the shawl of grief and wonder
above is a picture of a squirrel skin, recently “harvested”. It was not a harvest I wanted to make. I would have much rather seen her dash up a tree and out of site, but she was too slow for the over-sized truck barreling toward her. I saw it in a flash: wow! bushy tailed squirrel in the road! Then: oncoming truck whizzing past without a hint of brake light. What that human driving the truck left was a trembling body in it’s wake. I circled back and pulled over, driving slowly. Annoyed drivers rushed past, while the squirrel twitched as they passed over her and I waited for the road to clear…it was a brutal 15 seconds. Then, in the abrupt silence, I walked over and scooped her up, head bleeding, but warm and pulsing. Before another driver could seal my fate to the squirrels, I dashed back to the side of the rural highway that happens to run through a most gorgeous stretch of rolling, oak-covered hills. The squirrel had a far off look in her eyes, and then she didn’t. She was dead, just like that.
The tears that came surprised me, after all, it’s just another pesky squirrel, right? But my chest heaved and my tears kept escaping as I wondered at the softness I held, the bushy tail that extended far beyond the tips of the hairs, the perfect little ears…those brilliant claws. She belonged where she was, was essential to the humming beauty of those hills, and still had gifts to give. The grief brought profound gratitude, and the two emotions wrapped around me like a woven blanket.
I wanted to blame the brutish truck driver, but it could have been me in my car that dealt the blow just as easily. It’s the ability to drive by, without a second glance that makes me wonder, “where is our collective heart?” When do we remember that the grief of the clear-cut forest, or the other squirrels and birds looking on at the one they lost, or the countless species that go missing from the planet forever every single day, is our grief too? Why do we not stop everything when we witness death or destruction to weep with the world? What if we did?
I can’t leave the squirrel here, so I place her on a crumpled paper bag with a few acorns in the backseat, and drive on towards my own family. I sing as I drive, telling the story of the end of the squirrel’s life, as if she could hear me.
When I return home, I turn her death into an offering, laying her hardened body on the last rose petals of the season, and see my children get quiet and alert in the reverence of the moment. I pass her over to my son, who later skins her with tenderness, appreciating every detail, then buries her under a grateful Oak. I hope, in turning all his senses to this animal, he feels the wonder and grief wrapped around him too.
The story that grieving is too painful to bear is an old one, intertwined with the ones that say ‘focus on the positive’, ‘stay with the light’, ‘turn away from the dark’. We can’t decipher the light without knowing the dark, or know what love is without the thought of losing it. So many cultures hold practices that guide the psyche towards loss - death meditations, tonglen, maranasati. Joanna Macy has done decades of work around helping people honor their pain. When we attempt to stay with joy, pushing the grief away, we end up with an empty cup. it may still be called joy (or progress, or ingenuity), but there’s nothing in it. So, how to change the story, and fill the cup, collectively?
It matters that we change this story because our love is intricately tied to the survival of the planet, to our own species continuing, and without deep love for both ourselves and what we think of as other, we miss out on what it means to care. During this pandemic, for example, we’ve invigorated the plastic industry with barriers, individual containers - bulk bins a thing of the past – massive amounts of cleaning chemicals, but at what cost? We all know about the floating plastic island in the Pacific, that it never decomposes, but we’ve got to be safe, right? it depends on the definition of safety: does safe mean us individually, or species wide, or as a part of the metabolic earth? Is the road safe because drivers can pass easily, or is it considered safe only when it is safe for everyone (squirrel, fox, deer, bug) to pass?
we are the only species that gets to choose how to tell our own story. The story that we are separate from what we call ‘nature’…better, more essential, more powerful, is one we’ve been telling for millennia. We could tell a new - or, even older - story that we belong, that their grief is our grief, their suffering is our suffering, their extinction is tied to our own. In this story, everything is vital. Everyone matters. This is what Black people have been shouting at white people, what Indigenous people have been shouting at settlers. This is what recent immigrants are shouting at people who immigrated before they did, what women are shouting at men. We all have to matter in this story, and let ourselves be drawn in to the lives all around us and release our own storied isolation…to acknowledge who belongs, even if it's a pesky squirrel or a scraggly oak blocking our view…and to reckon with the depths of which we belong to each other, and the depths of which we belong to this earth.