‘Courage’

Tightrope and Travels

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Over the internet today, we heard news a local Vermont high school was evacuated because of a bomb threat. Immediately, my coworker and I thought of our children, although none of us had kids in that school. That experience – fearing for your children’s safety while they’re in school – I’m quite certain my parents never had.

This past year, due to a confluence of events, I’ve had to consider physical welfare and safety in ways I never considered. I’ve come to think of fear as the abyss around a tightrope, a void filled with invisible air currents, unexpected temperature changes, the swells of uncertainty.

If there is one thing that is certain, though, it’s that my own children and their generation will need to have their eyes open in all kinds of ways that never encroached on my New Hampshire childhood: rising waters, erupting violence; I will not continue the list.

Then today, randomly, at the bottom of a work-realted email, I read these lines from Desmond Tutu. There, I thought, is the tightrope to ferry my children across the abyss.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

— Desmond Tutu

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Where I Told the Children I Went Today….

Bridge Over the Abyss, With Baby

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Today, in a grassy field, with sunlight everywhere and school children running around, another parent told me about a long bridge he had frequently crossed as a young man, and how at times he had been afraid of that bridge. Today was so quintessentially Vermont, with a hike through the woods behind the school, little kids and big kids, just fifty in all. The grass was warm, and my daughter and I ate wild apples we had picked the evening before.

The parent’s description was entirely metaphorical – he had now progressed far enough into his life, over that halfway point, that he felt darn certain if the Subaru went over the bridge, he and the kids would pull through.

Listening, I remembered when my older daughter was one, a baby chewing on a stuffed rabbit, and I was driving down the Vermont interstate to visit my parents in New Hampshire. I was driving a beat-up red Toyota pickup too big for me, and I wasn’t able to fasten the safety belt as I sat so far forward to reach the clutch. At highway speed, I approached a long bridge spanning the White River. By chance, I happened to see the bridge in just a certain way, at great speed, and I saw how enormously high was the bridge over the river far down below in the valley.

I had a sudden fear that I absolutely could not traverse such the narrow path over that abyss. I slowed and saw a highway worker along the shoulder, and I had an abrupt impulse to stop and beg this man – a complete stranger – to drive myself and my baby across that bridge.

I didn’t, of course. Somehow I knew I would have to get myself and my baby from here to there, in whatever rattletrap I was driving. Since then, I’ve driven both daughters over many bridges, through all kinds of snowstorms, and once through a terrible ice storm, and I’ve always ferried them safely home.

But like my parent companion today, I often see that abyss beneath us, an intimation of our own morality, and yet I press on. As I drove over that bridge on my fearful day, however, I slowed more than perhaps was prudent on an interstate, and I steeled myself to peer over the guard rails. Far down, in the same tenor of autumn sunlight I sat in today, the bend of river glowed like gems.

Albert Camus wrote a novel, The Stranger, in which his character, Meursault, is condemned to death. Three days before his execution, he is able for the first time in his life to touch the blue sky. He is in his cell. He is looking at the ceiling. He discovers a square of blue sky appearing through the skylight. Strangely enough, a man forty years of age is able to see the blue sky for the first time. Of course, he had looked at the stars and the blue sky more than once before, but this time it was for real. We might not know how to touch the blue sky in such a profound way. The moment of awareness Camus describes is mindfulness: Suddenly you are able to touch life.

–– Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love

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Tomatoes on the Way Out/Photo by Molly S.

Autumn: Coyotes Howling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

Last night, reading in bed with the windows open, I heard a pack of coyotes yipping 0n the forested hill behind our house. Abandoning my book, I lay with my eyes closed, listening to the way those wild creatures howled, throaty and jagged, as if biting each other’s calls.

