Taking Care of the Spiritual Self

            I've been having kind of a rough time lately – dealing with my sister's death, then immediately afterwards completely blowing my chances to get a job I wanted by doing badly at the interview, then spinning into despondency for having done that. On top of that, it's fall term, and I'm not teaching.

            Last weekend I hiked into the Red Buttes Wilderness Area on the Frog Pond-Cameron Meadows loop trail partly to see if I could still do a difficult hike after a summer of inactivity (knee injury, excessive heat, wildfire smoke) and partly, of course, to see what the trail would offer.

            Had I forgotten that every hike offers wonders? Had I forgotten that the mountains are a sure antidote for what ails me?

            After the first steep mile, my hiking partner and I entered an enchanted forest, where a thin white line of snow turned everything it touched into lace –­ every needle of every pine tree, every stone, root, or limb, every branch of every bush, every scabrous edge of bark. 

Gradually the snow deepened until we were kicking through a half inch or more. Where the sun had visited, briefly, before it tucked behind the mountain again, winter-brown stalks rose from wet earth. We walked from snow-sprinkled woods to sun-melted patches of browns to shaded open spaces where bushes, earth, rocks, and sticks were painted white.

           Flourishes of ice decorated the edges of Frog Pond. At Cameron Meadow, just under the Mt. Emily ridge, ice had spell-bound the pool into silent immobility.

            Occasionally we could see views of the aftermath of the Seattle fire, where it had spilled over the ridge onto the Middle Fork, burning in scallops down the mountain: a beige-brown scoop of burned trees here, a clump of black evergreens there. Green forest still dominated the mountain. This had not been the kind of fire that swept so fast over the Columbia Gorge or through Napa Valley. This was a friendly fire, the kind to be grateful for.

            At one turn in the trail, we saw, through the trees, a green mountainside polka-dotted with the pointed white cones of snow-burdened evergreens. On the Cameron Meadows trail autumn leaves covered the ground like a fabric of yellow and brown hues: tawny, flaxen, buff, terra cotta, tortoiseshell. A cluster of mushrooms complemented the colors.

            Once, when I stopped walking to take in the beauty of the forest – that carpet of yellow, the early afternoon dusk, the stark linearity of a clump of tall, white-skinned madrone trunks – I saw a bear clambering down one of those long slim madrones after a meal of berries at its top, descending hind end first, looking now over the right shoulder, now over the left, scooting as fast as a fireman down a pole, a rolling black ball on a white trunk.

            Even the hour's walk at the end of the hike, from our exit at the Cameron Meadows trailhead to the car at the Frog Pond trailhead, usually boring and tedious, was enhanced that day by autumn trees and winter air.

            The next day I had a conversation with a friend about what we mean when we talk about the spiritual self (religion aside). I'm not sure I know. I long ago gave up the struggle about whether I am developing my spiritual self. It doesn't seem to matter. What does matter, and is probably relevant to that spiritual self I claim not to understand or to nourish, is that being on the mountain trail with its white beauty, its fallen leaves, and its galloping bear has left me a better person today than I was before.

A Story from My Past Unfortunately Still Relevant Today

            The brave women who have spoken publicly about the sexual misconduct of people like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes, and Bill Cosby are helping bring those men to accountability for their actions. Their stories have also opened a path for women to tell about similar misconduct from lesser known men, stories that indicate that a certain permissibility of treatment towards women I had hoped was a part of the past apparently is not. To recognize its existence is the first step towards eradicating it. For that reason, I offer my own story, which takes place at Cambridge University in the late sixties.

            Because students at Cambridge take only one set of exams, at the end of their years at university, the weeks before exams are full of tension and anxiety. After exams, release explodes in the May balls, exotic all-night affairs at each of the colleges, accompanied by a week of other social gatherings, such as the sherry party I attended in the beautiful gardens of Queens College. Flattered to have been invited, I was dressed to English-society perfection. The gardens were beautiful, the grass thick and perfectly cut, as always at Cambridge, and the flowers in full bloom. Butlers passed glasses of sherry on trays through the crowd.

