Some Wandering Thoughts On An Easter Morning
Amidst the unrelenting cruelty, grief and sadness that 2025 will be remembered for, here is one small piece of personal happiness. I am in the midst of getting to spend 6 uninterrupted weeks in California with my dog Bodhi (aka the joy machine). By mid May, it will become too hot for him in Davis, so I will drive him home to the ranch and then fly back to California to finish out the teaching quarter, though I might sneak home over Memorial Day weekend to spend those days with him and Mike and all the other animals as well. Because of how I make my living, these six weeks will be the longest consecutive time we have spent together since he first came to live with us when he was a puppy, and the longest time I will get to spend with him until late fall. This stretch, as of Easter morning, is about halfway through.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays I have obligations to the University of California that have to come first, but on the other four days of the week, though I have to get some work done, I am able to prioritize Bodhi’s desires over my work demands. Bodhi, of course, prefers to spend as much of those days as possible outside. Ideally at Stinson Beach. Or in the Davis arboretum, or somewhere on the green belt, or on Clam beach up in Humboldt County, or in Truckee, where he likes to roll around in the leftover snow. I probably don’t have to tell you that his desires line up pretty well with mine.
There are few things in life that feel better that watching a dog you love find ecstatic joy running as fast as his legs can take him down the beach or leaping through the waves or meeting a dog matching in age and temperament to run circles with. I have spent hours and hours and hours doing just that on the three weekend outings we have managed since we got to California, and not one second of it feels like wasted time.
At the end of these outside days with Bodhi I am tired in the best way possible. By that I mean that my limbs wish to be still in bed for eight whole hours, as opposed to what I would call the other version of tired during these times, when anxiety and grief for my country and all the people and animals who are suffering in it becomes so overwhelming that I have to use my arms to push myself up off the couch.
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My beautiful friend, the writer CMarie Furhman, zoomed into my graduate nonfiction class last week to talk about her essay collection Salmon Weather, which I had assigned as our first full book this quarter. She was talking about an essay called Coyote Story, and was explaining how humans lost our connection to the Earth and to ourselves as creatures when the colonizer´s English took over as the dominant language. “The being who has always been “bear” suddenly turns into “the bear.” She said. “Everything changes in that moment.”
Got that? Now try mountain. Sky. Woman. Earth. With that dreaded article we put a sheet of dirty Visqueen between us and bear. We will never really see bear again. Let alone learn from her, let alone dance in her long shadow, let alone work hard to preserve her habitat, to give her the same chance to thrive that we ourselves desire. “If tree has a blue dot spray painted on its trunk,” CMarie said, “its name changes to timber.”
If those currently in charge succeed in eliminating all of this country’s National Parks, if they succeed in eliminating all of our public lands and the animals and the trees who live on them, the name for that will be genocide.
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Last week, at Clam Beach, Bodhi was attacked by a golden retriever, a breed that while beautiful, I have come to think of as the underwear models of dogs. Both dogs were off leash and there were literally miles of space available. The golden came down the beach from where his person was sunbathing—topless, I noticed—and there were sniffs and wags, nothing alarming. I kept walking, calling Bodhi who, not atypically, didn’t come along right away. The other dog walked back towards his owner and Bodhi followed him, and, when they got a certain distance away from the sunbathing woman, the Golden turned on Bodhi, pinned him on his back and seemed suddenly intent on ripping his throat out. The Golden was tall and outweighed Bodhi by at least forty pounds.
My husband Mike handed me his good camera and ran toward the dogs, and when he got there shouted at the golden retriever to let go, which the dog did. Bodhi slunk toward me and collapsed in my lap. I will not forget how he looked up at me from under his poofy white bangs in utter betrayal. Not by me, but by the world. He is one and a half years old and this was the first bad thing that ever happened to him. He was bleeding, his chest full of puncture wounds, but after a trip to a very kind emergency vet who was thank God open on a Sunday, and a round of antibiotics he is back to his joyful wagging self, greeting all dogs on the beach bravely and with the assumption of good will.
In the ten seconds or whatever it took Mike to get to the dogfight, the topless woman did not one thing to interrupt it. Nor did she say she was sorry, or offer her information, nor put her dog on a leash. Which was a mystery to us, but one we did not take the time to investigate, given that our dog was bleeding and we were already a long walk from the car and a longish drive from the emergency vet with whom I was already on the phone.
“Who knows what was going on for her?” Mike said, in his Buddha way, and I guess he is right about that. Who knows what is going on for anyone in these terrible terrible times.
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There are a lot of people, my husband Mike is one of them, who are surprised by the extent and scope and rapidity of the destruction and cruelty we have witnessed in this country since January. I think this is because if you are lucky enough to have never lived under the control of a monster, you don’t exactly believe in them. Or, conversely, the desire to not believe in monsters is very strong until your survival depends that you do.
