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.

Teddy

There is one fractured day that I can’t quite recall-

One of those memories whose mismatched images

Won’t quite assemble into a narrative,

And to this day, I don’t know quite what to make of it.

I know that it starts with two doors opening up in the ground

In the middle of a crowd of kids, who all step back, and I

Am one of them- breath sucked in.

The doors are big and blue; opened, they are taller than two

Of us, atop each other’s shoulders.

Out climbs a lumbering, sad, and curious clown,

Slowly climbing up a set of stars into the sunlight,

Not donned as well as one at the circus,

But yellow enough, with a painted frown.

We are all mesmerized by his simple magic of emerging from the ground.

Time passes and we disburse- it seems to be a playground.
Adults are playing softball far away enough not to witness

What transpires, but I have my favorite Teddy,

Who never leaves my arms- the one whose orange rimmed eyes

I still recall seeing life in around that time, and who I sang to in the night.

But somehow Teddy ends up submerged in a wading pool

That is the same blue as the doors the clown came out of—

A frantic sense of loss and recovery.

The story ends with Teddy hanging by his ears on the clothesline

In our back yard, and Dad laughing about him going for a swim.

The postscript, some days later, is that we have to perform surgery on him,

Replacing his soft belly with a ridged patch of cloth

Cut from Mom’s worn out old corduroy pants.

He has long since fully dried out, but he’s never been the same ever since.

To My Daughter

I’m addressing this poem to you because

I've seen you turn words inside out

To bend them toward your meaning, toward

The infinity you're dreaming of--

Wide open to the universe, you work

To wrap your mind around the limits

Of this enterprise, but at your best your soul becomes

A tuning fork that resonates with love--

Your mind is always climbing the invisible ladder

That in my quiet moments I still imagine myself climbing up,

Hand over hand into the sky, never reaching the thing

I am striving for.

I remember when my bones were a cradle for yours,

Before you were born, and after,

And how nothing could crush you without crushing me too.

It’s still true. But now you’re you.

Most of the time, I am lost in my thoughts,

Feeling my being in the wrap of time, and stretching my hands

Outside of it into the dark, looking for the spark

Of the infinite, and I see you doing that too.

I hope you find it if I don’t. I hope time never wraps its ropes

Around your being too tightly. Because you exist

Outside the scope of all of this, and you rightly deny

The pull of time’s demands. You stand

With one foot in this world and one in the other,

And I can never lay claim to your future, but as your Mother,

I want you to know that I see you.

This Is It. Breathe.

There is no truth more difficult to grasp than the fact that the past exists nowhere but inside of us who remember it. We take our view of the world from the collective impact of all that we remember and we conduct ourselves in the world according to the understanding we have collected from those experiences and yet, those experiences have vanished from the world. Perhaps they are only alive, in any real sense, in our conduct.

I remember the feeling of sitting across the breakfast table from my father many Saturday mornings when we went to Talk O' The Town restaurant. I can recall the feeling of my size compared to his- I remember being small. I was 7 or 8. My mother would sit next to him and my sister, who is 4 years older, sat next to me. We would always get the same table and always sit in the same seats. On his factory worker salary, he would treat us all to breakfast and then, once we had finished eating, I can recall how his look of boredom, absently gazing somewhere at the wall behind my head would flicker, he would lean over to retrieve four quarters from his pocket, and he would plunk two in front of me and two in front of my sister. Off we would scamper, delighted, to a room past a heavy glass door.

My sister- older, bigger, faster- would always get there first and rush through the door, which I could barely hold open long enough to run through. Inside were a change machine and a Pac-Man game. The Pac-Man music would always be playing even if no one was in there. I think there was pinball too, but we would always play two games of Pac-Man each. On the other side of the little room there was another glass door that led to a bus station. I can remember the feeling of unsavory men coming into the room and hovering close to my sister, watching her play, and feeling the distance from our parents on the other side of the door.

And I also remember in that restaurant, how I would always choose the cheapest breakfast I could find on the menu, which was 2 eggs, sunny side up, with toast, and a glass of orange juice. They would bring a basket of foil wrapped jellies for the toast, which I would never use. It would be decades before I would look at a menu in any restaurant and pick something becuase I thought I would like the taste, rather than because it was cheap. No one ever instructed me to choose food that way in a restaurant-- I just felt like it was what I should do, because we didn't have a lot of money. As the younger child, I watched a lot, was quieter, and took in the balance of things. And I wanted to be good. That Good Little Girl persona still has residence somewhere inside of me and flinches at the recollection that I don't recall ever saying thank-you for the quarters my father gave us. I do think he smiled after us as we ran to play, though.

My father is gone now. Three of us remain from those distant Saturday mornings. Three of us- I think- remember. It's astonishing how much information about who we were and are as a family exists in those recollections. I think we went to that restaurant regularly over the course of maybe 2-3 years. And I don't remember everything about it. And I don't know how long my sister and I would be away playing Pac-Man or what my parents would talk about while we were gone. I don't ever remember them coming to fetch us, so it mustn't have been long.

