The Storm’s Letter to the Corinthians
This week the sound of leaf blowers
Manicuring the neighboring yards
Has been replaced by chainsaws
And wood chippers
As great metal buzzards
Tear away at the carrion
Of windshorn trees.
Reports say
That hybrids and imports
Suffered the most,
And that makes sense.
Olives and Chilean mesquite
Thrived here, with their invasive pollens,
And hybrid palo verdes
Looked even more naturally beautiful
Than was naturally possible.
We planted, tended, and loved
Like we were taught,
Making our city
Into something it wasn’t ever meant to be.
We fell in love with a place
And then,
Like so many lovers,
Went about the work of changing it.
And isn’t that what we do?
We think we love someone
Or some place
For what they are
But perhaps we really love a possibility:
A false promise
Of what things could be
Rather than something more plain
But true.
Is this our way of doing good?
Of making our mark?
Of leaving the world a better place?
Of working on our relationships?
Or are these just excuses
For meddling and denial?
According to the Apostle Paul,
Love bears.
Love hopes.
Love believes.
Love endures.
And it does this for all things.
We have taken this
To extremes:
Either thinking that we love
When we believe the unbelievable,
Tolerating what should never be tolerated
And for far too long.
Or else we become gods ourselves,
Making others in our image
And carving our own Edens
Into plotted parcels
We call our own.
But do we really own anything?
Have we any claim
To the earth,
Or to the lives and pleasures
Of our neighbors,
Friends,
And loves?
Where does our gentle tending
Become a colonizing force?
Our love become control?
Was it ever a kindness
To plant a tree
Where it never belonged?
To think that love
Is fashioned in shovels
And scalpels
And self-help books?
And is it any less unkind
To blame ourselves
For the hopeful prophesies
Of desire,
Of resilient optimism,
Of the innate need to create
A better life,
To have some dominion in this world?
Acceptance
Sits there on the same shelf
As dreams
And both are tools.
Both are treasures.
Both are paths.
And there,
Between the heavy pressures
Of these quarreling bookends
Is love.
Tucson has tornadoes now.
That realization still makes me woozy as I grapple with what it really means. Arizona’s weather and climate are changing so rapidly that we have storms we have never seen before, and what was considered a freak event last year (our first tornado) has now happened a second and third time, begging the question: “Is this the new normal?”
Phoenix has experienced storms of such ferocity that they have had to import new words to name them. Haboob, an Arabic word describing the destructive and awesome sandstorms of Sudan and the Middle East, was unknown to all but a few Arizonans a couple decades ago, but now we track them on the news and see the word pop up on weather alerts. Every year now, it seems that haboobs shut down air traffic in Phoenix and bring cars on the freeway to a complete standstill as they are engulfed in a blinding wall of sand and dust. Sky Harbor International Airport even had to change the way their sliding door sensors worked because the clouds of sand were so dense and hot that they activated the doors the same way a human would, letting all that sand inside.
On a positive note, a fortunate side effect of our climate-change-induced weather extremes is that Tucson has been receiving more water than it has in decades, with much wetter winters and a longer monsoon season. Earlier this year I read an article that said Tucson was one of only a handful of cities in the entire US that saw its water table increase — surely a blessing for this desert city. Tucson just happens to have the perfect altitude and topography to reap blessings from what is a disaster in Phoenix.
In July, though, we suffered an incredible storm that was so widespread that meteorologists could not even determine whether or not it even qualified as a tornado. Most agencies agreed that there was a tornado in there somewhere, especially since the wind patterns had the telltale signs of violent rotation, but old methods of identifying tornadoes failed in the face of a city-wide storm that did so much damage that it made tornado tracking impossible. That is a startling thing to ponder.
Our neighborhood was one of many that received catastrophic damage. Our roof was completely denuded in places, and shingles hung from tree branches and covered the yard after the storm. A giant limb from one of our old olive trees fell on our friend’s truck, an enormous branch of our old mesquite broke off into our pool, and worst of all, a fifty-foot tree with a canopy that stretched over three houses was felled completely.