I was raised by a monster, and a monster’s enabler. And the most important thing I can tell you about a monster, the most important thing for us to reckon with, is that a monster will never be satisfied. A monster has to keep escalating his cruelty, in order to, pardon the expression, get off. Because that is what a monster wants, more than fame or adoration, or even money. Follow the money everyone says about our current situation, but I say, follow the sex crimes. A monster needs to get off and hurting other beings in such a way that they can never recover is the only path to satisfaction. This is one definition of evil. My definition. The version of evil I lived inside of for my first 17 years and survived.
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When I was a little girl, I never got an Easter basket. My mother was forever on a mission to make me thinner, so instead of chocolate bunnies and jelly beans, my basket contained apricot facial scrub and Calgon bath oil beads. My mother also knew my father was hurting me, was torturing me sexually, before my small body had any idea what sex was. My mother was afraid of my father, of course, though he did not hurt her physically. Sometimes I believe emotional torture is the worst of all. She kept herself at her desired weight of 120 her entire life, by eating very little actual food, and drinking a lot of Vodka, which you may know is the least caloric of all distilled spirits.
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I have always considered myself to be a person of deep Faith, though I do not follow any organized religion. The longer I live the more I prefer talking with people of faith, even ones who belong to religions whose tenants I find challenging, than I do talking with cynical atheists. I was trying to explain one time, to a devout Christian how my faith was very personal, and specific to me, so specific in fact, that I wasn’t sure I could find language for it. I said if I had to put it some kind of category, it might resemble some aspects of Buddhism or maybe even some pantheistic druidism more than Christianity. She said, “Well, sure, Buddhism has some great ideas and all, but how could you even think of following a religion that was made up by a bunch of men?”
In one of my favorite essays of all time, Kaveh Akbar’s On Fasting, in which he poses the question, “If I can talk to God, shouldn’t I?” he writes, “Take a second: picture a bladeless knife with no handle. Where’d it go? Now, with that same clumsy brain, imagine God.”
There is some disagreement over who washed Jesus’s body before burial on Good Friday. Credit is often given to Joseph, but if you read a little more deeply, it is a couple of women named Mary who did the actual work.
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About a year ago, a good friend invited me to go to the BottleRock music festival in Napa with her. Think Cochella, but with white wine. I am a person who finds it impossible to enjoy gatherings of more than about seven people, but I went, because she wanted me to, and because I thought it might in some way be good for me to face that fear.
My friend was most excited about seeing Stevie Nicks, who was that day’s closer, but we got there early enough to see some other bands too. It was in the middle of the afternoon, when we wandered past a stage that had hundreds of 13 year olds jumping up and down in front of it, and a beautiful woman of substance dancing hip hop on it. Her name is Bebe Rexha, and you have probably heard of her but I had not. She had more energy than anyone I had seen on stage in a long time, I would call it loving energy, for her music, for her young fans, and also it seemed, for herself. She kept telling all those girls who were in her thrall how beautiful they were, these girls who were at the age where they feel the most unbeautiful imaginable. She made intentional eye contact with one after another after another of them. She told them how much they were loved.
Bebe Rexha was the first person I heard say the word Ozempic outloud. Bebe said, “People are telling me I ought to take Ozempic, but you know they don’t know what that shit might do to you down the road, and I’d rather spend my time and money learning to love myself just the way I am.”
I walked a little closer, noted the happy delirium she was producing in hundreds of tween and teen bodies. Then she announced a dance contest and invited at least thirty of those girls up on stage. Many of them knew all about hop hop, and could really dance, and others believed they could because they were up there with Bebe Rexha. She told the audience we would be the judges and asked us to cheer for our favorites. She danced with each girl one at a time while mothers and best friends on all sides of me shrieked approval. We watched every girl on stage go a little crazy with joy for the music, for the things their bodies could do. Then Bebe proclaimed, “You know what? The results are in and it is a thirty-way tie because you are all so amazing and I love every one of you! Thank you thank you for coming up here and dancing with me! You are all so so beautiful and you are so loved!”
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Now, not quite a year after BottleRock, I seem to be losing half of my girlfriends to Ozempic. What I mean by that is several of my friends have lost half of their body weight in a frighteningly short amount of time. As most of these women are on the down side of 50, or even 60, they have been left with giant heads and rickety stick legs they seem to have difficulty pushing through the world with their nonexistent hips. I also understand that white America, generally speaking, finds this emaciated look attractive.
One of these friends said to me, “It has always been my dream to be a size two.”
“Your dream?” I said, “Out of all the dreams possible?”
I cannot stop thinking about a correlation between the rise of patriarchical fascism and a woman’s desire to disappear. To become literally half of herself, to be able to slip under doors or under rugs like an apology. Talk about obeying in advance. I can´t help thinking about the insatiable component of sizing down, as is so beautifully expressed in Kiese Laymon´s book Heavy, (another book I am teaching this quarter) how an 8 seems great until a 4 seems possible, a little like the diminishing average age of girls who are trafficked. Like what does it exactly mean to be a size zero. What happens after you get to that?
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Last October I was invited to read from and talk about my book Without Exception at the First Unitarian Society of Denver in Capital Hill. I did not know, when I wrote a book about women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy that it would mean I would get invited to speak at more churches than I ever had before, but that is what happened. At First Unitarian, I stood at the pulpit in front of one giant banner that said all souls are sacred and worthy and another that said salvation in this life.
