September arrived and looked very much like August.
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Hot, muggy, and buggy.
The weather was rich and sweet and, in the classic character of summer, seemed to insist that it would be so forever.
Cold felt like a memory from another lifetime. The acute pain of my depression, the desperate, constant thoughts of escape and suicide, likewise felt distant.
It’s scary how quickly the present becomes the past.
Summer spoke in a deep, hazy voice and said, “I am here to stay.”
The meadows that skirted my beloved woodlands said something different, speaking in a language of flowers. Thistle and goldenrod and red clover. Cattails shifting from sleek brown to shaggy white. Other flowers too, ones I knew by sight, but not by name. Blooms I knew would still be in the field, side by side with the woods, when the oak leaves were turning brown and the maples red.
Fall was coming.
I bought a cord of wood and began having backyard fires at dusk as the temperature dipped.
The lightning bugs were gone, but bats still fluttered in the twilight.
One evening, I went out well after sunset. It was true dark, but on a whim I decided to make a little fire. I stepped out back and there was a plump, gray Virginia opossum sitting on my back porch railing nosing at the birdfeeder.
It’s scary how quickly the present becomes the past.
I will ask my taxonomist friends for their forgiveness for my using opossum and possum interchangeably. I am a product of my region. Technically speaking, possums and opossums are very different animals. Colloquially, they are not. I was an adult before I ever heard anyone say “opossum,” pronouncing that initial O.
She swung her snout in my direction, in the slow, careful way possums always seem to move.
I love possums.
I love that they’re my continent’s only marsupial.
I love imagining what strange happenstance brought their ancestors to these shores.
I love their sleepy movements.
I love that they seem to be half storm cloud and half child’s doodle of a deep-woods cryptid, clever clawed fingers and that naked, prehensile tail.
I love the fairytale way an opossum mother becomes a bus for her children.
They are gentle, omnivorous, beneficial creatures that will quite literally play dead rather than harm you. Still, I once found an opossum skull in the woods and the image of it stays with me. All those sharp teeth inspire respect.
I don’t speak possum.
So, I told her I meant no harm in the language of deer.
I sat down.
In surprisingly short order, the possum turned away from me and went back to munching birdseed.
I spoke to her in a soft voice.
“It’s nice to see you. Are you finding anything good to eat?”
She ignored me so completely. I decided to go inside and get her a snack.
I came back with unsalted, shelled sunflower seeds. I walked to her in a wide arc so she could keep an eye on me and leaned against the railing about seven feet away. I assumed she would run for it and I would leave the seeds for her to find later.
She did not.
She stayed motionless for a moment, then began sniffing in my direction.
I reached toward her and dropped a little hill of seeds between us.
Soon, she approached my offering.
There was a flash from our sliding-glass backdoor.
Leslie had noticed what I was doing and had taken a picture.
I smiled at her, then swallowed.
What I was doing was irresponsible.
I knew better.
You shouldn’t feed wildlife.
This wasn’t like the ratsnake. There were no extenuating circumstances that justified my behavior. I was unwisely acclimating a wild animal to humans, and I was doing it for my own entertainment. I had no justification.
I wasn’t thrilled about her documenting the moment.
My dog Atticus woofed and clawed the glass.
The possum fled, climbing off the railing with surprising speed.
I turned and shouted at Atticus, while Leslie pulled him away.
There, steps from the porch, laid the possum on her side, mouth slightly ajar.
She was playing dead.
Playing possum.
Defensive thanatosis.
It was a fascinating and unexpected sight. Unexpected because typically possums only perform this behavior when they can’t escape, but apparently all that sudden commotion was too much for my gentle visitor.
I sighed.
I had made a big mistake.
Atticus was a rescue from a shelter in Appalachian Ohio. The folks there told me he came to them “from the middle of nowhere.” In response, I thought but did not say, “We already are in the middle of nowhere.”
Atticus is a sweet dog that presses his head against me when I’m sad and regularly climbs into my lap for a hug even though he weighs eighty pounds.
On the worst of my depression days, he stays by my side without being asked.
Having Atticus around means I rarely cry alone.
He was also almost certainly feral before coming to the shelter.
When we brought him home, he had never seen stairs.
He didn’t seem to recognize food or water bowls.
He happily asks to sit outside in deep snow or in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Sometimes, he seems surprised he is allowed to come back inside.
He is dotted with all sorts of old scars.
And, if I don’t shoo the squirrels far enough from the house before letting him out into our fenced backyard, he brings me one of their bodies. At least one.