It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that life consists of such experiences, and that these vignettes are what give shape to who we are. Those repeated, every day experiences in which we rehearse, with little reflection, how we respond to those around us, where we determine who is safe and who is not, what we look forward to and how we make our choices-- those are us. And even when those experiences are shared with those we love, they see them completely differently than we do. No one ever knew I was, at 7 years old, looking out for the family's bottom line in my little way (unnecessarily, as it turned out!) And I'm sure there are aspects of those same experiences that others of my family routinely experiences that I know nothing of. It's even stranger when those characters who people our memories are no longer around to discuss them. The solidity and reality of those memories seem less reliable and so too, perhaps, our sense of our own identity.

The Two Trees: Bible Stories from a Non-Believer Part II

Some years ago, I wrote my version of the Doubting Thomas story and of Paul's conversion. Another Bible story that continues to ignite my imagination is that of the two trees in the Garden of Eden. The full text of that story is found in Genesis 2:4-3:24. It is a deceptively simple story that explains human nature better than anything else I've ever heard. It raises a thousand questions and maybe the answers are in the questions.

The story begins with God making Adam from the dust of the ground and breathing the breath of life into him and putting him into the Garden of Eden, where God then made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground. In the very middle of that garden he planted the two proverbial trees- the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told Adam he could eat from any tree in the garden except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil, "for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Then God made Eve out of Adam's rib and brought her to Adam so that he would not be alone. 

Eating from the Tree of Life did not preclude later eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; but the inverse was not true. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a show stopper. And for as long as Adam and Eve did as Adam was told, and lived out their lives in the Garden without eating the forbidden fruit, the Tree would remain there in the middle of their world, with its good looking fruit.

So later, the serpent questioned Eve about eating the forbidden fruit, saying, "You will not surely die...God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Eve took some of the fruit and ate it and gave some to Adam, and he ate it also. Their eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked.

When God discovered their disobedience, he cursed the snake, Adam, Eve, and the ground, and banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Because they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he could no longer eat from the Tree of Life and live forever.  

The idea of the two trees being positioned together in the middle of the Garden and pitting them against each other as mutually exclusive choices is interesting to me. Is eternal life really the opposite of the knowledge of good and evil? What is even meant by "the knowledge of good and evil?" In part, this is a rhetorical device called a merism, which is a figure of speech pointing out opposing qualities within a whole as a way of colorfully summarizing and referring to the nature of the whole. These types of sayings are often used in legal contexts (e.g., a "last will and testament" refers to the sum total of one's material legacy). They are also used throughout the Bible. In Genesis 1:1, God is said to have created the "heavens and the earth," meaning everything. So in this story, the idea of the forbidden fruit imparting the knowledge of good and evil likely refers to imparting to man the entire scope of moral knowledge, from good to evil, and everything in between-- the gray areas.

It's deeply interesting (and ultimately impossible) to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where we have no perception of either good or evil- where we have no morally qualitative judgments about anything. And it's not like Adam and Eve were incapable of making any kind of judgments prior to eating from that tree- Eve did tell the serpent before she at the fruit that it was "good for food and pleasing to the eye" -- so she was able to make other types of qualitative judgments already.  Just not moral ones. What does that world look like? And how culpable were Adam and Eve really for falling prey to the serpent's deception if they could not yet perceive morality? God gave them a commandment to follow- do not eat from that tree- and they failed. But if they didn't know it was evil to fail, how did they even perceive that decision-making process? What kind of a choice did they think they were making?

It is also interesting to think about the fact that God made animals before making man, and that animals were not given this choice or this command. Animals, at least as far as we can tell, don't have any concept of good and evil. So in a way, perhaps Adam and Eve saw the world much more like animals do before eating the fruit. (But then again, what about that serpent? He seemed to have a pretty big clue about the nature of good and evil before Adam and Eve did. How did he get so crafty?)

Did God know, before putting man in the Garden, what choice he would make about eating the fruit? It's kind of dark to think God did know in advance; then it seems fairly cruel to go ahead with the plan anyway. But what if God didn't know? What if it was an experiment? What if God wanted, as he said earlier in Genesis, simply to make mankind in his image, and he wasn't sure what exactly he had created and what the implications were of this new creature? What if the two trees were a test of man's nature, a way of getting to know his creation? Or what if God didn't have any choice but to make those two trees just exactly as he did. What if that was simply the nature of the world he had created, to include those elements-- this propensity for an eternity that we feel in our bones alongside a bewildering knowledge of the whole scope of morality from good to evil-- elements that are both inherent in this world and yet somehow irreconcilable?  

