All I want is to go to Omar’s for falafel with Becky. Becky doesn’t know who I am. We’re students at a university in Israel, I see Becky around campus, I’m loitering near her dorm—not every day, but enough so it’s getting a little weird and her neighbors are starting to notice. I should just ask her out, but I’m nervous and she’s pretty and she wears these headbands with wavy dark hair spilling out everywhere. Finally one of her friends introduces us. She likes bookstores, she likes REM, we make a date to go to Omar’s famous falafel stand in the Old City. Then a war starts. It’s the Gulf War. The Iraqi army invaded Kuwait and now Team America is ramping up. Iraq has an arsenal of SCUD missiles pointed at Israel—one SCUD missile can destroy, like, a football stadium—and Becky’s parents are afraid she’s going to get blown up. So Becky goes home to New Jersey. She misses the next three months when air raid sirens and missile attacks are driving us underground night after night, or into little rooms that we sealed with plastic tarps against chemical weapons. Basically, I’m a pacifist, but I’m harboring violent resentments against the Iraqi military for fouling my plans to woo Becky. While Becky’s back home, I’m running in and out of bomb shelters every night (sadly like people in Ukraine are doing this year), and I keep a backpack handy—clothes, book, flashlight, bag of peanuts—and my Special Added Bonus. Everyone in Israel in 1991 has a Special Added Bonus. It’s a personal defense kit, an oversized brown shoebox with a shoulder strap, distributed by the army—like everyone in the country has the same cardboard purse. Inside are a full-face gas mask, a huge syringe, and a towelette in a foil packet, like you get with a fried chicken dinner, only bigger. The towelette is supposed to heal the chemical burns on your skin caused by mustard gas. The syringe is like an epi pen: you jam it into your thigh if you’re exposed to a nerve agent, like sarin, which is what the Iraqis say they’re going to use on us. Later, we learn the Israeli government lied to us and the nerve gas antidote is only temporary; it delays the symptoms, but does not cure them, so you will live long enough to get to the hospital, where you will die with everyone else on the lawn. I decoupage my kit with magazine cutouts of George Bush and Saddam Hussein and Cindy Crawford. In a few months, the Iraqi army is defeated, and Becky comes back. We pick up where we left off and make another plan to go to Omar’s. We decide to take Bus 23, which travels through a couple of neighborhoods in the West Bank. It’s a risk because the city buses are sometimes seen as symbols of the Israeli occupation, but I’ve done it before, and it only takes 20 minutes to get to Omar’s, and if you take the other bus through the Jewish neighborhood it takes an hour. We find a seat near the front. It’s not crowded, Jewish people, Arab people, a Palestinian mom with two little girls, an older man with short white hair wearing a kefiyya, an Israeli soldier about the same age as Becky and me. Apparently taking a risk together makes you feel like a couple, so we’re sitting close, and we’re holding hands, when there’s a BANG and the window across the aisle shatters and blows apart, needles of glass spraying everywhere. The driver slams the brakes. Everyone’s thrown out of our seats. Someone is screaming. The face of the man next to the broken window is covered in blood. And then BANG BANG, two more windows explode. Slow motion takes over. Becky and I are crouched on the floor, clutching hands. There’s shouting outside the bus, which has driven into some kind of street protest. I raise my head and look outside. There’s a crowd, they’re angry, it becomes a mob, working together to topple the bus by pushing it from side to side. The tires are coming off the pavement and slamming back down. Stones the size of footballs are scattered on the floor surrounded by shattered glass. More windows are breaking. Some people are banging on the front door to get in. The soldier is on the floor a few seats in front of us, holding an M16 in one hand and a 9mm in the other. He won’t resist the mob if they storm the bus. They will take him and the weapons and if that happens I don’t know if we will survive. Suddenly, the soldier jumps to his feet, kicks out what’s left of the windshield, and fires two shots into the sky, apparently hoping the rifle crack will break the inertia. It works. Everyone backs up. There is a pause long enough for the the bus to land on four tires. The driver grinds it forward, up a hill and into a gas station. The crowd stays behind. The bus is nearly windowless. The girls and their mother are crying. I pull bits of glass from Becky’s hair while everyone rushes off the bus, and we do the same. We look around. Omar’s falafel stand is a block away. We’re still holding hands. We get a taxi home. [the author in Jerusalem, January 16, 1991]
0 Comments
