Not Yet

There is another hostage crisis and we are all captive. Waiting for the outcome of the political circus, the resolution of our deepest anxieties, much of the country is holding its breath. We are all trying to make it through these last few weeks of not knowing, craning our necks, watching the trapeze artists, the tightrope walker. Everything is up in the air while we wait for the advent of solid ground we can stand on. Ours is not a culture that rewards hovering in the in between. We abhor ambiguity, the shadows. This is a painfully uncomfortable neither here nor there moment and we are all in it. Yesterday, I saw a drawing at a gallery opening that perfectly reflected this condition. The caption accompanying the drawing said "the abyss yawns but it does not sleep." Looking up at the tightrope is dizzying. Looking down into the abyss is frightening. And there is no straight ahead. Not yet.

At home, I wrap myself in sweaters and blankets. I eat too much comfort food and watch baseball. It's been raining all day today, but not in Chicago where the Dodgers are playing the Cubs. During the unfolding of the postseason, I think about the rain. It's that rain that always comes when fall begins to lean into winter and the burnt sienna trees give up the ghost. It streams through the porous roof of the sukkah, a monument to impermanence. Here in New England, in the attics of our minds where we keep the wool socks, the thermal underwear, we are anticipating ice. We don't know it consciously and we don't know exactly when it will come, but soon enough we'll be standing outside the door sprinkling rock salt like confectioner's sugar down the front steps. But not yet. This is above all a season of not yet.

We have not yet fallen on the ice this year. Later, it will hide on the blacktop or under the snow, threatening us with its slippery lack of empathy. Sometimes, it will fall from a dark sky and cover our windshields with a brittle crust, daring us to get from here to there unharmed. It has its upside, ice does. It offers its slick, glassy surface to swan-like Russian skaters. But overall, ice is misanthropic, unloving. Better to crush it mercilessly and introduce it to Margarita.

When it melts in the spring, crocuses giggle, birds trill their free-spirited sing-song. Then, droplets irrigate the born-again grass, rivers rush headlong to meet the sea. Waves approach the shore, tickling the toes of small children building sandcastles with moats that empty and fill with the August tide. Once long ago when we were taking our two boys to Tobago for the first time, the airline lost our luggage. We arrived in the punishing heat dressed for the arctic, no sandals, no bathing suits. The very first thing we did was tear off our north country clothes and fly naked and unashamed into the Caribbean, after which, covered in sweat and salt, we stood rapturously under cascading outdoor showers that reminded us of the waterfall where the Konkapot meets the Umpachene. It receives us, water does. It cleanses us and slakes our thirst.

In another state, not red or blue, but scalding, hot enough to burn your hand when you drain the angel hair, water becomes steam. It whistles a happy tea tune. It creates an entire percussion section, making that deeply consoling knocking noise that tells you the radiators in a drafty New York apartment love you and won't forget you. It pours out of our mouths in winter breath, affirming for us that we are warm-blooded animals even as the air on the far side of our skin is below freezing. Water has its moods, icy and forbidding, steamy and evanescent, just right for swimming, for drinking.

Watching the rainfall, a lesson from nature arrives at my front door. It's the lesson of neither here nor there, the understanding that definite boundaries in time and space are often human conventions, designed to make our experience intelligible, tolerable. This not that. But what if the various material states of water are not boundaried, despite everything we learned in school about the boiling point, the freezing point, in Fahrenheit and Celsius? Our teachers admired specificity. They had no feel for those liminal intermediate moments when water hovers between solid and liquid, liquid and vapor like a blurry pre-dawn consciousness in between dreaming and waking. This is the existential situation we find ourselves in for another two weeks waiting for the election to be over. It's foreign to our way in the world. Still, here we are, the future of our country hanging in the balance, inhabiting a state of suspended animation, like water on those days when it freezes, then melts, then freezes again. Or those times when it refuses to boil, no matter how intently you stare at it.


For more on impermanence and the lessons of nature check out Aruni's piece below.
http://coacharuni.com/2016/10/the-lesson-of-leaves/

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