what becomes of a broken heart?
We are here, opposite the exhales of autumn, hurtling into spring with consistent speed, and as far away from fire as we get, here in Sonoma County California. I’m feeling the infectious joy of sprouts popping out everywhere as they draw me down and close to inspect how new beings begin. It truly gets my vegus nerve relaxed and open and functioning properly. At the same time, I tuned into the radio for a short moment this morning to hear that the past 4 Januarys have been the hottest on record (planet wide), it reached 70 degrees today in Antarctica, and Australia has just announced, after 5 months of burning, that the fires there are officially contained. I know, now the vegus nerve is trembling as feelings of bewilderment and grief and exhaustion rapidly replace each other, right? I keep finding myself in this fluctuation of extremes: heart melting beauty swinging to heart melting devastation. How does our collective vegus nerve metabolize all that? How can we deeply allow both the gratitude and the grief to ebb and flow? Many wise people talk about this, my favorite ones being Rebecca Solnit, Pema Chodron, Joanna Macy, and Martin Prectel, but the common thread they all touch on is that of fierce radical acceptance in all the muck and tumble that drenches our daily lives. Easier said than done…
Recently, I had a love affair with a fox. sort of. You see, this red fox has lived in the blackberry patch for years, about 2 acres from where I lay my head. One day, with my toddler on my back, I wondered out to the field where about 100 newly planted native grasses and shrubs were taking root. Like any good mother I was checking on them, eyes cast down, scanning for blue eyed grass and buckeye, figwort and toyon. I happened to stop and look sideways, and there, not 50 feet from me, was a fluffy red fox, hammering away at the itch behind his ear. We stood transfixed, me and my 2 year old, watching as this beautiful creature scratched and chewed and licked nearly every part of his body. He even looked up and saw us a couple of times, but his bath was more important. I stood with tears welling up in my eyes - not even sure why - it was just so much to be so close with this fox, sitting in the sun at the base of an old valley oak, sharing an intimate moment. And then, he dissolved into the blackberry thicket, just like that. Over the next several days, I courted him with handfuls of madrone berries, toyon, some dried huckleberries from the season before, to which he replaced with scat, perfectly placed, where the berries were offered. I could have kept on like this forever, but then, my neighbor came home with a dead fox in her car. She’d spotted it on the side of a nearby road, and brought him home to take the skin. I didn’t want it to be the same fox, my fox, but when I saw his bushy tail, now deflated, I knew. I felt silly for crying, and only then realized what he’d meant to me. To have a wild friend to bring gifts to, someone in the back field to visit, someone who speaks a refreshingly different language all together. His departure felt like a wound in the landscape.
What’s uncanny to me, is that if this happened weeks before, I might not have even noticed fox’s disappearance. He might have been like a passing memory; oh yeah, there used to be a fox there…
Making contact with the wild earth is an opening up to the immense magic and beauty that it holds, but also to the deep grief that comes with such open-hearted witnessing. Maybe that’s why so many of us live in cities, suspended above the earth, moving from screen to screen. Maybe it’s just a little too much to be in a constant state of falling in love and being heartbroken. It might be though that our ability to love and grieve are our deepest gifts, and using them is just what our earth is demanding of us right now.