Essays

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.

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.

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.

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.

Purple Martins

I watched desert purple martins last night in the glorious saguaro near my home on Javelina Way. I was surprised that there are still nestlings who haven’t fledged yet. They need to get going so they can prepare for migration.

I love birds as dearly as anything on this earth, which means I love them imperfectly. I initially studied them so I could write with more detail about the natural world. I didn’t want to always say bird in a poem and leave it at that. Bird. Tree. Sky. Not good enough. Poets are not children naming things generally and statically for the first time. (I’d actually argue that children are more creative than that and could teach poets a great deal about how to encounter and describe natural worlds.)

I wanted to know the birds’ names, their habits, their struggles. It was a fact-finding mission. But then I loved them, suddenly and completely. I was done in by their delicacy and resilience and incomprehensible beauty. I loved them. I remember where I was when I realized that was the case: watching a house finch on my fence at my home in Overland Park, Kansas. I at once loved that particular bird and all birds. Their gorgeous or silly calls. The myriad ways in which they walk or fly or run or crash into branches or come to an inelegant stop on glassy water.

I watched birds for seven years and kept daily logs, took photos, fed them, gave them water, checked on their roosts and nests out by lakes and in apartment complexes around the city. I knew where every eagle’s nest was located. I watched. I worried. I hoped. Those vulnerable days on the ground before first flight. The slinking neighborhood cats. The poisons neighbors used for rodents. I watched one—a trumpet swan—slowly freeze on Wyandotte Lake in Kansas City, Kansas, when a cold snap hit during migration. My dear friend, also a poet, was with me. All we could do was watch and hold vigil until death came with its white gloves that to anyone else would have looked like gentle snowfall.

I did all this while I wasn’t writing poetry. I was never going to write poetry again. (So much for that.) Did I impose my love of poetry on birds? Probably to some extent. I had a lot of love inside me. It had to go somewhere. Love always has to flow out and out, forever, endlessly, the way Pablo Neruda describes it.

“The Martins,” a poem I recently wrote, isn’t just about the community I live in or the sprawling development on the other side of Old Spanish Trail. Ultimately, it’s about me and death and family and love and the natural world and conflict (internal/external, individual/collective, natural/designed). And it’s about birds. Desert purple martins to be precise.

Yesterday, I was discriminated against when I disclosed my dyslexia—a documented, ADA-protected disability—to my coworkers. I’d been struggling all day to do my work but was unable to do so because of a modifiable issue in my immediate workspace. The employee I share a cubicle with was gathering with others. They were engaging in loud, boisterous conversations, including those that did not pertain to her work or to work at all. This went on for hours.

Eventually, when I was trying to send an email but was unable to accurately type a single sentence because of the noise and distraction in my immediate vicinity, I decided to share my diagnosis with the folks who were gathered in my space. I thought explaining how noise affects my ability to read and write would help them understand and be supportive. Instead, I was met with dismissiveness, sarcasm, and a refusal to be supportive. When I said, “I’m dyslexic,” one employee threw a hand in the air and sarcastically replied “Congratulations?” then staring me down as if I’d done something inappropriate. It was the equivalent of saying something akin to, What do you want, a medal?

I can’t imagine anyone responding that way if another documented, ADA-protected disability had been disclosed, such as a physical disability for which someone was requesting a ramp when only stairs had been provided. The response was unfathomable and unacceptable. I realized then that I will never be able to advocate for myself in that workplace or to feel a sense of safety, inclusion, and belonging there.

Immediately after this incident, I attended a one-on-one training that was not accessible. When I disclosed my disability to the instructor:

1. did not treat it as a disability,

2. made comments that were not acceptable and would never have been made if it were a different type of disability,

3. continued the training despite my having explained why it wasn’t working for me without modification to the way it was taught and what was being asked of me.

One comment the trainer made when I told him I needed my own keyboard and mouse—which are assistive technologies for me—if he wanted me to do extensive typing as part of the training, was that “everybody” has trouble with that keyboard and mouse. Even after I was clear that dyslexia is a disability, that it’s protected under the ADA, and that it’s not the same situation others without a learning disability may have with the keyboard, he continued to make that statement. It was minimizing, dismissive, and uninformed.

