When I was a little girl — about 8 years old? — I remember thinking all I was very good at was love. It sounds more profound now than it was then. Mostly I just wished there were jobs for lovers (the legal kind ????). I loved everything, passionately: my grandmother, my great-aunt. My sisters, my teddy bear, my dog. The trees I climbed, the room I slept in. The way the wind lifted my hair when I held my head out the window of the old blue Buick. The fragrance of rain on hot grass. I swam in love, like a fish breathing water.
As I’ve grown older, I believe even more firmly that my assets aren’t material, although I can cook. And garden. And ‘m good w/ most animals and small children. Parrots and snakes love me. So do bees.
But none of the above ~ or even reading & writing, both of which I’m also pretty good at ~ bring in bucks. If you’re fortunate (and I have been), you can make a modest living. Nor are such talents easily ‘quantifiable.’ Look at the huge hoopla over how to evaluate teachers! We pay lip service to how valuable the non-material things in life are, but as Doc & Steinbeck note in Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Log from the Sea of Cortez:
We have definitions of good qualities and of bad …. [a]nd yet … the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man … while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. (p 80, SoC)
It doesn’t matter to most Americans how ‘good’ you are if you make $$. This is just the cultural mindset, identified decades ago by a scientist and a writer. The recent controversial ad from Wells Fargo is an example of this attitudet: actors & ballerinas are inferior to botanists & engineers, it implies not very subtly. Even though (kudos to @DLChamplin for pointing this out) the highest paid actor in 2016 made $64 million, and the highest paid botanist only $165,000-ish. But there we go again, reducing things to $$ and ¢¢. Who is to say what is more important, ultimately? Some days I want botany — the names of flowers & trees, details on what to grow where. Other days? I want refuge for my weary mind: a farce, a comedy, two hours away from now, in the hands of master craftsmen. But I will confess: most days? I want ART. I want beauty, even if it terrifies; writing that may break my heart; dance that makes me catch my breath. Still — I can’t live w/out engineering ~ the structural soundness of my deck enables me to watch the birds that bring me such joy. The botany explicit in the successful farming of the CSA I buy my tomatoes from is why they taste so very fine. The water that sluices from my shower is the result of advanced schooling, to make it all work.
In other words — like most of life, binaries are pretty damn reductive. Which leads me back to love… We say we respect it, admire it, wish to emulate it. But one of our candidates for president belittles it, rolls his eyes at the idea of political respect for other nations & backgrounds, and foments the very opposite of love. Or even respect. And millions of American admire & follow this man. Because he’s ‘successful,’ he says. And because you cannot measure good, or kindness, or love. You certainly can feel them, but it’s like trying to count the wind, or hold sunlight in a bottle. You can tell how fast the wind blows, but you can’t really count IT. You can tell how hot the air is, but you can’t hold sunlight in your hands. Money? That you can count. Success in material goods? Those you can measure (but not realistically, if you don’t include the ‘collateral damages’ of unfair practices, theft, cheating…). And those you can aspire to. There is, we believe, no ‘luck’ about them. They are achievable by all.
Except, of course, they’re not. More on that another time. Suffice to say that the deck is loaded against many Americans.
When the world breaks your heart — as it does mine at least twice a day, chipping away at the my thin candy shell — you have two choices. Love or removal. A temporary bridge into love for me is anger — I am quick to anger. Because of love, paradoxically. All I can do when I don’t know how to take the next breath is try to return to love. And while I”m still good at the easy kind of love ~ the sturdy delicacy of a fly landing on my page as I write outside, laughing as the dogs chase each other ~ the ‘returning to’ part of it, coming back from the incandescent rage I feel at injustice? That’s verrry hard! Still, I believe in it, love. Fiercely. The child of a mother who believed, literally, in the power of love. If you just love enough, she would say. Love can do anything. And so it can, I still believe, as my mother did before me. I just have to practice, that lovely Buddhist word that says I can keep trying; it doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, there is only the expectation of continuing, not perfection. So I just have to learn how to return to love, to employ it even when the objects of the exercise are sooo very unloveable!
Tea and Breath 