Postcards from the Rogue Valley

A few days ago, I started re-reading Barbara Kingsolver’s 2002 novel, Small Wonder, a favorite of mine. I bathed in Kingsolver’s words as an antidote to an especially destructive week for our democracy — as if it hadn’t already been destroyed enough. Yesterday’s passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” spurred me to spend today’s Independence Day harvesting some of Kingsolver’s reminders about savoring the small wonders that punctuate our daily lives. (A note: At this morning’s Ashland July 4th parade, a group of young people holding “End Genocide” and “Free Palestine” banners kicked off the festivities — I’m not quite sure how they snuck in — followed by eight police on motorcycles and the city’s marching band.)

Naming the things we love

Small change, small wonders—these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. It’s a workable economy.

It’s the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life… Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, “twixt two extremes of passion–joy and grief,” as Shakespeare put it. However much I’ve lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world’s least losable things.

Graciousness among friends

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that’s set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall.

What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.

Walls and hearts

Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

What is new is that we know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we’re left with a desperate sense that all of it is exploding, all the time. We see so much, understand so little, and are simultaneously told so much about What We Think, as a populace polled minute by minute, that is begins to feel like an extraneous effort to listen at all to our hearts.

Exercising resistance

In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we’ve believed in, throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self-preservation? The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses.

Questioning our government’s actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure.

Needing wild places

Oh, how can I say this: People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.

Photos — Naming the things we love: Far flung grandsons (Lucas, Damian, and Timmy) and small wonders at our fingertips. Needing wild places: Hoodoos at Bryce National Park; wild turkeys at our cabin outside Death Valley; sunset along the Oregon Coast.