Author: Dana Henry Martin

Morning Prayer September 21, 2024

In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.

The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.

It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.

The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.

Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.

May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.

Incrementally, Tenderly

Morning Prayer September 21, 2024

In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.

The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.

It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.

The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.

Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.

May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.

Snowy Tree Cricket

Oecanthus fultoni, snowy tree cricket, dominant frequency 2.9 kHz

This species occurs in dooryards and open stands of hardwoods throughout the United States except in the Southeast. Its song is memorable in at least three respects:

1. Especially at low temperatures, the song is melodious and haunting. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, If moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that.

2. Because its chirps are produced regularly and at rates that are easy to count, the pace of the song can be used to estimate the temperature at which the cricket is singing.

3. Neighboring individuals synchronize their chirps so that a shrub or tree with many individuals throbs with the same rhythm as that of a solitary singer.

Click on the image below to listen to the songs of numerous crickets, including the snowy tree cricket.



Morning Prayer September 16, 2024

Trees don’t move in the wind. They’re moved by the wind, the way we all react to unseen forces, unseen faces, unseen lives, and unseen lies. But I digress. This isn’t about deleting and inserting letters to stumble on real or imagined connections. It’s about how, wherever I’m standing, I want to be standing somewhere else. A foot over, a mile, a state, a bioregion.

There, where I saw my first Blackburnian warbler. There, where I learned the name scissor-tailed flycatcher. There, the mud. There, the sand. There, the untidy rows of cows. There, tidy rows of roses a girl could hide in if it weren’t for the thorns.

I’m trying to stand still for ten minutes every morning while I watch the sun rise and listen to birds. Yesterday, a western screech owl. Today, a pyrrhuloxia, as in red or tawny, not as in pile of wood for burning the dead.

I’m trying not to think about how the northern cardinal should be the one named pyrrhuloxia, not the pyrrhuloxia, or about how that must mean the person who named the pyrrhuloxia had never seen a cardinal, or about how the person who named the pyrrhuloxia must have felt the first time they saw a cardinal after having named the pyrrhuloxia pyrrhuloxia.

I’m trying not to think, which is always the biggest impediment to not thinking. I just want to stand for ten minutes with my feet planted, my body unstirred, like palo verde trees on a calm morning after hard rain. I want to be here, with these birds and these trees and these cactuses in this desert. I want to feel safe enough to remain still for ten minutes. I’ve seen cottontail rabbits do as much, though their mouths were working incessantly because they move their jaws up to one hundred twenty times per minute when they chew. That’s twice my average resting heart rate but nowhere near the four thousand times a hummingbird’s wings beat per minute.

I’m trying not to think about facts and comparisons. This more than that. That less than this. Living beings are not just math, so I’m trying not to tilt my head and scan for rabbits or add up my heartbeats as they batter my chest or make a futile attempt to count the wingbeats of the Costa’s hummingbird who’s zipping past me.

I’m trying not to worry about Valley Fever and global warming and poisonous toads and communities in crisis and birds falling from the sky from avian influenza and assassination attempts and wildlife without habitat and unseen lies and unseen lives and unseen faces and unseen forces and my father and my family and my childhood. That’s what lies in stillness. All of that and more.

So I count. I compare. I slot things into more than that, less than this. I learn facts. I look around. I take in. I fill my head with details. And I move. I have a head full of analysis, a body full of terror, and the trauma to justify both.

Those last three things on my list are the crux of the matter: my father and my family and my childhood. They’re the real, lived dangers that tie me to the rest of the dangers in the world, the rest of the heartbreaks in the world, the rest of the injustices in the world. The broken wing. The dry lake. The toxic dust. The highway. The swimming pool. The bedroom.

My father didn’t have any guns. He’d had enough of them in Korea. We had an empty gun case built into a wall at our lake house. I wanted to fill it with flowers. He wouldn’t let me. It had to be empty, a sign for anyone who saw it that he meant them no harm.

My father was the weapon. He ultimately turned himself on himself but not until he destroyed everyone else. I mean us. I mean his family. I say his as if we belonged to him. Belonged as in were owned by, not as in were members of. He owned us all. Kin from the Old English cynn, which sounds like sin. To kin, to sin, to skin, again. Buckskin and doeskin and firing pins and deadly sins. No win, no wins, no whining, no whinneys.

I stood still for five minutes this morning. Five minutes in which I didn’t keep vigil, in which I watched the sun rise and listened to the birds. It’s not ten yet. I’ll keep trying for ten.

May we all be free from suffering for ten minutes today.

Good morning.

The Egg

I had a dream that all male software engineers were held in such high esteem that they became their own class that was positioned just below the richest tech billionaires, who had become the ruling class.

