CLASS NOTES: A SHORT HISTORY OF PERMANENCE by Marilyn Sigman
We were so smart, we were so funny. We were going to change the world that we were convinced wasn’t meant to be unjust or at war or filled with unhealthy food, unhealthy relationships, and useless things that couldn’t be reused or recycled. Our connected daily lives, our friendships, our passionate loves, our politics or what we solemnly declared our solidarity, felt like the beginning of what would never end. A yellowing piece of newsprint in tucked-away diploma quotes Richard Nixon: “In the whole history of the world, in all of the nations of the world, there has never been a time I would rather be a graduate than in the year 1973, in the United States of America.” Thirty-five years later, nostalgic memories are burnished, echoing with the laughter and delight of encountering a new and glorious world. So real, and yet so past.
“Want to hear from your Stanford classmates?” begins the email that entreats me to be part of my 35th college reunion. “Create a class book page for the upcoming reunion.” And then, ominously, “People who don’t submit a class page usually wish they had.”
I feel a resistance in the pit of my stomach, at the base of my skull. College in 1969 was all about rebellion. I was a freshman that year of the Vietnam War Moratorium, attended hugely in the Bay Area, which culminated in anti-war protests that shut down the campus completely in spring quarter. That same spring was the birth of Earth Day with Stanford founding “ground zero.” Now I rebel at the formulation of a Christmas letter blown up to the scale of an entire adult life. We are now in our late 50s, with a world seemingly much diminished from the one before us at 21. My optimism feels faded. At the 30th reunion, during a session where a small number of classmates were selected to tell their after-college story, one of the audience members erupted. “Some of the smartest people I have ever known are in this room,” he shouted. “We should be able to solve all the problems in the world. Are we going to leave all them to the next generation?”
The Stanford alumni magazine appears in my mailbox despite my conspicuous lack of donations. I can’t help but read the class notes. Many of my classmates were born and raised in California and have lived there during their entire life after Stanford. Others went on to law school or medical school in large cities on either coast and remained. Somehow, the people I wonder about most don’t write or email in. The ones who do are now running entire hospitals, curing cancer and AIDS, being asked to reinvent government, or retiring from their state legislature. Those that were more rebellious tout their success in creating world music, decades of teaching and practicing yoga and body work, or designing green buildings for eco-conscious movie stars. I can’t help but make comparisons. Coming to Stanford like everyone else from the top of my high school class, I now rank in the bottom financial rung of my fellow alumni. They report marriages that began in college and have lasted, kids now going to Stanford, and above average levels of happiness. After several relationships and a marriage that didn’t last, my companion is a very sweet Samoyed dog. Have I changed and lived the life of goodness and virtue I envisioned or has the changing world just overtaken me, flattening me like a steamroller?
In August 1974, I found myself hurtling across Canada by train on my way to Alaska the very day that Richard Nixon, who had championed the great good fortune of the timing of my college graduation, announced his resignation. I arrived in an Alaska of intact ecosystems, just before a classic environmental campaign that set aside immense cores of wilderness.
In the summer of 1975, I went to the Arctic tundra for the first time, a pattern I was to repeat for eight of the next ten years. Umiat, the place I first landed, had come into being as a base for oil exploration in the 1950s and was now largely abandoned. On the map, it was located within what seemed then to be the merely hopeful “Naval Petroleum Reserve #4.” The airstrip, large enough to land large military jets, was like a short, graded gravel road to nowhere in the midst of tundra that was as old as the Pleistocene. I was greeted by a whining, winged ocean of mosquitoes and instantly fascinated by the quirky history and uncertain fate of Alaska’s Arctic.
The Arctic tundra was still a relatively new scientific frontier then. Umiat turned out to be the perfect landing place for a would-be ecologist – in the Colville River valley, nearly dead center of the Alaskan land mass, surrounded by a perfect diversity of tundra habitats. I could step off the gravel pad and plunge into tussocks, the short islands built by generations of cottongrass roots trapping soil to stay above the ocean of water that surrounded them. I could stroll, or rather stumble, to nearby patterned tundra, a geometric quilt of many-sided polygons with higher, drier centers surrounded by the lower wet troughs. Closer to the river, marsh plants and tall willows thrived, and the river itself was carving the country around the 800-foot-tall Umiat Bluff. The top of the bluff was as dry as the tundra ever got, home of short, leathery heath plants, like the moors of Scotland, and stony fell-fields of lichen-covered rocks.
