neither Georgia nor I were able to sustain faith in Mae’s God so we pretty much knock about without that security and yet more times than we can count, we have felt that unfailing support as we do now.
There was no logical reason why things should have turned out so well. Coincidences maybe. Lucky breaks perhaps.
It has turned out to be a fortunate fall.
We are a little dizzy
Spider Rock, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, USA / photograph & text by Rich Greene
Here is a post from an Irish farmer.
What is a Wound?
Reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s “There is a crack in everything. That’s where the light comes in.”
Skyfall: M and Ulysses part 2
My post Skyfall: M and “Ulysses” got me thinking about what I know by heart. Long ago some English teacher or other required me to commit the whole of that long dramatic monologue, “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the 19th century poet, to memory. It is 70 lines long and free verse and that much more difficult because there are no rhyming clues.
It begins “It little profits that an idle king/By this still hearth, among these barren crags/ Match’d with an aged wife/ Should mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race.” Ulysses is standing in the port of his island kingdom, Ithaca, beside his ship or even on its prow, and addressing his crew and his subjects. Presumably his “aged” wife is there, Penelope, who faithfully waited for him all those years while he was fighting in Troy and taking his own sweet time getting home. Thinking he had perished, suitors beset her in order to gain her kingdom. She devised a scheme to put them off, saying she would choose just as soon as she finished weaving her tapestry: every night, she tore out what she had woven that day. Now Ulysses regards her merely as an aged wife.
Presumably his son, Telemachus is also there. Ulysses says of him “most blameless is he”, suited to the task of mete-ing and dole-ing apparently and subduing the savage race “thro soft decrees”. Ulysses does concede that Telemachus is “well-loved of me”. Maybe, but not all that well respected. Still “He works his work, I mine.” but make no mistake, only one is glorious.
Mainly, however, Ulysses is talking to his mariners, those poor sods who are going to row him, assisted now and then, by fortunate winds and scant sails. “Push off, and sitting well in order smite/ The sounding furrows”, Ulysses cries. “For my purpose holds/ To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths/ Of all the western stars until I die.” “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,” he suggests, for he is going to take them out past what we call Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean, terra incognita so far as the ancient Greeks were concerned. I am ill-equipped, probably, being an aged woman, to understand how his charisma made his men eager to follow him still.
Nevertheless, I can well understand the lines with which he closes. I took them to my heart as a teenager, but they are even more significant now that I can empathize with the ageing hero:
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.
But can you see where you are?
Christmas Cactus
One of my treasured memories is of my mother, just before Christmas, coming downstairs with cries of joy. She was carrying a huge Christmas cactus that had been languishing unattended in a closed room. It was completely covered with riotous fuchsia flowers.
My grandmother had a knack for getting these to bloom all year around. Mine blooms once a year, but it always reminds me of her.
A Moment of Grace in the Farmyard
Epilogue to my memoir Never Tell: recovered memories of a daughter of the Knights Templar
I am talking to the hens in bright sunshine in the barnyard, barely taller than they are in my three year old body. They are big and white and full of chatter as they step around me, sometimes raising their voices as if they were asking me a question. I call them by the names I have given them, inquiring about their health and whether they have laid an egg today and they answer me when I speak to them. The little brown banty hens are too busy hunting for corn I have scattered to speak. The rooster is otherwise occupied up on the roof of the henhouse. Then I hear my name and looking up, I see my daddy at the barn door, beckoning me. “He’s here, Joy. He’s here. Come quick.” I drop the corn and rush to the barn. My father takes my hand and leans down to whisper, “Be very quiet and move slowly.” He walks with me slowly and softly down the aisle behind the empty cow stalls. I crane my neck to see. We stop when we can see the dish on the floor beside the cow door. It is put there, filled fresh after every milking, for the cats. There darting its long tongue into the milk is a little green garter snake.
Jack and Charlie: a study in compassion
Jack and Charlie lived at Wild Heart Ranch in Oklahoma in the care of Annette Tucker who has fostered 16,000 animals since she got her permit. Jack was a 16 year-old goat when the story began and Charlie, a horse blind in one eye.
I learned their story on an episode of the program Nature on PBS featuring unusual relationships between animals. I don’t usually watch Nature because, although I can watch any amount of mayhem involving people, I can’t stand watching animals suffer. But this one was full of good news. A retriever and a cheetah raced each other and had play fights, having been paired as puppy and cub, as did a lion and coyote. A gorilla hugged its dog friend. An owl and a pussycat played games. A female deer adopted a blind dog and groomed his hair into spikes every morning. But it was Jack and Charlie that blew me away.
At first, Jack walked on the side of Charlie’s good eye when he guided him to a favourite patch of grass in the woods. Then when Charlie lost his sight in the remaining eye, Jack walked ahead of him and, according to Annette Tucker, Charlie followed the sound of Jack’s footsteps, which he could distinguish from other horses’ or people’s.
Once in tornado weather, Jack came running home screaming. As soon as he got a response, he set off running back into the woods where Annette found Charlie trapped in a circle of downed trees, a real Lassie moment -“Timmy’s in the well. Timmy’s in the well.”
To see Jack plodding along, as he did for 16 years, you cannot explain this dedication. Jack doesn’t seem to get any reward for his efforts nor does he seem especially happy to be doing it. He just goes on doing what needs to be done year after year. He never dawdles along the path, snacking now and again, as he did before Charlie went blind. He walks slowly and steadily about 10 or 15 feet ahead, waiting when Charlie gets confused.
When Charlie dies in his favourite pasture, Jack rests his head on the fallen horse briefly. Then he gets up, walks the path alone and lies down in his usual spot to sleep, apparently unmoved. Does he understand his friend is dead? Evidently, for from that point on, Jack declines. We see a much weaker animal making his way to the woods to graze. In the end, he is buried there beside his friend.
Remarkably, two members of my family, who never watch Nature either, saw the same episode and so I had a little discussion forum. One of them hypothesized that these were highly evolved souls. The other said it was just a case of companionship and that was Jack’s reward.
Scientific studies have found that people who help others are healthier and live longer. It kept Jack going for a great number of goat-years. Giving others what they need can be a satisfying experience. We feel connected when we do and this good feeling translates into well-being.
Jack gave me insight into the nature of compassion. It isn’t a sentiment or even an emotion; it is an action. Jack registered a need and responded to it. He provided a model for me.
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