One thing you hardly ever ask somebody on your first online date is, “Are you allergic to bee stings?” I read like a thousand websites with top ten lists of dos and don’ts for meeting someone online. Not one of these mentioned bee sting allergies as an important compatibility question. I’m here to tell you it’s important. It’s a Do. It’s a strange time to try online dating. I recently sold my house, closed my business, and currently have no physical address. I’m living in the camper of my Tacoma, driving around California, nomad-style. I have the idea that a sublime and cosmic combination of timing and accident may lead me to a new relationship, with an amazing woman, and I'm calling on the power of visualization and manifestation to attract her into my life. Also, I'm using a dating app. Day 1. I match with Patrice. We text all afternoon. I look at her photos forty-seven times: a little black dress at a winery in Barcelona, a rugged mud-smeared hike in the jungle, a flirty pic in a two piece. She lives in the mountains, a can-do adventurer with a PhD in biochemistry who totally buys into my shpiel about being on a sabbatical. We meet in the bar at the Lake Arrowhead Resort. Bright green eyes, cool jewelry, long dark hair, skinny jeans in an armchair by the fireplace. She sips a mojito, I have a margarita, we get a couple more. She tells me a long story about missing her train and being stranded in Cairo. I make self-deprecating jokes and we laugh our asses off. I go in for a closing hug that sort of lingers. It couldn’t be better. And then it does get better. On the drive back to my campsite, she calls. “Hey, my kids are with their dad. What if I jump in my camper van and meet you? Is it cool if I bring my dog?” Definitely. I’m staying at a private campground tomorrow on a nature preserve (like I’m some kind of van life VIP). I’ll text you the address. Is three o’clock good? She’s in. Yes! This is a good sign. It’s the beginning of my new life with Patrice, tripping down highways of laughter and chocolate and money, starting tomorrow afternoon. Day 2. She calls exactly at three. “Something's wrong with my camper van. I don’t think it’ll run.” I find Patrice and Mia, her three-year-old mixed breed, standing outside a fruit market on Highway 62. There’s antifreeze on the ground, and there’s a hose clamp under the van, the metal ring that attaches the hose to the radiator. I hold it up like it’s the Stanley Cup. Look! I say, easy fix. We’re good. The problem now is that my campground tonight is off the grid. I can’t call the guy, there’s no reception, only GPS. I have to meet him at the gate at five or else I lose my spot and have nowhere to stay. I need to get this chick’s van fixed in the next hour and get us to the campground so we can get busy building our life together. “I don't know . . . I'm going to call my insurance company.” Wait—you didn't have an accident. You don’t need to-- “I'll call the insurance company, and then I'll call triple A. And then I'm calling my friend Janine.” She’s not talking to me. She’s talking to herself, or maybe to Mia. She’s making a mental list, putting imaginary sticky notes up on the inside of her head. I get the feeling she does this as a response mechanism, any time she’s confronted with the unexpected. What happened to the can-do confidence of that woman from the lobby bar who hikes in the jungle? Look, I say, there’s a mechanic’s shop over there, the white sign. We can drive your camper—it’s downhill. But if you tow it home, you’ll just have a broken van in your driveway. I’m impressed with my skill at rhetoric. The guys from the shop come out and predictably tell her she needs a new radiator for $1,500. She starts to hyperventilate, and calls Janine. I go in and tell the guys, look, it’s just the hose clamp. Charge her fifty dollars and attach the hose. If she gets a tow, you get nothing. They have a meeting and say, okay, half an hour. In some hidden corner of my mind, I see the crack widening down the center of my fantasy. I know it’s over. But I can’t leave. I need this story of luck and timing and redemption to be true. I can’t exit the narrative I’ve already written. They finish two hours later. The van runs fine, but I miss my campground meeting. It’s colder now and getting dark. The mechanics tell us no one cares if we park overnight by the nature preserve. We find a couple of parking spots under the trees. I pull out the stops. On my camp stove I make us a chicken piccata, fresh lemon and garlic, capers, bowtie pasta, even chilled sauvignon blanc. Making dinner in the parking lot! Years from now we will laugh when we tell our friends this story. Patrice eats everything and says nothing. No eye contact, except with Mia. Why isn’t she being more fun and flirty, after I fixed her van and made her dinner and saved her fifteen hundred dollars? She chugs two glasses of wine, stacks her dirty dishes on the ground, and tells me her plan to get up early and call the tow truck. She wonders if tow trucks are more plentiful before 7am or after. She is blind to every detail of this experience except this desperate, irrational need to tow her fully-functioning camper van seventy-five miles back to Lake Arrowhead. She’s tired