Red-tailed hawks screamed and peregrine falcons glided as they rose from their nests on the cliffs above the river. Marsh hawks flew their undulating paths over the wetlands, stopping to hover over a promising rustle or a tell-tale shimmy of grass signaling a scurrying lemming. Moose, the very animals we were seeking that summer as the most recent inhabitants of the tundra, like a kind of biological Holy Grail of the moment, could be heard crashing through the willows.
Even before I arrived, I had learned that Arctic tundra was, by definition, treeless, cold, and underlain by perennially-frozen ground, termed permafrost, within inches or feet of the ground surface. It’s the land beyond the northern limits of tree growth. The dense boreal forest gives way along its northern edge to woodland with few trees, and then to scattered trees, finally to individual trees in environments so harsh that upright tree form was abandoned. The final northern landscape is nearly completely flat and devoid of the comforts of shade, snow interception, or protection from winds and temperature extremes that the forest canopy would provide. It’s a land of ground plants and shrubs and largely horizontal.
The simplicity of the tundra ecosystem was, in fact, one of its most attractive traits to me as a newly-hatched biologist: short food chains (polar bear-seal, wolf-caribou-lichen), a relatively small number of species of plants, and fewer of animals. In the 1970s, before technology and well-heated oil development facilities forced Arctic biologists outside year-round, to be a student of the Arctic meant that the long winters were spent analyzing data and contemplation somewhere else. It was still possible to become an expert, relating every new hard-worn fact into a spare framework, as comprehensible and amenable to brute mental labor as a log cabin.
When I traced the origin of the word “tundra,” I found that its origins were in the Latin word tuntere and the Russian tundra, both of which describe a barren ground or wasteland. But the reality was anything but. During that first tundra summer, I witnessed a compressed explosion of life. It was permafrost that made sense of it all. Ice was like a set designer for the brief summer pageant, weaving the tundra tapestry through its cycles of freezing and thawing and the movements of underground ice. The surface had buckled and cracked, often in astonishingly regular geometric patterns of polygons. It had heaved upward, churned, boiled, and spewed rubble. As the large ice masses below the surface grew upward, they had heaved the soil into pingos, 30-foot-tall mounds with a solid ice core. The lower spots and cracks collected water, conducted heat downward, and melted the permafrost more deeply, which then subsided and slumped.
The underlying dynamics of ice governs all the life processes of Arctic tundra residents and visitors. Water and elevation became warp and woof to a miniature moiré velvet kingdom that spreads out for hundreds and thousands of miles. Plants are the threads in the tapestry, the conditions for life set by the depth of the water at any specific location. As the uppermost layer thaws, plant roots begin to function. The thawed soil in the flat tundra soon becomes waterlogged, the cool air slows evaporation, and it never dries out during the short summer. Small variations in elevation wrought by the slow grinding of ice and water translate into various degrees of wetness. Mere inches separate the areas that drain and become “upland” for the majority of the summer from the permanently flooded wetlands or “bottomlands.” A few more inches separate areas that are flooded occasionally from those that are permanently and shallowly flooded; more inches and the land is covered by deep, ponded water. The result is a small number of repeating, stable patterns of plant communities; here adapted to deep pond margins, there thriving on miniature uplands, there spreading over the leeward side of a pingo.
I learned the names of plants that summer, flipping through Hulten’s tome of the Flora of Alaska again and again looking for a match between line drawing, range map, and the plant I held in my hand. I began to chant the Latin names like poems as the plants unrolled before my eyes when I strode along ridges or slurped down the troughs of tussocks and polygons. The flowers changed at the rate of movie marquees – one week, tall and delicate yellow narcissus starred; the next week sturdy pink plume bistort. The plot was all boy stamen meets girl pistil through the potent one-note love letters of pollen.