My friend Kimberly Urish, who is a longtime and active member explained it to me like this: “Basically, all souls are sacred means you’re sacred and worthy no matter what. I’d say it’s the opposite of some denominations where you’re sacred and worthy only IF. If you’re Christian. If you follow the Bible. If you’re a believer. And if you aren’t gay or trans or break some rule like having sex out of wedlock or having an abortion or all the rest of it. First Unitarian accepts you if you believe or if you don’t. If you follow a faith or no faith. We welcome you no matter your mistakes and baggage and trauma and invite you to not be ashamed of who you are.
Then there is salvation in this life. I especially like that one. A lot of religions act as if you can behave badly, destroy the Earth and the people on it, as long as you say you’re sorry or confess to a priest, then you’ll be saved. Everything is about your next life. But what if there isn’t a next life? What if there’s no heaven and you’ve just destroyed the only possibility of heaven here on earth? What does that leave you? So we take care of each other and the earth here and now.”
Before I gave my talk that night, Reverend Mike welcomed us like this: "Whoever you are, whoever you love, whether you carry joy or sorrow in your heart, you are welcome here. All people of good will are warmly invited to join us on the great journey of the mind, the heart and the spirit.” The ten hour commute makes it impractical for me to join that church, but I felt more at home there than I have ever felt, not only in a church but also in a University, or at a writer’s conference, or at a literary festival.
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One time I had a student in a class who worked for Eileen Fisher, and she brought me some clothes to try, saying I would love them, and I did love them, so she sent me even more. I posted a thank you to her on Facebook, dressed head to toe in Eileen Fisher, even my shoes, with some info about the company’s sustainable practices and fair-trade policies. I have to admit I was feeling, in that photo, something I almost never feel which is fashionable. Several friends commented positively on the post, and then one woman, a facebook “friend” but no one I actually knew, said, “Yeah, I always feel that resorting to Eileen Fisher is a sure sign a woman has given up.”
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A Greenlandic student who I have been working with at the Institute of American Indian Arts named Naja Aparico wrote an essay that was about many things including the Inuit concept of SILA. “In Inuit cosmology,” she wrote, “SILA is a world view that holds the exterior, air, weather, intelligence and spirit of the cosmos…when we lose a loved one, it is only in the physical sense. The soul never leaves us.” Later in the essay Naja included some paragraphs about how important it was to her to play How Great Thou Art at her father’s funeral. I asked her if she thought the essay needed to reckon with the harm the Danes had brought to the island, to her ancestors and to her culture when they forced Christianity on the Inuit. I asked how Inuit cosmology and beliefs sat alongside Christianity in her mind. She said, “Inuit beliefs are born and live inside all of us in a way that Christianity could never challenge. And also, Pam, Greenlanders really like to sing.
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To write, I believe is to have faith in many things simultaneously, though what those things are may vary from writer to writer. I can think of many people, without really trying, who would disagree with me about that.
I have faith in Mother Earth, her ability to heal herself, and her ability to heal me. I have faith in dog, Bodhi specifically, but also dog generally. I have faith in horse and bear and mountain and sky. I have faith that if I spend at least four or five hours outside every day I will feel better and sleep better and with better sleep comes better everything. I have faith in acupuncture because at least twice it has saved my life. I have faith in my husband Mike and a handful of other people. More than a handful. There are so many people out there fighting, helping, caring, continuing, in the face of retaliation, death threats and worse. I am trying to decide these days if I still have faith in humanity. Individuals, of course, but collectively it gets trickier. My friend Josh said, “I just don’t know how to live in a world of AI and Bitcoin,” and when I think of it that way I wonder if it is not an absence of faith as much as profound confusion.
What I do still have is faith that I am being looked after by something larger than myself. I think I cultivated this faith as a very young child because without it, I would not have lived to see adulthood. Not looked after in the sense that I will be saved from calamity or imprisonment or torture or death, if any of those things are coming for me. Just that I am being looked after. That I am being watched over. That something, somewhere, just beyond my comprehension is somehow keeping track. It does not have a white beard or the face or the name of a man. Sometimes, it feels more like a meadow, or the light coming through the trees, or the way the surface of a wild river turns into mercury as the sun drops lower in the sky. This morning, though, my protector more resembles Bebe Rexha. She’s leaping all over the stage, flinging her powerful limbs with all the dexterity of a track and field star, telling a football field full of 13 year-old girls they are perfect just the way they are.
This piece has been haunting me since yesterday, so that my clicked “thumbs up” doesn’t feel adequate. Everything from the opening “unrelenting cruelty, grief, and sadness” of 2025 to Pam’s hard earned wisdom about monsters, and a woman’s desire to disappear herself, and everything in between resonates in a lasting way. Women who look unflinchingly at the facts and then tell the truth are awe-inspiring and, as a 76 year-old who hasn’t always done that, a little frightening. Thank you, Pam!
Let's dance like everyone is watching with astonishment <3