The Furious Spinner

Hmmm. I had a long post half written, but it has disappeared. Maybe it was meant to become part of the computer ether.

I told you—in the post that disappeared—about how sometimes I am completely still here. I sit by the pool and listen to the wind blowing through the palm tree. I watch the sleeping owl as the tree sways ever so slightly. Sometimes a sound will cause her to open her eyes and rotate her head so far around I start thinking Exorcist.

Sometimes we all need a little exorcism...Or is that exercise?

Did I tell you owls have feathers that make no noise when they fly so that the prey cannot hear them coming. At least that’s why the biologists say their wings make no noise. How do they know they didn’t evolve silencer feathers so they wouldn’t be distracted by their own noises while they flew above the world?

I imagine a princess who has lost her memory wandering into the house and out to the pool. She sits by the pool and looks up at the owl in the palm tree. And then the owl is standing across the pool from her, only she is an owl woman, made of soft comforting feathers the color of the shadows on the moon. The princess says she has forgotten who she is or how to help herself or anyone else. The owl woman asks her to look into her eyes and tell her what she sees, “I see myself. Only different.” “Go out into the desert every day for three days,” the owl woman says. “When you are finished come tell me what you find.” For three days, the forgotten princess goes out once a day and walks in the desert. She sees many things: cacti, road runners, coyotes, horses, quail, cardinals, feathers, fumets, prints in the sand. But she can’t really say she has found any of those things. They all existed before she did. Near the end of the third day, she breathes deeply and looks down at her hands. Her hands! She recognizes her hands. She hurries back to the pool where the owl woman awaits her. “What is it you found?” the owl woman asks. “Myself, myself, myself!” she cries. “I remember who I am. I found myself.” The owl woman nods, then flies up toward the palm tree...or becomes a shadow on the moon, awaiting the next one who is forgotten.

I am so still sometimes that the cactus wrens come and walk by my feet. They are spotted and streaked in brown, as if Nature didn’t quite know how she wanted to them to look. Sometimes I see flickering red, and I know the cardinal is in one of the trees on the other side of the wall. Other times I hear music coming from the tall tree next to the house—tall for here, that is. I think it’s an old mesquite tree. The music is a bird song, many different bird songs, actually; sometimes the bird even repeats the words “ribbit, ribbit,” over and over, as if it has dreams of being a frog. When I look through the binoculars, I think it is a mockingbird whose throat moves up and down with song. Maybe a thrasher. Gila woodpeckers sit on top of saguaros looking all around, as if contemplating their domain. “Top of the world, Ma!”

Mario goes to the Quail House and plots. Literally. A couple weeks into the process he tells me some of the story. I grin and say, “Oh, I wish I’d thought of that.” It is the ultimate compliment one writer can give another. As for me, I’m storied out, I think. I want more: I want to know that my stories will make a difference in my life. I want healing from them.

My friend Linda gets her teeth pulled, most of them, in preparation for daily chemo. Some of them were bad, the teeth, so the docs didn’t want an infection to stop the chemo. My other friend with the brain tumor has been diagnosed with another brain tumor. Mutt and Jeff he calls them. Different agencies argue over which one will foot the bill for the life-saving chemo while he writes poetry and waits to see if they’ll let him live. Colette, the horse, gets better. I wonder how I can be happy here when so many suffer. How can I have healing when so many are ill. Linda says, “That’s your Judeo-Christian guilt stuff coming up. You deserve happiness just as much as anyone else does.” When I asked a Buddhist therapist once to tell me why I deserved to be healthy when my mother was still ill, she said that question was an example of my hubris. I didn’t understand. I still don’t.

I walk the wash, sometimes with Mario, sometimes alone. We see all kinds of footprints. Some we recognize. Some canine prints are huge. We wonder if they grow coyotes bigger out here. One big print looked like bear, but we didn’t believe bear were here. Some looked feline in nature. Jaguar, can you whisper to me the secrets of the ages?

We walk in the wash at dusk, when La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, is said to wander along riversides or in washes, looking for her lost children. I listen for her moans but only hear my own breathing.

