Seasons of the Heart
On compassion, on empathy, on kindness, on love, on tragedy, on pain, on epiphanies, on rivers and lakes, on grieving, on childhood, on consciousness, on resilience, on time, and other anecdotes.
My sister and brother are ten and seven years younger than me, respectively, so that by the time I was in college and fully grown they were, especially my sister, still small people. During a handful of nights when they were toddlers unable to sleep, woken by hunger or fear or some such nocturnal discomfort, I rose from my nearby bedroom and went into theirs and cradled whomever was fussing. I was doing what caring siblings, relatives, and parents everywhere have done for as long as we’ve been primates: shielding the vulnerable from the lurking threats of night. Threats to my siblings were blessedly few, but the more primitive parts of our brains that still live with the exigencies of the Pleistocene are immune to reason, especially when the sun falls down.
Jesse slept on a squeaky metal blue-framed bed against one wall, and truth be told he rarely woke; he slept as if curled in the arms of a great cave bear who would demolish and devour all ill-intentioned things that approached his sleeping form, but for some reason restlessness came more readily to my sister Michaela. She stirred from sleep often, as restive children do, afraid in the disorienting eclipse of the room.
If you have children—my girlfriend and I do not—and you have beheld their little bodies with fists no bigger than plums and those forearms so frail your being is torn asunder to consider them, then you understand yourself, especially when your children are very young and dependent and nauseatingly innocent and defenseless, as a badass Grendel-slaying mojo who will burn down cities to protect them, if necessary. Maybe for you it never was or never is that grim, but some of us have florid imaginations that can conjure at will hordes of zombies (or, more likely, car accidents and disease) coming specifically for our loved ones. That they will come is what troubles us.
Some years ago here in our idyllic town in Montana, a man took his wife and two children rafting on the Yellowstone River, turgid and tempestuous with the melting snow of spring. When their boat capsized against a bridge piling, the wife and one of the two children drowned. For days, rescue crew boat trailers and vehicles were parked at the boat launch that happens also to be a dog park, and each time I brought our pups there to unwind I saw those trailers and jeeps and trucks with their affixed Search and Rescue stickers and I thought of the oceanic pain that man had to be undergoing.
At that time of year hereabouts the landscape is so fetching you almost have to shut your eyes now and then to hide and rest from the unsurpassable beauty, the sacred ground gone to a mint green and the meadowlarks singing and all the preposterous infinitude of wildflowers blooming.
It was weeks before both bodies were recovered. At work, with a colleague, a mother of two precious teenage daughters, I could not bring up the story without being overcome by sadness, as much for that husband and father and surviving child as for the thought of such a tragedy striking closer to home, knowing that if I had been that man and failed to save, say, my brother or sister after putting them in such compromising circumstances, I could not imagine living with myself, with the guilt. I knew that man’s grief would be like a black hole in his soul, swallowing all light, swallowing all the beneficence of spring, now forever not for this man a time of rebirth only but of death too.
There was context for my commiseration. Once, while rafting a whitewater section of an Oregon river with a friend in the boat’s bow, I lost control of the oars and our boat turned full circle in the crashing rapids before I regained from the roaring turbulence a sense of direction. The river was cold, implacable, monstrous, and my friend is not a strong swimmer, and though she did not fall out, those oars torn from my hands rived open a season in my heart that has no proper name.
The idea of it shook me to the core, shakes me still, and though it was but a few chaotic moments during an otherwise tranquil multi-day journey, it is those paralyzing seconds that remain most vivid in my mind. For months afterwards, I relived glimpses of walls of killing waters pummeling Theresa in her purple life vest, her slim fingers woven like vines to the boat’s handles for ballast. Despite attempts to allow the exhilaration of the experience to become primary, I mainly chastised myself for missing the safest chute into the maelstrom, for incompetence, for violating the trust invested in me by a whitewater novice, for the superfluity of the risk.
I spent the bulk of my childhood and adolescence living with my grandparents on Water Street, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. It was a charmed life. Friends came by regularly, knocking on the door, and the landline telephone buzzed daily during the summers with callers from all over town who wanted to get together for games of hoops or bicycle mobs, a type of childhood now presumably antiquated in America, where the young lead disembodied simulacrums of lives on social media, or at least so it appears to me when I walk the streets of this town and see empty baseball diamonds and vacant swimming and fishing holes and deserted basketball courts and snowed-over hills devoid of toboggan marks and never the front yard of a sprawling house with a dozen bicycles tipped over on the lawn.
Aging can often feel like a type of metaphorical drowning, and what one truly rues is the irreversibility of the days, not so much the incomprehensible pace of change. To be sure, my own perceptions are limited and insular, inseparable as they are from a persistent nostalgia, but I do worry upcoming generations will be overly concerned with the virtual rather than such things as soil and fish and lighting storms.
As far back as 2007, when that year’s edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published, the words acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow were removed and supplanted by the words attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.
Not that my chums and I were budding naturalists—we played video games, too—but we knew pumpkinseed from perch and perch from bass both largemouth and small, we knew crawfish and the searing discomfort of a snowball or a crabapple taken at speed to the face, and how to swap flat BMX tires and lubricate gears and chains and the specific odors of one another’s homes, which marriages were troubled, where spare house keys were concealed, bloody lips, bruises, broken bones, and the sagging inconvenience of the pocket change we relied on for purchasing junk food to fuel our constant escapades.
On my walks about town now, the missing feature I notice most is the sounds—the music, really—of children. When I do catch their voices and laughter aloft on a breeze, my spine straightens as the glum burdens of the adult world of wars and other civilizational upheavals sloughs off.
But I digress.
My grandparent’s house was on the northernmost shores of Lake George, as insufferably dull a colonial name as imaginable for one of North America’s most stunning natural bodies of water. The summers in that part of the world are hot and muggy and emerald and abuzz with mosquitoes and cicadas and fireflies, and all of us in our large extended family—in the neighborhood—swam for cool refuge. The lake there is shallow and peaceful, and my grandfather had built several docks that stretched from the shore into waters shoulder deep on an adult.
There was a sandpit where the lake lapped at the shore, and one broiling summer day my brother, having recently learned to walk, was playing in the sandpit. Our grandmother was sitting in one of those low-slung beach chairs, watching him, and I was far off up toward the road looking at the nascent hard fruits burgeoning on the pear tree when something inside me shifted and I turned to see Jesse falling into the lake at the end of the dock and my grandmother struggling to rise from the low chair. I ran so hard I felt the grass shearing under my toes as I passed the chair and our grandmother before she was able to stand upright and hit the dock at full sprint and dove at least ten feet through the air. Then I was under the water, my hands grasping that sinking body baptized now, and I held him aloft sopping and terrified and safe. He trembled and cried, abandoned by his cave bear and thus less nauseatingly innocent, and as I returned him to the sand I saw in the countenance of our grandmother a forlorn melancholy. The what if in her eyes bespoke of a shadowy realm of nightmares and ghouls.
Many years later, when a friend and I were aimlessly wandering (oh blessed aimlessness!) in the Republic of Georgia, we stayed for a few days in the country house of an acquaintance we had met in the capital city of Tbilisi. She was a modern person, skeptical if a bit intolerant of myth and superstition and of her country’s lodgment in ancient traditions. Wherever we went together, she volunteered as our translator.
In the countryside where her family kept the falling down cottage, she struggled to interpret the local dialect, which was altogether different from the dialect of Tbilisi to which she was accustomed, so we didn’t ask her overly much to help us communicate with the locals, but there was one occasion when we met some older folks walking on the road that led down to the center of the town (which was but a store of sundries, like something out of frontier America) and after exchanging words with them our kind interpreter told us that tonight all the villagers would be building bonfires for the bereaved of the community, so that they may jump over or walk through the flames to burn off the ghosts of their loved ones, who had followed them since their deaths throughout the previous year.
