I finally understand how to enter into palliative care for the earth, humans, and all living beings.
I finally comprehend my way of being in this world as this world is being destroyed.
This is the way I’ll live on this land until my body returns to the land. I say this to myself, now, because I’m afraid I’ll wake up in the morning and this feeling, this understanding, will be gone, like a dream.
I say what I say and write what I write to remember what I’ll otherwise lose in a moment, in a flash, when the wrong noise makes my body tighten, when the wrong move makes me brace, when the wrong memory, reawakened, makes me run.
We’re all just walking each other home, as Ram Dass says. “Said,” technically, because the perpetually present-tense world we want to create—especially in poetry—is an illusion.
Past and future exist and matter, even if it’s only because we perceive them and need them in order to make sense of the everything that’s doing and being and moving and thrumming and creating and re-creating everything all the time. Call it God. Call it Gaia. Call it what you will. Call it nothing. It’s still everything.
Past and future inform us in ways we understand and in ways we never will.
Maybe we don’t need perfect understanding.
Maybe love is all that’s perfect and timeless and always available to us, not in a greeting card way but in that way where something is so profound we need the simplest language to discuss, express, share and feel it.
We need a little carving of a heart to hold what can’t be contained, just as we need talismen to keep big, scary things that can’t be named or tamed at bay.
I think it’s Mary Oliver who calls what lies beyond language the ineffable. I can’t find that quote right now, but I did find this passage Oliver wrote that feels perfect for this moment precisely because it situates every moment, every life—everything—within the larger whole of eternity:
Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.
Yes, yes. All the yesses. Oh, Mary. My heart. My heart.
But back to Ram Dass. He’s dead. He died three years ago. He doesn’t say anything now except what he’s left behind with us. Maybe that’s our afterlife, our everlastingness: What we teach each other, what we share with each other, how we love each other, how we fight for each other.
Maybe that’s heaven. Maybe that’s our forever, written not in the clouds but right here where we walk and crawl and kneel and drag ourselves from one day to the next over rough land, over stone, over grasses, over loam.
Regardless, these are things we can do now, while we’re living: teach, share, love, fight.
We can interlace our fingers and move forward, together, until we can no longer move, until we die of natural causes, not from hate or from being cut off from others, from community, from those on whom we all rely for our lives and our well-being.
Every one of us can reach deep into love and, in so doing, become part of a whole that transcends who we are as individuals. No censorship needed. No isolation needed. No shunning. No shaming. No guilt. No fear.
Hold those you love close, and love everyone. I’m begging you.
May you all swim forever in the stream. I’ll try if you will.
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Sunday, November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance. This essay is, in part, a call to end the hate that results in trans people being killed just for being who they are, loving who they love, and being some of the bravest people who walk this earth.
Love can stop these needless deaths. We can stop this. Let’s make it stop.
Dana Henry Martin 