Feeding in the Grey Zone

Originally published February 23, 2021

A year, and half a million deaths (in my chosen home country) into this pandemic, seems like a good time for me to reflect. The following is partly inspired by Laila Lalami’s beautiful exploration of her personal grey zone in her book “Conditional Citizens,” which I highly recommend.

What have we learned?

What will or can life look like if and when we emerge from this global holding pattern that most of us (unless we live on the tiny German island of Helgoland or in New Zealand) are still forced to stew in?

What do we want to preserve and discard from this past year and however long this will last still?

What practices have been forced on each of us personally to become habits that we can’t wait to shed? And what aspects of former life have crumbled with no looking back?

Pandemics are times of rapid change, as those of us with cosmic antennas will certainly agree. Terrifying, challenging, exhausting.

Transformation, the seed of new life, new possibility.

Evolution, devolution, revolution. No matter how you see it, the wheel of life has been turning quickly in all this perceived slowness on the surface.

Exactly one year ago, I had my last visitor from Ireland stay with me for a few blissful days, so naive in retrospect. She flew here on an exhaust-spewing thunderous metal bird, carelessly walking past immigration agents at the open border, a suitcase full of whiskey and mustard. We ate breakfast at my favorite bakery, a boisterous place full of laughing people waiting for a table with a view of the water. Since they were sold out of croissants by the time I got to the counter, the baker whipped up a special batch and handed me one fresh from the oven, finger touching finger. That memory now makes me ache with such longing that I know I have to listen to that grief and envision a future that holds space for that. Touch, sharing food and connection with strangers, public spaces that reveal the basic goodness of humanity in so many simple ways.

Here is to the brave souls in the grey zone

who straddle the fence line between right and left, yes and no, Black and White, between the much more solid and reliable ground on both sides, sticking out as an easy target for the rotten tomatoes that come flying from the haters on both sides

the desperate parents who ford the Rio Grande and freeze in the desert, carrying their children to a better life, to safety, only to have them ripped away by the men in uniform

the oh so lucky ones whose passports have fallen apart from overuse and who have learned the joy of communicating in foreign cultures with the language of the heart, with smiles and hugs and shared humanity (I know that one as I used to be one of these)

Hasn’t the pandemic made us all residents in this grey zone? And how have you taken advantage of that lesson?

Borderlands, transition zones, growth spurts, pressure cooker, washing machine on spin cycle, liminality, whether you are talking about time or space, geography, society, or human development, we are stuck in it.

How can we embrace the lessons of the giant Grey Whales?

For those of you not familiar with them, let me explain: Swimming 170 miles out of their way on their yearly migration, they arrive this time of year on my beach, starved after many months of no food, and hang around for a few months during which they visibly fatten up. The reason for this behavior is that they have learned to enter the shallow intertidal zone in a high-risk feeding strategy that has allowed their population and culture to flourish, while their cousins, the resident orcas, are slowly starving to death from lack of salmon (here is an article on it). In a tiny window of just a couple of hours, perfectly timed to the high tide, they gorge themselves on hundreds of pounds of ghost shrimp a day in intense feeding frenzies. Were they to lose track of time during this orgy, they would literally die from “getting stuck in the muck.”

What a metaphor for this time for me, the fertile muck that can mean abundance or death, depending on our ability to adapt, to straddle the fence, to surrender to divine timing.

Any farmer knows the pain of being involuntarily suspended on a barbed wire fence. Transition zones are never comfortable for outsiders, unless of course you are an eagle who uses the height of the fence post to watch for rodents or a Great Blue Heron with strong wings and long legs made for fishing in tidal flats.

What have been your grey zone challenges and gifts?

Here are some of mine:

Establishing a heart-to-heart connection while teaching on Zoom

Eating from my garden and truly living off and with and in the land

Embracing my simple small solitary life with no distraction (because what choice did we have?)

Sitting with the destruction of consumerism and consumption and our unsustainable extractive lifestyle, and making friends with the pain of climate collapse and my fear of the future

Oh the love of a quickly aging dog who has taught me to transcend time in our precious moments of just being!!!!!

Truly making peace, and having fun, with my quirkiness

The medicine, for me, of naked ocean swims

Accepting my ineptness at non-attachment when it comes to letting my daughter fly

Honoring the messages from my dreams, the trees, the whales, the ancestors, and other teachers

Blessed are the peacemakers!