Bearing Witness in the Menomonee Valley

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The bend in the Menomonee just downstream from Miller Park is one of my favorite haunts in the Valley. There the river makes one of several ninety-degree turns that remind us, if we attend to them, that the watercourse is not “natural” but as manufactured as the industries that replaced the wild rice marsh from which the river was carved. But that’s history. Today this corner of the river is rare for its seclusion—and for a blessed illusion: paradoxically, it is one of the few stretches of seemingly natural landscape without a glimpse of the surrounding city.

It is a place prized by anglers and I am not surprised to find a suitably costumed one casting repeatedly in the shallow water. I ask what’s biting and he grimaces before grumbling amiably, “Nothing yet.” Then he adds, “But it’s a lovely afternoon and the autumn colors are beautiful.” He continues casting. 

By chance I spot the remains of a hawk, victim of some unknown violent end, splayed across the ground near the river. I might have missed it; so closely do its colors blend with the earth on which it rests. I haven’t come seeking this, but here I am and here it is.

Without clearly understanding why, I record the scene with my camera.

Photography famously excels at representing the material world. Just point and shoot, as they say, with a camera—or a phone—and you have a lasting record that is often far more detailed than what you’ve consciously observed. But my mind is on a branch of Zen Buddhism that encourages a practice known as bearing witness.* Bearing witness is more than observing your surroundings.

I observe the crushed body of the hawk, the pattern on its feathers, the curved talons—their vicious sharpness rendered impotent by death. Noted later, my camera also records matted, muddied entrails; twisted brown leaves scattered all around among surprisingly fresh green shoots; even the grit of the sandy earth.

After shooting the dead body I move on, turn the bend, and 
climb an overgrown slope to the Hank Aaron Trail. There in the middle of the asphalt I find another, smaller carcass: a vole. (Perhaps a mouse, but mice have pointier snouts. Its flattened state makes the attribution tentative. In any case, common prey for a hawk.) This one has not died a natural wild rodent death—most likely it was squashed by a speeding cyclist. Nor did it provide sustenance for a hawk. The flies busily digging in its punctured hide, however, care nothing for how it perished. In nature nothing is wasted. Death begets life.

I have not come looking for hawks or voles. I’m not seeking memento mori. I did have a purpose in mind when I chose to walk this bend in the river today but once I arrived I let that purpose subside. Buddhism teaches us to let go of attachments. It is a practice I deliberately bring to my photography, if not always to the rest of my life. Had I stuck to my purpose I might have noticed neither hawk nor vole. Letting go of my purpose and being present in the moment allows me the freedom to discover things I am not seeking.

But the idea of bearing witness goes deeper. You are not merely present in the moment and open to experience, though these are the necessary conditions that make bearing witness possible. Bearing witness is an act of social engagement, not only being aware of the life—and death—around you but embodying it. Allow yourself to embody the experience of the other—that which is outside yourself—and you may become one with it: hawk, vole, predator and prey, river, trail, Menomonee Valley, city, Earth. Words, ideas, experiences.

Occasionally photographs.

Bearing witness isn’t about the photographs. It isn’t about the words. It isn’t about death either, unless it is death to which you attend.

Ultimately—ideally—bearing witness is about the dissolution of self, becoming one with all life, with the universe. By embodying the universe you assume responsibility for it. Not because of a moral obligation—too intellectual—but because you experience the other as yourself, inseparable. If you embody the other then the other is you and you will naturally care for it as you do yourself.

The Menomonee Valley represents an unusual kind of oneness, the planned reintegration of nature within an urban fabric. The inseparability of natural and built environments is being made manifest here. I come to the Valley to be present, to bear witness, to try with due humility to embody this universe.

In Zen practice bearing witness commonly addresses injustice and inequality, promotes peace and reconciliation. But we must also bear witness to progress and hope. Like the hawk and the vole, here in the Valley it is easy to find dead carcasses of abandoned factories in various states of decay. But I haven’t come seeking death.

I have come seeking renewal. The Valley provides that in abundance.

*Glassman, Bernie. Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace. 1998. Bell Tower, New York.

This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.  

In Memoriam: a meditation

As we arrived at the cottage thunderheads rolled over the tree line and out across the vast expanse of Lake Michigan. I rushed down onto the narrow beach. Bright sunlight danced with shadows as the broken edge of the storm swiftly gathered itself into a solid overcast sky that poured down torrents of rain. I am not a great believer in coincidence. On the other hand, I am acutely sensitive to nature’s moods and when they resonate with my own emotions I welcome the symbiosis.

