Prayers for Humanity

     One of the 75 repetitions of 75 things each that I did for my 75th year of life on this Earth, five years ago, was to write 75 prayers for humanity or the earth. (Item suggested by Mariposa Kerchival.) Last Thanksgiving I posted prayers for the earth. Today, in thankfulness for the many examples of beautiful, kind, life-responsible people in my life, I offer prayers for humanity.

    Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

May the children know laughter, love, song, and freedom from fear.

May all children know the joys of childhood.

May the balm of sleep and the calming touch of an adult ease the pains of childhood.

May the voice of reason and the aura of compassion prevail in all circumstances.

May women and men be treated with equal respect all over the world.

May communities thrive with compassion, respect, neighborliness, and conviviality.

May those with illness find relief from pain.

May we learn to tune our hearts to the aches of others.

May music resound everywhere in the world, always.

May the cities flourish with art, music, and the good works of the poets.

May we learn to trust again.

Memorial Services

    I am saddened by the recent death of a friend.

He looks stern, but behind in that closed mouth his glorious humor peeks out.   

We hardly ever saw each other and communicated seldom, but he was always dear in my heart. He lived on the other side of the continent, so I'm not sure I would have gone to his memorial service, but I know I would have wanted to so I could hear the stories people told of him and to know, in this way, more about him.

    It didn't matter. He didn't want a memorial service.

    This is something I don't understand. My late husband also didn't want a memorial service. My anger at these deaths can be displaced onto the dying person himself: how dare you tell us we can't come together to mourn, laugh, and feel a common love through our relationship with you? How dare you deprive us of ways we would like to mourn, remember, and celebrate? What difference does it make to you? The memorial service is not for you. It's for us.

    I knew my husband for only six years. Our years of exploring each other's pasts and personalities were cut short, so I was looking forward to a memorial service, where his family would talk about what Mike was like when he was a child, as his children were growing up, as a brother, uncle, father, employer. I was cheated of that greater depth because there was no memorial service, not because Mike had requested there be none (he had agreed to it by the time he died) but because COVID prevented that kind of gathering. My mourning felt incomplete, ragged, solitary.

From the last hike Mike and I made together.

   A memorial service elicits closure and completion. It is a communal gathering, fellowship displacing the individual mourning in each heart. Rituals at memorial services can be rich experiences—singing songs, releasing (eco-friendly) balloons, planting flowers, eating together. A sudden and tragic death—a young person's suicide—becomes easier to bear when many mourn together.

    Years ago, driving to the memorial service for a friend I didn't know well, I wondered why I was going, but at the service the stories from her sister and brother broadened the incomplete picture I had of this person. I was glad I had made the effort to be there. 

    At the reception after the service for my friend Maren, I was suddenly surrounded by five or six of Maren's students whom I had also taught at the University of Gothenburg.  They were there through their love for Maren; now that love surrounded me as well. 

    At the reception after my sister's service, person after person came up to me to thank me for the help Linda, an occupational therapist, had given their children. Through the memorial service and following reception, I learned more about Linda's life that made me respect and admire her even more.

    At my father's memorial service friends and family laughed and told stories and radiated such love I have felt its warmth in my heart all these years. 

    So, listen, this is what I want to say. Go to the memorial services. Take advantage of this one last chance to know, in many dimensions, this person you loved. 

    And by all means, when you are dying, don't say you don't want a memorial service. This is for us, not for you. 

Pipe Fork Not Saved (Not Yet)

     A few days ago I listened in disbelief as the chair of the meeting of the Josephine County Commissioners told us that the board would not accept the Williams Community Forest Project's offer of over two million dollars to buy the forests of Pipe Fork. 

    "I know you have worked hard to raise this money," he said, apologetically, "and I know the strong feelings you have about Pipe Fork. But you are more than $750,000 short of what we want for the land."

