Author: Trebbe Johnson

Where is the environment anyhow?

In my article, “You Are Now Entering the Environment,” just out in the new issue of Minding Nature, I question what, exactly that word—that massive, amorphous place—means to us:

Several years ago The New Yorker published a cartoon that showed two people in a car turning their heads in bewilderment toward a roadside sign that reads: “You are now entering the environment.” Now entering? Where were we before? Surely the environment is all around us. Or is it? Like any good joke, this one has a bite that’s sharp enough to leave an aftertaste. What is the environment anyway? Is it a synonym for nature? Are you more likely to find it where there’s plenty of nature to enjoy or where nature is under threat? Can you get out of the city and spend a Saturday hiking in the environment? Or is the environment that place over there, the one that’s having a lot of trouble nobody quite knows how to fix?

To explore these questions, I talk about the environment as predator and as prey… how looking out the back window of the car as a child taught me about the meaning of “environment”… the many environments we absorb and are absorbed by every day, and other conundrums!

To read the article, click here.

Love, Actually is in the hospital

I love the movie Love, Actually. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a British film made in 2003 that ties together about a dozen love stories. Some of the stories are sad, some fantastical, some funny. They all braid together with chance encounters, great music, and fabulous actors.

The beginning and end of the movie takes place in Heathrow airport. We watch people greeting one another in the arrivals hall. It’s touching enough to get you weeping before the actual story has even started—so many lovers and parents and friends embracing one another after an absence. The love is palpable.

Recently, I’ve noticed another place where love is palpable—the hospital. In the past six or seven months, I’ve spent entirely too much time in hospital waiting rooms, while my husband has been treated for a kidney infection, severe back pain, and bladder cancer (he’s doing much better now). And I’ve felt a lot of empathy with the other people waiting for news of their loves ones.

While they wait, family members talk softly together. Individuals scroll and tap their phones. Some people read. Almost no one watches the TV that’s on in all too many of these places. But the moments when you see the love is every time the door opens and a doctor comes in. Everyone in the room looks up, wondering—Is this for me? Is this about the one I love? Oh my god, what will be the news for us?

In an airport, you see people joyful in the moment of reconnecting with love. In the hospital waiting room, people are standing on the brink between a future of health and easy companionship with the one they love or sickness and perhaps onerous care-taking.  In an airport, what you await impatiently is the moment of joy. In a hospital, what you await impatiently is a message that could bring either great joy or great grief.

In the hospital, too, as they say in the movie, “Love, actually, really is all around.”

Try this in your own driveway

 

The next time you go out to your car on a freezing morning and you have a few extra minutes, try playing this little game with the elements.

Instead of scraping the ice off the windshield right away, while the car warms up, just sit inside the car and watch the spectacle of melting ice. Turn the heater on full blast, aim it toward the windshield, then sit back. You might want to sip a cup of coffee as you attend to this phenomenon. But do watch. Don’t be tempted to read or check your messages on your phone. This experiment is best when you’re paying full attention.

After what seems like an endless spell of waiting with nothing happening, when you’re just about to give up and slam back outside with your scraper and get this thing done right already… Just then you will notice that a slight shift is taking place in the ice barricade. It appears as a dim arc spreading across the bottom of the windshield. This arc slowly becomes lighter and thinner, and finally you will start to see the ice crystals melting in the path of the heat. They soften, they drip. Some of them catch hold of other ice particles and drift down the window like a collusion of raindrops. Others loosen their hold on the mass and float upward. You can watch the borders of the ice field slowly withdraw and the outside world slowly become known. Ice and heat, clarity and obfuscation, nature and technology.

It’s a visual concerto.

 

Plungers & Toe-dippers

PLUNGERS AND TOE-DIPPERS

My husband thinks you can divide people into two categories: plungers and toe-dippers. He defines himself as a toe-dipper. He doesn’t like to act precipitously. He prefers to consider his choices carefully and use reason and projected consequences to determine the one that’s right for him. Presented with an invitation to do something new and perhaps a little strange, his immediate tendency is to say no.

I’m just the opposite. The time between the appearance of something new and beguiling in my life and my leap to embrace it could be counted in nanoseconds. I act spontaneously, some would say impulsively. If I don’t fully understand all the ramifications of one of life’s invitations that I’m allured to, I’ll say yes now, with the promise to myself that I’ll resolve any difficulties when and if they arise.

Andy and I often get impatient with each other over our individual proclivities. Nevertheless, over the years, we’ve learned from each other. If he’d listened to me 30 years ago, when we were looking for a home in the country, we might have ended up moving into a collapsing barn without plumbing, albeit with a beautiful landscape. If I’d only listened to him, we’d have missed exploring some amazing places in the world, like South Africa and Bali. Also, in my work with Radical Joy for Hard Times now, I’m blessed to be working with a board president who is constantly (and gently) holding me down and back from making intemperate decisions. (Thank you, Joanne!)