            At some point during the party a dashing young man brought me a glass of sherry and introduced himself as Ian somebody, a student at Trinity College. He was handsome and smart and debonair. He flattered me by his attentions, and he saw to it that my sherry glass was kept full. My head was spinning, but I was so inflamed by the occasion and by Ian's attentions that I didn't realize how drunk I was. Because in 1967 no one ever talked about the dangerous connection between sex and alcohol, I didn't know to be cautious. When Ian suggested I follow him to his digs at Trinity College, I had no objection.

            Nor did I object when he took me to bed. I was not fully aware of what I was doing, though Ian was. He never hesitated. My virginity was no deterrent. "Isn't it beautiful?" he kept saying, and I kept thinking, "No. It hurts. It hurts."

            When I woke up the next morning and saw the blood on the sheets and realized what I had done – what I had allowed to be done to me – I was horrified and in shock. My impulse was to run away. I had to go home. "You should wait until people are coming in and out of the gate," Ian said, reasonably. "Then you can leave without being noticed."

            But I was terrified. I had to go home. I had to flee, to get away from this man. I walked through the gates of Trinity College in the early hours of the morning, having obviously spent the night in a man's room, but the porter, who must have seen me, didn't say a word. (This was part of the culture of the day that allowed a Cambridge University student of good breeding and in good standing to rape a woman without repercussion.) I don't think I was stumbling, but I felt all tight within myself, my vision no bigger than one step in front of me. I made my way home and went straight to my room, where I stayed for days. I didn't speak to anyone and hardly emerged to get food from the kitchen. I lost myself in fantasies that Ian was in love with me and was going to marry me. I was not applying myself to my studies. I was isolated and in shock.

            Classic rape victim symptoms.

            My housemates were worried. Polly, another American student, came into my room to visit with me. Talking about the sherry party or Ian, whom she had seen at the party, or anything she thought might get me to talk about what had happened, she said, in the vernacular of the day, "I'm glad you didn't let him go all the way with you."

            I crumpled. Tears that had been shored up ever since that night poured out. I confessed what had happened. I cried at last, but I was still numb and depressed.

            One day, when the doorbell rang, someone called up the stairs, "Diana. There's someone here to see you."

            I went to the door. Ian was on the doorstep with two of his buddies. My housemates crowded behind me, watching protectively. Ian chatted with me for a few minutes, debonair and impersonal. He didn't come in, and he didn't say anything in particular. He left with an airy wave of the hand, turning to the street, followed by his cronies, who hadn't said a word.

            I have always thought that my housemates had called Ian and told him he needed to see me. And they were right. That's exactly what I needed to bring me out of my numbness. It didn't take me long after that to resume my studies and return to myself.

            No one called it rape. There were no counselors to go to with my story. There were no repercussions on Ian, who, as far as I know, might have deflowered a dozen more young women by deliberately getting them drunk and taking them home with him. I like to think he has learned better by now, that he has come to realize the harm he did to me, the invasion of my body, the trauma he put me through, the villainy of his behavior. I like to think that young men parallel in education, parentage, and social status today would not think of doing as he did. But recent events would have me believe, instead, that a culture of rape as tacitly acceptable in the eyes of some men still exists.

            It was many years before I could call this incident a rape, though it was certainly what we today call date rape. I am lucky that I recovered quickly and that the traumatic effect lasted only a few years. I was lucky in having friends who knew how to take care of me. But it has taken many, many years for me to admit that I was raped – "admit," as though the shame is mine. I do feel shame in admitting what was done to me, and I wonder – did Ian ever feel shame in having done it? Or did he boast to his friends about his exploits – "deflowered a virgin last night" – drinking beer in the pub the next day, before attending to his studies as usual?

Cutting a Pattern for the Perfect Autumn

      Season-makers, I think, should work from patterns. Variations from year to year would be allowed, but if the tailors would use patterns, they could cut the seasons according to what we already know is a perfect fit. My suggestion is that the tailors take this autumn as the pattern for all future autumns, since it is as near perfect as they come.

      Consider, for instance, color.

The tailors this autumn have eschewed the washed-out blandness of some years, pale, uninteresting fabrics, in favor of vividness and sharpness.

