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November 24, 2010
Dear Friend, It is Thanksgiving Day here, but not there. I will not be eating and drinking, but in a way observing. There is a birthday party for some of the girls at Mehan this afternoon. You exclaimed how much you are looking forward to spending this holiday in your cabin away from the city. Before Afghanistan I spent my life living in the woods. Over the years I built three cabins, one in Washington, one in Alaska and one in Vermont. I listened to the wind and the rain, the song of whales, and watched eagles mating high in the air, as they tumbled with talons locked in a freefall toward the ocean. I sometimes think I could have stayed in any one of those cabins forever, but relationships, weariness, wanderlust pulled me along. I wonder now what is so damned important about these things, that in some sense I gave up other things that were vitally important to me almost every step of the way, again and again, to keep intimacy, to keep love, to keep a sense of purpose. Oh, I know, moments of sheer beauty, whispered words, touch... Once in a while in the middle of a dark night I miss it terribly, but when the aching passes missing it is like missing my father reading to me in bed or my mother cutting my morning fruit, driving fast on the highway with my best friend egging me on in the passenger seat, or strolling across a campus and talking heatedly with classmates about the state of the world. I am profoundly alone now, and yet eternally linked to the past and the future every moment I commit myself further to these children. There are passing pleasantries, such as when the children express their love for me, but even this is not what holds me still. There is love, and then there is something I cannot quite identify, words such as purpose, God, responsibility, guilt, meaning, duty, need, commitment… these all fall short as much as the word “love”. It is as if I have already died. This is a very loaded statement, and most anyone will think I’m losing grasp of reality. I have not detached from life, in fact I celebrate and adore its every facet more than ever before. To a degree I’ve not been I have detached from fear of death. Oddly, this is not akin to the adolescent jumping from a bridge forty feet into a shallow river. It is more akin to my revelation in my last entry about the word “hope”. There is enough of life in the world to keep me afloat until I am finished, or it is finished with me. I know that you, my dear friend, understand many things regarding life and death, plenty I have yet to learn. You will understand this much of what I say: that I have lived life as if it matters, even though it does not. When I listen to music that is a synthesis of East and West tradition, such as the track from “Dead Man Walking” in which Eddie Vedder collaborates with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, (in particular The Long Road), I am close to this understanding. The words, yes to a degree, but also the feel of it. It is a kind of lament, a letting go and also an embracing. It is full of love for life, so much love it will, if necessary let go of it. There are memories, but the speaker does not get caught up in them even as he is, commenting as he does from a place outside memories how they simply go round, round, round. Perhaps it is the commonality that endears me to this song, that we are in this together and that in the end, we all walk the long road. Thanksgiving is a time when we celebrate this commonality. The native gives food to the starving invader. There is no gesture in the world of human history that is more noble than this. The native forgives the invader, and the invader lets go at least for one day fear and consequently hatred of the native. On this day, think of yourself. Think how interchangeable the invader and native are. Think of them within you. Embrace that native and forgive the invader. Then, when this has been settled think of your family, your friends. Do the same for them. And if you can, maybe after the turkey and before the pie, think of the people at the center of this war being waged in Afghanistan. Then, in a moment, even if only for a flash that is here and gone think of the Earth itself, the ultimate native that humanity, the ultimate invader suddenly must turn to in the cold dawn of winter for nourishment and strength. Please raise your glass, look into the eyes that love, even if you are alone, even if in all probability we are Godless and there is nothing when we die, the stranger next to you, the mockingbird and the raven perched on the barren branch of a sycamore, one randomly singing its catalogue of songs and one settling upon a simple, throaty croak, these at least are real. It requires no faith to see them, to hear them. Fear them not, accept what they have to give or feed them if you can. Forgive them their strangeness. They are going down the same road as you.
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