Sometimes we drive far out into the Sonoran desert. One day we go to the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. We follow a curved road through desolate cumin-colored hills. Mesquite covers many of the hills, an indication that this country either still is or has been range land. Cows eat the mesquite pods, then poop out the seeds (seeds which love being in the alimentary system of the cows); then the mesquite propagates more than the proverbial reproducing rabbits. Then ranchers use pesticides to kill the mesquite (rather ineffectively). Arguments rage on all sides (or at least on some sides) about whether mesquite is pest or a boon. I can see the dilemma. When they aren’t taking over the landscape and creating their own monoculture, the mesquite are beautiful, spirited, reaching deep deep down into the desert earth to find water.

We find a marshland—a real life wetland—in southern Arizona at the refuge. Tall dry marsh grass makes the wetland blond at this time of year. The bare cottonwoods are tall and ghostly, their branches curving up as they reach for the sky, frozen, as though caught in mid-dance. A small blackish bird, maybe a Black Phoebe, sits on a reed in a marshy pond, coming down from her perch every few minutes to scoop something out of the water. Two cardinals, the male resplendent in his red Zoot suit of feathers, dart from bare branch to bare branch in the forest just behind the marsh. A hawk or harrier flies overhead. A flock of birds rises up from the marsh; we see their pale yellow underbellies just before they drop back down again, hidden by the grass, reeds, and cattails. Maybe Western Kingbirds? We find bones on the trail of a deer or pronghorn, its small hooves curled up toward the leg bone as though it were still in the womb, still waiting for life. I hear red-winged blackbirds but do not see them.

We keep driving, past Arivaca and many Border Patrol SUVs. This is jaguar country—or at least we hope it is. This is the absolute northern part of the jaguar’s range. Sometimes they cross the border and come up into Arizona, although the biologists don’t believe there are any breeding pairs here. I would love to see this giant spotted cat (even the black ones are actually black spotted). They are power, mystery, and ability incarnate. Often in Meso-American myths, they represent death or darkness. In my mythos, they are just beautiful.

Mario and I stop at another trail. As we prepare to step out of the car, an Anglo man walks toward us, a gun on his hip, and says, “Have you seen a bunch of illegal aliens come this way?” Mario and I look at each other, wondering silently, “How would we know?”

“No,” I say, “we haven’t seen anyone.”

“I just rustled me up about six back there,” he says, as though he’s taking about cattle or birds or something not quite human.

“Are you with Border Patrol?” I ask, since he has a gun.

“No,” he says. “It just makes me mad. You know that car that overturned the other day in Arivaca that sent those illegals to the hospital, we paid for that.”

Mario and I get out of the car. I frown, but I don’t say anything. My momma didn’t raise me stupid: I ain’t gonna aggravate this white man with a gun. But I’m thinking, I’d rather pay for medical care for so-called illegal aliens than for dropping bombs on Iraq.

“If you see a couple of ladies, one’s my wife,” he says as he gets into his huge white truck with Montana license plates. “Tell her I’ll be right back.”

“Why are you carrying a gun?” I ask.

“I never go out into the desert without protection,” he says. He drives off.

He carries a gun but he’s running off to find the Border Patrol and leaving his wife behind?

“Are you worried?” I ask Mario.

“About what?” he asks. “A bunch of guys trying to find jobs?”

I nod. “I agree. But this guy with the gun could hurt someone.”

We go for our walk. It’s a wooded area, old cottonwoods along a dry streambed. Several of the huge old trees have fallen across the bed, as though they just got too tired to stand it any more. We wonder how the guy with the gun knew the men were illegals. He had seen brown people out in the woods, that was it. Since he was from Montana maybe he didn’t understand that brown people had been here longer than any Anglos...

We see several shoe prints in a wash off of the trail and wonder if these are the prints of the “aliens.” I hope they have enough water.

We drive again. In the distance, mountain ranges rise on the right and left of us. Is that West and East? I’ve lost my bearings. We can see the observatories of Kitt Peak, one of them a tiny D-shaped (on its side) and D-sized building on a flat “peak.” Why do we call this landscape desolate? Magnificent desolation. Didn’t one of the astronauts say that about the moon? Kitt Peak is on reservation land. Before they put the ‘scopes up there, the scientists had to convince the tribal elders that what they were doing wouldn’t desecrate the mountain. They brought several of the elders to Tucson and had them look through the telescopes here. The elders said, (and I’m paraphrasing), “You are the people with the long eyes.” They liked what they saw and decided the observatories would not be a desecration. So the scientists were able to build their telescopes a little closer to the stars.