Again, if this were another form of disability, that would not have happened. His approach was no different from telling someone in a wheelchair who can’t use the stairs that everybody has issues with the stairs, then continuing to expect the employee to scale the stairs somehow without any other alternative.

I cannot take on the responsibility that job requires within a culture that is discriminatory in general and toward me in particular. Even with an accommodation request, which I’ve never had to make before in my career, the culture will not change quickly enough for this to be a tenable workplace.

I will not continue to subject myself to comments like the ones those employees made, and I shouldn’t have to. I invested a great deal in this position financially, emotionally, and otherwise. I turned down one offer and terminated the interview process with another potential employer to be at UA. I’m not going to be able to see my brother-in-law before he dies because I needed to be present at work. I started work two days after being in the emergency room for a serious, chronic medical condition that’s affecting my heart. I did all of that because I thought UA and UA Libraries lived their mission and would be safe places where I could learn, work, grow, thrive, and give back in spades to AIS, UA Libraries, and the University of Arizona as a whole.

In addition to the issues I’ve recounted above, employees use ableist, sanist, and otherwise dehumanizing language regularly. I was subjected to instances of discriminatory language, behavior, and attitudes multiple times a day. As someone who was supposed to be helping to shape the culture there and ensure the library is a trauma-informed space and community, I didn’t have the ability to effect change because I wasn’t empowered to do so. That was clear from day one. I was literally told by a high-level leader to just keep taking notes about what was happening. That’s right. Discrimination is occurring. Ableism and sanism are occurring. But all I could do was take notes that I kept to myself. Until when. When would something be done?

The reality is that I am a queer, female, trauma survivor who thrives despite having multiple disabilities. Only some of my identities and statuses are currently being protected at UA Libraries. This queer-positive environment is sorely lacking in inclusion in other areas. It’s always the disabled, the disenfranchised, and poor, the silenced, the struggling, and the utterly destroyed among us who continue to be harmed by people’s dogged adherence to bigotry, as if it has to be funneled somewhere rather than being eradicated entirely.

Can’t be racist anymore? Be ableist or sanist! Can’t be sexist anymore? Be ableist or sanist! Can’t be transphobic anymore? Well, it’s your lucky day. We’ve got some fancy schmancy ableism and sanism right here for the taking!!! Step right up! We’re running a two-for-one sanism sale! Buy one ableism, get a sanism for free!

But here’s the thing: Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all. Since this country was founded, ableism and sanism have been part of its fabric. And now, they appear to exist in order for bigots to express their generalized bigotry in the only way that’s currently palatable, which is by attacking human beings based on their disabilities.

Ableism and sanism affect the most vulnerable folks in our communities. We need to do better by them. All of us. And that includes the people working in our academic libraries.

I expected equal protection across statuses, but ableism and sanism appear to be endemic at UA Libraries. It’s unfortunate. It’s actually devastating.

Some acts of bravery require resignation. My act of bravery this morning was to resign.

P.S. On my way out yesterday, I saw the bumper sticker on an employee’s car. It read, Ask me about my lobotomy. Fuck that noise.

Dreams

I dreamed I was a mattress. A thin, hard mattress. I was also me. I sat on myself. Human me was uncomfortable with mattress me. Mattress me was uncomfortable with human me. Mattress me stood up. Human me fell to the ground, hard.

I dreamed my siblings were going to put me in an institution, get power of attorney over me, and use that power to steal my money slowly, discreetly, over many years until my death, the way my father did with his oil-rich aunt in Oklahoma.

The other dreams were just darkness but not the scary kind. The kind like floating in black water in the middle of the night in a silty lake you know doesn’t have water mocassins in it. Peaceful like that, as peaceful as things get in my sleeping and waking worlds.

Walking with Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. / How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Windy night. Windy morning. Tumbleweeds congregate in my yard like churchgoers who stick with their own kind and bristle at anything unlike them.

Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here, / where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.

I walk from one tumbleweed to the next literally sizing them up. I want a fat one, nice and round, no thorns. I find one I like and carry it high like a torch to my back door. I imagine I’m carrying justice or truth, though it’s just a dead amaranth and I’m just a person living in Toquerville, Utah, trying to make sense of this place before I leave it.

