One Potato
“So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide. ”
Yesterday morning, I listened to the celebration of John Lewis's life and wept - not only because he's gone, but because of who our current leaders are not. His many sacrifices moved the needle but not as far as we had hoped. We still have a steep climb ahead.
In the afternoon, my listening day was bookended by a riff from Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! I cried again: maybe fifteen years until the Amazon rainforest becomes a carbon-emitter rather than a carbon sink; nuclear treaties scrapped and a renewed arms race under reckless despots here in the US, Russia, China, and likely Saudi Arabia, Israel and India; tens of millions of people starving now or soon; the pandemic and the plastics and the dithering. Our pockets are full of problems. Our basket of options is nearly empty.
We seem to have forgotten how spellbound we were back in March, as we watched the resurgence of the natural world during the pandemic lockdown. Climate restoration is hardly on the radar anymore as we rush to find a panacea in the form of a vaccine without addressing the root causes of our ills, still chasing quick fixes as if we didn't know better.
As the world spirals, the questions have not changed, though they grow more urgent: In the face of all that is happening, how to respond? What to do? What to say? How to sing our great yearning? Maybe it all boils down to this: How can we love so fully that we are transformed? My Liberian brother, Bill Saa, says, If I am healed, I can heal twenty people just by interacting with them; each of them can heal twenty; each of them can heal twenty more. That's the way it works. If this is true, or, perhaps, since this is true, then we must take our task to heart - to heal ourselves as best we can by learning to love so well that we, and the world, are transformed.
On election night, 2016, I was at the InterTribal Conversations in New Mexico. It was perplexing: no one mentioned the election. Not one word, before or after. My curiosity got the better of me, and I finally asked why. The young man in charge looked at me with great, pitying kindness, and said, Well, put it this way: we've been screwed for the last five hundred years, and we're still screwed now. For us, it makes no difference who's in the White House. Our work doesn't change. I hear the same thing in the West Bank: If we allowed one toxic individual to take us down, we would have given up long ago. During the Troubles, Joe Campbell, a peacebuilder from Northern Ireland, once told me, I'm here to make a difference in my time.
And so I've been wondering about this business of walking with the wind; of the work doesn't change; of how we can each make a difference in our time. And I think of my friend, Susan Cerulean, a splendid writer who is devoted to birds, particularly the shorebirds of northern Florida along the Gulf of Mexico, near Tallahassee, where she lives. She bears witness to human encroachment and its toll on the tiny, essential, feathered wizards who struggle to survive. Her new book has just been published: I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird: A Daughter's Memoir. It's the parallel story of caring for her dying father as he struggled with dementia, while trying to protect the endangered plover, the bird she adores above all. She says, The Earth is the brain and the body into which we were born... I offer you the story of my own explorations in service to this question: How can we care for this world? I have tried to reconcile my roles as one daughter caring for one father, as one woman attuned at times to only a single wild bird while the planet is burning. How I long to change the world for the better. Offering care to those we love is closely similar to standing up for our Earth. In all cases, we are required to be fierce and full-bodied advocates, in an endless series of small actions, each as important as the next. This story braids the human and the animal, as it must, for we can never be separate.
Last night, unsettled by sadness, I puttered aimlessly in the kitchen. I looked closely at some potatoes harvested from my garden - one potato, in particular. By the time it was pulled from the soil, it was no longer edible. Its skin is leathery. Shriveled. Its wrinkles look like an elephant hide. But here's the thing: it's sprouting! Its last dying act is to give itself completely to feeding new life. Last night, there were six sprouts. Today, there are seven. Tomorrow, who knows? A nursery rhyme comes to mind: One potato, two potato, three potato, four. Five potato, six potato, seven potato more. As the dying potato shrinks until it disappears, it empties itself into new life, as we must empty ourselves into a livable future. My task is to put those sprouts in good soil, to water and tend them with care. The same with my words, and all that I love. My prayer is that I learn to feed them well, knowing that we and the future will be fed in return.
