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The Magic of Wild Places
The Tragedy
"Shall we go?" I say to Roberta.
"Yes, let's."
I drain my coffee, retrieve my skis, resting against the wall, beside the picture of Irl LaGrand, and in a few minutes, I am skiing down Sixteenth, heading for Volunteer Park, perhaps another mile away. It is a morning of beauty; the trees etched in snow, up ahead, a dirty, icy snowman built of last week's snow with thin branches for arms and small candy canes hanging from the arms. A small whisky bottle, upended and placed in the place where a mouth would be. Eyes made out of two round orange slices with a red cherry stuck in the middle and a black, plastic fast food tray, with a fresh layer of snow, for the hat.
Roberta snaps a picture. I turn and the way ahead, on Sixteenth, looks like a cross country ski dream of packed snow on the road, perfect for gliding, and huge mansions lining the road, and somehow I get the feel that I'm in some New England town on a snowy day. The houses so old, so well kept up, so stately and it's a wealth of beauty and wonder to ski down that avenue.
Am I living my life as I was meant to do? I hope so. My delight seems to tell me that I am. For surely I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing right now than this.
Roberta, is perhaps a half-a block behind and I slow and wait.
Heaven. I think, I am in heaven.
And I find myself wondering, what if this is heaven? What if this is it? What if there is nothing beyond our death? How can we know? Maybe in the end, it just doesn't make any difference. What if this is heaven? And I have to stop and look around. God, I wonder, if this isn't heaven, what else could heaven offer than this? What a place this planet is!
Had I not been born to the people I was born to-- if that woman hadn't thrown the ring back in my father's face, had he married her instead of the woman he did marry-- uh-- would I be here?
More and more, the older I get, the more I just want to let go of all the pain, put it aside because it really does occur to me that no one comes into the world, this magnificent heaven, wanting to damage anyone or be unhappy.
My dad, upon his arrival into the world, never said, "Well, here I am and I'm gonna get fucked up by a bitch of a mother and I'm going to be unhappy, marry someone who will also make me unhappy, have kids with whom I can't bond because I am so miserable and depressed. Then I'm going to get colon cancer and die a miserable death. Oh, boy!"
Did my mother come into the world and as soon as she looked around, did she say, "Oh, wow, at five I'm going to have whooping cough, give it to my baby brother when he's two and he'll die and I'll feel this immense guilt then in my thirties, I'll marry someone child-like, have two kids who will be sickly so that I can take care of them, then whenever they are getting well, I can freak out because that will be like them leaving and dying like my baby brother did so I have to keep them sick so they won't leave me and I can forever assassinate their power so that they'll feel like they can't grow up and leave and they will hurt me."
No. No. And I really don't think I was born saying, "Wow, here's a wonderful chance at being and I think I'm going to get sick, be unhappy, be freaked out at the violence in the family and deny myself access to hat which had meaning because if I went after what I wanted, I know I'll make my dad angry, my grandmother will slap the shit out of me and my mother will abandon me, so I guess I'd better get diabetes, and fuck my teeth up so I can have a little bit of what I want and people, feeling sorry for me, won't hurt me again or be too angry at me for being selfish at just trying to exist."
Volunteer Park up ahead. And I laugh to myself at all this. What if this is heaven? What if this is it? We have to let go of all the pain, we have to assume the good intent on the behalf of others, unless proven otherwise, so that we can be fully alive in the only thing we know for certain-- this heaven, this now. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe we should act as if it is.
Because if it is--
Because if it is-- to not move toward joy, toward love, toward forgiveness, toward compassion, means we die long, long before we die and we miss out on being in-- Heaven.
What if this is it?
Might as well be. What a place it is. Dogs, that if they had the right vocal structure, could talk with you. African Gray parrots that-- can; Gorillas that understand sign language, not to mention the intelligence of dolphins and whales, monkeys in the jungles of Bolivia who clasp each other and sing to each other at daybreak -- and all the other wondrous life-forms of this world that seem to live and exist as we do -- for the sheer joy and exuberance of being for the sake of being, living for the sake of living. And then there is the amazing beauty of this world, this third planet circling around a star. My God, I think this is one helluva heaven and it's heaven enough for me.
Certainly, my father found it as such when he wrote about hiking in the Cascades.
I cross 15th avenue East, heading toward Volunteer Park. The spirit of The Magic of Wild Places with me.
A spirit that my father knew and in spite of his pain, taught me. And taught me well.
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