knowing without knowing

from smelling the snow (3)

Everything Howard Irwin said about the early May freeze reminded Mrs. Scattergood of her life.  If you’re working on improving the nature of your relationship to the world and the nature of your relationship to relationships you have to work on yourself. Something about this time of life and the arguments with yourself are good.  If you’re going to be in an argument, the one with yourself is the one to have. Yeats said it brings poetry. 

~

 “...lacking evolutionary experience to deal with the ups and downs of a New England spring...” Irwin wrote about native plants as opposed to exotics.  Was Mrs. Scattergood the exotic searching for and stretching towards the unfamiliar?  She stretched like a cat that reaches out comfortably with the full length of its body. She saw no reason to reach for anything.  She just wanted to feel the length of her own stretch. Yet this too could be an example of someone lacking evolutionary experience.  It was unusual for her not to satisfy her feelings with something immediate. The usual compensators in the past had been sex, food, smokes, talk, even exercise. It seemed as if it were sudden change for her, but just sitting with her feelings, not seeing any need to act on them was a good thing.  “Moreover, native plants, in general respond much more conservatively to spring warm-ups than exotics.” Could this information clarify something for her?  ‘Well, I’ve been here nearly long enough to count as native.’ However, she thought, by New England standards she was definitely an exotic.  Well, she was hardly that.  But she wondered if she was still classified as a gal or not.  Maybe a gallon considering the weight she accumulated in the last ten years.  Why wasn’t she feeling lusty anymore?  But she did think it clever that she was no longer captive by her hormones.

~

      So much lost on desire.  What can be saved by it?  Mrs. Scattergood wondered if she touched the wild in some other way.  At that time her libido was wilder than ever. The salmon were jumping and flipping orange to the sky gods. The frogs gurgling mud and river blood. The loons loony and jiving on insects and little fishies that know the temperature of the river is just right for swimming their little silver streaks in the sun.  The water washed silt onto the banks leaving crinolines of white foam in layers and layers that look post-coital and soft with new plant plugs. It was rich with movement, flashes of silver and color, broken rainbows and bubbles.  No participle, no fragmented, segmented aspect of her being was untouched by these feelings; this suave, soothing and smoothing, dipping and dripping life, mishpucha, life.   And that is a good thing.   Not separate from her but a part of it all. Knowing without knowing.  Like having the scent of snow coming.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

Nothing happens without a fight. Nothing continues without a truce

from smelling the snow (3)

It was a huge expansion in her being to understand that everything was connected. Enormous. But then, the never ending interconnectedness, the troubles of it all, the thin and fragile delicacies that bridged each eco-system created a sense of concern within her that was difficult to bear.  The real world, pushed back into the subliminal mindset holds all of life.  You do not turn your back on that but that is the thing you cannot gaze at directly.

~

     She settled with ‘enough for now’.  Enough to know that everything is connected.  Everything had to be lived with as if each part were essential. The birds, the animals, the land, the water.  Landscapes come naturally with complex relationships.  Like everyone else around her, she didn’t see it that way for a long time. She hoped that the places she had dreamed of traveling to were still intact, though she feared they were terribly diminished in size and capacity. She recognized vulnerabilities as everyone did who understood what ecology really meant. It meant we weren’t living on top of the world but in it.  We weren’t on a carpet; we were on a planet.  The nets, neural and interconnecting life nets were holding us in place and it was place that mattered. Place was the nexus. We were a part of that but we didn’t understand true community or incorporate the nature we were a part of it into our idea of neighborhoods.

~

     Here’s how you know we didn’t include nature in our world. We have no language for it.  Nature or the natural world is outside of us.  Ecology was a study of eco-systems. But our lives and livelihood were on top of those things, like a cup on a coaster.

~

     Mrs. Scattergood wanted her dream locations safe and rivers running free even though she wasn’t sure if she’d really know what that meant. She even saw places in her imagination unpeopled.  There are enough people, she thought, in her life and memory, she could leave some out of this fantasy.  She loved the wild but her understanding of it wasn’t any more successful at incorporating the world of people with the world of the nature.

~

     Fantasy was her only contact with the wild. “When it disappears, I will also.”  But she couldn’t explain that. What did Lady Day sing, “Don’t explain.”  You really can’t explain everything.  Can’t explain lapses in judgement.  Times you remember that make you cringe now. Times you leaned too heavy on a friend and forgot to share the good stuff too.  You can’t explain how helpless you feel in the presence of the past.  ‘But you know’, she argued with herself, ‘nothing happens without a fight.’ Nothing continues without a truce. 

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf

smelling the coming snow

from smelling the snow (3)

Ignoring the spring day and paying attention to the cold, she knew one thing for sure as she headed home, it was a good day for soup. This was the blessing winter brought. She could go out to the porch nights after he died and find comfort there.  The cold was a cushion.  It had become a comfort ever since her mother died in the stinking heat of Florida.  She’d sometimes acknowledge the burden of death and stink she’d put on Florida for the sake of original Floridians.  But it felt right to say the ‘stinking heat of Florida.’

~

     Cold just seemed a natural solace after her mother died.  Movies with snow in them the best kind of entertainment.  People complaining about the cold, suspicious. It wasn’t anything special to feel the snow coming the way she could.  A lot of people could feel that. There are telltale signs. The brain gets a signal and a feeling settles someplace in your body, holding out for the satisfaction the first sight of the snowfall brings.

     One particular night there was the telltale quiet before the snow.  Mrs. Scattergood went out to be at one with the cold and think about Barry.  She began to have a very odd feeling as if something was trying to peek through her consciousness. Then she realized what was going on.  She could smell the snow coming. Was this her animal self? It took her whole long life to know she had this ability. But then, she thought, everything takes your whole long life to know.  Damn the chronology of things.  So she stood there waiting for it, knowing it was a certainty and wondering what other senses she’d had but didn’t know she did.  Could she reach across the country to the wilderness? She wanted to go to the borders of those areas of the country she only saw in places like the Sierra Club magazine. She didn’t want to step into them. It is enough to read about those places, she thought.  Eco-tourism.  Another way to lose the land to people.  Maybe it is enough to smell the snow.  In time, she joked to herself, she will be able to smell the bird sanctuaries, the cathedral cliffs, the long stretches of red rock, mile long shadows swollen with the evening coming on. She could create a whole new field of nature writing, olfactory geography, and put an end to her envy of every nature writer she ever read.

~

     When she was younger she wanted to save the oceans. Her mother’s friend called Jacque Cousteau her friend because she had talked about him so much before his television special The Silent World of Jacque Cousteau aired. That’s when everyone knew who he was. Before that, he was her invisible friend.

~

     She knew about pollution when the word had meaning.  It’s so common now that we don’t feel its sting.  She loved the ocean. Saving it seemed like something she could help to do. As if you could reach in and pull out the muck.  Once she realized that every life was connected, every system and every stream, she also realized that she didn’t know how to clean the oceans, she didn’t know how to reach in either. Not yet.  She would find her ways.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf