For starters, the sunflowers, once lords and ladies of the garden, are fallen, picked clean of seeds and crumbling to dust. A lone gold finch alighted for a final meal a few days ago as I prepared toppled giants for the "melt-down" pile, but alas, nary a seed remained. The bewildered bird flew off, probably looking for a finch soup kitchen. It was only a couple months ago that the sunflowers were
in their glory. How quickly glory fades, and light too, another of November's sorry lessons, within which one must search for hope.
For example, I started this post at 4:57 p.m. and it was almost
dark.
But hello, that's a perfect rationale to start happy hour earlier! And also dinner. Ominous clouds fill part of the sky most days, whether it rains or not.
But that makes for dramatic lighting, which sends me scampering for even
more photos, most of which are losers. But taking them (or
making them, as current vernacular goes) satisfies my growing itch to capture moments before they go the way of sunflowers. Also on the cheery side of November, diminishing light primes deciduous tress to transform into sweeps of brilliant color, including those planted by PK in 1984 when we built our house, trees that now embrace with glowing arms our little Southern Oregon nest.
Some bad news this November: one friend was diagnosed with cancer, and another is scheduled for throat surgery, relegating the rhino virus currently mashing around in my head to its appropriate category: trifling. Then there's the same old, same old, having naught to do with November, but coincidentally, it came to my attention this month that:
- Too many old people are sad, lonely, and bored.
- Soldiers and civilians continue to suffer and die in wars that beggar justification.
- Muslim fundamentalists hate you and me more deeply everyday just because of where we were born.
- Politicians dick around with national health care, and how does anybody believe that things will get better if insurance companies continue to rule?
- Young girls still want to look like Barbie.
And then drilling down to the more serious muck: I know that right now, not far away, some out-of-control parent is whaling—physically or emotionally—on his or her kid, or closing a door and a heart on a screaming baby, or sexually abusing a child. Or a woman is being brutalized by her husband, boyfriend, or father. Or a miserable pet is chained outside in the rain. Or a homeless teen is selling sex for food. And the ugly images go on and on and on. If I let them.
That's why I, and most more-or-less healthy people, cultivate art, music, dance, gardening, nature, and sport too. To create a balance of beauty and vitality with evil and decay, to construct a reality separate from the gut-dragging underside of humanity. Even though I live in rural USA, the snarling sad face of the loveless is as prevalent in Southern Oregon as it is anywhere in the world. Rural America is not at all spared from home-based hometown brutality. It's all here, same as it ever was, although not exactly as the Talking Heads sang. It's more like a scene out of a David Lynch film or a Stephen King novel. Our pastoral landscapes and safe-looking streets and neat little homes (and a fair number of McMansions) can and do hide brutality, ignorance, and pain. Somebody has to do something, and somebody does.
But for now, it's not me. I've resigned, after nearly seven years, my position as a board member for the
Womens Crisis Support Team, a still-passionate grassroots organization addressing local domestic violence. But I will soon follow my heart into an organization such as
CASA, which advocates in the legal system for child victims. I'm fortunate to do paid work for an affordable health care organization,
La Clinica, in Jackson County, Oregon. One of its program is
Healthy Start, Oregon's most effective child-abuse prevention program. Tragically its funding has been reduced, and more cuts are threatened, putting at least 50 local kids, mostly babies and toddlers of first-time ill-equipped and isolated young moms, at risk for abuse and neglect. This drives me crazy.
So I create my own reality with plants, food, flowers, friends and family making November not such a bad time, after all.
Some images to back up my claim.
As I begin this post Nov. 18, son Chris, 23, is en route to India and perhaps Nepal, China and Tibet, on a two-month kayaking expedition. This is not "ordinary life" but it is his life. Here he is, my baby, 20 years ago dipping a paddle into the river for the first time. (That's his dad's vintage blue Dancer) And here he is a few years ago in a circling-the-drain Chilean waterfall. Actually, I"m not sure that's Chris. He and a Spanish kayaker explored this creek and took turns with the camera. Those days Chris was on his own with a hunger for adventure and a quiet determination to join an elite cadre of kayakers who travel the globe pursuing primo adventure and first descents. That's what he's doing now—primo adventure and first descents. And that's what he did in 2008 in Pakistan and Brazil, and in 2007 in Newfoundland and Chile. It's a ridiculous life. He toils for a few months to earn enough for life support and airline tickets, and then hops around the world with his kayak. It's not something that you envision, or can even imagine, for your child. But Chris is driven by an endless well of ambition and passion, so I go along, oscillating between pride and terror. Despite my fearful motherliness, I say, Go Chris! 