Or going beyond that, what if the two trees were a way of introducing humanity to the fractured nature of the world we live in? The Garden was humanity's nursery, where they could slowly become acquainted with the rest of the world from inside a relatively protected space, but they would always have had to leave at some point. And in order to know what awaited them in the world, perhaps they had to have an earth shattering experience of coming, by their own choice, and even as an act of disobedience, into an understanding of their own nature. And maybe there was nothing special or magical about the forbidden fruit at all, except that it was forbidden. Perhaps it was the act of disobedience, rather than the act of eating that particular fruit, which opened their eyes to their own nature and to the nature of the world from which their flesh was shaped.

One of the reasons I don't listen to music on my runs

I spent almost a quarter of my waking hours today on a long run. A couple of miles in, I passed a farmer spreading manure. (I was to later pass 4 more farmers doing the same thing. Today was the day, apparently). I imagined him shaking his head at what was essentially a pointless expenditure of effort on my part, while he spent his day toiling from dawn to dusk to accomplish necessary tasks, on a Sunday. It made me reflect on how strange the gap is between people's needs. I need to spend a good chunk of my free time running in order not to have a heart attack at 50-something because I spend the bulk of my time with my ass slowly conforming to the shape of an office chair, while there are serious needs for physical labor in the world- 2.4 miles from my house, to be exact. Why isn't there an easy way for my need for physical work to get matched up with an actual job that needs to get done? There are migrants coming to our country to perform physical labor that no American wants to do- like picking New York State's apple crop every year- while Americans are dying way too young because we are way too sedentary. Why the imbalance?

All of nature, apart from human beings, exists in balance, each life and force flowing into the need of another part. The intricate balance of predator and prey; animals and plants figuring in their roles and producers, consumers, and decomposers; water continuing in its cycle through the air and back to earth-- all matter dissolves and reconstitutes itself continually in a dizzying dance through being and non-being. As humans, the matter of which we are composed is a part of all of those cycles, and we feel our kinship with it. But we stand apart in that we are driven by some other need which makes us resist all of those never-ending cycles. We are constantly looking for a break in one of those chains to find our freedom. But what are we really resisting, and why are we resisting it?

The strange mismatch of human beings' needs seems to stem from this need we all have to be out of step with nature. I read a crazy article last year about an Indian entrepreneur who figured out a way to collect the thrown out food of restaurants and distribute it to India's starving population. Here was a guy who just figured out how to match up people's mismatched needs- on the one hand there's a class of people with so much money that they continually waste food, and on the other hand there is a huge population of people literally starving and which could live on the waste of the upper classes. What a simple and beautiful idea to connect those people so that they can share.

I still don't know what it is in human nature that compels these excesses that remove us from the cycle of life and death. But it is something fundamental and flawed and strange. And there are some genius souls who can see their way clear to mending the rent this tears in the social fabric. And they feed millions of hungry.

Beauty is One

From April to October, the sun is high enough at 6 a.m. for me to run outside before I go to work in the morning while it's light out. Before I run, I read for awhile in my purple chair with me eye on the window, waiting for the first pale rays to climb over the horizon. Starting each April, I begin to notice  that from day to day, there is a minute change in when those first rays appear, slowly coming earlier and earlier until June and July when they are up before I am at 5 a.m., greeting me in my bed.

At first I have to run on the roads because the trails in our woods and the grassy areas are too muddy, but eventually I begin to test those areas too as they change each day, until usually May or June when most are reasonably navigable. And when I start running the trails almost every day, there continues the slow evolution of their drying and hardening, each day a little better than the last.

The animals I encounter change, too. Earlier in the spring, on my first lap around the pond each morning I would hear frogs gasp in surprise and plunk, with a little splash, into the water as I would pass, one after the other-- as if they had all lined up in a ring around the edge for this performance. By mid-summer, there is only an occasional and larger splash and they no longer release a little yelp before they take their plunge. Now it is the lone loon whom I terrify on my first lap. His prolonged and agitated yelping are hysterically satisfying. And just today, I surprised a single deer on the pond path. I think he was just getting a drink alone, and I must have been moving quietly, because we came very close, startling each other before running in opposite directions. If I had had the wherewithal to reach out my hand, I could have touched his flank. I often see the deer back in the pines where they bed, but usually in groups and never so close.

Also today, I picked a bowl full of blueberries after I finished. They are late this year. Usually they are done by now but the raspberries ripened before they did. That is a first. This is only the second picking. Once they start to ripen, we can pick quite a few every day and they are all at different stages of ripening. Each day their colors shift until they are deep blue and my fingers know, by the slightest tug, whether they are fully ready. When they are, they roll into your palm with no resistance.

The daily ritual of returning to this space is its own lesson. The land is constantly changing, each day shifting its lights and colors and shapes in a predetermined course. Only through constant conversation with it, melding my own habits to its course, do I fully experience it. For all the relentless forces in this world, beauty is one.