Leaning against the porch rail I pitch a ball for the dog. Decades ago, I lost my overhand perfection: the ball arcs behind me and bounces down the hill where it nests in a pile of autumn colors at the foot of a tall white pine. I suggest that the dog go fetch it. She raises an eyebrow before giving full attention to a nap. I lean harder against the rail, follow the bounces, and allow my mind to bounce along.
Bounce number one. More about spiders. The largest known spider web in a cave on the Greek Albanian border – “largest” in a measurable way, not in the bragging superlative of idiocy. An interesting spider culture: two different species co-inhabiting the same web. They do not war, neither do they help each other. They live peacefully side-by-side, both species feasting on the massive clouds of midges that also inhabit the cave.
Bounce two. Spider Woman among indigenous people. Her purpose was to protect sleeping children from dream fears: she sat at the head of the sleeping child and gathered hurtful dreams and discarded them in daylight. Eventually people grew in number and lived great distances apart. Unable to be there for everyone, she gave mothers the skills to create webs to protect their children. Today we call them dreamcatchers. A web to catch the dream, a feather to hold the dream until daylight when they would be dumped in the sun to purify.
Bounce three. Listening to the Soldier Songwriters, men and women from recent wars. They were given orders to kill, to destroy, to burn, to lay waste to lands and people with explosives and artillery many times more powerful than needed. Most soldiers came home and returned to civilian life. Many could not. These soldiers suffer what is now called PTSD, recognized as a result of war. Suicides, drugs, alcoholism, family destruction – soldiers back home to lives they can no longer live, searching for ways to live. A number of them have found community and health in writing, singing, performing music. Music, their dreamcatchers, tells their stories and heals them. They give us the music and the possibility we, too, will heal.
Bounce four. I watch the news. Masked men with rifles chasing people through the streets, alleyways, parking lots in Charlotte or Chicago or Los Angeles. Masked men with rifles rappelling from helicopters to occupy apartment buildings, throw people out of bed, zip tie them unclothed in parking lots. They are people who have attended schools where they were given instruction about how to play dead, how to find closets, hide behind tables for when, if, a shooter enters their school.
Bounce five. For eighty years we have read about, watched, listened to the horrors of roundups of Jews, Gypsies, gays, blacks, Orientals, women – rounded up and slaughtered to make life better or richer or purer for someone else. We have sworn “Never Again!” We claim we are better than that, that our children will have better lives, that we will accept differences, that the color of our skin is skin deep, that we are “of the people” and are equal under law.
Yet our elected officials fund, appoint, and congratulate the opposite. We see Americans chased, tied, thrown to the ground, arrested: just a few years ago fascist troops obeyed the orders of their fascist leaders and rounded up people. We let these nightmares happen again, and in our own country.
Resting in the soft fall colors, I know we will find sanity again. I am certain of that. What of those humans now masked, gunned up, and chasing their fellow citizens on the orders of their president? Will they be our next layer of PTSD? Certainly, a number of the combined HS, BP, ICE hirelings will find no problems with this treatment of their fellow humans: they are following orders. But I suspect there will be a great number of others who will see the nightmares, who will judge their activities with horror in their souls, who will need dreamcatchers just as have the Soldier Songwriters.
Rest there in the soft fall colors. We are better than we seem to be. Fascists do not last in a society born a democracy, lies do not withstand the stress of truth. We turn the last page of Orwellian reality; we turn our kindness toward those who today mask up and chase others because a president tells them to. We can co-inhabit our country. And will.