That majestic old tree anchored our entire block, crowning three lots as it sat on our neighbor’s property right against our shared wall, between our house and two neighboring homes. It was a constant source of shade and protected all three houses underneath it for at least a century. Our neighbors had been training it every year, hiring workers to shape it into the majestic umbrella it eventually became. Its roots must have been tremendous, too, because when it blew over, the roots stayed intact, and the entire trunk split about nine feet up from the ground, snapping the entire tree off its base.
The winds were strong enough to push heavy flowerpots and large decorative rocks off our porch wall, and it ripped our air conditioning ductwork right off the roof. Neighbors lost carports, and trees were downed everywhere. The damage was breathtaking.
Even so, we were overwhelmed with gratitude that nothing worse had happened. Although, as of this writing, our house is still tarped as we wait for insurance to cover the replacement of our roof, we realize that it could have been so much worse. Even with the debris and entire falling trees, nothing landed on our house, and we only lost a few flowerpots. Even our landscaping lights could be mostly fixed with just a little attention.
Also, while we wait for our insurance settlement, our neighborhood still waits for the city trash service to pick up all the debris. Great mounds of dead branches and tree stumps line the roads, as bit by bit, the city comes to cart it all away. What they expected to take a week has taken over a month, and in our section of the neighborhood it still looks like the storm just happened, the only tell being that the once-green branches have now turned brown.
Shortly after the storm, agencies, arborists, and ecology experts announced that most of the damaged trees were non-native, or hybrids, and that damaged indigenous trees had most often been trained into unnatural shapes (like our neighbor’s giant mesquite that shaded almost our entire house).
That made me think of all the ways I and my neighbors say we love the desert, but then get to the work of taming it, of “beautifying” it, of growing things like olive, citrus, and fig, as we terraform our little plots of land. This only increased with the Tuscan craze that swept through in the late 90s, where entire neighborhoods dug out cactus to plant olives and oleanders around barrel-tiled-roofed houses.
This reminded me of how much of my life I spent trying to change the people I loved. I tended to them and their spiritual or emotional wellbeing the way I tend my garden, all the while thinking that I was helping them, improving their lives, loving them the best way I knew how.
My ex was an addict, and for seventeen years he looked to me to keep him sober. After one horrific relapse he literally begged me to be his “probation officer,” and, true to what I had been taught my whole life, I leapt at the chance to demonstrate my love by helping him be a better person.
I truly thought I was doing the right thing, and so for seventeen years I was his Jiminy Cricket, keeping him from destroying his own life.
Until one day, we suffered a storm that would strip us both of our fantasies, toppling the codependent life we had built. Despite the deep roots we had put down into the soil of our shared lives, our marriage was shorn like our neighbor’s tree.
I’ve been chewing on this idea a lot the last few weeks, thinking about all the ways I am still learning how to live in the dynamic tension of acceptance of what is and hope for something better. How do we know when to just accept something for what it is and when to hope for or even work toward improvement? A theme of much of my earlier life was tolerating the intolerable, especially staying in situations well beyond their expiration.
I thought about our now-dead potted gardenia trees in our front patio, which I nursed back to health time and time again and poured tremendous amounts of care into. Gardenias were never meant to grow in a places like Tucson, and yet I made these beautiful trees my personal mission. Their heady blooms were so delicious I just had to do whatever it took to keep them alive. Honestly, making these notoriously difficult plants bloom in the desert became a source of pride— until I couldn’t anymore. They were just too much work and their health was too precarious in this climate, needing constant attention. One day I realized that it just wasn’t worth it anymore. They simply didn’t make sense in this climate and took way too much time and expense, especially since I would have to bring them back from the brink of death every time I returned from travel.
But how many metaphorical gardenias had I had in my life? How many times had I stayed in a relationship, in a work environment, in a vocation, in a course, in a volunteer position, in board service, in a contract, in a health status, and any number of other things well beyond reasonable limits? When had my undying loyalty and hopeful optimism been paid with far more than a pound of flesh?
