While Rome Burns

or From Micro to Macro

Monsoon season in the American desert southwest is cause for rejoicing.   After weeks of scorching sunshine, afternoon clouds and thundershowers temper the heat and glare.   The dust settles;  the mesas green up and the sunflowers come into bloom.   To call it a rainy season strikes the outsider (and even the insider) as laughable—we measure rainfall in the hundredths of an inch;  if a storm lasts for an hour we count ourselves lucky.   The rains can still bring floods to our brick-hard lands, but they are localized—intense and damaging, perhaps, but soon over.   To compare our storms with the deluges unleashed on the Indian subcontinent and its neighbors and call them both the monsoon almost makes a mockery of language.   Technically, however, the weather patterns work the same way:   the prevailing winds reverse direction and bring with them seasonal moisture.   The difference is one of degree rather than of kind.

With the monsoons come more varied clouds than we often see here—not only the mighty cumulonimbus, the towering thunderheads that can be several miles tall, but also cirrus clouds with their delicate "fallstreaks," the high, wispy clouds that may look stationary but are most likely being buffeted by 150 mph winds; and the lovely cumulus, with its steely, flat-iron undersides and sunlit, billowy tops, each cloud boasting 350,000,000,000 water droplets per cubic foot.   I marvel at them from the patio.   I may love the sense of connection with a larger world that cloud-watching gives me, of reaching out with my imagination into the ether, but when I try to comprehend how these lovely white objects can be so mammoth, so high, so complex, my brain just gives up.   I have no way of understanding those dimensions, of weighing the information on a human scale, yet I accept it as truth—just as I accept that the world is round without having traversed its circumference.

I love writing this blog, for the record.   I value the creative outlet that it gives me and the way it encourages me to find the beauty and humor in the tiny occurrences and small lives with which I am surrounded.   As I seem to be growing fond of saying, you can only hoe the row that's in front of you, and Microcosm is a way for me to hoe the row that is my life for all it's worth.

But sometimes I feel as if I'm fiddling while Rome burns.

Or, more pertinently, while a nation drowns.   The very same internet that makes it possible for me to transmit images of my small life, my small pleasures, to the world, makes it possible for the hugeness of the world and its catastrophes to come to me.   I make peace with a cat while 17 million people in Pakistan are affected by flooding, 6 million of them now homeless;  I rhapsodize about a bowl of rocks while the Indus, swollen to 40 times its normal size, strips the topsoil away from an area the size of the entire state of New Mexico.   Yes, cats and rocks are my row, and I feel no guilt about that.   But sometimes you look up from the end you're working on and realize just how far that row extends.

The very hugeness of the catastrophe makes it impossible to grasp;  how can those numbers be weighed in a scale that's accustomed to cats and rocks?   The difference in life condition makes the problem seem larger.   How can I, an American urbanite, understand what it means to a family of farmers in Pakistan to have lost their home, their cows, their goats?  to face missing the winter planting season?  to have the work of a generation swept away and have nothing left to rebuild with?   In my head I can see the answer:   the loss of food, income, security, hope; a future spent in poverty below subsistence.   But I have no way of truly comprehending that loss, of experiencing that devastation vicariously, of knowing in my gut what it means.   I have never lost everything, knowing that everyone around me, not for a few miles but for hundreds of miles, has lost everything, too, and that there are no roads left to follow toward a better life.

You know what?   It doesn't matter that I can't "get" it.

If your head is the only thing that works, then use your head.  Visceral comprehension isn't a prerequisite for acceptance.   Facts:   the earth is round;  the clouds are high;  a lot of droplets of water make a rainstorm;  the people caught in the middle of this disaster need every bit of help they can get.   An acquaintance recently wrote about the "cumulative effect of small lives well lived."   Just as it's hard to comprehend the magnitude of a problem that seems to have exceeded a human scale of suffering, so it can be hard to believe in the adequacy of small kindnesses, small mercies, small gifts to ease the suffering of others.   But it's time to accept that these are real, too, that they matter.

Because sometimes, the world is our row.

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The Pakistan flooding is the largest humanitarian crisis in living memory.   The following links are primarily US-based, though many of the organizations are international, and I'm sure there are equivalents world wide.   Please consider giving.

Interaction.org (an umbrella organization that lists many member charities)
Doctors Without Borders
U.S. Department of State Pakistan Relief Fund

Thank you to my friend N.B. for originally posting these links on her Facebook page.   I hope readers will feel free to add others to the list.

Cat's Cradle

or Making Peace

Sir Marley, Hurler of Fur-balls

I don't actually dislike cats; I'm just not a cat person.   Without seeing the need to have a cat of my own, I often enjoy being around other people's.   But there are limits, and when I have cleaned up enough of my neighbor's cat's fur-balls—and other unsavory things—I tend to get a little irritated.

