The Lesson of the Wave

I have a new place and I don’t live here yet. It has golden walls and I don’t even own a couch yet. There is too much running around and too much fighting all the time. The books are stacked up to the roof and there is not even a bookcase. I left my car in South Philly somewhere and I watch Parking Wars and pray it’s not been towed or stolen. It is not, as they say, “street legal” here, and I don’t think I consider myself that either. I am definitely not “street legal,” although I want to be, and I bought my first go-go CD yesterday.

I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend sitting on plastic chairs listening to storytellers older than myself. I am in research mode. I am reading John McPhee books so I can learn how to write about the Internet because he rocked the abstract.

I have never had to spend so much time absorbing and translating information. My friend who is one of the best writers in the movement told me it took a YEAR for him to even learn to speak coherently about the communications industry; I am at month seven, and growing mighty impatient.

I thought going to the Folklife festival would be a tonic of sorts, because I am in need of guidance right now, and it was. One thing I am learning is that your requests are answered in the most unexpected ways, and I had the most terrifying and touching moment at one of the performance spaces called ‘The Stoop’, where the great Sonia Sanchez from her perch onstage turned and looked right at me in front of 60 people and started talking to me in front of the crowd, telling me that “you have to find time to write, dear sister, you have to carry a notebook around with you, I hated that I had to work and write in my spare time but that’s how it is, I loved my work too and it was hard, and you will find your process, dear sister, on the plane or in the airport, when you go to Peru and South Africa, you will find it, and if you don’t, please come and find me.”

And it blew me away, to be so recognized, and I was speechless, because I walk around all the time with my head in a cloud of imaginary beings, places, loves, wars, characters, drained lakes, animals, newly invented games involving rubber bands, the flotsam of words from billboards, etc etc, all of the story I tell myself in order to make my day to day non-existence a trifle more exciting. This cloud is so thick that I am in constant danger of stepping off the bridge into the river and drowning one day. (Knowing too, that, if that happened, I sure would be telling myself one hell of a story.)

Plus I thought: do I really get to go to Peru and South Africa someday?

I was in Seattle for ten days and just got back Sunday. It was such an astounding adventure I am trying to keep it with me. It was a city that lay completely under the spell of the sky and the weight of the water around it and the trees (even as far as they were in the distance – great Ent trees, some of the tallest trees on the planet).

Ferries poke back and forth across the Sound, and on one of the piers there’s a tiny hut made of bark and twigs with a sign that says “Wild Woman Coffee” where womaned by a tanned blissful being with a miniature espresso machine. There is something that all that water does to you, even in June when I went – it’s sunny then. The fish might as well be swimming down the sidewalk; I think the drunks are part fish. There are certainly a lot of watering holes.

If you are sensitive enough, you can feel the layers of a city’s history emerge in its present, and in Seattle, the wild, brutal frontier town layer – the boom town layer – is still there under the software. It might well be another country entirely – a self-sustaining economy that relies in no way on the federal government but yet creates more value for the country than any other industry.

Everybody looked so outdoorsy and they offered to take me kayaking and about half the men were licensed massage therapists and the city had a pagan parade with large floats of sea animals or comical tributes to the Seattle rain, all headed up by about two hundred naked people riding bicycles in body paint.

I went to a Mariners game with friend Steve, an expatriate New Yorker and Mets fan, and he had to explain at the beginning that it was a “family-friendly” ballpark. “You notice, something’s missing here,” he said.

I looked around. I listened.

“There are no obnoxious drunk guys!” I said. “Where are they?”

I tuned my ears for the sound of insults, grunts, boos, etc., but all that was around me was a small sea of beautiful multiethnic middle school children fiddling with their IPhones, bounded by a phalanx of men in yellow ALCOHOL ENFORCEMENT t-shirts.

“This is weird,” I said. He nodded. The middle-schoolers did a giggly wave.
Ichiro did that cool Japanese-archery flourish he puts on every swing. And the Mariners won, of course.

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I want to say something important. I have realized something about myself and my endless love-hate relationship with my own career, and I need to write it down. All the advocating I am going to do from here on out is going to be done in the spirit of enlightenment, possibility, education, freedom, hope, and love. When fighting for something, it is easy to motivate oneself by darker emotions – anger, ego, a desire to kick (fill in the blank)’s ass. But all of that is corrosive. It is not that anger cannot be a legitimate force, but it is heavy, and it weighs you down.

There was not a hint of payback in the Obama campaign – although that campaign could have been filled with it - and that is why it was so aerodynamic. It flew. It was weightless.

When one is attempting to organize a miracle – which is really what public-interest people in my field do, and I have a couple on my plate right now – the only forces that have the power to accomplish such a thing are hope and love: love for those on behalf of whom you fight, love for the future… and boundless hope, I mean boundless unfathomable hope that humanity can turn back from the cliff on which we stand teetering and find our way back to civilization and a humane world. This kind of optimism comes close to insanity, but such are the confines of our world, and such is the need to break them.

There is no room for destruction.

These are the only transformational forces on earth. It took me so long to learn this, but it’s true, especially in a job where my primary objective is to hold up the voices of silenced multitudes so that they may sing.

The world that I am helping to create is so beautiful that I simply will not get to it if there is so much as a shred of the fog of anger drifting about me. I do not know if I am going to be successful at this, but it is important that I draw this line now. I have had it with thunderstorms and destruction. From here on out it’s waves only.

The earth turns on its axis and the moon pulls and the wind shears and you get: big beautiful blue waves. Wave… wave…wave… wave. Like the sky over DC this spring – it was like the ocean itself raining down on us. People complained, and the Washington Post ran an article on Mami Wata, but nothing truly spooky happened.

And … maybe once in a while a mild tidal wave… but no one drowns. And the boats get moved a little bit up the shore, but they are fine, and maybe some friendships are formed amongst the comically and mildly angry fishermen who must of course complain but, in the end, simply cannot curse the ocean.

And the sand on the beach is purer, and the land is quenched, and there is an abundance of seafood for all.

This... now I think that this might be a way to live.