I once had to scold him before he could catch a starling in flight, having watched from the back porch as he gained on the bird flying low across the yard.
He is a kind, loving dog whose prey drive probably saved his life once upon a time.
Playing dead would not protect a possum from Atticus, and I had just given one a reason to revisit my backyard.
I did what I could to correct my mistake. I brought in my birdfeeders and resolved to be extra vigilant before letting the dogs out. I kept the floodlights shining on the backyard at night as a deterrent. I worried it wouldn’t be enough.
And it wasn’t.
Nature is not a toy.
The lives of other creatures are not playthings or ornaments for our egos.
A few days later, on a cool, September morning, I walked out back in my slippers to see how the mists lay among the headstones. I found the possum’s chewed body by the back fence beneath a blue spruce.
Ten to one Atticus was the killer. But I couldn’t avoid thinking that the responsibility was mine. No, I do not control all of the events in my backyard. I did not control the possum. I did not control Atticus. But my choices influenced the situation, and it seemed my influence had proven deadly. I knew better than to feed the possum and I did it anyway.
I set my slippers aside on a cinderblock, retrieved a shovel from my shed, and, barefoot, I buried the beautiful creature in the soft earth near the fence, extending the territory of the cemetery another few feet. I stacked stones on the grave to thwart digging paws and said a few words of apology and farewell.
I couldn’t help wondering if the possum was playing dead when it died.
I tried and failed to resist imagining it.
It hurt.
I let it.
I have a tendency to play dead.
When I feel threatened by dangers, real or imagined, I preemptively cut myself off from life.
When I was younger, I was afraid of cities, so I did my best to stay away from them.
“You can’t fire me, because I quit.”
When I was younger, I was afraid of cities, so I did my best to stay away from them.
My mom was afraid of highways and tornados and I joined her in those fears.
I was afraid of crowds, so I found excuses not to go to concerts or events with friends.
Fear of loss or embarrassment prompted me to keep my head down in sports or in the classroom.
I could happily sit in pitch black woods listening with interest to the scuffling sounds of unseen creatures in the dark, but I was afraid to talk on the phone for fear of sounding silly.
When I first went to college in Athens, Ohio, a town somewhat infamous for its parties, I spent a great deal of time in my dorm room. To me, bars meant violence. Crowds meant violence. Parties meant violence or potential embarrassment. I often felt like my friends were naïve for failing to recognize the dangers and that, if I went out with them, I would be called upon to stay vigilant and to protect them.
So, I stayed in my little room, rushing to bury myself alive before anyone could do it for me.
I could, I thought, at least maintain control.
I could be safe. A dangerous concept.
Depression, and acquiring the skills to fight it, has taught me many things. How to differentiate between senses and feelings, choices and beliefs. How to build homemade enthusiasm. How and why to choose whimsy. How to ground myself in the present and in nature. How to reject myths of purity and perfection. How to respect the craft of making meaning. How to find happiness in a flawed, impermanent world. How to be enough.
I have not learned how to banish fear, and I’m not sure I want to.
I am still, frequently, afraid. The difference between my fear now and the fear I held when I was younger is that I no longer feel obliged to act on that fear. Fear is a feeling, arising from a thought, sometimes a perception. Yet it isn’t an action. It isn’t a mandate. It doesn’t get to decide what I do next.
I have not conquered fear, but I have found that when I defy it, again and again, it is diminished. Its demands become optional. The fear still comes. It still barks orders, but I no longer reflexively obey.
Every time I am frighteningly vulnerable in my writing or attend a party with strangers and my world does not end, the fear loses a little more ground to experience. I take another step away from defensive thanatosis, dying so that the world will not kill me.
Playing possum feels like it works, until it doesn’t.
Maybe staying away from cities and crowds and parties spared me from some danger or discomfort. I’ll never know. I can, however, take an educated guess at what it cost me in terms of unmet friends, missed experiences, and absent memories. I can also say, definitively, that my fear did not keep me safe.
I am not safe.
I never have been.
None of us are.
We are vulnerable, temporary creatures and there is no careful choice that will change that.
We focus on safety because we fear pain or loss or discomfort, reasonable things to avoid, but the foundation of my general fear is an aversion to change. All change.
Often, a false premise lies at the heart of what we seek to protect. We want to preserve an unchanging version of ourselves, an impossible version, and we want to do it forever.
I have humored endless fantasies of power and immortality, fantasies of safety drawn out to their extreme conclusions, the power to be unaltered by anything beyond my choice, including the passage of time.
Living on my own terms.