    Let's see. They originally said if we came up with $1.6 million, we could have the land. We looked and looked for an environmental philanthropic organization that would buy the land and turn it over to the Bureau of Land Management to add to the Resource Natural Area the BLM established on Pipe Fork decades ago. We found that buyer. We had an assessment made and came up with $2 million to meet the assessment price—more, as you see, than we were originally told we needed. Now the commissioners had raised the price. They would keep the land and sell the timber.

Imagine this scene, clearcut                         Photo by Kevin Peer

    "There are other people in the county who need what this money could bring," the commissioner said. "We will go ahead with our plans to clearcut Pipe Fork."

    It is to my credit that I didn't spit in his face as I left the building. 

    We are just a little local organization passionately attached to our local stream, Pipe Fork, for its beauty, the importance of it as a water source for the community, and its ecological importance. We are just a handful of people, yet we raised more than two million dollars.

    Those three years of work—and anxiety—came to a close at the commissioners' meeting on Tuesday, yet I cannot accept that reality. I cannot envision a clearcut Pipe Fork. It just should never happen. It just simply cannot happen.

    This environment depends on a forest canopy.        Photo by Kevin Peer

    If the commissioners are thinking, "Well, thank goodness that's over. Now we can get on with cutting the timber"—if they think we're going to have a little grieving ceremony for the trees and accept their fate—they're wrong. Cheryl Bruner, head of WCFP, said, "It's not over, and we will continue to fight." 

    Saying that there were places in the county where the money was needed strikes me as a myopia we can no longer indulge in. When will we begin to understand that saving any portion of the environment, this small area of Pipe Fork, for instance, is in the interest of us all? When will we start seeing that destroying our forests for a handful of bills now means devastation for everyone later? Pipe Fork is important for the groundwater of Williams, where all residences depend on wells. If our wells run dry, will the county supply our water? Isn't everyone better off if we can continue to irrigate our fields (important agricultural income for many Josephine County residents) and supply our domestic water from our watershed? The Conservation Fund was willing to pay more than $2 million dollars for Pipe Fork, not to appease a small group of passionate citizens but because, in the bigger picture, the land is more valuable intact than the timber is worth, cut.

    But the commissioners said no. 

    We all live on this planet. Every ecological destruction affects us all. Yes, we who live in Williams are most acutely affected by a potential, unimaginable clearcut on Pipe Fork, but, in the long haul, it should be unimaginable for everyone in the county. 

                                                                                        Photo by Kevin Peer

Go to williamscommunityforestproject.org/save-pipe-fork to see a video of Pipe Fork by renowned videographer Kevin Peer.

    For years a bone spur in my left foot would sometimes be so painful I would have to stop wherever I was and take off my shoe. It was a pain like a knife. It didn't last long, but it was bad when it hit.

    I also have hallux rigidus in the left foot, the arthritic condition I had surgery to correct in my right foot last year. (See posts on December 9 and 23, 2022.) Recovery from that surgery was three fairly difficult months—non-weight-bearing, no walking, no driving.  

    So this time, when the doctor suggested an easier surgery, just to get rid of the bone spur—one-month recovery, walk (in a boot), and drive—I said yes, yes, yes. I would put up with continued pain from hallux rigidus in exchange for a shorter, easier surgery and no bone spur.

    Surgery was last Wednesday at the Grants Pass Surgical Center. Everyone is so nice there they make the whole experience not exactly fun but certainly pleasant. The woman at the entrance desk greets patients with a broad smile and says, "Thank you; I appreciate that" every time you answer a question. The prep nurse chatted pleasantly and asked if I wanted something from Netflix on the TV screen, and when I said I didn't want to start a movie I couldn't finish, she found a wonderful video about mating dances among tropical birds that kept me entertained and my mind off what was going to be happening very shortly.

    The anesthesiologist remembered me from last year. He and the nurses joked about my age as they wheeled me into the operating room. "The form says she is 79, but I think there was a mistake," he said. "She can't be almost 80." The operating room nurse asked me what I was going to do for my 80th birthday. I remember saying I would be hiking 800 miles on 80 different trails. That was the last thing I remember.