The birds arrived by the thousands to perform the tundra chorus. Ducks and geese, swans, loons, grebes, gulls, sandpipers, plovers, and phalaropes spread out to feast on the abundance of mosquitoes and aquatic life. The tundra resounded to the manic laughter of the common loon, the stubborn off-key tweets of the white-crowned sparrow, the perfect-pitch melody of the golden plover, and the coffee-grinder whirrings of the willow ptarmigan. Loons commenced stately journeys between coastal fishing grounds and inland island nests, while owls and jaegers perched on well-fertilized hummocks and scanned for food for their young.
Mammals were more like the walk-on players. Arctic ground squirrels emerged from melting snow bank dens to dig new warrens of tunnels in the thawed south-facing slopes. Grizzly bears returned to the tundra from winter dens in the foothills. The pregnant caribou cows arrived on their forced march to their traditional calving areas, accompanied by wolves. Female polar bears emerged from coastal snow dens with their cubs and range inland from the offshore ice pack. Arctic foxes shadowed them, living on scraps. Caribou herds moved like amoeba, extending long lines of individuals like sensory structures outward along well-worn trails. The landscape is here suddenly empty while that patch of the tapestry was suddenly alive with snorts and brown bodies and spiky antlers. They munched and crunched the lichens which may take as long as 100 years to re-grow.
In late July, the Arctic sun dips below the horizon for the first time. In 1975, the first time I saw it happen, it felt like the longest day in my life so far. I still look at the picture I snapped at the exact moment the sun disappeared. It has a meaning that is undeniably mine alone, peculiar to my personal history and perspective at that exact moment, and the melancholy that struck me immediately afterwards. By the first week in August, it had snowed. By the end of August, the dark outside the circle of the lantern was deeper than my memory of it. Until the long moment passed for my eyes to adapt, it was as sudden and disconcerting as a cave.
More than thirty years after my first step for women scientists onto the wobbly ground of the tundra, nearly forty years after the first Earth Day, I’m an environmental educator, teaching Alaska’s school children about global warming. It’s a household word, from cabins in Yup’ik and Inupiat villages being washed off cliffs by violent seas to the mansions along Louisiana bayous with high water marks above the first floor windows. The Arctic, we are told over and over again like a mantra, is ground zero for climate change. Tundra is melting. Polar bears are dying. Walrus leap into boats. The environment I have been trying to preserve is vanishing before my eyes. The age of beasts and beastly environments is coming to an end.
The warming conditions of the world are becoming what humans have never experienced before in their tenure on the planet. What we are encountering is nothing that our genes, strained through the bottleneck of the Pleistocene Ice Ages, could remotely anticipate. From Fairbanks north over the serrated blades of the Brooks Range, past the curving mounds of the foothills, stretches the tundra, rectangular ponds and lakes without end, as if polygons were the only consonant in the visual language of permafrost and water its only vowel. The streams and rivers glint silver black from horizon to horizon, entangled by a subtle gravity on the flat Arctic Plain.
Now we have to wind the tundra backwards. It’s the opposite of Ice Nine, Kurt Vonnegut’s fanciful weapon that could freeze the world from a single splinter crystal. When permafrost melts more deeply, the sets of the summer play sag and slump. Ponds and lakes drain; coastal ponds are filled with salt water as barrier berms are overtopped. If the shallow active layer over deep, frozen tundra is all about slow decomposition, then warmer tundra speeds it all up, releasing a cascade of nutrients and most of all, CO2, to the atmosphere. In the great turning, the vast tundra sink becomes a source. Ground squirrels wake up early and find no food. Their babies, destined to be born into the exquisite rhythm of the system, miss the beat, and crash into the mortality of being out of step. Shrubs, on the other hand, grow much better in the warmth. Their dark branches contrast to the whiteness of the long period of snow, so their expansion translates into more sunlight and heat absorbed, speeding up the thawing of the ground. Recent models predict that 77 to 90 percent of Alaska’s tundra present in 1920 will be gone by 2100.
