Tending to Endings (thirty-seven)
My teachers come in many forms—friends, apricot trees, students, neighbors, rivers, my own fears lifting. Some of the teachers I feel closest to are those I’ve never met except through their books. These authors have helped me see differently or more wholly, and sometimes their wisdom becomes foundational to my own thinking and writing.
As I’ve gotten older, I’m less concerned with being original in my writing and more concerned with being honest and precise. Each day brings new stories, new contexts. But the wisdom always belongs to the collective.
For instance, it occurred to me recently that that the title—Tending to Endings—is probably rooted in a line I have carried with me since 2016 from Mary Oliver’s essay “Upstream”: Attention is the beginning of devotion. The line reminds me when I am overwhelmed by all I don’t know and don’t understand about something important—like grief or love—to begin by turning towards rather than away. To make peace with death, then, I might begin by paying it some attention.
Lately I have had more space in my life for not only the compulsive reading I always do—the skimming of articles to get the gist of things—but also for sinking into books composed thoughtfully, carefully, over time. Certain books require attention of mind and heart. For all the strangeness of the past year and a half of my life, I have been grateful it has allowed space for that kind of reading. These books feel like conversation more than consumption. They are books I can talk with on a long hike afterwards: agreeing, questioning, turning things over in the light, welling up with recognition.
Below are just a few that have recently influenced my own thinking, probably my writing, and hopefully my living, too. These works contain too many nooks and crannies to do justice to in a summary or a critique. And so instead I am including a few quotes from each that have stayed with me long after I set the book down.
Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays.
Oliver converses with Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth in this collection of essays. And also, owls, turtles, her house, and the long dark nights of winter. Here are three quotes from her essay, “Winter Hours”:
We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith as I imagine it is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know is a fighter and a screamer. (147)
Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. Stepping out into the world, into the grass, on the path, was always a kind of relief. I was not escaping anything. I was returning to the arena of delight…Eventually I began to appreciate—I don’t say this lightly—that the great black oaks knew me. (151)
I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny. (154)
Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
Linda Hogan is fairly new to me. I’m currently reading her poems (Dark, Sweet.), fiction (People of the Whale), and this collection of essays, Dwellings. Through all her writing she weaves together science and spirit and story. Hogan does not hesitate to bring the hardest things about living in this world into the discussion, and she does so in a way that is specific and gorgeous and that offers guidance.
From her essay “A Different Yield”:
When I was a girl, I listened to the sounds of the corn plants. A breeze would begin in a remote corner of the field and move slowly toward the closest edge, whispering. (47)
When I first heard of Barbara McClintock, it confirmed what I thought to be true about the language of corn. McClintock is a biologist who received a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants. Her method was to listen to what corn had to say, to translate what the plants spoke into a human tongue. (48)
In a time of such destruction, our lives depend on this listening. It may be that the earth speaks its symptoms to us. With the nuclear reactor accident in Chernobyl, Russia, it was not the authorities who told us that the accident had taken place. It was the wind. The wind told the story. It carried a tale of splitting, of atomic fission, to other countries and revealed the truth of the situation. The wind is a prophet, a scientist, a talker.
These voices of the world infuse our every act, as much as does our own ancestral DNA. They give us back ourselves, point a direction for salvation. (52-53)
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I always thought I had read The Fire Next Time, but it turns out I had only felt like I had because I’d heard it referenced so many times. Last year, I finally did read the slim book of two essays written in the form of letters. The writing is beautiful and searing and precise. It pains me that it is still timely. I can’t help but wonder, would we even need books like White Fragility in 2020, if more of us had read and received what Baldwin gave us in 1962. These passages are from the second letter of the two in the book, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.”:
There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them: they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. (21-22)
What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro: it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house? (94)
Baldwin comes back to love in this essay, but like Oliver’s hope and Hogan’s listening this isn’t a soft, pastel love. Nor is the self-love he refers to about narcissism, but its opposite. This love is wedded to honesty:
All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. (95)
John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
My favorite book by John O’Donohue is Anam Cara, and this one, too, is a close companion. There is a warmth to O’Donohue’s language that makes the whole concept of suffering as spiritual growth seem less lonely. The passages below are from the chapter “Suffering as the Dark Valley of Broken Belonging”:
When we learn to see our illness as a companion or friend, it really does change the way the illness is present. The illness changes from a horrible intruder to a companion who has something to teach us. When we see what we have to learn from an illness, then often the illness can gather itself and begin to depart. (174)
It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering. Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you. When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen. You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic. The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously. There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light. Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway that we can never fully glimpse; it alone knows why suffering comes. (157)
Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Christian Wiman is best known for his poetry, but he wrote this collection of essays while he faced an aggressive form of cancer in his thirties.
From the preface:
When my life broke open seven years ago, I knew very well that I believed in something. Exactly what I believed, however, was considerably less clear. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life—and for your death—to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?
From his essay, “Tender Interiors”:
No, to die well, even for the religious, is to accept not only our own terror and sadness but the terrible holes we leave in the lives of others; at the same time, to die well, even for the atheist, is to believe that there is some way of dying into life rather than simply away from it, some form of survival that love makes possible. I don’t mean by survival merely persisting in the memory of others. I mean something deeper and more durable. If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication—even as, maybe even especially as, our atoms begin the long dispersal we call death. (35)
There’s been a lot of talk of elders lately, and often mine come in the form of books. These teachers, too, seem pull from some deep stream of knowing. They listen to wind and darkness and illness and love. They make clear, the thousand unbreakable links between us, even in the dark winter hours.
More Resources
If you have more time for listening to podcasts than reading, Kristin Tippett interviews three of these authors on various episodes of On Being.
Interview with John O’Donohue “The Inner Landscape of Beauty”
Interview with Mary Oliver “Listening to the World.”
Interview with Christian Wiman “How Does One Remember God?”
James Baldwin died before the era of podcasts, but these two recent interviews about race in America have given me grist and hope.
Interview with angel Kyodo williams “The World is Our Field of Practice”
Interview with Claudia Rankin (on Longform)
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the author of the new book, Just Us: An American Conversation.
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