Our acquaintance thought such a ritual silly and backwards and not worth dwelling on, but she was young and endowed with an urban sense of irony and perhaps the darker angels hadn’t yet visited her, though they would with time. I wanted to share with her how I felt, but I was overwhelmed by the challenge and so let the opportunity pass until now, when the poetry of the bonfire ceremony returns to me a decade later and half the world away on a February morning in Montana where, unfortunately, no such customs meant to ease our spiritual burdens exists.
There are things, bereaving among them, we cannot expect ourselves to do rationally simply because we live during an era of hyper-consumerism that baselessly promises us polished and painless experiences insofar as we are willing to accumulate material things. We need, perhaps now more than ever, immaterial cauterizing bonfires through which to pass and practices of shared, ritualized, communalized grieving, less toughness and irony and more tenderness.
I started writing this ramble having no clue what I wanted to say, but it began with an image, a fond memory from when as a college sophomore home on holiday, my brother and my sister and a cousin of ours were playing a game of two-on-two tackle football on the yard of a church just before sunset. My sister was approximately nine years old and so a fraction of my size, and our brother and our cousin were striding into the anatomical thunder of men, so to balance the odds I teamed up with Michaela and swore to play on my knees.
Little men they were fast becoming, but our cousin and brother combined had not enough strength to slow me down. Each play when the ball was in our possession, I quarterbacked for Michaela, Jesse and our cousin hanging off of me in all sorts of contorted positions doing their best to topple me, but I always got off a pass and Michaela scored touchdown after touchdown and she being by far the youngest and thereby most physically disadvantaged among us, I contrived a neck and neck game where she would taste the sweet maple syrup of triumph, and she did.
But there was more than the game. Before Michaela and I clobbered those chumps, we had taken a half-time break during which each of the two teams retreated to far ends of the churchyard field to powwow and discuss strategy.
That done, Michaela and I lay back in the gloaming against the damp cool ground and she told me about a night she had recently spent with a friend lying on a trampoline contemplating the heavens and the vagaries of life. She was overjoyed. We were a touchdown ahead of the chumps, and all of them had been running, trying their best to succeed through fun, which makes for happy sapiens. I could hardly believe my tin ears. Here was this person whom I had cradled nearly ten years ago when she woke and cried out for company now telling me that with a friend she was philosophizing and making, to boot, some serious inroads into the mysteries by being so inquisitive.
I was flabbergasted. I hadn’t yet conceptualized her short life, or anybody’s life other than my own—if even my own—as ever widening concentric circles of increasing complexity. I had not thought of her consciousness as a thing expanding, as greeting experience from its unique point of view, with its concomitant assortment of judgements, joys, and moments of reflection and angst and insight. I had not stepped outside of myself sufficiently enough to notice in any lasting sense the unique universes of others unfolding all about me.
There arose in my chest at this point of epiphany such a potent elixir of emotions and a clarity of purpose that I felt myself for perhaps the first time in my awkward adolescence relax into my own body as I became acutely aware of this other body, that of my sister’s, whose diminutive frame ferried about with it an outsized perceiving instrument capable of such sophistication that as immediately as I relaxed I began to question all the stodgy certitudes I wore about me like a carapace. Who is this person, I wondered, who are we, and how are we to behave?
There was something about my sister’s size compared to the reach of her imagination that shattered my ego, ripping me as it did from the sterile heights of abstraction back into the warm regions of vulnerability, of love, of that place where we are charged with a responsibility to engender care and benevolence and compassion and generosity and, if necessary, a protective violence that bullies everywhere will recognize and avoid, because they know by the glint in your eyes and tenor of your voice that you are a tad loco.
There were no bullies that night, but I knew from experience they would manifest and bring with them lacerating words which would needlessly hurt other people, people like my sister and the adorable chumps down yonder the field who themselves, though growing tougher by the hour, still needed the shelter of sets of wider and stronger shoulders than theirs.
When I returned to college, I told my confidant, Kate, about the game of football and shared with her the story of two children, my sister and her friend, having a sleepover and how they were out there under the hushed cavernous bell jar of the galaxies philosophizing on a trampoline and how it had never occurred to me this could happen, and I was wracked by tears the source of which was so incongruous to the ordinary simplistic wonderful caprice of the moment that Kate, bless her heart, was confused. You see, as someone older, I had been away from home too much, had missed too much, and I was still learning, like all adults must learn and relearn, to reconcile those paradoxes—such as a glorious Montana spring day when two beloved people drown—that make this business of living a miraculous and very serious thing.
