I’m trying to write a poem, the task I’ve set myself for each day here, but nothing is coming. There is just too much terror in the air for me to settle into image. Even though I’m away from the East coast here in Wyoming, where the sheer vastness of the land makes me feel that I’m the only person in the world--- like I did yesterday when I climbed through the red mud up to the ridge that overlooked a panoramic mountain range—despite the awe, the cherished solitude, I read of the world’s fearful crashing and taste my own.
I am almost seventy-eight, and though I’m in great health and my immune system is being bolstered by the depth of caring here at Ucross, the delicious food, long nights of sleep, clear crisp air and absence of pressure and distractions I feel constantly when home, I’m in that risk group for coronavirus death and illness being constantly discussed. It’s sobering. At the end of the month I’ll need to travel home, walk through airports, buy food, sit on planes. I’d planned to visit friends in Denver, also my age and even more at risk due to their health issues and residence in a senior community. Now should I do that? And what about my plans to do a workshop with a facility for troubled girls in Sheridan? Is that wise?
I don’t like these conflictual questions, creeping their way into my peaceful existence here, scrubbing away the trance that feeds my creativity and forcing me into facing places that scare me, the places where I have no control, none at all. What foolishness it has been to imagine my reverie would continue, “the hazardous bliss /before you know what you will miss, “ in the words of poet Ada Limon.
Hazardous bliss, indeed. I’ve been reading Erosion, Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams, about the assaults on America’s public lands, about the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion and trust. She writes that Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the country, responsible for more than ninety percent of US coal (though I saw a lower percentage-forty—in Wikipedia). And in Gillette, Wyoming, a city an hour and a half from the tranquil place I’m in, there are black open-pit coal mines. In Pavillion, a town of two hundred and fifty, the EPA warned residents in 2011 that they could not drink, bathe in, cook with or farm with their water. No one would say why, but everyone suspected it was contaminated by fracking. I had not realized what a huge fossil fuel state this is, and how dependent on oil and gas revenue.
I guess I’d forgotten about Cheney.
So ignorance has been bliss, as the saying goes. During the week before I knew these things as well as other painful facts in Williams’ book, I felt magic in the cottonwoods, the hooting great horned owls and white-talied deer outside my window, the sheer magnificence of the wide open space impossible to imagine in my cramped New England village. Of course, I was bound to have my perfect experience bang up against reality, as perfect experiences always do. I try to remember impermanence, the Buddhist teaching that one of the only things we can count on is that everything changes, but when it hits that it’s happening, I’m easily shocked.
And, this gorgeous sanctuary for creativity that I’m currently inhabiting was begun by a man who was the founder of the Apache Corporation, a fifty-billion oil and gas company, Raymond Plank. So money made from a wealthy fossil fuel corporation has been funding this artist’s retreat since 1981. And a research partnership was established between the Ucross foundation, Apache Corporation and prominent scientists from Stanford University, Columbia University, and University of Wyoming to study the impact of coalbed methane development in the
Powder River Basin. Many more positive efforts in this arena have been made in the years since that initiative.
So perhaps I can hold the owls and the oil both with equanimity.
Beauty and peace can co-exist with facing dispiriting times, can’t they? Can’t I still feel the innocent magic in my first encounter with this spacious land? Can I feel my way into living in the present moment, as we all need to do all the time. despite the fact that our ingrained habit patterns fight to keep us from doing so?
I’m going to keep trying.
Last night Chris, my fellow writer here, taught me how to play Texas hold’em.. A few of us sat around after dinner, pushing piles of red, white and blue poker chips back and forth, making passes and checks and folds, laughing and feeling the special community that comes from being at an artist’s residency. I learned about straights, flushes, full houses, four-of-a-kinds and the other ways to win chips and make bids, and enjoyed an amateur’s delight at actually being able to play the game. Today I took in the scrumptious sandwich lunch that gets delivered to my door each weekday, and ate it on the sunny deck outside my studio. I read. I printed out my old friend T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” for inspiration.
And now I’m going for another walk amidst the mountains , and get some more red mud on my boots.