Published by the Dillydoun Review, Issue 4
Pearl raindrops pause on tree limbs, cleansing leaves' vacant spaces. A December morning's yellow brown patina surrounds my sloshing boots. The impressionist lens of a nearsighted naked eye leaves nature's beauty pure.
I walk slowly to perceive dying leaves in detail. They cross one another, wind-strewn. Hardened edges curl, protective gestures as leaves pass elder days. My sister and I when young gathered leaf forts, leaping out at fancied foes to call ourselves heroic; Vic Morrow as Sergeant Saunders fought Nazi evil Tuesday nights on television, but Dr. King and the Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day inspire this adult.
Runners peek at Prospect Park's pastels as Sharon shares our Parade Grounds Sunday sojourn. Tourist dollars greet the Berkshires’ autumn forest glory. City branches shake in sorrow; we miss what nature offers as we clatter past to subway, bus or car to workplace, school or store. There we check off task lists that exclude what lends life meaning, including nature's grace.
Compassion, service, loving touch mean more than the largest or the most of anything, yet we contest rising costs and planned obsolescence for fleeting convenience, status, satisfaction.
Status quo corporate politics induces Pavlovian sneers at socialism, cloaking capitalist despair. We move too fast to stop on treadmills, or fear our fate if we do. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't, a 1539 Irish proverb warns.
Retirement helps me contrast how I was to how I can be. Outward drives for family and career turn inward. Writing makes insights of thoughts and feelings on good days. Fluid body motions as I walk at length connect heart and mind in depth, a divine hand's work, not mine.
Content to feel whole, I pace through leaves that melt the brick and concrete harshness of cities. They absorb light energy, trade carbon dioxide for oxygen for the photosynthesis of plants. Kneeling, I praise their role in parting. The building superintendent's potent blower will tornado them into streets where spinning tires prey.
The imminent deaths of leaves remind that I spend finite days. I touch and greet each tree along our dog's perimeter to bless the breath of life as we carouse outside in morning. “Thanks for another good day,” I tell them, noting patterns in the bark I lightly touch at sunset.
The temporal rest of sidewalk leaves shows their work is done. Mine endures as thumb taps cellphone keyboard. After nineteen years of teaching, this screen's my classroom now.
A Peace Corps year in South Korea training special education teachers taught the value of others' perspectives, the virtue in humility, the efficacy of nonviolence. “How we are, more than what we do, touches others,” a Korean soldier turned student told me. His surprising soft affect stayed. I joined NYPIRG's Citizens Alliance as a community organizer to have a “soft footprint, big impact” at home.
“We’ll walk down Northern Boulevard so the brothers see us talking and it's cool,” a friend said after five men grabbed and searched me as I came off the elevated subway in Queens. The confetti stream of flyers from my shoulder bag made them free me, proving I was canvassing for a summer jobs campaign, not drug dealing, buying or informing. That society's tolerance for poverty and its crime correlation made this occur enraged me.
We all know at birth what we must relearn from leaves. A smile or sunbeam, touch or toy, delight infant eyes that greet the world in wonder. It excites a child to start school, find friends, explore words' and numbers' revelations.
Later grade-strivings to pass, excel or earn awards breed more angst than pride— will I make the good middle school, high school or college? Can I get a good job, a title, an office, more money, nice things? Then: Is that all there is?
Competition is said to bring out our best but it labels winners and losers, brings isolation and costs our compassion.
Leaves share color and shade, persevere through the seasons, fall in due time. “Everything exists according to its own nature,” a Zen tenet says, “Our individual perceptions of worth, correctness, beauty, size and value exist inside our heads, not outside them.”
Leaves are peaceful and content while denial, greed and fear among us make violence normal.
Our thirst for placebos and presumed happy endings made cliché of Anne Frank's claim “that people are really good at heart” but her full statement adds context: “I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death,” her attic journal adds, “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too.”
Materialism, militarism, economic oppression, police brutality, and the apathy of ignorance abound. The pandemic worsens them. So does moderates' inaction, a de facto form of violence with Congress on recess as catastrophe ensues.
Liberalism dissolved on Manhattan's Upper West Side with the Hotel Lucerne a haven for homeless New Yorkers from virus spreads in shelters. Funds that could have rendered aid or offered options went to an expulsion lawsuit as the gentry barked “not here!”
Be the change you want to see in the world, Gandhi said. We exceptionalize others like him —Mother Teresa, Congressman John Lewis, as well as Dr. King and Day — as if they were divinities, not human beings who like us had innate potentials that we could, like them, achieve.
Fewer people hold greater wealth. A shrinking middle class fears falling among unseen poor. Jobless claims reached 778,000 last week, the Wall Street Journal said. The pandemic may add 15 million to the 35 million who the US Department of Agriculture last year found struggled with hunger.
Bill Gates, meanwhile, lives in a $123 million mansion, owns luxury horse ranches and, worth $80.1 billion, is the world's richest man according to Business Insider. I salute his philanthropy but question its limit.
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist,” Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camera memorably said in the Sixties. Guests called me “a free person,” “close to God,” when I served at Brooklyn's CHIPS Soup Kitchen before the pandemic though I was just there on Wednesdays. I cry at how deeply grateful they were for the kindness in what little we gave.
It seems like a drop in the bucket.
Why can't we all make it rain?
Golden leaves, like silver dollar pancakes, beneath the tree's maroon.
The CHIPS Soup Kitchen, Brooklyn's blue sky beacon for the pandemic's rise in hunger.