Safe forever.
These are perfectly natural impulses and I have come to distrust them entirely.
Safety is not my friend.
This isn’t me saying we should all go play in traffic, but I am saying we should not avoid being near traffic for fear of what might happen.
I am a person who has stood at the edge of death more than once. Playing dead did not stop the dog’s bite. It did not save me from sleepless, suicidal nights trying to empty my mind and be still because simple
existence was pain.
Playing dead did not keep the gray from my beard or the suffering from my perception.
All it did was allow me to pretend that I was fully separate from a world that I couldn’t predict and did not control.
And yet …
Losing what and who we love feels like a reasonable thing to fear. Some decisions may preserve us while some may lead us to pain or destruction. There are many things in each of our lives worth protecting.
So, how can we smile and accept a reality that will, eventually, take away everything that we hold dear?
In such a world, can we avoid being defined by sensible fears?
How can we possibly look on our own unquestionable vulnerability with anything but distrust and terror?
In all honesty, some days I can’t.
More interestingly, some days I can.
Consider this. The impermanence we fear, the impermanence that seems endlessly poised to take from us, also gave us everything that we know and love. In a static, unchanging world locked into a rigid forever, none of us, nor the things we hold dear, ever would have arisen. In such a reality, there wouldn’t have been the space for us to arrive.
It helps to think of the universe as an event rather than a place.
That shifts the goal from owning and controlling to experiencing, from possession to participation.
This existence is not a patch of ground to build a fence around. It’s a fireworks show. It’s a birdsong among the trees. It’s a sunset turning the ocean into a sheet of gold.
It is evident to me that we do not possess life in any real sense. You cannot possess something you were given without asking, something that will one day depart with or without your permission.
We don’t own this life. We witness it. We participate in it. We spend our parcel of choices as best we can. We are both audience and choir in the music of the universe.
Somehow, this feels both true and absurd. Yet, on the days when my meaning-making skills are sharp and I am well-awake within my own mind and power, I can see the kinship between the absurdity I feel in the bare facts of existence and the whimsy I actively choose to nourish my life.
My depression often feels like weaponized boredom, like a smothering blandness in all things. The full and final extinguishment of interest and enthusiasm. Both the absurdity and the whimsy of this world remind me that neither my happiness nor worth is granted by some sober council of human rectitude or the conventional practicality police.
When my life seems like thin, room-temperature gruel, I reach for a handful of science and a handful of magic. I think of the big bang. I think of how the universe continues to expand. I recontextualize. We live in an ongoing explosion. Somehow, that same explosion led to this thought, led to this writing. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. I reach beyond my little Ohio skull and my little Ohio walls and my little Ohio town.
Somewhere, there are orcas.
Somewhere, there is a living bristlecone pine that stood when the pyramids were built at Giza.
Somewhere, an unnamed creature swims in dark waters and has never witnessed an electric light.
This is where we live. This is our world.
I am a wild, inexplicable thing.
I am from and on and of a world of wild, inexplicable things.
I am a part of cycles and systems beyond human understanding, predating my birth and postdating my death.
So are you.
So is that robin you heard singing while walking to your car.
As I write this, a blue whale’s heart is circulating nearly ten tons of blood through the largest animal we have ever known to exist.
Not the largest animal now.
The largest animal ever.
As I write this, the largest organism on Earth, a fungus beneath the soil of Oregon’s Blue Mountains, quietly occupies over 2,300 acres.
As I write this, we share the planet with immortal jellyfish and snapping turtles that can live without inhaling oxygen for six months.
As I write this, there exist bacteria that can eat radiation and bacteria that can eat plastic.
This isn’t a world for safety.
Think bigger.
This is a world of miracles.
Sometimes, I feel as if my craving for safety creeps in to fill the space my enthusiasm or awe once occupied when I allow them to atrophy from disuse.
Sometimes, I feel as if my craving for safety creeps in to fill the space my enthusiasm or awe once occupied when I allow them to atrophy from disuse.
The trick is to coax the awe back and prompt my thoughts to take root, once again, in the grand truth that we are a part of this amazing world and a colossal, mysterious universe.
This, as ever, requires choice and intention.
Blue whales and snapping turtles aren’t going to knock on our doors to brag.
We must choose to notice.
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Taken from Something in the Woods Loves You © Copyright 2024 by Jarod K. Anderson Published by Timber Press, Portland, OR. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Cover image copyright the Artist (Tuesday Riddell), reproduced with grateful thanks to Messums Org. Photo: Steve Russell.
