It rained today, the season’s first. I woke to susurrus of tires and wetted soil, a summer’s thirst part-slaked before the month of fires. September rain’s ironic threat is that it spurs the grass to grow anticipating further wet, a metabolic quid pro quo, and when October turns out dry (as is, often enough, the case) that just adds fuel to the supply. The Earth endures the flames’ embrace.
I thought today for a while of Earth Island Journal, of the work I did there. There were two articles, of all the pieces I wrote for EIJ, into which I put a rather large aount of work, travel, discomfort, and legwork. One was a piece on the catastrophic desert fires of 2005, and the other covered the environmental and social damage caused in the Arizona outback by US immigration policy. Hundreds of miles of driving for both stories, heartbreak at seeing beloved landscapes forever devastated, walking around in temperatures well in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit for both stories…
And the sum of the comment I got on either article in the Journal? That would be two mentions by co-workers, one of whom was Matthew, who came along when I did the desert research for the fire story. (Both pieces ran here as well, at least in parts, and comments from CRN readers on either one far outstripped total comments from readers of the Journal on both stories.)
In fact, there were more comments on the quick Mojave storm video I put up this past week, which I filmed in the desert with Matthew the weekend we were down there looking at burn, than I got from both Journal articles put together.
Not long before the border story came out, I was in a meeting at work and — struck by a morbid curiosity — asked my co-workers there if any of them could name any article in the previous issue of the Journal. No one could, though a few people did offer fairly accurate descriptions of the cover. One of the people at that meeting, Earth Island’s development person, who had just started the job, made a point after that of talking to me about the content of each issue a few days after it came out, and I was very grateful for that. He’s the person other than Matthew who’s alluded to above.
It’s the same feeling that has come up for me — not here, certainly, as CRN readers are a rare treasure in the world of blogs, I am coming more and more to realize — but elsewhere in the blog world this last year. I don’t get that feeling just on my own behalf. I get it in empathetic form whenever I see someone put together a good piece of writing that gets ignored in favor of some piece more suited to Go Fug Yourself than a political blog. Quote an estimate by an NGO of 35,000 politically motivated gang rapes in 18 months in Port Au Prince, and people yawn. Post about some manufactured new personality calling Britney Spears fat, and oh the humanity.
I think I figured out today why I’ve made certain changes this year in the places I blog, comment in, or for that matter even read.
I am tired of being invisible.
I thought today of my dog, which will surprise no one. A year ago this weekend was his first steep slide toward the grave, and he has been more heavily on my mind than usual, and yet the memory that laid me low today had to do with missing him only in part. We used to play, back when he was in less pain, and one of his favorite games involved rushing toward me, brandishing his teeth with a deep growl, and snapping at my face with mock ferocity — his teeth closing with a loud clack less than half an inch from my nose. He never bit me, at least not from playing like that. Sticking a hand down his mouth to pill him was a different matter, but playing “Zeke’s gonna bite Chris’ face”? Wasn’t gonna happen. He was so conscious of my presence, so mindful of his position and movements, that after the first couple of iterations of the game back in 1992 or so, it didn’t even occur to me to flinch, or for that matter even to blink. It simply was not possible that he would slip, that I would move too close to him at the wrong time. A mistake could quite literally have blinded me, disfigured me, and yet for years he and I played that game a few times each day, a whole-hearted, unconscious trust between us that neither would harm the other.
I have been very lucky, especially lately, in the people who love me, in the friendships I’ve gained. And yet no one has ever seen me the way Zeke did. When I quit Earth Island in order to take care of Zeke, a few people praised me as though it was an uncommonly selfless act. It was not. I had been wanting to quit since 2003, really, and when offered the choice between working with people to whom my work was invisible, and a few more days with the one who saw me most clearly even through rheumy, aged, cataracted eyes, the only hesitation I felt was over how long to make the letter of resignation.
I hold to the notion that whole-hearted trust like that is not magic, that it is achievable even between people who do not know one another all that well. I hold to this notion despite almost a half century of counter-evidence. It’s easy to focus on the negatives, the disappointments, the people trusted who turn around and kick you in the teeth because they didn’t realize your face was in the spot they felt like stepping on. It’s understandable that those folks would occupy a larger part of one’s psyche than they really deserve.
But they’re outnumbered, I think. And this group of people who read and comment here, I have been thinking, is hard evidence of that proposition. I’m no saint nor leader nor teacher, and my own openheartedness is notable not so much by its steadfastness as by its frequent absence.
And yet here you all are, seeing not just the blogger but one another as well, treating us all for the most part as human, proving that the net can be a place of heart as well as mind. I am grateful, again, and I am blinking a bit less.
