We Will Contain What Must Go On

I was lucky. I lived both in my tiny home and on its 49-square-foot back deck. From as soon as possible in the Spring till as late as I could push it in Winter, the deck and stoop were my dining room, writing space, temple; my bird, spider, and elk viewing platform. And they were my celestial observatory.

I did not own a telescope. I made do with 50-year-old binoculars. I had once been a city-dweller under skies never dark, my children and I once homeless. So, from the cabin’s deck, I blessed my neighbors fighting for Dark Skies, and was content with what revealed itself to my naked eyes. Here are notes from that time:

I walk out of the cabin. That is an act of alchemy. I have believed for years that the huge-windowed mansions are built in an effort to recapture for the owner the sense of Bigness they experienced on their first moment in the western wildness — with the guarantee of none of the risk that goes with walking in wilderness.

I walk out not into wilderness but onto a deck twenty feet away from a telephone. I sit not on an exposed basalt ledge, but in an old pine rocking chair. The only animals that prowl around me are five thoroughly domestic cats. And, I sit under the same hugeness that arches over mountaintops, and cups in a glittering bowl deserts echoing with pure silence.

Sometimes I turn on my headlamp and make notes; most of the time I simply watch. I put what I see into my holy middle. Later I sleep with what I contain and wake to my fingers aching with words: Parchment moon. Ribbon of molten quartz. New moon black over black trees.

I ached with more than words the morning when I sat in the rocker and stretched my arms out to shreds of hope. “I join you in this work,” I whispered. “We will contain what must go on.” I had trance-walked out to the deck with my son’s phone call howling in my mind: “Mom, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. It’s not a movie. It really happened.”

I had put down the phone and known there was only one place I needed to be for the next…I didn’t know how long. I sat in the cool September light. I saw how morning gleamed in the strands of the spider web that stretched from lupine to lupine. I considered that I had sat with just that light and shimmer 24 hours earlier and I wondered if I would occupy that radiance in a new morning to come. I could not find an answer. I whispered again, “We will contain what must go on.”

Only a little less than six years later, I took myself out to the back stoop to watch the elegant progress of a full eclipse of the moon. There was a faint pink-gold disc above the ragged pines. I wrote apricot in my notes and returned to my bed. Hours later I jolted awake. The moon hung further to the west, the exact color of the translucent membrane I had once seen stretched over the rib cage of a dead fawn. I wrote without my headlamp, raised my head and, in that instant, a fat meteor arced slowly from west to east.

On many of the nights that flowed between September 11, 2001 and August 28, 2007, I walked out to the back deck, to the base of the two-trunked pine that is my southern altar, to the heart of the little meadow that lay between my Pine Dell neighbors and me. I watched Orion hunt Lepur, the star-giant doomed to never catch the glittering rabbit crouched at his feet. I named the Pleiades to my self, knowing a few of the seven sisters would become women in my newest novel.

I stepped down to the wet grass that sparkled in the light of a monsoon full moon. I lay down, watched the stars from a bed of stars — and I remembered so many years ago tucking my children into their blankets in the back of our car. We were not camping. We had nowhere else to go.

I turned my head and saw the soft glow of the candle in my bedroom window. I thought of my children’s homes and knew they were held safe in them. I turned my gaze back to the sky and considered our great good luck in the double shelter of roof and sky.

Later, I sat in the rocker a while before I went into my warm bed. I imagined that a spider lived in the low corner of a huge window in a huge empty mansion. Because the heavy curtains were never opened, the spider lived her life unbothered by any humans, even the person who came every two months to clean a house in which no-one made a mess. The spider rested at the edge of her web. She knew that there were insects that would find their way to her. She waited for them — and every night she watched as the moon moved through its immutable cycle of shadow and silver.

[Editor’s note: This was adapted from a feature that ran in a 2007 edition of Mountain Living, a monthly publication in Flagstaff, Arizona.]

Feature photo: Coso Blues