Elon Musk hatched a plan to get these engineers everything they needed to be comfortable and live a life of satiety. He developed what he called The Egg, which as the name suggests was an egg: a really big, high-tech, egg-shaped thing not unlike Mork’s egg on Mork and Mindy.

The engineers could spend as much time in their eggs every day as they liked. The eggs were designed for work, rest, restoration, and learning, but they were also virtual reality spaces where the engineers could create any immersive AI scenario they wanted simply by providing a verbal description of what they were interested in experiencing.

Guess what happened? The engineers did not work or rest or learn in their eggs. There was no restoration. The AI technology wasn’t used to expand on their horizons or as an expression of their imaginations.

They masturbated. That’s what they did. They made endless AI porn and went to town on themselves.

They masturbated over and over and over until all The Eggs had to be gathered up and disposed of in a mass landfill out in the West somewhere because they had become biohazards. Whole communities were redolent with the smell of ejaculate, which upset all the other classes. (Well, not the ruling class. They didn’t care. They were busy in their own souped-up versions of The Egg.)

In the dream, my husband had The Egg. Of course he did. He’s a brilliant software engineer (both in real life and in the dream). Musk loved him and personally delivered The Egg to our home, which as you can imagine was not as fun of a time for me as it was for the two of them. Musk offered to impregnate me and almost made it a requirement for giving my husband The Egg. Being menopausal saved me, though Musk said he’d try to cure menopause (?!?!), and he’d be back once he did.

Sadly, my husband was not an exception to the rule. I mean, he read some graphic novels, took a few comfy-cozy naps, and did some guided meditations. He even tried to use AI responsibly for a while. But ultimately, he succumbed and did what everyone else did inside The Egg. He defiled it from within. It had to be destroyed.

The Egg had to be destroyed, and we both had to live in the real world knowing full well what had happened in The Egg, what The Egg had brought out in him, and how The Egg had changed everything, every damn thing.

Listen, Listen

Morning Prayer September 14, 2024

Do not see the horrors of the world. Do not speak the horrors of the world. Listen, listen to the horrors. We only need to listen to know them in our bones. Then we can see. Then we can speak.

Cover your eyes until you hear. Cover your mouth until you hear.

I mean bomb. I mean siren. I mean gun. I mean blade.

I mean hand. I mean voice. I mean footsteps. I mean heartbeat.

I mean fire in wildlands. I mean fire in territories and cities and countries. I mean whole areas turned into carbon. Trees. Structures. Animals. People.

I mean the horror we hear coming and the horror we don’t hear until it’s come, until it’s sitting on our chests, pinning us down. To the bed. To the floor. To the sopping ground.

I mean flames and thermal winds roaring like jet engines, what feels like the whole world rumbling.

I mean horror like bones breaking because horror often breaks bones but also sounds like bones breaking when no bones are broken.

The horror of wrong death, wrong place, wrong time, wrong turn, wrong war, wrong leader, wrong policy, wrong hope, wrong prayer.

The horror of wrong family, wrong father, wrong town, wrong time, wrong words, wrong body, wrong hands, wrong home.

I mean bomb turning brick to sudden dust. I mean siren screaming aimless into night. I mean gun bucking in eager hands. I mean blade causing muscle to burst like distant thunder.

I mean hand turning body into target. I mean voice lulling child into trust. I mean footsteps like percussionists pounding out time. I mean heartbeat like another person inside the chest trying to tear themselves free.

The horror of why. The sound of that question as it sits on the tongue croaking like a toad.

I mean horror as gunshots down a long hall. Then in a room. Then in a library. Then in another room. Then back in the hall.

Horror in the school, in the business, on the base, in the place of worship, in the car, on the street, in the parking lot, in the neighborhood, on the highway, at the train station, on public lands, in the bedroom, at the splash pad.

The always-more of horror. The never-endingness of horror. Our faces like dry pools. Our skin dull as powder. We want no more of this screaming horror.

Now we hear it. Now we don’t. Now we do. Now we don’t. We are children, every one of us, playing games with our senses.

May we listen. May we see. May we speak.

Yesterday, I somehow managed to make one OK three-part poem out of what started as a single absolutely hideous poem. It was like fashioning one of those do-it-yourself wire tree sculptures that were all the rage in the ’80s. You had to keep twisting and untwisting until something at least passably treelike emerged, then you had to hang little leaves from the wire branches, which was its own surgical undertaking. I was the only one in my family who had the patience for that kind of thing. It wasn’t patience, though. It was something else: the need to destroy and create, to pare and repair, to make what I saw in my mind a reality in the world, not a poor approximation of my mindplay.

