Be Quick to Love, Make Haste to be Kind

The Truth of Things

The Truth of Things
For Eugenia


She is struggling:
		So much change
				In so little time.

Losses stack upon each other
		Like stones on an ancient grave,
			But even gravesites

Are full of life:
		Moss on granite,
			Roots unfurling underground,

And untold families
		Of vital elements
				Transitioning the dead
				
Into more life.
		This is the truth of things:
				Even death keeps busy,

Her agile fingers
		Spinning old stardust
				Into ever new creations,
				
Getting on with life.

---

Fallen grave marker, Saint Martin’s Church, Canterbury, England

I had a plan for this week’s writing, but when I sat down to put pen to paper (or stylus to iPad in my case) I was overcome.

It is fully spring in Tucson. The wildflower seeds I gathered and sowed in 2020 during the first months of lockdown have taken over the entire neighborhood, so that the alleyways and roadsides burst with color. Native plants that had long absent from our downtown district are back and celebrating the abundance of springtime in a glorious profusion of color and life.

And all of this life started with death.

in April of 2020, right when lockdown started here in Arizona, three friends of mine died in a single weekend. On Friday I got a call about a friend, Laura, who died after her surgery because she had caught Covid in the hospital. The next day my phone and email were flooded with messages about Bobby, a friend and coworker from Sundance, whose Covid death made national headlines. On Sunday my friend, David, also died.

All three were my age.

This was such a massive shock, especially in those early days of the pandemic, where nobody even knew for sure how Covid was transmitted. To be honest, I thought this was just the beginning, and that I would soon have many more weeks like this where multiple people I knew would die.

To deal with all of this grief, uncertainty, and fear, I started collecting wildflower seeds on my daily hikes. Tucson is fortunate to be surrounded by wilderness areas where we could go out and hike in safety during lockdown. It was also late spring after a superbloom event, so the wildflowers had started going to seed. By the end of the season, I’d collected over fifteen gallons of wildflower seeds, and in memory of Laura, Bobby, and David, I decided to scatter the seeds throughout my entire neighborhood to sublimate my grief: I would take the darkness of their deaths and sow seeds of life and beauty as a living art project.

I called this effort, along with two paintings and a poem, The Brittlebush Project, named after brittlebush, a profusely flowering native plant here in the Sonoran Desert. The project was a lifesaver for me during that time, and later it even won an award from the Italian government and was published in Rome through Poesia Quarantena, in which it was translated into five languages and distributed internationally for pandemic relief! That project gave me a sense of purpose, as well as a way to honor important people in my life, bring comfort to others, and prepare for future rewards in the blooms I hoped would come.

Thankfully, that shocking series of daily deaths did not continue unabated. I would still lose several friends and family members in the ensuing years, but I never had to go through another awful weekend like that horrific time in April of 2020.

Now, four years later, the flowers have gone through cycles of seeding and spreading, and every year I am reminded of my friends — but not in mourning. Their memories are now eternally linked to the outburst of life and color that spring up every year in their place, with thoughts of life and beauty instead of only death and loss.

The reason I was overcome this morning when I sat down to write, however, is because I felt paralyzed by another string of deaths. In the past two weeks I have again lost three friends. One died suddenly, another died from extremely aggressive cancer (she was just diagnosed in December), and another succumbed to Parkinson’s fourteen years after his diagnosis.

I thought I was doing well, especially considering how productive and busy these weeks have been in the face of all this death, but as I sat down to write what I had planned — including a poem that I guess I’ll save for later — I realized that I just was not in a space to write what I had planned.

I sat with myself for a bit and centered on my body and intuition. What did I really need right then? Was writing the healing agent I needed at that moment? Perhaps I just needed to write for myself rather than to my subscribers.

I felt like I could have possibly written something, but that was not really what I wanted. The more I sat with it, the more I had an intuitive sense that I needed to get outside and get my hands in the dirt.

Every spring I remove about half of the compost from my compost bin, mix it into potting soil, and then replenish all the soil in my potted plants. I have no idea why, but every year my pots lose a bunch of soil and the dirt line sinks by several inches. As I started tending to that again, I wondered, where does all the soil go?

That was when I remembered a poem I’d written in 2020, also during lockdown, for a friend who had gone through an intense period of loss and suffering. Poetry and art were my lifeblood during that difficult time, as was gardening. And so was doing what we could to help others.

Because my husband and I were both able to continue working during lockdown, we bought artworks to help our artist friends, we commissioned work from craftspersons, we hired a chef we knew who had lost her job, so that once a week she delivered meals to us. And we bought groceries and cooked for people, delivering food and meals to those who lost their incomes. Friends dropped off masks they had sewn. Other friends came and brought me food and groceries when I got Covid and almost died. Again and again I saw how people found solace in helping others, almost like caring for the community became a form of resilience and an act of defiance in the face of all the fear, uncertainty, and political craziness. Kindness kept us going and gave us something to latch onto even when it seemed sometimes that the world was going mad.

One of the people I delivered food and groceries to was an acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist who had to close his shop and, as a result, had no income. When my own Covid got bad enough that my doctor wanted to hospitalize me, I bargained for twenty four hours before going on a ventilator, and this friend delivered me an herbal formula that I believe saved my life — and kept me out of the hospital in those terrifying early days of the pandemic. I’d never felt closer to the idea of reciprocity and interdependence.

