The walls of our house are mostly glass, door-size mullion-less windows floor to ceiling and higher, on both sides, so looking out you can see most of your surroundings – downhill a tree-girded meadow, uphill thick forest – and looking in, from many angles, you can see through. We live outdoors – in magically modified air – all year long, from winter’s angry onset to effulgent spring, hoping the native fauna and flora ignore our intrusion. Faux camping out, you might call it, nature’s glories without its inconveniences.
Our inhuman neighbors work around us and sometimes with us. Birds build nests below our deck; shivering deer nestle against our less frigid foundations. Bees and hummingbirds swarm our deliberate gardens; squirrels, titmice, finches, cardinals, among others, congregate around our dangling birdseed containers (which sometimes interest bears, alas). Migrating birds may mistake our glass walls for empty air and klonk, there they lie, twitching or motionless on the deck, dead, dying, or deciding to live.
That’s how I felt November Fifth. Klonk. Was I dead or alive? On earth or some science fiction planet? Dazed.
If you don’t know where you are you can’t know who – or why – for purpose is dictated by context. We live for others, like it or not. Imagine a world inhabited by you alone – or by aliens, for whom you’re less than a curiosity. Why exist? What’s the use?
I blinked, stunned. My eyelids worked, at least. Could I lift a wing, hoist my body upright? Not yet but maybe later. Could I evade the predators who’d soon be eying me splayed there, an easy snack? I’d better try!
After a spell, I felt normal enough to betake my injuries elsewhere. I was alive – that was something. But what to do? I was used to flying toward a certain goal in predictable weather and, klonk, a formidable impenetrable obstacle intervened. My kind was not what I’d thought; neither my nation. My mission – in my case, to spy and speak sense – was a delusion, hare-brained, pointless in a land where sense was mocked, literacy tarred-and-feathered, and decency ridiculed. So now what? I felt OK, even dandy some mornings, but how to busy myself? To exist is not a life, one must insist – in some direction. I grew impatient with myself, disgusted: get a move on, bird!
I describe my travails because I believe they resemble yours. Many of us went klonk November Fifth. Now what?
One gladsome tiding from that dire day – yes, gladsome – is life finds a way. Rain on the mountaintop finds its way to the sea, though it carve its own channel. We live until we die. We recover. We limp away to tend our brokenness and, lo, strength returns, not because we will it, but because life refuses to give up.
What will I do in my changed America with my paltry strength? Not much – it was never much – but what I can. I will feel for my best use in this rubbled landscape. I will fly again – maybe – more cautiously – briefer flights -- but I will try.
Choice is simplified by absence of alternatives. Lucky for me, these days there’s only one thing I can do half-decently. So I’ll write. What? What I see – of my speckled skin, gnawed fingernails, emptied coffee cup, perhaps, if they’re in view. Of my hurt, heart, hopes. I will write to you, because (in my mind’s eye) you are hurting too. Shared sadness is almost happy. Will my words matter? If they matter to you, yes, and even if not, it consoles to compose. Doing encourages. I can almost fly.