The perennially-frozen ground of the Arctic tundra, like the perennial ice of the Ice Cap, is – well, indisputably – melting. Perennial, like diamonds, is supposed to be forever. How can I face the loss of this massive world of the Arctic tundra in its intricate ecosystem dance? Have I been completely deluded? Completely lost in illusion? Have I lived my life as a fool, thinking myself smart and filling up with interlocking ecological knowledge about a mirage that will fade away just as I think I finally understand it? Am I the only one who fell for the word “perennial”? The world changed, and the rate of change is accelerating, but in the direction I have been fighting against all my life.
Stanford sends me numerous pleas for money, exhorting me to make this the year our class gift is bigger than that of every other graduating class. I know they have a billion dollar endowment so my nostalgia only goes so far in motivating me to make what would be a measly contribution. They send me (well, probably my entire demographic) a carefully-crafted brag about their leadership in understanding global change and sustainability. Earth Day 1970 was apparently a melodrama, a diversion of the energy of freshman girls like me in our embroidered Mexican blouses and granny glasses who would otherwise be protesting the Vietnam War under the guidance of self-styled Maoist revolutionaries. The university has ten times as many buildings now as it did then. Not one dime of the billion is mine.
Endowment or not, nothing is permanent, it seems. The Dow can drop hundreds of points in a single day we are re-learning, and then drop again the next. The stock market can have a melt-down, no doubt affecting the retirement accounts of even my wealthiest classmates who thought they were choosing the path of security.
There are only two classmates whose paths continued to intersect with mine in a meaningful way. I’ve kept in touch with Karin, my roommate sophomore year, for all of the last 35 years. We’ve traveled to each other’s homes and favorite places (The Tetons! The Pacific Ocean! Alaska!), sharing break-ups and divorces and her remarriage, and the deaths of our parents. Karin majored in Japanese Studies and has been a student of Buddhism ever since. In Buddhism, she has explained to me, reality and self are emptiness. Emptiness, indeed, is the nature of reality – all things of the world are in flux, coming into existence and perishing. Best not to attach, which is done in ignorance of this true nature and the basis of all human suffering. How then, do “I” exist as her friend?
And of course, I had a first love. Robert majored in philosophy, running the gamut from Plato to the Void, while I dabbled at the philosophical edge of biology that affirmed that life was more than mechanics. The 30th reunion, he arranged a “date” with me to meet over sushi and told me he would always love me. His emails began to emerge from the void, like intense ghosts, for four years, then stopped. Just one year ago, my last gift to him was the entire set of the U.N. Millennial Assessment reports on environmental sustainability, reasoning that it was an important analysis for someone planning to create a global biotech “fund of funds” to create wealth and green industry in Brazil. His subsequent last gift to me was Zero Limits, a Hawaiian version of The Secret, the New Age bestseller about using your mind to create your own reality of endless love and wealth. I think we were equally baffled by the gifts.
Endowments, friendship, true love – are none of them permanent?
These are the cold, hard facts about a warming climate. Despite the frozen nature of my snapshot memories scattered through the last three decades, permafrost and perennial ice, it turns out, are maps, not territories. As the atmosphere warms, the world map of permafrost will shrink in extent and the depth of thaw will go deeper and deeper each year. The world map of sea ice will shrink and thin. The Arctic ice cap reached its tipping point in 2007 and will disappear within decades, not centuries.
These are the cold, hard facts about the ecosystems that have evolved with permafrost and ice as long-lived physical features in their environment. The lives of almost all animals within them depend on it. The changes we are talking about will affect all of the world’s ecosystems. It truly is all connected and the effect of the Arctic melting at a rate twice that of anywhere else on the planet will change everything.
There are no cold, hard facts about how we’re supposed to feel and respond in the light of this massive and rapid change during our lifetime in what we think of as nature, the natural world, or wilderness. We will have to come to terms with impermanence on the scale of the polar bear and the tiger, and on the scale of entire ecosystems. How will we bear it?
