I’ve always traveled. I’m a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done.
Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.
I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.
It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened while your attention was elsewhere.
Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.
When you look into your baby’s eyes,” my friend Sarah once said to me, “that will become your Tibet.” I have no doubt that looking into one’s own baby’s eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet.
Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?
How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.
The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it, until and even after it is gone, no matter how much it hurts.
Several times in my life, I’ve sat with women, friends of mine, who reveal, sometimes shyly, sometimes proudly, bruises of one kind or another, and I know I’ve said, “If it happens one time, leave him,” I’ve said, “It doesn’t matter how much you love him. Leave him if it happens one time.” And I’ve said it with utter confidence, as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, as if violence was something that could be easily defined.
Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Maybe it was simply what being a grown up meant.
We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us – it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen.
We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn’t dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.
To the people in Creede I am intelligent, suspiciously sophisticated and elitist to the point of being absurd. To the people at UC Davis I am quaint, a little slow on the uptake and far too earnest to even believe.
This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.
Remember this remember this remember this the next time you think it’s over, because some man, or some hope, or some life takes away instead of gives. Remember this and get on an airplane, a small one if possible, because it always works.
We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us – it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we’ve slept, the kitchens where we’ve cooked, in the food we’ve prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.
And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally, wounded at our hands.
How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy.
I’m just saying, I guess, there’s another version, after this version, to look forward to. Because of wisdom or hormones or just enough years going by. If you live long enough you quit chasing the things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.
I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even one that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.