As I did my Everyday Divinas practice today, however, I came across one of those downed palo verdes that had started blazing back to life in a verdant spray of new growth. I thought about how this particular property, which had been one of my favorites in the whole neighborhood, lost all but one of its immense trees. Every spring it had been a source of joy form me as its palo verdes erupted in yellow blooms that flurried through the air like cherry blossoms, covering the streets with gold. And now those trees were gone, and yet the one that had half its roots still in the ground was fighting to come back.
Was it going to survive? Probably not. I’d imagine that the stump will be removed once the huge piles of branches get taken away, but here was life persisting in the face of destruction. And it probably could survive if the property owners tend to it. Who knows? Maybe it will grow into the form of a giant bonsai shape! I’ve seen that happen before with other tenacious trees.
Also, this was one of the native trees. There was no shame to cast on anyone for its destruction. This didn’t happen because someone trained it to be something it wasn’t, like my neighbors had done with their huge mesquite, or planted something that didn’t belong, like my olive trees out front.
Suddenly I realized that up until then, I had been looking at all this damage as if we’d all deserved it somehow, as if our desire to cultivate desert gardens and landscape with flowering plants was a symptom of some grave denial or delusional drive to improve, improve, improve. And maybe that’s true. But sometimes things just happen. No blame. No shame. No rhyme or reason but nature.
Before this encounter with the downed native palo verde, the blinding light pouring in from where our neighbor’s tree used to be reminded me of our lost canopy of shade. Every time I drove through the neighborhood or went for a walk — or looked out my front window — the huge piles of storm debris still sitting on the curbs reminded me of climate change, of the folly of planting non-native plants, of trying to make the desert into something it was never meant to be. I thought about the religious programming I grew up with, urging me to subdue the earth and save the lost, and how much this has shaped my ethics and desires.
And yet here was a gorgeous palo verde growing right where it should have been, and still pushed over by the same storm that ravaged the rest of the city. And it was coming back to life.
Seeing this native tree damaged just as badly as the trees I had wrongly assumed “deserved” their damage woke me up from the old messages of guilt and shame and blame that I’d been carrying for all these weeks. Suddenly I realized that I still go back to those old mindsets that I grew up with when I try to make sense of the senseless. It is as if some deep part of my inner self believes that if I can figure out what caused a loss, then I could somehow prevent it from ever happening again.
But that is a fantasy.
This has been a year of many losses, and just a couple of weeks after this terrible storm in Tucson I was in Isle of Palms, South Carolina as a hurricane raged all week, and we’ve had so many freak stressors that it has almost become comical. In the midst of all this chaos, some part of me tried to make sense of the chaos as a way to understand it, manage it, control it.
And, in that desperation to make it all make sense, I reached for my old tools of blame and shame even as I sat in gratitude and hope.
Today I am reminded, however, that these things can all coexist. I can both be at fault and accept that I am also doing my best. I can be complicit in the structures that create climate change while also living as gently on earth as possible. I can mourn what was lost while being excited about the future. I can accept what is and still hope for something better. Heck, I can be grateful even as I complain.
There’s so much more that I could write about this, but today I feel like I just want to sit with that blossoming stump and its new, tender, green spray of life. I want to acknowledge that all my codependent rescuing was detrimental to my life while also acknowledging that I was doing the best I could with the tools I had.
And perhaps most of all, I want to revel in the fact that despite all of my life’s storms, I have always been able to rebuild my life into something better. The light now blazing into our windows where the mesquite had once shaded them is harsh, but it is also stunningly beautiful. The white marble in my bathroom gleams. Light shines through the guest bathroom’s door to bounce off the mirror and brighten the once-dreary hall. Even the artworks hanging on that side of the house seem to drink up the light to become saturated with vibrant color.