They have shunned the monotony of last year's yellows in favor of a rich variety of hues and tints. We don't have to dig deep into our vocabularies to describe the trees. We can take one look and shout, "Red! Yellow! Bronze! Orange! Pink! Burgundy!"

and then if we want to get closer, we can lean in and whisper, "Cinnabar. Magenta. Amber. Terra cotta. Russet. Mauve. Ferruginous."

      Next to color, the most important consideration for a perfect autumn is rain. A long autumn of dry days is wearing on the nerves, since we are never far from the thought that without winter water we face summer drought. Our spirits begin to dry up. We lose the spring in our step. We languish in gloom even under bright skies. On the other hand, an overly wet autumn doesn't give us a chance to breathe. When it rains too long our spirits are dampened. Our step becomes weighted. We peer at the sky as though from under water, looking for that blue that will give us a chance to come up for air. This autumn, which, as I say, should serve as the pattern, has given us a dash of rain now and then, every once in a while a good hard downpour to promise a strong, wet winter, and plenty of balmy, sunny days when we can breathe deeply and swim happily in autumn air.

      Temperature is perhaps the most temperamental element of all, and tailors could maybe make some adjustments in this autumn along these lines. It's easy to spoil the whole outfit by getting things either too cold and dry or too warm. Colored leaves go with cool weather like scones with tea, and cheese with wine. Autumn should be crisp, with nights cold enough to sweeten the apples and days just cool-tipped. This autumn has been a little too warm for the perfect pattern piece. Frost hasn't even killed my zinnias yet. The overall feeling isn't bad, day and night, but adjustments would be in order.

      The night sky of autumn is important, too. It should be keen and lustrous, something with an edge to it, something tinged with excitement or desire. Imperfect autumn nights – too warm, too wet – seem a little warped, the stars globbed onto the sky with glue. Autumn nights that serve as the pattern have a crescent moon and a scattering of stars cut out by a precision die and incised into the sky.

      So there you have it. That's how autumn ought to be, so let the pattern-makers take note: for color, rain, and night skies, (not quite for temperature), this autumn is a perfect fit.

Eulogy for my sister Linda

My sister Linda, a year and a half older than I, died on Oct. 13, from Lewy body dementia. My post this week is my eulogy to her, dedicated to her memory.

Linda Rose Stephens, 1943-2017

            Linda had our parents to herself for a year and a half, but I know, by extrapolation from the person she was in later years, that she was not jealous and angry when I arrived but generous and loving. I adored my older sister. We played dress-up together, had a wedding for Raggedy Ann and Andy, explored the woods like little elves, climbed the mimosa tree like monkeys. Dad's nickname for Linda was Monkey. When Linda went to first grade, I moped so much that Mom and Dad put me in kindergarten, but Linda shared school with me. She taught me to read. For twelve years I followed her through school. At the beginning of every school year, teachers would say to me, "Are you as smart as your sister?"

            When Linda was a senior in high school, she wrote in my yearbook, "You have been my roommate for so many years it will be hard to break a new one in." We angled the heads of our beds in a corner so we could whisper late into the night, commiserating about the girls who snubbed us and mooning over the boys we loved. Linda handed down her clothes to me. We participated in church youth activities together, played in band together (Linda on clarinet, I on drums), were in the same Girl Scout troop, camping and canoeing and doing good deeds. Linda learned to sew through Girl Scouts and was a fine seamstress. It was through Girl Scouts that she learned about occupational therapy and decided to make that her career.

            The summer before Linda's sophomore year in college, a man in our youth group at church asked me if Linda could cook. She couldn't, but he married her, anyway. Consequently, maybe, the marriage didn't last, and Linda moved back to Atlanta to raise her two boys and create a sparkling career. I have always had the greatest respect for her for doing both things so well.

            I knew Linda as a sister and a friend, but not very well as an OT. I remember when she got her Masters degree, and I was vaguely aware of her leadership in the Georgia Occupational Therapy Association. Linda was never very good at blowing her own horn, and I understood how good an OT she was only when I witnessed her at work. I was so impressed with the way she handled the kids and, especially, with how much both the kids and their parents loved Linda. They thought the world of her.

