The Peace of Wild Things

Learning to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of my own unfolding

They say you should never name something wild. Resist the urge to name the spotted fawn who wanders into your azaleas. Resist the urge to name the pair of squirrels that gather acorns under the yellow oak. Resist the urge to name the cardinal who returns to the bird feeder, year after year in autumn, the one who might be your grandmother with a message from the great beyond.

Resist the urge to get too close to the wild mystery of the world. You must always keep your distance in order to protect your heart.

But I can’t help myself: I do the opposite and name everything. Naming the things I love gives them eternal life. They know them by name and so my three daughters rejoice when they see Slippery and Slimy appear, the first spring earthworms to slither across their rain boots. They know how Kermit, the peeper frog at the pond’s edge, likes to be held and they stroke his smooth belly until he lets out a joyful croak. They greet Lady and Lulu by name, the twin butterflies who arrive at the lavender bush every morning during breakfast. And they go out after it rains to collect Mr. Slowski, an enormous “Weinberg” snail, and his brood of mollusk friends for a party in the fairy garden, in the little houses tucked under the peppermint bush.

I want my daughters to love the living creatures on this earth in the same way I want them to love the world itself - with curiosity. With brave and open arms. I want them to name every single thing that they love and love it even harder.

I want them to love with wild hearts, hearts that they’re not afraid of breaking by getting too close.

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When the first roses arrive in May, so does my dearest animal friend. Bob is an iridescent-green rose chafer beetle, the most beautiful creature in our wild and chaotic garden. You may remember the story of when Bob miraculously flew directly into the palm of my hand when I called out to him. And how one hot summer day, I rescued him from Esmeralda’s web, a trap built by our resident orb spider. Bob is not the best flier and is always getting himself into precarious situations. We lost count of how many times we found him flailing on his back in need of someone to flip him over so he could carry on with his day.

Though I know you’re not supposed to impose human feelings on animals, and especially not beetles, I get the feeling that Bob loves us as much as we love him. How else can you explain these stories?

At our neighbor’s birthday party, just before a thunderstorm struck and moved us all inside, Bob crash-landed on the table right in front of the birthday girl as she blew out the four candles on her cake. When the rain began, Bob flew inside the house alongside the children and waited out the storm on the kitchen table before we brought him back outside again when it was time to go home.

On more than one occasion, Bob was waiting in plain sight on the front steps when the girls came home from school. He let them pick him up, they’d say hello and then he’d launch back into the afternoon sun.

At twilight in the humid heat of summer evenings, the girls and I watched as Bob tucked into the cool, soft petals of a peach-colored rose in the garden and slept. At dawn, he would hum around the patio table again, his furry legs covered in yellow pollen that fell like fairy dust as he moved.

In September, my heart started to grow anxious with the anticipation of autumn, then winter, and needing to say goodbye to the wildlife in the garden that I have come to love so much over the years of living in this old house. I began to worry about the looming darkness ahead and the bony fingers of winter depression that work like a quiet thief and pry open my door when the sun goes down.

But most of all, I was growing anxious to say goodbye to Bob.

I knew that once the roses lost their last petals in September, the rose chafers would lay eggs, bury their larvae in the ground and die. Getting close to things we love also means getting close to the uncomfortable and wild cycle of life and death. They’re inseparable and inevitable.

I assumed that we would simply stop seeing the rose chafers without a big announcement. I planned to tell the girls that Bob had gone to sleep for winter, and that he would wake up from hibernation when the flowers returned in the spring.

But earlier this week, I arrived home from picking them up from school and sat down on the patio chair to take my boots off. We had just had our first really cold night with temperatures close to freezing but the midafternoon air had grown warm. As I unzipped my boot, something shiny under the table caught my eye and I got down on my knees to get a closer look. It was Bob. He was moving incredibly slowly. I gingerly picked him up in my hands. Heidi, who’s nearly five now, came up next to me and watched his normally-wiggly legs barely respond to my touch. I knew in my heart that this would be the last time we saw him this year.

“It’s time for Bob to go to sleep for the winter,” I whispered to her with deep reverence. She nodded her head and without saying a word and ran up the steps to the herb bed where she plucked a fragrant sage leaf and two sprigs of lavender. Then she skipped back down to me.

“Mama, we should put him back inside the rose, the place he loves most,” she said. “We can cover him with this leaf blanket.”

Together we walked up the garden path to the rose bush that blooms alongside the little swimming pond. When I gently lifted him out of my hand to place him into the welcoming flower, I knew that he was no longer alive. Heidi covered him with the sage leaf and tucked the tiny lavender sprig next to his still body.

I don’t know why I was put here on this earth.

On ambitious days, I think it might be to create something large and expansive, a body of work that touches many hearts.

But on days like this, I think, what if this is it? And what if it’s enough?

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To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver, Blackwater Woods

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They say you should never name something wild. But I named my girls anyway - Rose Luna, Nina Brigitte and Heidi Josephine.

I named them after wild things - the queen of flowers, the blue moon, and in honor of other women who lived by the compass of their untamed hearts.

---

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

---

I sit at the edge of our little swimming pond in the garden. It’s early October and the water is cold and black by now, a startling difference from July’s warm and inviting green. It’s hard to believe it’s the same water my three young girls did cannon balls in just two months before.

The leaves on the linden tree above the pond have turned mustard-yellow and they fall into the water in clumps. The hum of summer is gone. Autumn is putting the earth to sleep, whether I’m ready for it or not.

I call this little swimming hole Lilith Pond. Lilith was supposedly the first wife of Adam but was banished from the Garden of Eden because she refused to comply with and obey him. Some say she was sent to the underworld to reign, some say she grew wings and flew away. Either way, she kept her power and broke free.

