Locking the Bunker Door

Ted Koppel's book, Lights Out, discusses at length the vulnerability of the U.S. power grid to a cyber attack. He walks through a hypothetical situation where such an attack has occurred, and traces out how it will impact people in the days and months that follow. In exploring the type of doomsday preparation that would be necessary to survive the aftermath, Koppel explores the Mormon church's teachings on preparing for disasters in such a way as to maintain self-reliance during an emergency. 

In the course of describing how impressively Mormons have made doomsday preparations, he indulges in some speculation about the moral crisis he believes that faithful Mormons will face when doomsday finally comes, because there is an inherent conflict between the Mormon belief in loving your neighbor as you love yourself, and the Mormon belief in self-reliance and preparedness. Because when you find yourself in the position of guarding a bunker full of the only available sustenance for miles around and the earth has become blighted and food scarce, how do you treat the people outside of your bunker? Do you give them food, or do you lock your door?

Koppel raises this ethical dilemma with real earnestness, because he believes it is one that we all will face in our lifetimes if we are lucky enough to survive a doomsday scenario. But I think we are already living through the early days of such a scenario, and that we all refuse collectively to see it, because the scope of it is so horrific. There is currently a vast migration of suffering humans across vast distances on the planet. They are leaving their homes because of gang violence which is escalating due to food shortages. And it is all happening because of climate change. Portions of the planet are becoming slowly uninhabitable for humans, and a large portion of our fellow human beings are fleeing to cooler climates as a result. Right now, they are heading north to places like the United States, and they are seeking a refuge from a warming planet that will no longer sustain them where they came from. 

We are living the doomsday scenario already, and thus far, the United States' official answer to these suffering throngs of humanity who are falling down at our door, is, "Go away." We are locking the door of our bunker, because we have never imagined this situation and have no governmental apparatus for dealing with it. No vision for what is to come or how we can intelligently and thoughtfully address it. It is just too big for us to see, so we fall back on false narratives about who these people are and why they continue to journey to our borders at great peril even though they know that if they survive, they also face unimaginable horrors at the hands of our current system. It remains the only alternative to certain death.

I don't hear any kind of public dialogue about whether locking the bunker door is really the best strategy for humanity as a whole to figure out some kind of plan to save ourselves. My hunch is that an honest and open discussion would lead to the conclusion that it's really probably not the best plan we can come up with.

Opening

Spring opens

Behind closed eyelids

Dark in the quiet morning.

It is the first stirring

Of consciousness

In bed, nest, and den—

Each day holding 

The quiet possibility 

Of surprise.

Portrait of a Lion

When I was 22 years old, I lived in an apartment in the City of Buffalo. One night while I was taking out the trash, a tuxedo cat who was visibly blind in one eye came up to me and asked if I would take him in. I picked him up and said, "Hi Hawkeye!" like we were old friends and he purred and rubbed his head against mine. He was very thin and flea bitten. There were chunks missing. So I carried him up the four flights of stairs to my apartment and fed him a can of tuna fish, and then went out to buy a litter box and cat dish. I had always had a cat growing up. I don't know how normal people get cats. Mine have always found me. 

At the vet a few days later, they said he had worms; had been hit by a car (hence the bum eye) and that he'd been neutered on the street (hence the cut ear, as a marking). And he needed a home (hence the human paying the bill). 

The first night he slept with me in my bed, I hardly slept at all. He couldn't stop telling me how happy he was. My vague impression is of a lion puffing out his chest on top of the covers to stake his claim. Still purring. And when I would come home from work every day, he RAN to me to pick him up and I would hold him in my arms and we would rub foreheads VIGOROUSLY for AWHILE. He missed me. 

After awhile, he settled into a better way of sleeping with me. I would hold up the covers after I got in bed. He would walk under head-first, make a U-turn, and lay on my outstretched left arm. I would wake up with him still lying next to me, head on the pillow, like a human. 

When I started law school I put two chairs in my home office, one for me and one for Hawkeye. I would work my fulltime job, go to school fulltime, come home at 6:30, sit with him and read until midnight, and then go to sleep for 5 1/2 hours (also with him) and start it all over again. The only thing I allowed myself to take breaks for was to pet him and watch him for awhile as he laid next to me in his own chair.

Later, I got married and we moved to West Seneca where he howled at the walls for being in the wrong places for the first few days. Then when I got pregnant and gave birth, I labored mostly at home. He came and laid in the crook of my arm just as he did when I would sleep. He stayed with me for hours and hours like that, purring and letting me pet him, helping me to stay relaxed. He put me into a kind of almost-sleep until it was time to go to the hospital where the baby would come within an hour. 

Sometime in those early years, I took him to a feline ophthalmologist who said he would inevitably develop an eye tumor in his damaged eye which would take his life unless we paid to have the eye removed. I was still in law school at the time, and had no money, and couldn't afford it. The doctor said if I couldn't pay the bill, she would do the surgery and keep my cat as her own. I couldn't imagine. So he didn't have the surgery. 

A couple of years later he did develop precisely the cancer that she had predicted would kill him, and I watched him slowly waste away. We eventually put him down. I still remember him on my lap on the way to his last vet visit, looking out the window, curious at his surroundings. He had been so lethargic for so many weeks that it was shocking to see him interested in anything again. It made it harder to let him go. 