I think the world needs both types of people, and it’s great when our own kind finds and balances with someone of the other kind. Sometimes we need to recognize that some person, place, or event is a unique opportunity and that to delay embracing it is to stay stuck where we are instead of risking some bold new future. Sometimes we need to put on the brakes, lest a rash decision threaten our finances, our friendships, our careers.

What about you? Are you a plunger or a toe-dipper? Are you satisfied with your customary response to the world? How about your partners or your children? What are they like and how do you balance you way with theirs?

My new best friend?

 

From 7th grade through 12th, I had a best friend. Annie Batchelder and I hung out together at school every day. We whispered and giggled in study hall until the librarian separated us. Then we learned sign language, so we could communicate from opposite tables. We talked to each other on the phone every single night. Often, I spent the night at her house.

After my sophomore year in college, my mother moved from Omaha, where I had grown up, back to her native Connecticut. Annie and I lost touch for many years. When I finally made a visit back to Omaha 26 years later, we were both nervous, for our lives, our politics, and our professional paths had diverged widely. But as soon as we walked out of the airport and got into her car, it was as if two embers touched and burst into flame. We talked on and on for days, ranging from one subject to another, as fascinated as ever with each other’s lives. We’ve stayed in touch ever since, if infrequently.

I think that, for the past 40 years, I’ve been looking for a new best friend. Every time I meet an interesting new woman, I have the same reaction that some people have when they’re eyeing the field for a prospective mate: Is this the one?

It’s never quite worked out that way. I have many very dear friends throughout the U.S. and in several other countries, but there’s no one I talk to every day (nor would I really want to), no one with whom I share a conviction that we know each other better than anyone else does (though my friends and I are very open and honest with each other).

Of course, I’m also a different person from who I was in Omaha. There I was a misfit—a scholarship student living in a duplex with my divorced mother, when the other kids in my school came from wealthy two-parent families. My best friend, along with her family and home, which I adored, were my refuge. I’m no longer frantically treading water as I try to paddle toward some (any!) shore.

Still, part of me longs for the regularity, the dependability of a best friend. I’d like to know who I’d automatically call in case of an emergency. I’d like to truly feel at home in another person’s house. I’d like to giggle with someone again.

I think I’ll call Annie and see what she’s up to.

Photo above: Annie (r) and me, senior year in high school, Brownell Hall, Omaha, Nebraska.

The foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart

 

A friend was telling me the other day that the recent sadnesses in his own life (the death of his best friend, a cancer diagnosis for him) had torn open his heart to the sadnesses of people everywhere, known and unknown. He feels overwhelmed, he said, and he doesn’t think he can stand to care so deeply.

Gently I told him that such breaches into a more oceanic compassion are good things. They drag us out of preoccupation with our own problems and heartaches and surround us with other living beings. We see, then, that we are not alone, that suffering is a great wave that constantly rolls in and out of the living world, and we ourselves are no better or worse or different from any other. Even though it seems our heart will break from such immensity, it is actually through the cracks that beauty, kindness, and even joy can flow.

There is a poem by W.B. Yeats that has guided me ever since I first encountered it as a senior in high school. It is called “The Circus Animals Desertion,” and it ends with these lines:

Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Whenever my heart is broken, when I feel at the end of my rope, when I am sure I’ll never recover from this particular blow, I remember those lines and they tell me that I am in the one right place, the only place I need to be in order to recover.
The rag-and-bone shop is a place that sells the oldest, most threadbare of materials that no one wants anymore. When we’re stuck there, we find there’s no door, no escape. The ladder of distraction and diversion is gone. In Yeats’s poem, that place is the heart. And there is no way out of that moldy, dank place except by surrendering to the sorrow until a new ladder materializes out of the suffering.

Revive Speculation!

A woman who took my workshop at Rowe Center last weekend commented, “The internet has put an end to speculation.”

She’s right! When you’re having a conversation with someone and a question comes up—In what year did Paul McCartney and John Lennon meet? What does hegemony mean? How exactly did the Cuban missile crisis end?—somebody invariably reaches for their smart phone, googles the question, and shares the answer with everyone.

But imagine what would ensue if we refrained from demanding instant resolution. People would venture guesses. Memories would emerge, some inaccurate. Theories would form, some improbable. One person’s contribution to the question would kindle a sliver of answer in someone else. The conversation would unfurl, slip, slide, backtrack. Funny answers would emerge. Someone would have a personal story to share.

Maybe, after all that, everyone agrees it’s time to look the thing up.

Twice, since the woman in the group made that observation, I’ve had occasion to urge friends in conversation not to grab their smartphone as soon as some perplexing issue arises.  And it’s really been worth the delay!

Try it! Revive speculation!