            Linda's happiest adult years were those with Bruce. She relaxed with him. The sharp edges blunted. She enjoyed life's pleasures. I am grateful to Bruce for providing that for her.

            The last years were a painful degeneration.

My siblings at my new house, 2010 (L-R: Sharon, Laura, Lee, Linda)

 It broke my heart to find her less and less cogent each time I visited her, all that intelligence and sweetness rotting away by her disease. I felt so far away and useless at my home in Oregon. I sent her cards twice a week until, last spring, even those became useless. All I had left was thoughts and sorrow.

The sisters at the first nursing facility Linda was in, 2014 (L-R: Diana, Linda, Sharon, Laura)

            I am inexpressibly sad to have lost my sister. There is a hole in our midst when the siblings get together. It is hard to think of us as four instead of five. I know now the truth of something I said in an essay many years ago, about seeing a V of geese flying south: "Flying exactly, symmetrically in its place among the seven dark gray silhouettes, but barely distinguishable against the pearl-grey clouds, was an albino goose. Keeping up wingbeat for wingbeat in the rhythmic pulse of flight, it was like a negative of its neighbors, like a placeholder. It must be like that to have a beloved companion die: an emptiness in the shape of that person where that person had once always been."

            There will always that emptiness now in the place where Linda had once always been. She is that albino goose in the flock of our siblings.

2012. L-R: Diana, Lee, Linda, Laura, Sharon

 I am going to miss my older sister.

2009 (I am in front, Linda behind me)

Whisperers of the Forest

             We don’t have to go to the extreme of Jains, who wipe the ground in front of them to avoid stepping on bugs or spiders, but it does matter how we treat the creatures of nature. Catch-and-release fishing, for instance, might be a good start towards treating wild animals better, though some animal rights fanatics point out the cruelty of even that sporting method. John McPhee, a fanatical fisherman who has written a book about shad fishing, gives their arguments in that book. Then you expect him to defend the sport he loves. Instead he says, somewhat shamefacedly, “They do have a point.” Perhaps, he says, generations years hence will be aghast to think how we treated animals.

             I have long been neighbors with wild animals, having lived for thirty-five years on the mountain, not at the edge of nature but in its lap, not on the margins of the woods but in the forest itself. I allow wasps to fly in and out of my open windows along with butterflies. Yellow jackets, though, are bullies and deserve to be knocked out of the way with my hand if they're hovering while I eat lunch on the deck. I can almost but not quite understand what the raccoons are saying when they warble to each other through the woods at night. I miss the porcupines. I haven't seen one for decades. I love the blue-tailed skinks disappearing with a flash of cerulean under the front step. I would like to see more snakes in my yard. Contrary to iconography, I consider snakes good omens for the land.

             Once I was on a hike with a ten-year-old boy who found a snail in the middle of the trail. Afraid someone would step on it, he stooped and picked it up. Though snails usually retreat into their shells at the slightest sign of danger, this one stayed fully extended in Condor's hand as Condor stroked and petted it with one finger. The snail seemed to be in sensual heaven, even turning on its back, like a dog, for more petting on its belly. Condor, the snail whisperer.

            One summer day I was sitting on the bench under my cherry tree when the bear walked by (my bear, Mr. Bear) through the woods behind me. Stately and huge in his shaggy coal-black mantel, he ambled om past, then scrambled up the hill. If he knew I was there, he didn't care. That evening three does and a pair of fawns galloped under the plum tree, frightened by some unseen danger in the woods. Later, at dusk, on an errand outside I heard my barred owl on the path just behind my house, very close, very loud. Early the next morning a fox stepped on the path in front of the house and stood there barking. Did I have a whisperer's connection with these wild animals who called my home their home? I had talked to each of them, whispering my thanks. I wouldn't mind being the bear, deer, owl, and fox whisperer of the forest.

Murmuration in the Park

      A group of starlings is a murmuration. Murmurations flow and swoop in aerial dances, individual birds communicating by anticipation, like a line of chorus girls, each knowing when to lift her leg at the precise rhythmical moment. Dancers of all traditions communicate in the same way. Whales in pods communicate.