The most famed hurler of fur-balls in the neighborhood is one Sir Marley.   I first made his acquaintance shortly after I'd planted my garden.   I had come across the signs of his passing, shall we say, but never met him in person until one June day after the plants had begun to settle in but before the pests took hold, when the garden was really looking rather fine.   I had been prepared to set Luther after him if I ever saw him (don't worry—Luther was 12 at the time, incredibly sweet, and not much of a threat).   Instead, I found this irritating cat sitting in the middle of the path, looking around at the new trees, slowly blinking his eyes—and purring loudly and happily.   He was purring at the garden I had made.

My heart melted.

Sir Marley, Melter of Hearts

Well, I thought, if he was going to approve of my garden so much, that was worth a fur-ball or two.   And perhaps discovering the occasional half-eaten cricket in my favorite chair.   And having the bird bath tipped over every now and then.   And finding a terra cotta pot or so broken.   And sometimes having to clean up a bunch of bloody pigeon feathers.   Mind you, I didn't particularly like Sir Marley.   He was always dirty, and even though he always sought out my attention, he didn't actually seem to know how to be petted;  I've long since gotten fed up with the "come hither/stay back" types.   Even so, I was more than willing to make houseroom for a fellow garden lover.

It was only when Sir Marley began to kill my ground cover by napping on it that I began to get peeved again.   When he started harassing Mr. Jackson (who expressed his ire by sitting and blinking) I began tossing pebbles at him.   (A couple of points:   1) I have never yet in my life hit anything that I aimed at and so consider throwing things to be a non-violent form of protest;   and 2) I was as much concerned for Sir Marley as for Mr. Jackson, since even a tiny taste of toad can make cats dangerously ill.)   (And a third point by the way:   my garden is really not as formal as the last point makes it sound—most of us are on a first-name basis.)   But when I discovered that my trees were being used as scratching posts and the beds torn up as litter boxes, it was all out war.   I got out the heavy artillery in the form of little plastic doodads filled with garlic oil that was strong enough to pretty well deter me, too.   (The organic gardener's idea of playing hardball.)

Sir Marley, Harasser of Toads

I wasn't reacting only to the damage to my plants but also to a sense of betrayal.   When I thought that Sir Marley enjoyed my garden, that he valued it, maybe even loved it in his own feline way, I was more than willing to live and let live.   But if you love something, you do not set out to destroy it.   Ignorant or accidental destruction is one thing, but to willfully befoul a place of beauty—I had thought that was only a human trait.   To discover it was also feline tarnished my soul a little and made me that much more determined to make Sir Marley unwelcome.

This would perhaps be a good time to mention that another neighbor of mine has three cats, which moved in when he married a year ago.   (That is, his wife moved in and brought three cats with her.)   I've only seen one of them outside before—Pinto, a large white cat with large black spots.   He perches on top of the cinder block walls between our houses, and sags impressively to either side.   I have never actually known him to move;  he just sits and looks regal.   (Well, his face looks regal.)   My neighbors spend quite a bit of time in Mexico, and they take their cats with them when they go.   One day it occurred to me that the problems with tree scratching and litter boxing had arrived, oh gosh, at the same time that Pinto had and—go figure—seemed to fade when he went traveling.   It dawned on me:   just because Pinto does not move in my presence does not mean that he never moves at all...

Ah.   A little miscarriage of justice, it appears.  Sir Marley may have been guilty of birdbath tipping, terra cotta pot breaking, pigeon feather strewing, and the not quite eating of crickets, but he had never purposefully desecrated my garden.   Of course, it didn't make any practical difference—they do not yet make repellants specific to one cat in any case.   But it's the principle of the thing.

Sir Marley, Enjoyer of Gardens

The other day I almost literally stumbled across Sir Marley lying on the garden path.   (Note to self:   Trim oregano.)   He was hidden on the side I can't quite see from the patio, and when I found him he looked relaxed and happy.   He must have sensed a change in my attitude, because after months of warily avoiding me, he came to say hello.

Since then I've decided not to replace the garlic oil repellant.   I've put water out where Sir Marley can get to it, and he hasn't been tipping over my bird bath.   I've put the empty terra cotta pots away, and it's amazing how they don't get broken any more.   Sir Marley still doesn't quite know how to be petted.   The crickets—well, it's best just not to look too closely.   The pigeon feathers aren't appealing, but really, who cares about a pigeon or two?

Sir Marley, Forgiver of Wrongs

Sir Marley enjoys my garden, and we are at peace.