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you.

This is not a city, I think. Not in any real sense. Eighteen hundred people live in this town named after a Paiute Chief who may not have existed. He makes a nice story, though, one of Native Americans and Mormon pioneers living in harmony, so the locals are sticking to it. There are probably as many cows and chickens as humans here. Six cloned while bulls live up on the hill. Two Shetland ponies reside down the street. More than anything, this place is comprised of sandy soils, so many types they each have a name — alfisols, aridsols, entisols, mollisols — not like the basalt, which is just called basalt. Chief Toquer was named after that basalt, so the story goes.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. / You’ll always end up in this city.

The tumbleweed will stay on my coffee table until I get on the road to Tucson, where I’ll display it as a reminder of the place I’ve left. Well, mostly left. We never leave the places we leave. Didn’t Cavafy say as much in his poem “The City”?

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

But I have hope. Those of us who despair must also hope. It’s like a teeter-totter, but with great effort you can sit closer to the fulcrum and find balance. Hope isn’t a thing with feathers. It’s a tumbleweed trying to spread its seeds as far as possible even after it’s dead. I have that kind of hope, one that moves with me and urges me to move. Movement is breath, is heartbeat. I especially love those slabs of highway that make the car go “ga-dung, ga-dung, ga-dung” the way my heart does when I know I’m alive. The roads between here and Tucson undulate like a roller coaster meant for children. They make me nauseated, which is another way of knowing I’m alive, an old way of knowing, a way I may cast off one day as I tumble along.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Then I might as well go anywhere I want, Cavafy. Why relegate myself to this small corner? Why do here what I could do in wilder lands with deeper histories? Where admission is possible and millions of saguaros throw up their arms to welcome the beloved wrecked and wretched with perfect equanimity.

—

The text in italics is from “The City,” by C P. Cavafy.

Conversation with Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. / How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Windy night. Windy morning. Tumbleweeds congregate in my yard like churchgoers who stick with their own kind and bristle at anything unlike them.

Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here, / where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.

I walk from one tumbleweed to the next literally sizing them up. I want a fat one, nice and round, no thorns. I find one I like and carry it high like a torch to my back door. I imagine I’m carrying justice or truth, though it’s just a dead amaranth and I’m just a person living in Toquerville, Utah, trying to make sense of this place before I leave it.

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you.

This is not a city, I think. Not in any real sense. Eighteen hundred people live in this town named after a Paiute Chief who may not have existed. He makes a nice story, though, one of Native Americans and Mormon pioneers living in harmony, so the locals are sticking to it. There are probably as many cows and chickens as humans here. Six cloned while bulls live up on the hill. Two Shetland ponies reside down the street. More than anything, this place is comprised of sandy soils, so many types they each have a name — alfisols, aridsols, entisols, mollisols — not like the basalt, which is just called basalt. Chief Toquer was named after that basalt, so the story goes.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. / You’ll always end up in this city.

The tumbleweed will stay on my coffee table until I get on the road to Tucson, where I’ll display it as a reminder of the place I’ve left. Well, mostly left. We never leave the places we leave. Didn’t Cavafy say as much in his poem “The City”?

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

But I have hope. Those of us who despair must also hope. It’s like a teeter-totter, but with great effort you can sit closer to the fulcrum and find balance. Hope isn’t a thing with feathers. It’s a tumbleweed trying to spread its seeds as far as possible even after it’s dead. I have that kind of hope, one that moves with me and urges me to move. Movement is breath, is heartbeat. I especially love those slabs of highway that make the car go “ga-dung, ga-dung, ga-dung” the way my heart does when I know I’m alive. The roads between here and Tucson undulate like a roller coaster meant for children. They make me nauseated, which is another way of knowing I’m alive, an old way of knowing, a way I may cast off one day as I tumble along.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Then I might as well go anywhere I want, Cavafy. Why relegate myself to this small corner? Why do here what I could do in wilder lands with deeper histories? Where admission is possible and millions of saguaros throw up their arms to welcome the beloved wrecked and wretched with perfect equanimity.