After several months in a nursing home, my mother suddenly took a turn for the worse. She was admitted to the emergency room in Venice, Florida, near where she had lived for the last 23 years. The next day, before I could book a flight, she died.

Death does not respect anyone’s schedule. There is no convenient time to learn that one’s mother has died. As it happened, after I learned of her death I found myself in a rental cabin on Lake Michigan, staring at the horizon every day for a week. When death chooses to occupy your mind the horizon – that paradoxically finite edge of infinity – can be a hard line on which to rest your gaze. Or it can be a comforting one.

Death can appear immediate and unequivocal or one singular moment in an endless cycle of regenerative life; it can feel excruciating and irremediable, or it can bring peace and enduring comfort.

What follows is a meditation inspired not by a contemplation of that horizon, but by a walk near a river, through a forest and a prairie meadow. These are all among the features that can be found in the urban wilderness of Maywood Environmental Park, in Sheboygan, WI.

Dawn

In memoriam, Polly (Daniel) Kempes, 1925 – 2012

I awake before dawn, suddenly alert in unfamiliar darkness, as if to keep an appointment I hadn’t made, but one I can no longer postpone. During the night it had rained – a hard thunderous downpour.

Last week’s newspapers still lie in the smug, neatly bundled heap where I had put them with such good intentions. Before I heard the news.

Alone, I go to the river. A hoary mist rises out of unfathomably black water. The riverbank bristles with grasses and sedge tousled by the night storm, heavily laden with morning dew, but perfumed with the fresh, damp sweetness of wild indigo, jewel-weed, wild cucumber.

From an unseen place in the misty shadows a great blue heron appears, silent and majestic, like the spirit of night. Its dark, angular form rises awkwardly, then sails with effortless solemnity into the brightening east.

I did not choose to love the river any more than I choose to breathe each breath. My love of nature was perhaps her greatest gift to me at that moment of youth upon which all else turns. She loved me and she let me go; she gave me freedom to wander, to linger at the river, to hear to the morning song of lark and sparrow – to learn to love in turn what is wild and free.

A doe looks up from the riverbank to stare at me, hesitant, expectant; then steps, unhurried but resolute, into the deeper darkness of the wood. Her three dappled fawns I had failed to see follow, softly stepping in line as if tethered together.

I disturb a brood of wild turkeys on the path. The young ones scatter at my approach, melting into the underbrush, while two hens strut protectively behind. Then they too disappear.

In the gradually lessening gloom a muskrat stirs from the security of overhanging grass, glides across the smooth surface of the water until it becomes indistinguishable from the river itself.

Those who are so inclined may see these fleeting encounters with wild creatures as omens, but they are not apparitions; they manifest our desire to heal the world and ourselves.

The wide, accommodating path I’ve been walking ends abruptly, with no sign or warning. The carcass of a crow rests on the verge, inert but peaceful, its feathers black and glistening. Its cold blue eye reflects a glimmer of the dawning sky.

I press on as if I have no choice, plunge into an unknown forest, as if no one has preceded me; a pioneer in a wilderness of tangled, dew-drenched brush, a wilderness of tear-stained, tangled emotions – as if no one else has ever lost a mother.

Rays of rising sun cut through the misty forest like golden swords. I emerge from a thicket into open prairie aflame with goldenrod, bejeweled with dew. The three fawns – untethered now, motherless – stare in fearless astonishment at my presence.

A mother’s love is the one debt that we can never repay. The best we can do is to love the world, to hold it in close embrace, as we hold our own children until the day comes when, like the fawns, they too sally out of the forest on their own into the blazing sun of a dawning day.

Here in a sunlit meadow is how I forgive myself for the thousand little deaths denied each time we said goodbye, each day we lived in our separate cities a thousand miles apart. I come to claim my true inheritance, to reap such joy as she sowed in me, to live with the knowledge that all rivers flow to an unbroken ocean.

The clean, sharp lines of three Sandhill cranes cleave the sky like a single blade. A few lingering storm clouds dissipate, vaporize. The sun rises into a sky so cleansed that my moist eyes ache in wonder at its blueness.

This is how I want to remember her; to reawaken after the storm in the night, to greet the glorious new day, to go on living my purposeful and reckless life, to love the world as I have been loved.