(Cartoon above by Dave Coverly/speedbump.com)

Some gulls allure

In my book, The World Is a Waiting Lover, I wrote this about allurement:

The earth, out of which all living things arose, is constantly pulling its offspring close through the force of gravity…. We ignore allurement at our peril. If we cannot stand outside ourselves in wild ecstasy (the Latin roots of ecstasy mean to stand outside), we will cower alone in fear. We will demand safety and security over freedom. We will frown upon people who don’t follow convention or who seem to be having too much fun or exhibiting too much sexuality. We will become conservative in crimped, unhealthy ways, preserving what has ceased to serve us, saying no to the naughty, the quirky, the weird. The quite possibly seductive. What we devote our life to, instead of liberating us, will tie us in knots.

Today I was allured by gulls. My husband and I were coming out of Jo-Ann’s Fabric store, located in a small mall near Scranton, Pennsylvania, when about a dozen seagulls started swarming around. Some of them perched on the roofs of cars, others swooped so low we could almost have reached up to touch them. They dove, they rose, they flapped. What were they looking for? We are many, many miles from the sea here. There was no restaurant in this mall, so the birds had no reasonable prospects of food.

Andy and I just stopped and watched them, speculating, amazed. Finally all the gulls flew off except these four, who decided to perch on a corner of the Toys R Us store—graceful, willful beings more fascinating than any of the plastic mimicries of animal life to be found inside.

The gulls were a treat, a distraction, a mystery, an amusement. I don’t have any idea what they had in their individual and collective minds as they explored that parking lot on a gray November day. But I’m glad we stopped to wonder.

Knock on the door you’re sure won’t open

I had a wonderful conversation on Saturday. A woman from Puerto Rico contacted me. Her niece in the U.S. had sent her an article I wrote, “The Beauty of Broken Places,” that’s in the current issue of Rowe Center’s magazine, Center Post. In the article I talk about the importance of facing the dark places in ourselves and the places we love and making beauty for them.

Maria, a 79-year-old woman living in the mountains of Puerto Rico, contacted me and invited me to come visit her, meet the people, write, and make beauty for that very wounded place. Maria is full of life, vigor, and, in her words, the spirit of a “warrior.” We had a long conversation about beauty, sorrow, toughness, and what’s happening in her country.

I loved how she saw the two of us as kindred spirits and simply reached out into the unknown to get in touch.

It reminded me of a time I did that that had a major impact on my life.

After my first essay was published in 1985, I sent a copy of it to Peter Matthiessen, whose writing I loved. He wrote me a nice postcard in response. A few months later, I attended a talk he gave in New York about Leonard Peltier and other serious and ongoing American Indian issues, including a land dispute that was forcing thousands of traditional Navajos off land both they and the Hopi considered sacred. After the lecture, my husband insisted I go up and introduce myself to Matthiessen. I was reluctant, since there was a long line weaving its way up to his famous presence, and I felt like I’d be just a nuisance. But Andy sat back down in his chair and said, “I’ll wait.”

So I joined the snaking line, and when I reached Matthiessen, I said, “My name is Trebbe Johnson, and—”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You know, you should go out to Arizona and write about that Navajo-Hopi issue. You’d like the people, and you could wrap your kind of writing around it.”

That was all I needed—a mandate from Peter Matthiessen. Two weeks later I was in Navajo-Hopi country. After that first trip, I wrote Matthiessen a long letter about my findings. Coincidentally, the editor of Amicus Journal had just asked him to write an update on the issue, and he suggested that I do it That was the first trip and the first article (photo above) of many I’d undertake over the next five years.

So the message is… it’s always a good idea to go somewhere you’re drawn to go, even if you think you couldn’t possibly be welcomed there. You just never know.

Resolution

When I was about to graduate from college, I received some encouragement from the Danforth Foundation to apply for a grant to start graduate school. I went to my advisor to ask him what he thought.

“You want to be a writer, don’t you?” he asked.

I said with conviction that I did.

“Writers write,” he said.

It was such wonderful advice. I decided not to go to graduate school, and for the past 40+ years I have been writing. I pass along this counsel to anyone who asks me for tips about how to start writing. Writers write.

Now, I need to take my own advice and start writing this blog!

For months, I’ve been asking myself with uncharacteristic indecisiveness what this blog should look like—how personal, how philosophical, how much reflecting the subject of my new book, how much about other preoccupations… But actually, tagline says it all: Grabbing the Great Now from the tiny now.

Life is full of challenges, and if I make an effort to see them with openness, curiosity, a sense of their larger possibility, and the certainty that I can be surprised at any moment, I receive great amazement and insight… even in the midst of grief and fear.

So this is my commitment to you: to write more often—sometimes with the personal, sometimes the philosophical, sometimes citing something I’ve found interesting… but always exploring how to grab the Great Now from the tiny now.

Thank you for sticking with me!