     With that inspiration, a performance troupe called Lelavision (my son and daughter-in-law, Ela and Leah) created Interspecies Communication, both a sculpture, conceived and built by Ela, of a starling with movable wings, flying over a truck-bed whale, and a community event, a gathering of dancers and musicians of many traditions, conceived and organized by Leah. This murmuration took place in Duwamish Waterway Park in Seattle last weekend, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

      I arrived the day before the event to help assemble the sculpture, which had been packed in pieces onto a Mitsubishi flatbed for travel. It was after dark when the forklift raised the bird, with its sixty-foot wingspan, into the air and lowered it carefully atop the thirty-foot poles bolted to the truck at the back of the cab.

It glowed and glittered in the floodlights, its two hundred smaller birds, lined up in the open-frame wings, twirling and twinkling in the wind.

       The next day the whale was assembled over the truck (head on the cab; tail drooped down the back end),

and at 3:00 two men from a yoga institute in Seattle, one dressed in white with a tall white turban, started the event with a gong and a drum.

Then the president of the Duwamish tribe, on whose land the park had been established, accepted tributes. After that the murmuration swirled and swooped: an Indian mudra dancer in bright fluttery scarves and skirt; dancers of the Japanese Butoh, in white-face make-up, black pants, and white tunics;

a gaggle of children dancing with miniature movable-wing bird sculptures they had made; a large black woman in a high black turban drumming and singing for the Interplay dancers (one of whom danced in bright yellow rubber boots). The dancers were on the grass, the musicians on the back of the whale, the audience facing the river and a swoop of crows over the Seattle city-scape beyond it. Above everything rose the sculpture with the bird's long beak pointing into the distance and the smaller birds in its wide-spread scalloped wings whirling and twinkling against the black clouds that threatened but never produced rain.

        Then Ela, on the stage, started playing his smaller sculpture-instruments, recording their music in a feed-back loop. Behind him Leah pulled a strap hanging from the body of the bird, down and up, making the bird’s wings wave. As the music swelled orchestrally and the bird flew gracefully thirty feet overhead, Leah, dancer and aerial artist, pulled herself into the strap, letting her acrobatics and rhythmical movements keep the bird flying, wingbeat by wingbeat.

Somersault by arabesque she hoisted herself higher and higher until she was just under the body of the bird. Ela left the music to loop along by itself and climbed onto the top of the whale’s head. Muscularly, he and Leah pulled themselves into the open framework of the bird.

They lay down in the body, their arms outstretched like wings. Because they were in the sky and the bird's wings were flowing, the impression, movement by movement, was that the dancers, too, were flying: dancers, bird, whale, and audience in an interspecies communication. Finally the dancers stood upright in the body of the bird,

their arms straight overhead, flying over the trees, through the sky, and on to unknown heavens, their silver-gray and sequined outfits sparkling like the inset twirling birds against the dramatically dark sky.

         Back on the ground, Leah led us all in a communal dance: “Walk. Come on. Everyone can walk. Run. Spin,” and so on, until most of the audience was running and spinning and dancing. Then she had us join hands and led us in a spiral, into the center and back out to a circle. 

        After more dances, and recitations by Seattle's poetry-slam winner, and fabulous nonsense-word singing by a Seattle artist, Ela invited the audience-participants – anyone who wanted to – to climb up the whale-tail ramp and pull the strap to send the bird a-flying. It was surprisingly easy to do. Little children, hardly tall enough to reach the strap, could pull it.

The trick was to listen to the bird's communication of movement, to find its graceful, meditative rhythm – the pull-and-let-go, the beat of the twinkling wings. 

       As twilight darkened into night, we ate grilled hot dogs and continued the murmuration in smaller groups. Green and purple lights came on the sculpture. The wings twinkled with subtle color, no less aerial than those of the planes flying over our heads to a landing at SeaTac airport.

       The next day we disassembled everything, loaded the bird and the whale onto the truck,

and Ela drove it all home to await the next murmuration in some other city at some other time. If it comers near you, don't miss it.