Like Us

As long as we’re talking about squirrels, for the last few minutes I’ve been watching a pair glide up and down then up again along a hickory tree behind our house. I think it’s a hickory, I need to confirm. At first I thought they were chasing each other, but from my perch they seem to be side by side, like they’re racing. Do squirrels race each other? Did one say Okay, down and back and down and back. Ready? Go! Are they competitive like that? Like us?

I wonder if that tree, which is possibly a hickory, enjoys the feel of squirrels racing its length down and back and down and back? Maybe that’s how trees get their backs scratched. I mean, that’s one way to look at it. Then again I guess the tree could be annoyed—Damn squirrels I hope you hesitate in the middle of the road today and get squashed by an F-150. Are hickory trees sensitive like that? On occasion malicious? Like us?

Speaking of us, I’m a little worried about us, us meaning we the people. We’re filtering a great deal right now, some days it feels like almost everything, through a lens of trauma, which is 100% legit because the recent past has been traumatic with a capital T. Maybe not just the recent past but our entire past has been traumatic. I mean, the biblical thread holds things got started with our parents getting expelled, some translations read banished. Can you imagine? One minute you’re standing there buck naked cheering on squirrels at the Hickory Tree Speedway (which sounds like such a rush) and the next bam! you’re gathering your stunned wits and now realized privates and heading “east of ginger trees…in yon wilderness of clove.”* There’s no record of Adam and Eve saying We’re sorry, really we are. I wonder if that would’ve made a difference, changed the arc of the narrative going forward. I wonder if they even knew what an apology was. Had they ever heard one before? We’re pretty hard on those two—No, John, God was very clear with the thou shall nots! They knew good and well what they were doing! I don’t know. I believe they were kids. Just kids. Like us.

My pause with the trauma lens is that it’s just one lens, and maybe not even the lens but simply a facet of it. I don’t want to diminish your trauma, my trauma, anyone’s trauma. It oughta be named, exposed, held to account, all that. And grieved. Grief we’ve lost a lot, Eden is just the tip of the iceberg. I just don’t want us to get stuck there, in the La Brea tar pits of trauma. Or my hope is that we don’t get stuck there because that anger, that fully justified anger, well, “you keep carryin’ that anger/it’ll eat you up inside, baby.”*

We all have our own pace, it’s not a race. I just hope we keep moving. The poet Maggie Smith of “Good Bones” fame has a book titled Keep Moving. I haven’t read it, but I sure like that title. Keep moving, not with a goal of closure or healing (I’m not even sure most days what those words mean). But possibly moving toward a certain stillness, you know, kinda like when Lieutenant Dan jumps off into the water and backstrokes under half-cloudy-half-sunny skies, comes to a peace with God or peace with things or peace with himself. A lot of struggle prior to that, wrestlings, ragings, no doubt. But moving, moving toward a stillness that’s maybe a forgiveness. I don’t know. I simply believe there’s more to the lens, more to us. More to life.

As a half-ass-middle-aged poet once wrote:

The suffering is part, but not all.

Note to self—Check to see if that’s a hickory tree. Plus research the emotional lives of squirrels (if there’s any).

Note to reader—*Seals & Crofts, “East of Ginger Trees”

*Don Henley, “The Heart of the Matter”