Another day, we drive to a small town in southwest Arizona to see a gathering of sandhill cranes. Instead we find an ugly little desert town, like something out of an apocalyptic Australian film. It’s technogarbage in the desert. Car dealerships. A fertilizer factory. A tank of pesticides on every other block. I try not to be judgmental, try to understand why people live in places without art or beauty—or live with art and beauty I do not see. We drive past mile after mile of barren farm fields and pesticide containers. We finally see art in the form of a mural on the side of a barn: it depicts a plane flying over a field spraying pesticides.

We cannot drive away fast enough. The road takes us to Chiricahua Mountains. The brochure at the visitor center says it is the “place in the United States where the Rocky Mountains meet the Sierra Madre and the Sonoran Desert meets the Chihauhan Desert.” It is part of the “sky islands” of Arizona, mountains popping up in the middle of deserts or grassland seas. At Massia Point, we get out and walk the trail. Red and cream-colored rocks surround us. We walk toward the edge and are astonished to see—all around the tree-filled valley below—columns of balanced rocks seeming to look forward, like tall rock giants gathered together at tribal council. Stone elders. The Apache called them “standing up rocks.” Mario and I sit and listen, watch. I whisper my thanks and prayers to them.

We leave the Stone Elders and drive toward another refuge, although it appears we are traveling in the direction of where a power plant sits, belching out smoke (or steam or whatever it is) that rises in the air like an ancient smoke signal, “Come here, come here.”

We turn right at the power plant. Across the road from the power plant is an area that they (the power plant mucky mucks) have set aside for bird watching. Sandhill cranes winter at a body of water about 1/4 mile or more away. We stand on the cement viewing area, in this place between Nature and technology, and look at thousands of sandhill cranes. We hear them first, the sound like the reassuring murmur of the Earth. We luxuriate in the sound, in knowing thousands of these birds live. In the fall, hundreds of the cranes are hunted and killed, for sport. No one eats cranes. But some people kill them for the fun of it.

We dance the crane dance as we leave, arms moving slowly and elegantly up and down.

Away from the cranes and cardinals and whispers of jaguars, we sit in a Guatemalan restaurant in Tucson. A huge mural on the wall depicts a scene from Guatemala: the deep blue mist of the place, the waterfalls, women walking. I imagine jaguars live in those misty blue spaces on the wall. The family who owns the restaurant fled Guatemala after the father was imprisoned and tortured. What is it like to be so far from home? To be on the edges of this or that culture? I talk with the woman who waits on us. She has been here since she was eleven. Although she has returned to Guatemala for a visit, her parents are still too frightened to go home. Recently the president who was responsible for so much of the torture and slaughter ran again for office, but he was not elected. I am grateful for the woman’s easy conversation, for her allowing me to hear the history of her life.

I eat potatoes and mushrooms from the inside of a chile. Mario sips lemonade and eats spinach and walnut patties. I look at the colorful cloth on the walls around us and feel at home. I want to cry.

We go to the bookstore down the street from the restaurant. I look at all the beautiful books and wonder what stories are within. One book is about how the body remembers, even if our conscious mind doesn’t. I used to believe that. Now I’m not so certain. Now I wonder if everything is just as we see it, just as we know it, with nothing underneath. No mystery. Imagination is just imagination, not the healing flow of the Divine within each of us. Stories are just stories. Nothing more. Other times I agree with Muriel Rukeyser, “The world is made of stories, not atoms.” This night, I sink into a chair in the bookstore and start to cry—although I don’t know why. I wipe my eyes quickly, prepared to tell anyone who might ask that it’s just allergies.

We go to campus after dinner to look at the first photos taken by a lander on Titan. Many of the scientists who worked on the project were from the University of Arizona. The hall is packed with people so we can’t see anything. The scientist talking sounds very excited. We see a member of our peace group there with his family. Visiting Tucson just like us. Talk about a small solar system. We say hello, are amazed for a bit, then he has to run and check on his kids. Mario and I go outside where several telescopes have been set up on the mall. Saturn is especially close now. I look through one of the powerful ‘scopes and see Saturn and its rings. I am so excited. I have never seen them that clearly before. “Look, look,” I want to yell. “Isn’t this marvelous? Isn’t life grand?”