now, and needs to feed Mia, and disappears inside. I’m doing the dishes. I hate her. But--maybe she’s embarrassed, or she’s afraid I’m not interested after kind of a shitty day. I’ll make breakfast tomorrow, and tell her I’m having a great time. Which I’m not. I’ll help with the tow, and we’ll go back to her place. Maybe we’ll have makeup sex, and start our life together. Soapy water runs over my shoes. Day 3. I make pour-over coffee, hash browns, veggie sausage. No morning flirt, no thanks-for-everything yesterday. She scowls at her phone. It’s an hour until the tow truck gets here. She offers, “Let’s go check out the nature preserve.” I’ve never been here so, sure, why not? We bring Mia and a couple of water bottles. The hiking trail wanders through an oasis in the Mojave. There’s a creek, some little waterfalls, lush vegetation on both sides of the trail. The cool air and fresh water sort of wash away my frustration. It’s fine. Just end it. Say goodbye and part as friends. She says, “There’s a lot of bees here.” It’s fine—they won’t bother you. “I might be allergic to bee stings.” Really? But I’m not thinking, “Really?” I’m thinking, You don’t know whether you're allergic to bee stings? You’re 46. I say, Don’t worry. It’s just a bunch of honeybees. She says, “Ow.” Please, let it be a cactus. “I got stung.” No, you didn’t. “I did. Look at this red streak going up my arm.” I see the mark of a beesting on her wrist. There is, in fact, a red streak climbing her forearm towards the elbow. “I need to get back to my camper.” I’m calculating. Twenty minutes. I know exactly nothing about the physiology of the body's allergic response to bee venom. This is a purely uneducated guess. Do honeybees even have venom? I’ve probably got twenty minutes before Patrice passes out or foams at the mouth or something. Let's get back. Here’s some water. “I feel dizzy. I’m getting a headache.” We need to get you back to your van. “My vision's getting cloudy.” You’ll be fine. It’s not far. “No, it's not that way. It's this way.” No, it’s not. “Yes it is—it’s this way.” It's fucking not. It's fucking that way. This relationship outlived its potential a day and a half ago. The only thing keeping me here at this point is my fear of being charged with misdemeanor accidental negligent homicide or something if Patrice spasms to death by bee venom on this nature walk. We make it back to the parking lot. Twelve minutes left. She appears to be fine even after walking back. Ordinary beesting. She says, “I have an epi pen in my camper.” She comes out with a little zippered kit, and hurries through the pages of the instruction booklet on how to self-administer a rescue dosage of epinephrine. Looks like her vision is not so cloudy anymore. Nine minutes to go. She sits on the ground, positioning various items from the case uncertainly on the ground around her. Have you done this before? “No. I've never been stung by a bee before.” If you’ve never been stung why do you think you’re allergic? “Well I just don't know. I better call 911.” I don't think you need to call 911. You seem okay, no respiratory problems, no seizure. I’ll drive you to urgent care. I immediately regret saying this aloud. And by the way, that's the fire station right there. I saw it when we pulled in. “No. I’m calling 911.” Well, if you call 911, they're just going to call those guys. I point at them, even though we can’t see them, inside their cinderblock firehouse across the street. I get a bowl from the back of my truck and pour some water for Mia. She calls 911 and tells the operator, “Medical emergency.” Is it? Six more minutes. She recounts the hiking trail, the bee sting, the epi pen, our location. A minute and a half later, the station doors swing open. An ambulance and a fire truck roll out, sirens on, lights on, a whole production. They drive past three houses and a length of chain link fence, and turn into our parking lot. I’m holding the leash. Mia and I watch on our left where two EMTs exit the ambulance, connect Patrice to a saline IV, and help her onto a gurney. On our right, two other first responders are doing paperwork when the truck arrives from Yucca Valley Towing. Rick the driver winches Patrice’s camper up onto his flatbed, so now Patrice and her van each have their own gurney, even though they are both running fine. The tow truck drives away as Patrice is hoisted into the back of the ambulance. Where are you guys taking her? “Desert Regional—closest emergency room.” That’s an hour away. As the doors close, Patrice calls out, “Hey! Bring my dog! And my purse!” Then four hours waiting with Mia in the ninety-degree sun outside the hospital. Then Patrice is discharged with no sign of allergic reaction or anaphylactic shock. Then the seventy-mile drive back to her house where the camper sits waiting in the driveway. On the way, Mia pees in my truck. I heard that milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. I heard that. I don't know. Monarchs are native where I live. They're endemic. Also, they're endangered. I heard that too. I don't know. It seems right. It