Metamorphosis (in memoriam)

The flowers began arriving soon after Lynn’s mother died, overnight delivery to our door. Some went to Lynn’s office. One especially lavish arrangement seemed a vast mountain of white, with bulbous hydrangeas, white roses, white carnations, and hundreds of daises. It would have made Lynn’s mother cringe. Lee was an austere, no-nonsense private woman. Her will stipulated that there be no formal funeral. She didn’t want to be fussed over.

Coincidentally, one of the flower arrangements, a simple basket of purple mums in pots that could be planted—very pragmatic; Lee would have approved—had been ordered from Barb and Dick’s Wildflowers. That is how Barb of Barb and Dick’s learned of Lynn’s loss. We’ve come to know Barb well through our many forays onto the Milwaukee County Grounds where she tends the Monarch Trail as lovingly as she does her flower arrangements.

Shortly after receiving the mums I found a small basket left on our porch. Instead of flowers this one contained only a few hazelnut twigs, twisted and bare. Hanging from the topmost twig were three bright green pupas with tiny golden dots. They looked fake: too perfect, as if made of plastic. Lynn thought at first they were a decorative memorial. When I told her they were the genuine article and soon would become Monarch butterflies she was as enthralled as I was. It was the perfect condolence gift.

Though a bit reclusive, Lee lived an active life. She and Steve, her husband, had traveled extensively. Three years ago they had recently returned to their home in Tucson from an annual trip to Switzerland when she was struck down without warning with the stroke-like symptoms of acute encephalitis. She was rushed to the hospital where she lay unconscious, shrouded in the cocoon of the medical establishment. The prognosis was dire. A mosquito-bourn disease, viral encephalitis can lie dormant for decades, but when it attacks the brain stem it is usually fatal.

Our friend Barb had collected tiny monarch eggs, no larger than mustard seeds, from our favorite urban wilderness, the County Grounds. She gathers them regularly from areas that are soon to be mowed. After hatching Barb nurtures the caterpillars, feeding them the milkweed they prefer. We did not witness these stages. Nor did we see the spinning of the chrysalis when the caterpillar folded, then bound itself, instinctively preparing for the unfathomable metamorphosis to come.

No one saw encephalitis coming. But, against the odds, Lee did survive. The miracle of modern medicine kept her alive, in a coma. The doctors didn’t ask if Lee believed in miracles. When the breathing tube had to be removed and the irrevocable decision made whether or not to put her on a ventilator for life support, Steve, knowing her wishes, said no. She survived without it. For a brief period, it seemed like a miracle indeed. She recovered enough to walk with assistance and to fly to Wisconsin to live near family. But she was often confused and didn’t always recognize the people who knew her well. It wasn’t long after that when she began a long, slow decline….

We set the basket with the three pupas on a counter near a window. The sun glinted on the shiny green casing. Tiny gold spots twinkled like miniature brass buttons. We watched for the slightest change. After about a week one of them began to fade. The next day it was black instead of green. It was happening. In another day, the shell had become transparent. We could see all folded up inside the orange and black patterns that would become wings. When the pupa was opaque it was impossible to imagine a butterfly inside such a tiny package; but now we could see it curled up inside, like a magic pill. We could see it but it still didn’t seem real.

For three years Lee lived in a wheelchair and was cared for by Steve. Before the onset of the disease she’d been sharp, confident, sometimes cantankerous and often cynical. Now she was cheerful and pleasant. She smiled easily at visitors with an uncharacteristic twinkle in her eyes. But though she could hear the slightest whispers, her soft, almost demure replies sometimes made little sense. She spoke in non-sequiturs. She was physically present, but no longer the same wife, mother, person that the family grew up with. Gradually she became weaker. When she died the grief was tempered with an unnamable feeling, something between relief and compassion. In a way she had died three years ago. The intervening time was a period of waiting and transformation. A life-long atheist, her death would not lead to heaven or hell; it was a final stage; it was release, letting go.

The morning we saw the first butterfly hanging, immobile from the topmost twig seemed like another miracle. It loomed, enormous beside the breached, whitened shell of its chrysalis. Its wings hung limply, damp. I coaxed it onto my finger and took it outside, placed on a milkweed leaf. It quickly scuttled underneath to hang upside down, waiting for its wings to stiffen enough for flight. I never saw it fly. When I looked again, it was gone. The next day we had another butterfly, another miracle. How marvelous! How natural; to think this happens every day somewhere is to understand that life – all life – is a cycle of transformations. The final stage makes way for new life.

The following day the last butterfly clung to the underside of the branch; another white chrysalis flung open beside it. No less marvelous than the others. I took it out in the bright autumn sun to watch it fly away.