It all boils down to what we are capable of. I am hurtling downward like everyone else in a material way, my mind stuffed with the artistic and technological creations of my culture that hide my dependence on the strands of a web of relations. What is truly global is that we are all going down together – the Native Alaskan elders in their shape-shifting Arctic coastal villages, the Buddhists, the New Age possessors of esoteric secrets, the clueless. We’ve been upright apes, Pleistocene cave men and women, migrants from out of Africa via Asia crossing a land bridge and colonialists from Europe sailing to a New World. Can we save the living world? Can we save ourselves? Will we be saved? Is there some ocean of positive, numinous energy that permeates every wave of us with ceaseless currents? Or are there just individual islands of illusion and positive attitudes that the spectacle of life on earth will continue?
Are there clues from the Native peoples, who have occupied the Arctic tundra for thousands of years? Until relatively recently, they were necessarily as nomadic at the other mammals, moving their camps to places they could catch fish, gather berries, and hunt caribou or seals. The realms of earth and sky are distinct, the horizons a vast distance away that never seems within reach. Their psychology was as spare and muscular as the landscape they scanned. But it shimmers at its edges. Outlines blur and shift, relative size is a complicated calculation, and mountain ranges float above the flats in mirage. Their tales capture the transformations of animals into humans and back again, the shape-shifting that occurs in the low-angle extremes of light of their cold desert. The forces they reckoned with were personal, embodied in each thing, stone and caribou and wind alike. The proper behavior was gracious, in the manner of a generous host whose generosity to give to self, family, and community was inextricable from the hungry need to take. The forces beyond their horizon were the realm of the shaman, who could plead their case if they failed and luck as a hunter and abundance was withheld. In the seemingly endless, flat world of the tundra, humans brought the world into being through song and dance, gifting and receiving.
There’s no way back. We and the Native people living in the modern world can’t go back to the state of mind that existed in a people totally immersed in their environment and totally dependent on its bounty. Even in my small Alaskan winter community, we have no collective stories we can tell each other during the long, dark winters that pass down hard-won wisdom about how to behave and survive. The Native elders are perplexed. Nothing in their experience and nothing in the tales passed down speak to traditional foods contaminated by pollution carried by winds from China. We don’t employ shamans, we have no one to intercede on our behalf, and we can’t even agree there is something or someone to receive our entreaties.
Regardless of our opinions or acts or indifference, we Alaskans are citizens of a state that guns down wolves from the air because they compete with humans for the moose and caribou that may be food but are often just trophies. Regardless of our spiritual beliefs, we Americans are citizens of a country where the dominant religion requires the belief that animals have no souls, no spiritual standing at all. Regardless of our dedication to recycling and re-usable cloth bags, we are also citizens of a global culture that is filling the very breath of the planet with invisible substances that melt down and shape-shift habitats and ecosystems, making it impossible for the animals, the food of the animals, and the food of the food of the animals, to return.
In Western philosophy, the relationship between self and world has been the subject of debate for centuries. You can get lost in the hair-splitting about forms and shades of realism, idealism, pragmatism. In my memory, my first love is still the young man grappling with Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue about the charioteer of the intellect holding the reins on the horses of reason and passion which make possible his ascent to the heavens; the balance of mind and desire that is required to ascend rather than to lose control and plunge into the chaos of lust and fury. He inspired my own flirtations with the lovely, unattainable Platonic ideals and neo-Platonic convictions of the Enlightenment that the world had a knowable structure, that there were answers to all the questions of human existence. When I am assigning blame, I zero in on Descartes. His dualistic philosophy of mind and body was the most far-reaching rationalization for the utilitarian approach that turned the natural world from a place to be inhabited into one to be used for human ends. Ceding the physical world to science and metaphysics to religion paved the way to godless nature and the dominion of superior humans in search of salvation of their individual souls, some inexpressible place outside the world of matter.