Compulsion was on my side as well, not just with the tree sculpture, but in all aspects of my childhood. I loved picking the tar bubbles in the road that formed on hot summer days and solving complicated puzzle games everyone else gave up on and memorizing impossibly long Simon tonal and light sequences because there’s no stopping, ever, until you absolutely can’t continue—maybe you’re out of tar bubbles and have to wait for the sun to make more or you can’t crack the stupid puzzle’s stupid code or your infuriating working memory deficits won’t allow your brain to hold onto any more BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP BEEPs.

I stuck with that hideous poem yesterday because I’m an adult version of the child I once was: stubborn, driven, perhaps a little dysfunctional. That poem was a pig, and I put some better-than-Walmart earrings on it, dressed it up a little by tearing it apart line by line and reattaching those lines to create a different creature entirely. Half of it lay on the table by the time I was done. Word, words, words. So many words. Sometimes words are too much with us. They’re like metal tree branches that need to be trimmed or tar bubbles that need to be picked or puzzles and toys that need to be put away and silenced.

Quirky

One year and three days ago today, Jon and I went for a hike in Snow Canyon, located in Ivins, Utah. A couple approached us. They were in their 70s. They asked to take pictures of us because they liked how I was dressed. They even got another hiker to take photos of us with them.

The man started talking about polygamy and all his polygamous relatives. He said I looked like his sister, who is very pretty. He asked me to pull up my dress and show my legs. Everything he said was funny, lighthearted, girdled in puns. It seemed harmless, especially coming from someone his age who was with his wife. But it didn’t feel harmless, not if I’m honest with myself. My body knew it wasn’t harmless. The body always knows.

They love-bombed us with all the things we had in common. She was an English teacher who loves literature and weaving. He was that everydad kind of guy who noodles with electronics and technology. They were just like each of us, so similar it was uncanny. The wife, C—, even noticed that she and I both have moles on our right cheeks. Family, she said. We could be family. You could be my kin, he chimed in.

We exchanged email addresses because C—, whose nickname was Queen, wanted to send me images of a woven rug she’d purchased. We still weren’t registering the kind of danger that we were in, that I was in. I was trying to flex in Southern Utah, to meet folks where they were at and to be open to everyone. Danger wasn’t on my radar, not until later that day. I was leading with love and trying to survive in an inhospitable culture.

Later, I emailed Queen about the weaving. I got a reply back from Quirky instead, one year ago today. That was his nickname. His response to my email was a photo of him naked in his bathtub with a bottle of lavender essential oil on the tub’s rim. His accompanying text was: You have to promise me that if I send too much, just tell me!! Off to Bear Lake after I get out of this bathtub!

It was too much, Quirky. Way too much.

This is the day: August 31, 2023. This is the day one year ago when I became terrified of everyone, the day my C-PTSD and bipolar 1 swooped in to save me, as implausible as that might sound and as inelegant as those protective mechanisms appeared to me and to others. They saved me from terror, from abject terror about being fundamentally unsafe in the world, even in super-safe family-friendly sunny Southern Utah. They saved me from not recognizing that I wasn’t safe, that Quirky and Queen weren’t safe.

C-PTSD saved me by making my body scream when I couldn’t hear it whimpering. Bipolar 1 saved me by giving me something other than sheer darkness as the only thing left in my existence. Bipolar made me think maybe, just maybe there’s something other than and beyond evil in this world—something unlike the Workys or their earlier counterparts: the Coolidges, the Yoders, the Swains, the Whites, and last but not least, my family, the Guthries.

Quirky and Queen are real people who really did live in Utah and who really did what they told us they did for a living. I looked them up after I received Quirky’s email. I looked Quirky up again today. He died at the beginning of 2024. He was active in his LDS ward, loved gardening, was charismatic, and made everyone feel welcome. A real gem in the community. No cause of death is listed.

I am walking out of that chapter of my life now, that near undoing (or unbounding, to extend the metaphor). Welcome, August 31, 2024. I’m happy to be here, or at least moving in the direction of happiness and healing.

Ween

Carbs made me love you. I love everything on carbs.

I saw a palo verde tree wearing a green tie today in Tucson. Nothing else. Just the tie.

He is dying. He will not tell me what he would carry in the pocket of his spacesuit if he were walking on the moon.

Jon is home now. Last night, his father asked him why he had to leave, and his dying brother begged him to stay forever.

Me Crow Wah Vay. That’s how an automated voice on a TikTok video pronounced microwave in a video I just watched. Me Crow Wah Vay.

Perhaps life is just a process of cyclically confronting the unfathomable until it’s fathomable, and then we die.

I just found a 20-pack of thong underwear for $27 on Amazon. I’m sure workers had safe working conditions and were paid fair wages to make them. I tried to make my own underwear years ago. I do not know how to do that. I forgot to use elastic, and the pair I sewed fell off immediately. Never have I failed so splendidly outside of a poem. Most of my poetry has no elastic.

My therapist made me feel good about myself, and it got me all messed up.

