Holding More Chickens

November 22, 2020, Freeport, Maine

In idle moments, while walking out to the mail box in the chill wind or washing up the dishes in the evening and staring out into the dark woods, my mind searches for an escape from this moment when reality blinks on and off in such slant form it is unrecognizable.  I look at the blue cupboard door in the kitchen and imagine opening it, finding another door inside that dark space and falling into a lost world: a world where everyone agrees that an apple is an apple and a pandemic is a pandemic and a win is not a loss and truth doesn’t come in two different varieties depending on what color hat you are wearing. 

“It’s all too much for me,” like a mournful church bell, I hear this sentence toll in my head all week.  I hear it too from my friend M. when we walk the leaf strewn paths that meander along the shore at Wolf Neck Campground where deserted campsites await Spring.  I hear it spoken in my telemed office where, in the double screen, I see that my face mirrors the disbelief and the discomposure I see in the faces feet away from me.  I have but small offerings to soothe the internal disturbance that accompanies the monumental and unprecedented disturbances in both the institutions of our country and the thought processes of its citizens: be kind, stay connected, don’t live inside the reality of catastrophes that haven’t yet happened.

Out for a walk yesterday, Finn offers another remedy.  I ask him if the isolation of living in the woods and rarely seeing anyone but his family, never going anywhere but school, and that just a few times a week, makes him lonely.

“You never have to be lonely, Gigi.  Nature is all around us,” he answers with that wise, much older than almost eleven, voice.  By nature, he means not only all the deer and the coyotes and the rabbits and the frogs we live with in the forest, and all the ferns turning yellow, but the six outrageously fluffy chickens that gobble and cluck around his house all day. I tell him I know what he means and describe what I saw yesterday when, standing a few hundred yards from my house, suddenly, out of the quiet sky, I saw a goshawk fly into the open space between the trees.  The bird was about ten feet above the ground and its heavy black wings, 40” in span, bent and flapped once as it glided silently across the road and disappeared into the thick woods on the other side.  But two feet behind it, chasing the hawk, was one small, brave bird.   When small birds feel threatened, the word “mob” is used to describe how they try to drive the big bird away and secure their own space for themselves and their buddies.

I ponder the words mob, mobbing.  The image of the small bird.  The word threatened. Does everyone in our country now feel like the small bird, does each side identify the other as the predator threatening their beliefs, their way of life? 

***

I want my old mind back, the mind I had before democracy was so threatened, before covid and its unfettered spread cancelled Thanksgiving, before I saw global warming as an immediate threat. I don’t want to be living with so many foundational complexities rushing through my mind, each one dragging screeching box cars laden with rancor and fear and denial.  My mind wants to flee.  Wants to lose itself.  Perhaps an alternate reality, my mind devilishly suggests — a game I could play with friends, a mystery I could throw myself into to solve the enormous problems facing us now.  Something with clues which account for the hawk, where it lives, how to find it, what it really represents. We could call it Q’hawk.  I understand the lure of the game, the lure of delusion.

I want to lose myself in something loud and rhythmic. I want to be in the middle of the maskless crowd at the Live Aid concert and hear Queen play the first startling piano notes of Bohemian Rhapsody, sing the plaintive opening word that pulls your heart apart: Mama.  Mama.

And later,

Carry on, carry on
As if nothing really matters

Mama, ooh
I don't want to die
I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all

I don’t wish I’d never been born at all.  Though all this is “too much for me,” it’s still chillingly fascinating, still holds the awe of what it means to be human. I just have to push the walls of my mind out to hold more complexity and contradiction, more conflict, more uncertainty, more fear, more love, more beauty, more chickens.