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Winter Week 6

Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk

To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair. Too often I feel I am living in a country I no longer recognize, a country determined to imperil every principle I hold dear and many of the people I love, too. Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard—or the nearby parks and greenways, or the woods surrounding our friends’ cabin on the Cumberland Plateau—is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear.

I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.

At heart, most people are good. This is one of my cardinal articles of faith, the principle upon which I have staked my entire conscious life. Maybe that explains why, for far too long, I assumed that the foulest voices of the political din were rare and isolated, faint and fading. I was wrong about that. Like King Lear on the heath, I had “ta’en too little care” of those who are made vulnerable by what is happening in American politics.

It wasn’t enough to write about the injustices. It wasn’t enough to give money to people and organizations working full-time to combat evil in all its forms. For my own sake, I needed to find a way to pitch in directly.

It was not yet dawn when I left the house for my first tutoring shift at a Nashville public school that serves refugee families. I groaned when the alarm went off that freezing day at the end of January. But I felt better the second I walked into the school. Haywood is a teacher, and I was once a teacher, and I spent many hours in many schools as the mother of three children, but it has been some time since I felt the very specific kind of electricity that fills any place filled with teenagers. The flowing stream of humanity in the hallways—staff, teachers, the security guard, even the teenagers themselves—seemed more cheerful than I have ever felt at six forty-five in the morning.

Two hours later, after helping with a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, I was humming as I walked back to my car. I wasn’t thinking about the cataclysmic state of my country. I was thinking about the bright, funny students I’d met in a class for English language learners. I was thinking about Bessie Smith singing “St. Louis Blues.” But when I started my car, the radio came on, offering the usual news summary that opens each hour’s programming. Two red lights later, my happiness was gone.

That’s how my vow of resistance finally yielded to the appeal of retreat.

When I came to the third light, I turned left instead of continuing through it, and I drove to a little park in the woods where I often walk. There wasn’t time before work to take the lake trail, my favorite path, but I walked as far as the dam and sat for a bit to watch a great blue heron fishing in the clear water. I listened to the invisible songbirds high in the treetops, and I watched the cold turtles climbing slowly onto fallen branches to warm themselves in the grace of a sunny day in January. For a few minutes, it was enough.