Page 98 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

Notes:

When I was a child I used to greet by name the flowers and trees I met when we went

out for a walk. Holding tight to my father’s hand I would nod my head or curtsy and call

things by their name. “Good morning roses, here I am again pine trees, it’s been a long

time chipmunks...” We lived up a long flight of stairs from the Bronx Park, which I

thought of as a great woods, filled with tree-like family members. I seemed to see

everything as related to me, like Sonya downstairs and Libby across the hall, and

Sonya’s sister who lived worlds away on the other side of the woods. They all, merely

neighbours, seemed to belong to us. In a Chinese restaurant I would stand up in the

booth and ask the people (strangers) on the other side to give me the shrimp from their

rice dish. My mother thought I should outgrow this sense of relatedness to everything

but my father and sister encouraged it and I held onto it long past the time many

children give up their magical sense of the world.

Unfortunately, I did outgrow it and for years and years came to see nature with

alienated and indifferent eyes. During this time I was constantly asking about the

meaning of life and finding no satisfactory answer; it was that early youth-time of black

stockings, dark turtle neck sweaters and fashionable existential despair.

But one day, in my late twenties, I was walking through the Golden Gate Park in San

Francisco, when I suddenly felt that my legs had become very short and that I was close

to the ground. At the same time the flowers in the botanical garden and the ducks in the

pond took on a kind of technicolor vividness that reminded me of images from my

childhood book of Russian fairy tales. Then, in the next moment or two, I had exactly

the same feeling I’d had as a child, a strong wish to call everything by name and to say

hello. An enchanted world, kinship with everything, a memory, a truth, a reality. A

crucial way of experiencing the world that had been protected from the

disenchantments of growing-up?

Of course, this enchantment did not last, but it would come and go over the years until

as I grew older it seemed to settle in as a permanent relationship to the world and

especially to its duck ponds, palomino horses, weeping willows, oyster ferns and

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