What about that New Age that is always dawning for the evolving consciousness of our species? It’s now a dizzying mélange of eclectic and often expensive individual quests, many for transcendence. With the right props, you can leave troublesome current reality behind and reside in higher states of mind. You can create your own reality. You can attract what you desire, that is the secret. Your inexhaustible wishes, not good works or faith or virtue, will bring the visible evidence of your salvation – love, happiness, and wealth, the last in the form of cold, hard cash. It’s a magical idealism, in which nothing really exists outside your mind and you possess the powers of conjuring and summoning. Why not try to conjure up and attract the permanency of tundra? Visualize world peace, with polar bears.
What about science, that generator of those cold, hard facts? Science bought me the wandering I craved in Alaska. Eight summers I traveled to the Arctic tundra – to study moose, nesting shorebirds, migrating fish, whatever the excuse. But it was the mysterious ecology that drew me, the gripping mosaic of which the small troves of scientific observations and data were only a fragment, like the anatomically-correct toenails on the saint. Ecological science constructs intricate schematics, virtual mandalas, of interconnections. But it can’t address ethical questions about how we should live or psychological questions about how we should feel about broken strands and the collapse of the web. In ecological science, humans, all of us, are in one box of the schematic and all of the links to other boxes are external.
In general, modern psychology has been tone-deaf to nature, as if human sanity could only be found inside a comfortable room of one’s own. Cognitive science, however, is beginning to converge with Buddhism in some ways. One cognitive scientist, Benjamin Libet, discovered a short gap with enormous implications. It takes nearly a half second for a sensation, such as touch on the skin, to be detected consciously. What happens during this half second is the hotbed of speculation, both scientific and metaphysical. Is it when memory, in the form of neural nets that have fired together in the past and are now wired together, “compares” this new sensation against all others from the past and “decides” whether it is novel or same-old-same-old tip of the fourth finger tip being brushed by a feather? Is it when the joy or horror of that smell or taste or touch come rocketing back and mobilize the body to fight, flight, or anxiety? What conditioning is taking place that constrains how what spoke to the sense will be transformed into thought or feeling or both? If it’s all happening subconsciously, it seems that “I” have nothing at all to do with creating the world I perceive and act upon.
But then there is the moment after – when something first comes into consciousness. Is this when the Buddhist in meditation can let go of craving and attaching to the sensation? There doesn’t seem to be a word in English for what could be happening in that moment. The Japanese have a term mono no aware which can be translated as the “ahhness” of things. The Mahayana Buddhists and the Hindu Upanishads employ the term tathagata which means both “thus come” and “thus gone” and has also been translated as “suchness.”
What we do or let go of in this moment feels like the root of it all. We are bombarded with advertising messages to act on impulse and gratify our desires now. We jump into classification, shove the moment into a box, name it. When we do so, mindlessly, we contribute to the diminishment of the world and of ourselves. Looking more closely into Buddhism, it is not desire that is the problem. Desire is natural and necessary for survival, to eat when we are hungry, to drink when we are thirsty, and to find a mate or friend when we are lonely. There is no blame or shame to desire, whether it is for a chocolate ice cream cone or the permanency of a self or an entire ecosystem. It is, however, ignorance, the Buddhists say, to perceive what we desire as having permanency. This particular type of ignorance is bound to lead to craving and grasping and finally, suffering, when the reality of impermanence becomes manifest. What to do, then, how to mindfully let go and begin again?
In addition to the goals of freedom from suffering, Buddhism has goals of living your life ethically with knowledge of the true nature of things, and ultimately, of liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Many Buddhist paths view the cycle, and thus the world, negatively, so there is an urgency to the escape similar to that in other paths to heaven and other enlightened destinations. But tathagata is another truth contained within Buddhism – the importance of appreciating reality by finding beauty in the ephemeral and transitory. “The flash of lightning in the sky, rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain” which, for the Buddha, was an accurate description of a lifetime.
The trick of living in the impermanence of the world could be to hold each moment in our consciousness as an absolute reality in its moment of being, just as it has flowed in from the past in anticipation and is flowing out into a future in memory. Each thing, each living being, each human connection – would then be real, but an event whose transitory nature is its meaning as much as is its bounded solidity. Tathagata expresses both the reality within the unique moment and the human ability to appreciate it. This is our special human power that leads us to be seduced again and again into mistaking our self for the reality and the “Ah!” that wells up into our being.