Like the mythical woman, Lilith Pond is also rich in dark magic and mystery. It’s a place where poems arrive on the backs of dragonflies and cattails burst open with fuzzy letters from God. It’s a place where lily pad flowers open their jaws in the morning sun to reveal mouths filled with diamonds and pearls, frog eggs and dew, a place where tiny wild strawberries grow at the water’s edge, sweet treats meant for no one else’s hunger but yours. Here you will learn that you can love something and fear it in equal measure - this dark water or the life you’ve built.

I stand up, look into the water and see the soft, rippled reflection of my face. I don’t hold an inner dialogue about the crows feet in the corners of my eyes or whether that expensive liquid collagen is reversing time as promised. I don’t wonder if I should get my hair cut or if I might still be considered pretty to strangers on the street. I just look and then, I look away.

Some days it all feels so big, so important, so impossibly heavy that I can barely breathe.

But today I am just another wild animal who has come here to drink, to be filled up with the dark, watery mystery of this world and to try and understand and love myself inside it. Like the other animals, I come to rest in this dappled October sunlight that wants nothing of me and nothing for me, the same sun that shines on me, and Bob, and my daughters, on all creatures great and small.

---

In early September, the creek that runs by our quiet street was stagnant to the point of stinking. If you looked down from the little foot bridge above it, you might have seen a few minnows scurrying to and fro in the sunlight. But likely not. On most days the water was warm enough to cook them. The brown, cloudy creek barely trickled downstream toward the Danube, a few cupfuls at a time, just enough to keep the heavy umbrellas of willow trees on its banks green in the late summer heat.

After a summer of full-time caregiving of three young kids, my creative inner life felt as stagnant as the creek. My chastising inner voice had become particularly relentless. “You’re not making enough progress on your book!” she would nag and nag while I tended to my big family. I would vacuum up the cat litter scattered about and she would hiss, “See? You can’t prioritize!” As I sliced apples for Heidi’s snack, she pulled up a chair and sighed, “You’re too late anyway. I wouldn’t even bother...”

In a matter of three days, the weather in Vienna went from scorching dry summer heat to a record amount of rainfall. It hadn’t rained since June and it caught the country of Austria completely off-guard. The storm even brought sudden snow to the Alps as people scurried about to dig out winter jackets while bathing suits still dried on laundry lines. It rained and rained without stopping for four days straight. As the girls and I huddled inside, the sirens blared from the fire station - the Danube would soon flood the streets.

“This is a once-every-1000-years flood!” the news warned.

“Why would this happen now?” I lamented to a neighbor as we stood in knee-high rain boots and watched the water rising on the street. Our house was spared, thank God, but there were people who lost everything. How could a creek that barely flowed have the power to flood homes a few days later?

Sometimes I wake up in the night and can’t fall back asleep, my mind overflowing with all the things I want to say and do and the stories I want to tell. I spend hours in that silent darkness organizing words, thinking of poems, trying to put the puzzle of my manuscript together. But there are other days, weeks, even months, where words leave me altogether and my inner world feels completely arid. I don’t know why this is or how to change it.

As I shook off my yellow raincoat back inside the house, it occurred to me that I feared this sudden flood as much as I scorned summer’s drought. And similarly, I feared all the extremes where the flow of my life and work wasn’t as I thought it “should be” - calm, easy, predictable and lovely for everyone.

And that fear, for both the creek-turned-river and my wild soul, is that the flow itself can’t be trusted. The cycle can’t be trusted. The fear is that there are only two outcomes: I’ll either die of thirst or drown.

As I enter midlife and take stock of what else I want to give and do during my time left on this earth, I feel an ever-loudening call to seek her, the source of this river inside, this wild woman who beckons to my creative soul and offers a flow that sometimes trickles, sometimes cascades and sometimes overflows, but always with her own power and in her own time.

I must seek her and trust her with my life.

---

“I would love to live like a river flows,

carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”

―John O'Donohue

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“What is the female soul, the Wild Woman? She is the source of the feminine. She is all that is of instinct, of the worlds both seen and hidden.

She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart.

She is the one who turns like a great wheel. She is the maker of cycles. She is the one we leave home to look for. She is the one we come home to.

- Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

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Swinda, my beloved friend and neighbor, turned 84 earlier this year. Shortly after her birthday, she declared that she wanted to have an exhibition of her entire body of artistic work, from her many stone and marble sculptures to her series of recent oil paintings of the solar system.

In the weeks that lead up to the exhibition opening, she worked to retouch a painting that depicted the starry night sky and the Milky Way.

On one rainy September Thursday, our usual day to work side by side in her atelier, she added large white circles to the black background of a huge canvas that covered her entire working table. She held a can of white spray paint in her right hand and an old soup can - her stencil - in her left.

“These are white holes,” she told me without looking up from her work. “White holes are the opposite of black holes. Instead of being a vacuum that pulls darkness in, they push everything out: energy, light, star matter.”

“That’s what we are,” she said and looked up at me, grinning like the 15 year-old that she is inside, the age her soul got stuck and happily stayed.

At her sold-out exhibition opening, she greeted guests in her “artist’s uniform” (her words) - denim overalls and her favorite paint-splattered red t-shirt. She didn’t want to look different at her own event, but I noticed that she had a fresh haircut. She looked fantastic and I told her so.

“I told my hairdresser to give it a little shape, but to keep everything mostly wild,” Swinda laughed and shook out the curls that framed her face.

“Great advice for making art!” I said.

She smiled wide and added to my sentence, extending her pointer finger into the air to make the point, “And great advice for living!”

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The Thing Is
By Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

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