Just like gathering and sowing all those seeds felt like a way I could transform all the death into life in the future, being able to help our friends — and receive help when I needed it — felt like a way we could transform financial insecurity and fear into a sense of connection for the people in our community.

While I was tending to the garden this morning, remembering that poem I’d written for my dear friend who was suffering so deeply, and remembering the relationships that deepened so much during that time when we all supported each other, I felt attuned to he fact that loss and gain are natural cycles of life. We continually expand and contract, transform, bear fruit, die, and get reborn. That is the nature of the universe. It is the truth of things.

Every year my compost bin becomes full with the scraps left over from our kitchen prep, and every year it gets eaten by black soldier fly larvae and other critters that come and transform our waste into the most beautiful black soil you can imagine. Those larvae then turn into flies, feeding off more death and decay, and then they die. Then their offspring return to do it all again, every year. In this way, even pestilence creates new life when it is allowed to be a part of the natural cycles of life, death, and transformation.

In working with the compost, filling the pots with their mysteriously shrinking soil, trimming off the things that died in the winter, and witnessing the new births coming out all over — it all suddenly made sense again. Death becomes compost, and plants eat death to make more life. Also, my grief was stronger than usual this morning; I think this recent string of deaths subconsciously reminded me of the shock, fear, and grief of losing those friends to Covid all at once.

Being outside with the flowers that bloom in their memory, though, reminded me that they are not completely gone.

Before going out to garden I had revisited an email I’d been meaning to reply to for a few weeks. A friend who recently and suddenly lost her father wrote to me to share some wisdom she’d heard a few weeks ago. She wrote:

…we do not need to lose those who have passed to the other side of the veil. We can continue to keep them close in our stories and singing and daily acts and rituals. We can continue to learn from them.

Perhaps this was the intuitive spark that whispered encouragement to go outside and be with the flowers, to remember how I’d dealt with death and grief in the past. And to get my hands into the soil, which may be the epitome of death’s transformation into life. After all, soil wouldn’t exist without something dying and rotting to produce it, and we would not have life at all if not for soil.

As I worked in the garden I saw hundreds of people pass by, all headed to the Fourth Avenue Street Fair a couple streets away. Twice a year the Street Fair brings thousands of people to our part of downtown, and my house is right along the route people take to get to all the artists, vendors, and food stalls selling their wares. Again and again, people stopped to take photos of the wildflowers growing in our yard and in the alley. A couple of people asked about them, and when I told them the story about gathering the seeds in memory of my friends, they were clearly moved. Even though these were strangers who had no idea who Bobby, Laura, or David were, it gave me great joy to see their delight in the flowers planted in their memory.

Finally, after a few hours of tending to my garden, trimming, troweling, planting, fertilizing — I came back inside exhausted, grateful, and happy. I remembered how this recent string of deaths was immediately followed by an incredible celebration of life as I baptized a dear friend’s baby in Madera Canyon, a grand and beautiful natural preserve south of Tucson, with springs and streams fed by snowmelt.

We chose St. Patrick’s Day for the baptism as a way to honor the family’s heritage, and we incorporated numerous Celtic and women-centered ecumenical prayers into the liturgy. During the service, I also had the privilege to administer first communion to five other children, and all of us got to revel in the sacred beauty of life, of nature, of change, of ritual, of family, of history, and of community. Just like the email I read this morning right when I needed it, so too had that life-giving service fallen on the day after I had been reeling from news of yet another friend’s death. Life buoys us when we allow it to, and I was reminded of all of this as I showered off the soil and compost that had clung to just about every part of my body.

And then, finally, I was ready to write.

I am reminded of a benediction I used to use when I worked in the Episcopal church, modified from a quote by Henri-Frédéric Amiel:

Beloved, life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us, so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and may the blessing of the one who made us and loves us and goes before us be upon you and all those whom you love, this day and always.

Amen!

These past couple of weeks I have been reminded yet again that life is short, and none of us knows how much time we or our loved ones have left on earth. But kindness and community bring meaning and blessing to what time we do have — so make haste to sow kindness, light, and life, even in the face of death. I am surrounded by meaningful mementos of people I have loved, from teaware, books, and dishes that I inherited from my grandmother to the flowers that I grew from all those seeds I collected during the pandemic. Even more, I am surrounded by a community of reciprocity, full of people who support me just as much as I support them, people who love me in the same way I love them.

Just as my garden would die if not for both the care I give it and the transformation of waste into nourishing soil, my own community of friends, family, and colleagues would whither if neglected. Likewise, as we help each other transform life’s garbage into nourishment, our relationships bloom and change too, and we all become nourished in the process.

And now, after a day of such deep sustenance and connection, I hope my writing has sown seeds of nourishment and hope in your heart too.

Madera Canyon, the day of the baptism, Saint Patrick’s Day, 2024

The Truth of Things
For Eugenia


She is struggling:
		So much change
				In so little time.

Losses stack upon each other
		Like stones on an ancient grave,
			But even gravesites

Are full of life:
		Moss on granite,
			Roots unfurling underground,

And untold families
		Of vital elements
				Transitioning the dead
				
Into more life.
		This is the truth of things:
				Even death keeps busy,

Her agile fingers
		Spinning old stardust
				Into ever new creations,
				
Getting on with life.

---

I love you,

Eric