seems like there used to be more butterflies. So I plant milkweed in my garden. It's not like I have a longstanding interest in monarchs, or butterflies in general. It strikes me as sad. There’s a melancholy, thinking of endangered butterflies. Everything feels endangered lately. I feel endangered. Everyone feels it. Monarchs don’t know they are in danger. They can’t imagine their own extinction. I'm curious how they earned a royal title. King Cobra, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Monarch Butterfly. It gives them a symbolic, almost mythical quality, more so than other kinds of butterflies, I think. I don't know. I can't really name any other kind of butterfly. I suppose the metaphor of transformation and rebirth applies generally across all butterfly species. A caterpillar—basically a worm—wraps itself in a cocoon somehow and sleeps in suspended animation, while nature transforms it into a new and previously unimaginable organism. It no longer crawls on the ground. It takes to the air. And don't we want this for ourselves? I want this to be me. I want to believe that after this cocoon—the pandemic turned everything upside down, forced us into cocoons, our homes, our little tribes, even our own minds are cocoons. And I want to believe in a transformation, an emergence after the suspended animation. The caterpillar can’t imagine what will come out of the chrysalis. Neither can we. Years ago, I visited the nature preserve at Ellwood Mesa, North of Santa Barbara: two or three hundred acres of coastal bluffs and eucalyptus forest, adjacent to Pacific, where monarchs breed and from which they migrate to Mexico. I was there in January, by chance on a day of hatching. I think it’s hatching. I don’t know. I saw one monarch, then another, then a third. I looked up and there were so many butterflies in the sky they blocked out the sun. A swarm or a murmuration or a kaleidoscope of butterflies that was altogether unimaginable. Thousands and thousands. I never forgot that. You never forget something like that. I plant milkweed in my garden, 30 years later, during the quarantine. I do not see a single butterfly. Then one day there are caterpillars, eight of them, black and yellow-green, fat little worms, eating the milkweed, chomping it to the stem. How long have they been here? How did I miss it? Monarchs flew in and laid eggs. This is promise. It’s more than bugs on my patio. This is something that means something. I need something that means something right now. I become a caterpillar whisperer. I watch them day and night. Their patterns of eating, sleeping, movement, social interaction, or what I think is social interaction. I don’t know. I visit every nursery and garden store in the city. I compare milkweed varieties. The leaves of the locally native plants are fine and light. The leaves of tropical and Mexican milkweed are sturdy and dense. Soon there are more baby caterpillars. I coax the little ones onto the local milkweed and the adults onto the larger plants. I buy more plants to sustain the food supply for these voracious insects. I count them several times a day, eleven now, terrified of losing one to the crows or seagulls. Should I build a screen enclosure around the garden to keep out predators? Shouldn’t I do everything I can to ensure they survive? Wouldn’t I want someone to do that for me? I’m sitting on the ground watching the caterpillars. My back is hurting, sitting here like this, because I have a couple of herniated discs, and maybe sciatica, I think. I don’t know. Two friends and WebMD say it’s a good bet. I watch the clock all day, counting the hours until another dose of pain meds. Eventually the right leg starts to fail. It won't hold the body up. Now I’m laying on a yoga mat on the ground, not walking, like a worm. My doctor won’t give me a cortisone shot—I need an orthopedic guy for that—but he orders an MRI of the lumbar spine. The MRI is a metal cocoon of spinning electromagnets. That's when they find the tumor. I read the report from the radiologist who examined the MRI. The radiologist made a mistake, I think. I don’t know. The word tumor, which I understand, is surrounded by other words which I do not: intradural, schwannoma, meningioma, et cetera. Or, maybe there is a tumor, but that's got nothing to do with it. It’s just bad discs. I think. Now and then, if I’m up off the floor, I go outside to check on my brood, my little herd, counting to eleven. Google tells me that soon, driven by urge and instinct, the caterpillars will each find a spot to attach their little caterpillar butt and dangle itself upside down. It will look like a little curly letter J. (Hey—that’s my initial.) Then it will build a chrysalis. I don't know how. I watch them day and night. I need these caterpillars to make it. I need to know I can make it. I need to know we can all make it. The tumor is inside the spinal cord, like a rock stuck in a garden hose. All the nerves that run down through the hose are being pinched and compressed by this rock. Treatment typically involves laminectomy—removing the bones