One day soon the city’s hulking trucks and tractors will make their way to our street to remove the huge piles of dead branches left behind in the storm’s wake, and things will return to a new version of normal. Already, one of our neighbors has planted a lovely young columnar cactus where their palo verde used to be. Currently it sits next to a giant pile of what is left of the downed tree. They have protected it with a temporary cage, and something about that just feels like love and hope to me. Quickly we adapt and move on, and maybe we learn something along the way. Maybe the loss of the old reality helps us cherish the new plan even more.
This is also the nature of life, and even in the face of catastrophic storms, life always finds a way.
Somewhere, between the dynamic tensions of acceptance and hope, we learn to grow and grow again, being grateful for every day we get to wake up and start anew. There will be no replacing an ancient and towering tree, but there will be opportunities to savor the new light that shines in its place. Even now, our lilac vines have grown lushly in the new banquet of sunshine, happy to be exposed. Can I learn from their happiness, from their resilience, from their ability to feed off even the harshest light shining down on them all day long now that their covering shade has fallen?
Yes. And so can you.
Life is loss and gain and chaos and serenity, just as love is both genuine acceptance and also the ability to believe the best in someone. It is rigorous honesty and gentle compassion. It is safety and it is risk. It is intimacy and boundaries, attunement and individuation.
And sometimes it completely transforms into something new, while at other times it just grows right back after devastation, every bit as tenacious as a tree that has learned to survive the harsh realities of the desert.
Whatever the case may be, shame has never been the solution. Shame won’t make the trees come back or make my insurance company pay for our repairs. Shame won’t make the city get to our block any sooner to haul away the storm’s detritus, and it won’t repair the damage I’ve done to myself and others over the years. Shame won’t fix the environment, reverse climate change, prevent extreme storms, or save our water supplies.
But hope will.
Hope leads to dreams, and even as we accept what is, these dreams inspire us to get back up again after the storm, after the loss, after the devastation, and do whatever that one next right thing to do might be. And I believe that is how we face reality with gratitude, resilience, grace, and love. Not fantasy. Not despair. But honest, resilient, tenacious hope.
The Storm’s Letter to the Corinthians
This week the sound of leaf blowers
Manicuring the neighboring yards
Has been replaced by chainsaws
And wood chippers
As great metal buzzards
Tear away at the carrion
Of windshorn trees.
Reports say
That hybrids and imports
Suffered the most,
And that makes sense.
Olives and Chilean mesquite
Thrived here, with their invasive pollens,
And hybrid palo verdes
Looked even more naturally beautiful
Than was naturally possible.
We planted, tended, and loved
Like we were taught,
Making our city
Into something it wasn’t ever meant to be.
We fell in love with a place
And then,
Like so many lovers,
Went about the work of changing it.
And isn’t that what we do?
We think we love someone
Or some place
For what they are
But perhaps we really love a possibility:
A false promise
Of what things could be
Rather than something more plain
But true.
Is this our way of doing good?
Of making our mark?
Of leaving the world a better place?
Of working on our relationships?
Or are these just excuses
For meddling and denial?
According to the Apostle Paul,
Love bears.
Love hopes.
Love believes.
Love endures.
And it does this for all things.
We have taken this
To extremes:
Either thinking that we love
When we believe the unbelievable,
Tolerating what should never be tolerated
And for far too long.
Or else we become gods ourselves,
Making others in our image
And carving our own Edens
Into plotted parcels
We call our own.
But do we really own anything?
Have we any claim
To the earth,
Or to the lives and pleasures
Of our neighbors,
Friends,
And loves?
Where does our gentle tending
Become a colonizing force?
Our love become control?
Was it ever a kindness
To plant a tree
Where it never belonged?
To think that love
Is fashioned in shovels
And scalpels
And self-help books?
And is it any less unkind
To blame ourselves
For the hopeful prophesies
Of desire,
Of resilient optimism,
Of the innate need to create
A better life,
To have some dominion in this world?
Acceptance
Sits there on the same shelf
As dreams
And both are tools.
Both are treasures.
Both are paths.
And there,
Between the heavy pressures
Of these quarreling bookends
Is love.
I love you!
Eric