    My friend who had taken me to the surgical center took me home again. Another friend came up to visit shortly after I got home and brought home-made tomato soup and pumpkin pie for my dinner. This weekend, my friend Bryan, who is an excellent cook, is bringing me dinner. Ibuprofen and Tylenol are keeping the pain under control. I'm doing fine.

    Just one month. Then no more bone spur pain. I can't wait for my next hike.

Autumn, 2023

     It's actually not a very spectacular autumn this year.  The trees seem confused. Some are still vigorously green with only one branch trying on yellow. Many turned brown in a dried-up fashion before they started turning yellow or red, so now they look half-dead and half-autumnal. Still, in the high country, the colors are better. Here is a picture from a hike on the beautiful Cook and Green trail last week.

                                    photo by Margaret della Santina

    Southern Oregon's autumns can be absolutely stunning. Here is what I wrote in 2013 to accompany Barbara Kostal's painting, "Autumn: Equinox," in our book, Wisdom of the Heart. 

    

    This autumn, on a sun-warm day in the woods, my heart is yellow—not a sickly pale jaundice, but a hearty, bright upspringing of rich, aqueous yellow; not a cowardly jealousy but a bold, brilliant glory of cadmium-rich yellow given it by maples, oaks, alders, and hazelnut trees flaming with the lustrous colors of canaries, goldenrods, and honey. Like a match, the sun ignites a maple in a dark hillside of evergreens with yellow fire. Gathering this fire in the palms of their hands, the broadleaf maples fling it into the air. Circles of yellow spiral from the trees like whirling embers, flowing through the leaves like warm air in a house, falling from the saturated yellow of broadleaf maples and the softer lemon of alders and the fulvous amalgamation of colors in the starry-tipped leaves of viney maples.

    I cannot drink it in enough, this aureateness, the gildedness of trees in autumn. 

    If the autumn of 2023 isn't as brilliant as that one, it also isn't as drab at the autumn of 2011, about which I wrote, "What happened to the autumn color? Where are the golden yellows and the flaming oranges, the scarlets and the vermilions? Who dulled the brilliance? Who rubbed the blush from the complexions of the trees? Who sucked the energy away? Who gave us acrhomatism, pallor, wanness in our autumn this year? Brown, brown, brown—everywhere it's brown."

      Well, every year is different. Even in its diminished brilliance, autumn is a beautiful time of year, and I am loving my hikes in the mountains this fall.

An Unsettling End to an Afternoon Hike

     We had beautiful weather on Tuesday, so when I finished my work by noon, I decided to take an afternoon's ramble up Bolt Mountain, in Fish Hatchery Park, just outside of Grants Pass. 

    The trail is a good, brisk six-and-a-half-mile hike up Bold Mountain and down. It's a great spring wildflower hike. Not so good for autumn color, but I enjoyed being in the woods, seeing the views, and taking strenuous exercise.

    Just as I was coming to the top of the mountain, I passed a man with a dog coming down. On the way down I passed another man with a dog, a single man, three or four single women, each with a dog, and a group of three hikers together. I was surprised at how late people were starting up the mountain.

    As I approached the parking lot at the end of my hike, a park ranger in a pick-up was just pulling up. "Checking on parking passes," I thought smugly, mine all in order, but that's not what she was interested in. She asked if I had met a tall man in a red shirt, without a dog.

    No, I didn't think so, I said. The only man without a dog I had met was in a black jacket ("Could it have been covering a red shirt?" she asked), and I didn't think he was especially tall. "But," I added, laughing, "almost everyone looks tall to me."

    She continued looking grim. This man, she said, had become so irritated with a woman whose dog was off leash that he had threatened her with a knife. 

    I hike alone in these hills all the time. I carry a personal locator beacon (a PLB) in case of emergency, which I have always thought of in terms of injury—breaking an ankle on slippery rocks, for instance, or some other fall. I have not been concerned about violence on the trail. 