If you don’t understand trauma, you can’t create trauma-informed spaces. Studying trauma, theorizing about trauma, and following the rules about what is and is not trauma-informed isn’t enough. You have to know trauma inside and out or you’ll end up creating environments that are traumatizing, which is detestable when you say you’re trying to do the opposite. Worse yet, you’ll bring people into your “safe” spaces and harm them.

The world is not how I left it.

I saved myself from myself for myself.

Neil Armstrong carried two artifacts in the pocket of his spacesuit when he walked on the moon: a 1.25-square-inch piece of muslin fabric cut from the Wright Flyer’s left wing and a piece of spruce wood taken from the plane’s left propeller.

Maybe I’d carry my mother’s high school valedictory speech, which she wrote when she graduated at age 16 so I won’t forget where my ability to write comes from. And I’d carry my father’s Sigma Chi ring so I never forget who he was, what he did, how he wielded power, and what I overcame.

If I could, I’d carry my mother’s heart and my father’s brain: the first so I could feel through her, the second so I could resist thinking like him.

Hope is just a nope whose ascender grew over time.

He didn’t show emotion because he’s neurodivergent. He showed emotion because he’s human.

Trauma set my body clocks

It’s not death I fear. It’s spending eternity with my father.

I dreamed a poem last night that was either terrific or terrible. Either way, it’s lost now. The waking world devoured it.

We no longer have the luxury of moving mountains one tablespoon at a time.

While watching the apocalypse unfold, people will be pissed that there aren’t snacks. We want to nibble while Rome burns.

Out of nowhere, I started playing the melody from “In Trutrina” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on my new toy piano. And just like that, I’m healed—at least for today.

Ableist culture, go fuck yourself.

I bought a toy piano. I will John Cage my way out of despair.

Sometimes, in our misguided endeavors, we fly a one-winged unicorn into the side of a crystalline mountain. That’s OK if our intentions are flawed but genuine. Sometimes, we have a crew of willing or unwilling riders with us, and our carelessness sends them careening. That’s not OK regardless of our intentions.

Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all.

I just realized they’re called pancakes because they’re little cakes you make in a pan. WHO KNEW? Dyslexia’s fun like that. I can identify complicated words with Old English or Latinate roots, but I can entirely—for most of my life—miss obvious word combinations such as the conjoining of “pan” and “cake.”

I write quickly so my fingers can stay ahead of my thoughts. Removing thinking from my writing is my best hope for experiencing, understanding, and communicating anything meaningful.

Wear sequins today, even if they’re just imaginary ones pasted on your heart. Wear red, the deep shade tinged with black ink. Wear a slogan on your chest written in invisible letters. Be ferocious. Be affable. Be any instance of yourself that you want to be. Good morning.

I came across all the microforms for The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands at the library yesterday. Here’s what the National Archives says about that bureau:

Bureau functions included issuing rations and clothing, operating hospitals and refugee camps, and supervising labor contracts between planters and freedpeople. The Bureau also managed apprenticeship disputes and complaints, assisted benevolent societies in the establishment of schools, helped in legalizing marriages entered into during slavery, and provided transportation to refugees and freedpeople who were attempting to reunite with their family or relocate to other parts of the country. As Congress extended the life of the Bureau, it added other duties, such as assisting Black soldiers and sailors in obtaining back pay, bounty payments, and pensions.

Be full of care today. Be full of love. Be full of kindness. Remember to breathe even when you don’t want to breathe. You are here, solidly, in this world. It breathes alongside you.

My favorite thing I’ve done with my life? Survived it.

A poem about obsessively removing the insects that have invaded my home because I can’t do anything about the cancers that have invaded the bodies of those I love.

The body is an inpatient facility.

Our militarized mindsets will be our undoing.

The problem is we think communities exist in order to be policed.

Facebook thinks I should be friends with some guy named Ween. No last name. He’s just a big old Ween.

Oil

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea.

Lake oil. Sand oil. Animal oil. Plant oil.

Oil with a Southern accent. Oil beneath troubled waters.

Oil in another tongue is still oil, oiled and oiling.

Oil on the lips that bite you. I mean me.

I mean father oil, mother oil, oiled mouths, oiled skin, oiled hours, oiled days.

I mean the coffin. I mean the verb. I mean the action.

Run, oil, run. Run from brother oil, from big brother, oiled.

He will draw you up from your dark earth with his skipjack pump and sell you to the highest bidder. A cop. A friend of your father’s. A man. A man.

Or he’ll keep you in a little bottle on an oak shelf until he can refine you, until you brighten, until you slink back and forth in the little jar like the little golden child you were supposed to be, oiled and oiling, body like an O.

O, brother, O brother, hallowed be your O.

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea. But, long before that, in me.