Of course one cannot place a finger on it precisely, but I knew then and understand better now, that what had me (what has me) plowing the furrows was an awareness of the great millstone of time turning and turning and of us all hitched to our separate wagons that cross paths too infrequently because we are busy and preoccupied and god forbid surly and confused about what we mean as mostly hairless saps and have to be reminded again and again to hit the brakes and forget for some interludes ourselves and turn our attentions outward toward others. That as fierce as love is, it’s also just being present to these imperfect broken shards that amount in the end to the totality of our lives, and to noticing those who need us, which despite the armor of appearances and alibis we adorn and our dangerously misleading preconceptions about one another, amounts to nearly everyone.
One of the great frustrations of being human is that we can never convey the fullness of our interior lives to others. The extent of our affections, regardless of how often, how earnestly we display them, is bound by the limits of language and of the confidence those we most cherish possess in themselves, among other restrictions. At the risk of sounding batty, I have long entertained the notion that individual consciousness is not confined like a caged parakeet within our skulls, that it is more like the invisible electromagnetic and gravitational fields in which we by immutable law wander, and like an electron that comes into being only by interacting with something else, we too are effectively being created by our interactions with the world all about us, with each other.
Especially among my friends and family, but often strangers too, I want to stop now and then and grip and shake them by the lapels and say thank you, for in you I am becoming love, in you I am becoming laughter, in you I am becoming joy, in you I am becoming heartache, in you I am becoming meaningful, in you I am becoming brave, in you I am becoming human, whatever the heck that is exactly. However, this type of behavior alarms the majority of people, so I mostly stay evasive and quiet and dense as a stone, though in truth I am brimming with a maniacal Brownian gratitude for this singular chance to be a bipedal upright traveling critter who apprehends an entangled infinite variety of selves, bipedal and otherwise.
Given the perspectival restrictions mentioned above and the abundance of so much mortal pain, it seems to me the best way to live is simply through what daily humble charities we can muster. Like the long migrations of birds, they carry, and since none of us can avoid the deep troughs of tragedy, on our worst days, when we are sunk and consumed by private miseries, we can be assured that we are not alone, that indeed it is fundamentally impossible to be separate from anything else in the whole blasted cosmos. These bodies we inhabit are fashioned of elements that themselves were synthesized within a previous generation of stars gone kaput. Not long ago, I woke from a dream of canoeing on a still and vast and misty lake in the Adirondacks, caterwauling loons akimbo. When I picked up my phone, there was a message from my friend, Rebecca, who lives in those mountains of which I was dreaming.
“Did you visit last night?” she asked,
I told her about my dream.
“I thought I sensed your presence,” she said, as casually as if she were pointing out the shape of a cloud.
Either waking or asleep, someone, somewhere—though they may appear to be walking the dogs only or jogging confidently along the sidewalk or curating an ostensibly flawless life on Instagram or stacking bricks or sitting there on the couch staring off into oblivion as if at unholy visions—is thinking of us, especially when they know our wagon is overloaded to the axles.
An acquaintance of mine, a retired surgeon in his early sixties, told me recently that some abnormalities showed up on his latest blood work. Married for thirty-two consecutive years and the father of four children, this man, striving to be gentle as buttery morning May light sifted through quaking leaves…
“But you know, what must happen will happen,” he said. “I’m not afraid to die.”
“Me either,” I said, “but I will damn sure miss loving.”
“Yeah,” he said, returning my smile, as if we were again two boys poring over maps conceiving grand adventures, “YEAAAAAH.”
—Dedicated to my friends and family, especially my siblings, and to all who are suffering. Let us remember, nothing can stop spring.
Got me in tears again...so beautifully written Joshua 😍
You are an extremely talented writer Josh. I’ve enjoyed reading all of your pieces over the past couple of days. Looking forward to what’s to come. ❤️