    Until now. 

    Maybe I could think that that danger would only be on trails close to town except for remembering that the first year I lived here a family went missing on the Cook and Green trail, in the Red Buttes Wilderness. Rumors of UFOs flew around, but the perpetrator—the murderer—was caught a few years later. 

    I often hike with friends, but I also enjoy hiking alone. I like the solitude, the communion with the trees and flowers, with the earth and sky and the mountain itself, in a way that doesn't happen when I'm with other people. I like conversation, but I also like the way my own thoughts wander and, especially, the way I enter a meditative, empty-minded, in-the-moment state. I like the spontaneity of taking off for a hike at the spur of the moment, when the moment is right, not having to make plans.

    I don't want unreasonable fear to rule my life. But I don't want to be naive, either. Can I keep pursuing my favorite solo activity? Or should I be grateful for safety up to now and not push my luck? 

    I don't know. I just don't know.

    

    

A Getaway into the Red Buttes Wilderness

     I am pleased to say that it has been raining for days. I like to think the winter rains have started and that it will be wet and gray for months to come. Should we be so lucky.

    However, I am just as pleased to say that there was no rain Wednesday through Saturday last week because I was on a backpacking trip in the Red Buttes Wilderness Area, my back yard, with my friends Cheryl, Janet, and Sandy.

L-R: Janet, Sandy, me, Cheryl                             (selfie by Janet)

          The weather was glorious, as was the landscape. Mostly, we were hiking through old-growth forests, past true-giant cedars and pines. We laid hands on the big, shaggy-barked trunks, in veneration and gratitude. How we need these magnificent forests!

Me with a ponderosa pine.         photo by Cheryl

After a seven-and-a-half gradual climb up the Butte Fork trail, we made camp at Cedar Basin.

                                                                                                    photo by Janet

    Then we made a late afternoon hike up to Lonesome Lake, where I had my best swim of the trip, under the headwall, where the water was deepest, even though that part of the lake was in shadow by that time.

Me, preparing for a swim in Lonesome Lake    photo by Janet

                                                                                                        photo by Cheryl
Coming into sunshine after swimming under the headwall.

Azalea Lake is large but probably not even six feet deep and the pond at Sucker Gap is even more shallow and dotted with lily pads, but because we camped at both places, I could indulge in one of my favorite things to do: step out of my tent into a lake first thing in the morning.

    In some places, low-growing bushes gleamed umber, copper, burnt sienna, fire-engine red.

                                                                        photo by Janet

They were especially striking where they lined Azalea Lake, with the ghostly trunks of the burned forest behind them and their reflection doubling the color in the lake in front of them.

    What else? Well, the company. What great backpacking partners they were! Besides the talks and the stepping in to help when needed, all three had brought chocolate to share. And at our first lunch stop, Cheryl astonished me by handing 'round large pieces of spanakopita and baklava she had made the night before. Imagine having carried all that weight! I had no qualms about helping lighten the weight of her pack by accepting the lunch she offered. 

    Janet and Sandy both joined me for swims in the lakes. Cheryl picked mushrooms we found on the trail. Janet religiously stuck to her commitment to meditate every day. 

Janet meditating at Azalea Lake     photo by Cheryl

    It's hunting season, so we used brightly colored pack covers to keep us from being mistaken for deer. We did meet two sets of two hunters, all in their camouflage. Afterward, Cheryl told us of the days of her past when she used to hunt.

                                                                                                        photo by Sandy

    We misjudged the mileage of the last day's hike, so we were two hours early for meeting the person coming to pick us up at the trailhead. Janet, Cheryl, and Sandy looked through the woods for morels. I read a novel on my Kindle. I recited a few poems, while Cheryl and Janet danced. The lovely long afternoon was waning when our driver arrived, and we returned to the valley for pizza and beer in the Applegate and a toast to a great four-day getaway with friends.