I have learned from the cats I've had over the years that most of companionship consists of shared routines. Looking at each other. Doing little things that relax each other. To have a life so intertwined with your own that is devoid of what we call language is a unique and powerful thing. His life story is a part of mine. It seems a shame not to tell it.

I Never Knew How to Hold You

It’s true that I never knew how to hold you. 

The nurses had to show me how to fold 

The blankets around you and I wrapped my arms the same way,

Following their lead, 

Tighter at first and then loosening as you moved.

It seemed like you were always trying to see something just out of reach.

We were always shifting to adjust 

And then you’d grow and I would just try again. It’s true. 

I never knew how to hold you.

Now you’re half grown and I still don’t know 

If I gave you what you needed. 

Mothering is as one-sided as grief is—

A relationship made for constantly leaving

(And returning)

I never knew how to hold this awareness 

As a constant 

Other than to keep coming back and trying again. It’s true.

I never knew how to hold you.

The House

I wonder if they know how their house looks
From way down here as I run by, 

Threading my line across these hills
The only way that I know how to,

Each step a stitch in the fabric of my time here. 

It’s always a surprise as I crest the last hill

To see it standing up on yet another hill 

Off to the left. It is two-dimsional,

As are the three generations I have seen out in the yard—

House, swing set, people, sky stand atop this hill upon the hill,

Straight out of a child’s drawing, at the edge of the world,

With nothing on the other side- a curtain maybe- blackness- backstage.

And I wonder, too, if they look down at me

What they might see— is it the path I tread, or me?
Or maybe those have become the same thing,
Sewn as I may be into the fabric of the landscape.

When we fade from view, are we in one world, or two?
And do we regain our other dimension again?
Is it only just in each other’s gaze
That we seem to inhabit this imaginary space?

We each tread so lightly in this world in our own way—
One of us to find our way in, the other to escape.

What It Means to Live

Poetry is truth and sometimes that’s beautiful

But sometimes it bleeds and that means

That it’s hard to read like the way it’s hard

To walk on the scene of a car accident

In the moment of silence after the crash

When the blood is still fresh and absorb 

All the pain of what’s lost even though

It’s just your mind leaping, and no—

You don’t know what this means.

But you feel that it’s true, don’t you?

It is. I am telling you.

The screams of the one who lived—

The ones that echo down the years—

That is the sound that life makes—

That is what it means to live. 

The Things That We Know In Our Bones

This spring I watched my youngest play many softball games. She's been playing for a few years but at seven years old she is really starting to understand the rules of the game for the first time and is asking me a lot of clarifying questions after games (or I will explain to her something I saw her missing during play). It's been interesting to try to articulate the rules of the game to her because they are something that I feel more than know. I grew up playing ball and learned the rules of the game through constant playing and repetition-- I know them in my bones. My mom was a Phys Ed major in college and a softball coach. I can remember being the age where moms play that game of rolling the ball across the carpet to their kids using their legs as bumpers because their aim is so bad-- well instead of a big rubber ball like most kids, I was wearing a tiny mitt and scooping up softballs. That's how early I started. I was probably two.

When I watch or play softball I just feel what's supposed to happen next. It's kind of like when we used to listen to CDs. There were certain albums that you listened to over and over again, and you would hear one song end and in the silence between songs your mind would already start to play the next one because you knew what was coming next. That's how I feel a play in softball- it's so rehearsed that I can feel in the silences what comes next. Yes, it's all governed by rules, but the rules are in my bones. For someone who loves articulating everything (especially intricate rules- yay lawyering!) the rules of softball have escaped that mental process for me, and I think it's because I learned by doing and also because I have held that knowledge for over thirty years now.

But that also got me to thinking about other arenas in which we learn by doing and have long-held knowledge, where intuition and long practice begins to drive behavior because we start to feel what comes next in the silences. I think that can happen even when you know the rules quite well and can articulate them. Once you have applied them enough times, over a long enough period of time, you begin to feel how they should apply to a situation, and retrofit your strategy with language that follows the well worn paths of intuition. This is what my work has become- a complex game whose rules are deep in my bones. I started acquiring my knowledge of immigration law over 17 years ago, when I was 21 years old and the frontal lobes of my brain had not yet completely formed. I have been applying that knowledge to fact patterns every day since 2001. When you play a game for long enough and encounter enough variations on how things can play out, the solutions present themselves to your mind. You just know what to do.

I should be careful to note that I do not practice law just by feeling- that would be malpractice, most likely. Once I create a strategy I review the relevant law, regulations and case law to clothe my arguments in substance and ensure that they are correct. Sometimes I realize a fatal flaw in them during that process and have to re-strategize everything, but most times the research process is a matter of fleshing out the barebones strategy that simply popped into my mind upon reviewing the facts of the case. That's what long practice gives you-- a deep intuition that is the culmination of years of addressing similar fact patterns.

I don't think there's any shortcut to acquiring practical intuition. It is always the byproduct of long experience. But what a marvel the human mind is, that it can assist us so creatively in our work, giving us an understanding that bypasses the lingual process, circumventing even the language that imparted the knowledge of the game to us in the first place. The mind truly is a wild place.