“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

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 – Charles Darwin

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A TORTOISE

 

          There are so many lovely stories about time, explanatory stories that allow us to consider our badness and goodness with snakes and apples, love and heaven. Creatures fill these stories, God given little gifts, each different and wondrous, examples of divine perfection. Once, all beings were neatly contained within the packaging of Biblical time, arranged in hierarchies that explained the world. So many of us knew our place, in dominion over the other creatures, under God.

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          But time has changed, through time. Charles Lyell scraped at the earth and found fossils, little pieces of connection that went down, down, down beyond Biblical reality, exploding time into an unimaginable before and after. Charles Darwin carried Lyell’s book onto a boat that took him to isolated islands in the Pacific. He held the creatures there in his hands, turned over the birds and inspected their beaks. He moved his fingers along dry tortoise shells, considering their forms, pregnant with explanation. Time became a process, one that confused our understanding of God, one that made us a little less sure of our place in the world.

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          Take a tortoise on one of the islands in the Galápagos, changing form through generations, through millions of years, surviving differently from island to island, demonstrating how beings diverge, holding the key to change, holding a key to our place. One arrived and then another through the waves, hundreds of miles on their backs, shells converted into little boats that washed ashore on new land, uninhabited. On greener islands that had time to grow food, tortoises ate, content. On black and red islands that had more recently exploded into being, where soil was thin and plants were sparse, tortoises struggled. Most tortoises struggled. Some were lucky to have necks that reached a little higher up through shells that arched ever so slightly. These lucky tortoises ate the precious fruit that dangled from taller cacti, out of reach from brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters too weak to pass on their forms to a new generation. But there would be many lucky babies with beautifully arched shells, born of lucky parents to advantage, to survival.

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          Then, take a human, a new form, evolved only recently of luck and of struggle, evolved to understand and to explain, evolved to decimate and to despair.

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          Take a mother.

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A MOTHER

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          It is hard to arrive into the small of morning. Bodies, tangled in a sleepy heap in the dampness of sweat, stirring from the shapeless expanse of night brains. Lingering darkness and the weight of the day press a child, the dog, the husband into the bends of legs and neck, seeking the pockets of twisted blanket warmth. A dense fog advisory on the phone, always close. A sudden sadness at the absence of happy. With a cry from the adjoining room, the mother rises, pushes it—the fog, the sad, the covers—away with an effort greater than those other bodies imagine. The dog runs downstairs to pee on the carpet. It’s a bit darker than it might be and the air seems to hang on the trees, the window, the mother. A once irrepressible morning optimism is put-on. With a resigned lightness, she directs her small beings toward water, toilets, socks, cereal. The big kids go to school and the little kids practice their sight words, the piano. They brush their teeth with reminders, urgings, nudgings. Rush and then a missed bus. Profanity in the car and then apologies to the baby and the big boy who is still little at six.

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          The baby who isn’t such a baby now at three says that the air is smoky. The mother tries to explain fog, as she has explained before with a nod to science and a nod to poetry. She has felt proud, even arrogant, in her parenting of these matters in the past but today, she just feels bored and wishes she could hear the news on the radio over her own voice.  “It’s like clouds are hugging the earth; we’re kind of in the clouds; the sun will burn all this moisture and clear the day.” It’s not perfect. No poetry. But maybe he’ll be satisfied. He’s not. He asks for more explanation and more. She tries again and again but the genuine enthusiasm won’t come. He seems to sense this.

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          “It’s soft,” he says.

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          “Yes, it’s soft, isn’t it? It feels soft.”

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          “It feels sad too,” he says, as if he feels her, which he might but probably not.

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          This wakes her, nonetheless, to the beauty of him and the stuff he sees triggering profound and painful regret about her reaction to missing the bus—the anger and profanity over something so trivial. So deeply buried in the reality of her too fortunate presence in a too certain mortality, dropped into a now that becomes a then the second it happens, she can’t stomach her position in time. No amount of mindful moments can prevent time from disappearing into wistful and tragic. Everything dies. She will die. Her babies will die. All of the moments will die, moment by moment, allowing the hormones of love to check out, lose interest, and bicker; allowing the soft flesh of precious childhood to harden, dry up, and blow away.

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