On the way home, I turn up Pat Benatar singing, “Heartbreaker,” and I sing it loud, dancing as best I can inside the car. Mario laughs, happy in my happiness, and I kiss him as he drives down Speedway. What a gift it is to be loved.

Today, Sunday, we walk the wash at dusk. We take the dog with us. He licks my hand (the dog, that is), and I don’t even try to wash it away—even though I know where that tongue has been. (Let’s not think about it.) No owl hoots tonight. Even the quail are silent. On the way back, near the house, a quail rustles in the tree and then flies away, startling us. I guess they can’t figure out that if they just stayed still, we’d never figure out they were there! Mario and I kiss, then part company. He and the dog go toward the house. I head for the mesquite tree near the Quail House.

I sit under the mesquite tree and tell a story, outloud. It is a ritual I do every day, near dusk, near the threshold time, when some believe the veil is lifted between then and now, here and there. A borderland. Usually I don’t know what I’ll say until I sit down. Tonight I sit in one of the rusted chairs under the tree and start the tale:

Once upon a time stories were told about a woman who walked the wash that runs through the desert near the old mesquite tree. She nearly always wandered through the wash at dusk, crying and moaning. They called her La Llorona, the Weeping Woman. Parents warned their children to stay away from the wash because La Llorona might mistake them for her lost children. She killed her children in anger after her lover and their father left her for another woman. A younger richer woman. Or maybe she didn’t kill her children. Maybe they just died and she was looking for more children. Some people said that her crying and weeping didn’t have anything to do with children. In fact, she didn’t have children. She was crying because there was no water in the wash, and there was no water because there were too many people in Arizona and they were desecrating the land.

Well, one night, the Mesquite Spirit heard what sounded like moaning and crying coming from the wash. The Spirit had been here a long time and hadn’t ever seen La Llorona, although the stories had been out there just as long. But the Spirit went into the wash and was surprised to see a weeping woman standing in the sand. “La Llorona,” the Spirit said. “Why are you crying?” She wiped her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been wandering this wash for so long that I’ve forgotten why I cry.” “Could it be because you killed your children because you were mad at your lover?” She looked at the Spirit. “That sounds pretty stupid, and I don’t think I’m stupid, so no, I didn’t kill my children.” “Hmmm. Are you crying because your children are dead?” “That would be a good reason to cry,” she said, “but I don’t think I ever had any children.” “Ahhh, so you cry because there is no more water left in the desert.” She thought about this and finally shook her head. “No, I don’t think that’s it either.” The Spirit said, “I will take you to the end of the wash and out onto the road and then maybe you will remember.”

Together they walked down the wash past the paloverde by the house. Several quails shook the bushes, cried out, then flew in front of the woman and the Spirit, startling them both. They continued walking by several mesquite trees. More quails cried, flapped their wings, and flew in the faces of the startled beings. Weeping Woman started to cry again. “What is it?” the Spirit asked. “Why are you crying?” “I remember now,” she said. “I was trying to get to the other side of the wash and those damn quail kept flying out and scaring me half to death. I got so confused I couldn’t remember which way was home.” The Spirit took her out of the wash and set her on the path to home. And that was the last anyone heard of La Llorona, at least in that particular wash.

When I finish the story, I am laughing. I stand and thank the Mesquite for listening. I am still in the borderland of story time. Yes, that’s it. Stories are part of the borderlands. Edgedwellers. Like jaguars and weeping women wandering the wash. They are incantations whispered, said aloud, sung. Are they incantations that ultimately heal us? Stories help us step over the threshold into...our lives. Or sometimes they help us step out of our lives. Help us get perspective like the Gila woodpecker looking over his domain. I have told stories since before I could write. Don’t I have this ability for a reason? It doesn’t have to be a cosmic reason. It can be practical. It can be medicine. Will I ever know? Let the mystery be.

I hurry through the dusk-colored desert toward the house. The dog jumps out at me, startling me, eager to play. I say, “Good dog,” and then I go into the casita where Mario awaits.

Labels: Arizona, healing, migrant issues, writing

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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Colette and Moi