Slipping downstairs, I passed my younger daughter’s room where she slept with her friend, the two of them twined in one bed, their breathing a whispery draw and release. I walked out into the Vermont rural dark, so heavy I saw the lights of the neighbors across the road as a handful of pearly light in tree branches. The hydrangeas, fragrant, faintly glowed in my window’s diffuse light. The coyotes cut into the night, two packs in the wooded hill behind the house and garden, the beasts wholly bodiless to me in the night, my heartstrings thrumming with their calls.

This evening, my older daughter returned from walking in the dusk and said the packs were howling again, not down in the valley where we’ve heard them for years,  but far closer to our house. I asked if she was afraid. She said, It’s a little scary to hear the coyotes so close, but at the same time, I can’t help listening.

We talked a little about the back and forth calling, the mystery of sound from these hidden creatures, and then she said, It’s beautiful.

We shall not cease from exploration
And then end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

–– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

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Burlington, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

Moxie in the Face of Fear

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

In Laurence Gonzales’ Flight 232, he writes about a flight attendant who realized the plane she was flying on was going to crash. She was in charge of the cabin, and she determined not to allow the passengers to see her fear, so no one would panic. She stepped out of the cockpit with that fresh, horrific news, and thought, Oh please, God, let me be somewhere else.

My ten-year-old daughter can be fearless at times, but I don’t think that’s courage, per se. This woman in the plane had knowledge, coupled with steely nerves. When we most need to draw on our courage, I think, is often where we least want to. It’s one thing to dive into a creative or athletic adventure with aplomb and spunk, but a whole other circumstance to override terror and uncertainty, to push through a scenario with grace, when every instinct in your body longs to run.

I think of my young daughter as practicing and cultivating that force of courage. Surely such action as this woman’s didn’t arise unexpectedly. I can’t help but wonder if the way she lived her whole life primed her for that moment.

She walked down the aisle, pale and shaken and almost in a stupor of fear and grief. She felt grief, she later said, for all the people, the children. “I couldn’t look at anybody,” she said. “It’s like I just withdrew into myself, because I was working a plan, and I didn’t want anybody to read the absolute terror in my eyes….”

–– Laurence Gonzales, Flight 232

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Courage

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Driving along the interstate the yesterday, I looked up at blue heron winging its oddly graceful way, silently above the rush-hour pavement. This strange bird, who always reminds me of its ancient, prehistoric ancestors, set me thinking of what I’m writing, where turkey vultures circle and ascend, silently, reappearing over and over in this novel, a wordless image of mortality.

On this drive home, the sprawl of Burlington thins gradually, and with relief  I cross over the Morrisville border where the farm fields spread out, and Mt. Elmore appears to my right, my familiar blue companion. I was still thinking of those vultures and that solitary heron when the rain began again, hurling down in handfuls as I alternated through patches of downpour and sunny spots. As I drove out of Morrisville, up the hill towards Elmore, the rainbows appeared, two great arcs, iridescent beyond belief, their tails not tucked neatly behind the mountain, but seemingly almost right before me: they seemed so near I could practically pull over, sprint into the woods, and discover their mythical ends. I parked on a dirt road and jumped out. The rain had already ceased, and only the green still shimmered its glittery glow. The other colors had already faded and paled, wicked away into the clouds.

I stood there watching the rainbows disappear into nothingness. The rain had muddied the road and swept a coolness over the day’s heat. The crickets sang weakly, as if they neared sleep.  The wet soil and tangled weeds along the roadside emitted a briny scent that reminded me of a place in Maine where we had once been happy. I wondered if the fall was edging in there, too, this place where I would never return.

The last miles home, I thought of those things–heron, vulture, rainbows, the Maine ocean and sky. The next morning, I told my younger nephew I had seen a double rainbow, and he asked, A double rainbow? Are you sure?

Yes, I said. I’m sure.

Let it not be said that in passing through this world
you turned your face and left its wounds unattended.
Instead, let it be said that when your friends
cut open your chest to partake of its courage,
a loon was calling.

–– Janisse Ray

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Photo by Molly Blume S.