of the spinal column—to access the dura, the sheath around the spinal cord. The dura is opened and the tumor resected, the vertebrae replaced, and the spinal column fused with metal rods. I will no longer have mobility in my spine. It is not the transition I was hoping for. I wanted out of the cocoon, with wings to fly. This is backwards, and upside down. They’ll be turning me into a worm. Then the monarch caterpillars guided me to a neurosurgeon at UCLA. They didn't guide me. I used my computer. Or did they? They are crafty little alchemists. The surgeon tells me he knows how to drill through the spinus process at the juncture of L2 and L3, open the spinal cord and perform a resection of an intradural schwannoma with a series of microscopic cuts and cauterizations, avoiding a complete laminectomy. Basically give me a giant surgery through a really small hole. Three days in the hospital, then three weeks on my back, then three months to full mobility. I will walk and drive and do yoga and plant more milkweed. But I live on the second floor, and can’t climb stairs, so I need to be away from home for the three weeks of recovery. I don't know how to find a caterpillar sitter. How can I explain to him or her to watch for sudden changes in behavior, such as not eating, or a long period of stillness, sometimes attached to the underside of a leaf, so you have to search for them. It's like they're meditating, gathering courage. Then they make a run for it. They travel away from the food source. They find somewhere to turn upside down. And after hanging there a while, maybe ten days, if you’re watching, you will see them split open down their back, and the chrysalis unfold from within, like they’re turning inside out. It wraps around them, pushing away the old skin, the outer worm layer they won’t need anymore. Then they hang there, wrapped in their translucent shell, doing nothing. Is it nothing? Is it surrendering or pulsating or quivering while the transformation just happens? Is that how it works? You just sit still and it just happens? I’m on a gurney on my back. They push me into the operating room. A cold feeling in my arm as the drugs rush into my veins. They’re putting me in suspended animation. They’re going to split me open. They’re going to make it so I’m no longer a worm. As I’m falling asleep, they turn me upside down. There are cockroaches on the mattress. The mattress is on the floor. I’m spending the night here. It’s a cement floor in a windowless basement that smells like feet and wet towels. It’s not how I planned to end my day. This morning, I got on a train in Paris. This afternoon, I arrived in Nice, and I’m on my way to villa, where I’m invited to go waterskiing this weekend with—I shit you not—King Juan Carlos of Spain. I’m traveling with three other guys—my friend Alex, and his two fraternity brothers. We’re all students at Cambridge, we’re spending a week in France with our stupidhuge backpacks, and Alex’s family is doing very well: his father is summering at what they call The House. It’s a 20,000 square foot estate in Monaco on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean, with a butler and a chef and an Olympic pool and a nine car garage, and they share a boat dock with King Juan Carlos of Spain. And His Majesty is taking the boat out this weekend, and we’re going. Alex calls his dad from a pay phone at the train station—I’m 21, there are no cell phones yet—and his father informs him the staff has only prepared for three guests, not four. So after an uncomfortable silence the three frat boys look at each other, then look at me and say, sorry bro, and they are driven away by le chauffer. Suddenly me and my stupidhuge backpack are at the train station in Nice with nowhere to stay. Fortunately, there were two American girls on our train and they’re still here. Fortunately, they have a hotel room near the casino in Monte Carlo, and they’re planning to dress up and drink and gamble all night. And fortunately, they say totally, come with us! And I say thank you to them and thank you to jesus, because now I’m shacking up with Stephanie and Michelle from Miami which is so much better than boating with three frat boys and an aging monarch. I wait outside while they check in because they only paid for two guests, and you pay per guest at this hotel, so technically I’m crashing. We spend the afternoon at the pool sipping cocktails and later that evening we’re getting dressed for our night at the casino and there’s a knock on the door. Boom boom boom. “Open the door! Gendarmes!” And I don’t speak a lot of French but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to parlex vous with the fucking gendarmes in your hotel room. There are two of them wearing these super snappy uniforms, and they’re with the hotel manager, and they throw me out. So now me and my stupidhuge backpack are walking down the hill, past the port with all the yachts owned by the sheiks. I find a little bar by the train station, I order a baguette with ham and cheese and a Belgian ale. It’s getting late, and pretty soon my beer