Holding on in the beauty of each moment, letting go – I could proceed, both with clear-eyed pessimism that the world is broken so I am moved to intervene alongside a clear-eyed optimism that I can slake my desires with every passing moment of beauty, so I am not paralyzed by losses. I could see the glass of the world as both half-full and half-empty and the water that is my fluid self both rising to the top and sinking to the bottom.
Maybe it’s also about the way to peer through the water. In the practical science of water quality, you can measure the turbidity or the clarity of the water; two ways of describing complementary qualities that depend on one another. Turbidity is all that clouds the water and blocks light from passing through. So you add something, a chemical reagent, to perfectly clear water until it is as murky as the water you have sampled. The amount of the blurriness agent you need to add are the units of turbidity. Clarity is about transparency. You lower a black-and-white patterned disc to the depth of water at which it can no longer be seen, like a sounding of the depths of your perception. The stuff of the world, by its very nature, blocks the light like mud. If I see and perceive everything in terms of its impermanence, I will be adding and measuring the cloudiness of loss that is at the root of the sharp pain of poignancy. But if, instead, I can behold what exists now, as transitory as all things are, my units will be those of clarity. I can either focus on all that blocks the light or see and perceive as clearly as is possible.
The life of this planet is in relentless transformation. Green things claw the sky for carbon dioxide and light, then shoot sugar downward to roots in the pulsing ground. Roots ply a labyrinth of mineral nuggets and are enfolded by blankets of mycelia who give as well as they take. Birds hurtle purposively through the air along magnetic songlines the length of the planet. Fish thrash upstream, mammals hunt in widening circles of scent and sound. As do we hurtle and trash and hunt.
In the shifting tundra landscape, the people native to that place know that real wealth is present in the relations in the web. We moderns can’t go back to a tribal mind integrated into the wholeness of living in the environment which became our food. But maybe we can dwell in a perspective that lies at the beginning of the process by which our own relentless cavalcade of perception gets stitched together seamlessly into logic and linear time. We moderns are just as enmeshed in the web of nature, where self and world intersect in moments of perception and co-create each other. The perception is equal parts “self,” as we experience it, and “world,” as it manifests itself to us in its shape in this moment. Each perception, each shape, lasts only as long as the unique intersection lasts. In the moment of its existence, it’s as crystalline in its absolute reality as ice. At its edges, it melts; it dissolves and flows.
My hope is that I can choose to flow with transformations and cease the internal jeremiad that accompanies the suffering of loss after loss. If I can choose the flow and the process, I can perhaps catch not only the whiff of nothingness in every thing, but also the whiff of the next thing coming from nothingness and the bouquet of every thing that can come. I can taste and savor the tang of existence, nourished by the wellsprings of a planet that is always being transformed, always dying, but always living as well.
After the reunion, I received two mementos of the mini-reunion of Jordan House Co-op, a place where I had lived communally and somewhat chaotically. The first was directions to a website where I could view photos and videos of my classmates “back in the day,” immersed in their lives now, and at their get-together for several days at a camp in the Sierras before the descent to the official reunion events at Stanford. In the last video posted, everyone is singing “Uncle John’s Band,” around the campfire with the musicians among them playing guitars and mandolins. The smiles on their faces are framed by gray hair, but they are as incandescent as the ones we wore during the Revolution. The second was a Jordan House Co-op mug adorned by a rose atop a mound of dirty dishes. As I curl my hand around the stout mug and sip my coffee, a red-breasted nuthatch darts by my window on the way to the feeder. The first snow of the year is falling as hail, small icy pellets popping off the deep fissures of elderberry branches wearing drooping green and brown flags. In the picture on my wall, I am still 22, watching the sun set over the tundra for the first time, configuring the trajectory of my life. Outside my window, 35 years later, the burial of snow is underway with icy, slippery paths outward. The reckoning of the Big Melt-down looms in the future. But for now, it’s the song and the mug and the coffee and bird and the new snow. We are all humming along.
Marilyn Sigman has published two essays, both in Alaska Quarterly Review.