is gone, and my sandwich is gone, and my villa is gone, and my girlfriends from Florida are gone, and the bartender says he’s closing. I say do you know a hotel? He tells me the hotels are sold out for the holiday. It’s a holiday in Italy and all the Italians are in France. I say, my friends left me behind and I have nowhere to stay. He says, “Well, if you like you can stay at with me for one night. I have a very large home that belonged to my grandmother. I live in Beaulieu, only two train stops away. My name is Claude.” This is some bonne chance. I help him close up the bar then we ride the train 20 minutes and walk a mile or so through winding streets with trees on both sides until we come to a storybook French manor home surrounded by a stone wall, with a path leading to a side door that opens into a huge kitchen, bigger than my apartment in LA, pots and pans hanging over a giant wooden table, the sink has a water pump, like nothing has changed in 200 years. Claude says, “You can wait in there”—it’s a sitting room with couple of couches—he says, “Here is some wine”—he hands me a glass—“I will come back and show you to your room.”—and he leaves. The home is exquisite—the kitchen, the artwork, the décor, all this Louis XVI stuff . . . this is what I want! I want to stay here, and hang out with Claude, and meet his friends, and work in the bar, and be like a local . . . this is so much better than trying to talk those girls at the hotel into a threeway. I’m looking around the sitting room. There’s an antique writing desk and on the desk there’s a stack of polaroids with a rubber band. The photo on top is a little boy, like 10 years old, smiling, in a swimsuit by a waterfall—I think maybe it’s his kid—Claude’s super old, like 40. I pick up the stack and the next photo is a different boy with his shirt off lying in the grass—maybe he has two kids? The next photo is two boys hugging each other. The next photo is another boy who’s a little older blowing a kiss. I look around and I notice on the bookshelf there’s a crate full of polaroids, and on the coffee table and the windowsill there are more. I’m 21, but I look 16, and there’s no pornhub yet. This room has hundreds of polaroids of little boys. I don’t say au revoir. I set down the wine glass, grab the stupidhuge backpack, and book it—through the kitchen, out the side door. I get to the street . . . I’m pretty sure the train station was to the left, so I start walking. It’s very dark, and very quiet. I hear crickets, and then a door slam, and then I hear Claude yelling, “Come back! Come back now!” I pick up my pace. I hear a car start. I see headlights through the trees coming towards me, so now I’m running. When the headlights get closer I jump off the road and hide in the woods. He drives past me and turns a corner. I think he’s headed for the train station, so now I’m following him. At this point it’s very clear that I will not be enjoying the royal waterskiing entourage, and I am not enjoying Stephanie and Michelle in a ménage à trois, and I’m not enjoying the hospitalitè of the local bourgeoisie—because I’m running through the woods on moonless night to escape from a bartending French pedophile named Claude. Eventually I find the center of town and there’s a shitty little pensione. I’m sweating and out of breath and I ask the night manager, do you have a room? He says, “No rooms,” and I’m like dude, por favor, anything. He says, “Fine, the housekeeper is not working today,” and charges me 50 francs for a mattress on the floor in the basement that’s crawling with cockroaches and stinks like feet because, c’est la vie. I am caring for 11 monarch caterpillars in my garden during July and August. I am so hopeful, invested in each little life. I want to see them all transform into butterflies, to see that nature still holds promise, that the unimaginable is possible, that beauty and delight have not deserted us.
Nature is not so straightforward. To my dismay, only two of them live to full maturity. Number One emerges while I am away, and I miss it. Then, ten days after transforming itself into a chrysalis, Number 11 cracks open and yes! A new butterfly folds out. Its wings are fragile and malformed. It behaves as though it is still its former self, still a worm that crawls. Its body is bloated and full of toxins. It flexes and flaps but does not fly. It literally clings to the shell of its old life. Hours pass. The wings gradually straighten and solidify. When it flies from the garden, its flight is halting, awkward, lacking grace. It crashes into a palm tree, where it spends the night, too far to return, too weak to go on. In the morning sun it flexes its wings again, but still does not fly—until a sudden breeze lifts it, ready or not! And it is away. The metaphor is unexpectedly complex. Instead of simple faith in progress it seems to say, take your time. Don’t expect too much at once. Allow ourselves to grow strong enough before we attempt to catch the wind. And even then, trust that the moment will come when we don’t need to do anything, except let go. |
Archives |