I had that cup of tea this morning. Outside on the front porch, I wrote for three pages about nothing much, but after it was over, I just kept sitting at the table, looking around. Admired white light illuminating once familiar, closely-knit houses on the hillside of my neighborhood. Marveled at bits of road I had never seen before–an entire cool, calm, world refreshed in a bath of air. Blue sky, no planes overhead, birds twittering in shadowy clusters in scattered trees—
So perfectly lovely and . . . peaceful.
How can we ever go back? I heard today on the radio--no one wants to buy petroleum right now. The producers keep producing, but sellers have no buyers and nowhere to store the oil they had put in orders for. No one needs more for next month. How did that happen?
Can it be possible that civilization has finally surrendered to the planet, thanks to the pandemic?
At T---’s (a friend whose property is designed as a one-man nature preserve) and elsewhere--where being on the land makes you feel so good and unfractured for reasons you can’t explain, lacking the scientific acumen to do so--we chat about it, flitting over the subjects about which we know nothing, hypothetical studies on measurable neurological and physiological responses of human beings to natural environments, unmediated by the constructs of man (conceptual or material) . . . the details necessarily get glossed over in conversation, as we talk about frogs, about our friend’s early childhood trauma at being served frog legs by his mother for dinner, “They were so shapely . . . two legs . . . still connected . . .”
We laugh and chuckle, and the discussion eventually subsides as we lose ourselves in the sound of moving water, water moving over rocks into a small pond; we grow absorbed by the light green luminous foam of pond scum buffeting the rocks, sunlight kissing every leaf and bloom, rocks and boulders of all sizes and shapes placidly passing the time by absorbing another hundred years of atmospheric pressure, the skies swept by wind and clouds seemingly arbitrary in the landscape but belonging like tumble weed to the plains. There is silence among us, and we are connected.
The body shudders against the real. The body relaxes in The Body. We are a world of children who seek to self-determine, but after a long journey of thrashing about and investigating options, we return to nature and are enveloped by the sights and smells of home. No idea has ever looked back at us, no idea has ever smelled like anything. Self-concept smells like ass. So maybe with my cup of tea trick . . . it’s not a trick, you have to be able to repeat it to call it that . . . maybe with my cup of tea experience of grace in urban life, in city life suspended from itself during a global pandemic--I unexpectedly encountered, with the help of a felt universe--what I have been attempting to access for years. A connection with something real--against the odds of smog, frenzied transportation, the harshly accelerating blades of new helicopters leased by the LAPD that taxi over our house at night, citizen strangers going to work, running errands, keeping schedules much more suited to the androids being designed to replace us--all of it together has made it nearly impossible to connect with the physical, natural, only, real world we live in.
Existence before Covid was a life built up by material forms of steel and glass, wheels on the road, many lives serving the economy. It now seems . . . an illusion. We ended up with a collective stake in the nightmarish demand for growth as would be evidenced by our respective Costco memberships. But real equity is in things we share. The real is where the illusion ends. It’s where the 99% and the 1% die, where we suddenly realize it’s just us, all of us, in the world—belonging to the world. In exploited and exhausted nature, we its creatures end up feeling weary and spent and alienated. Isn’t it unfathomable that during coronavirus, we would suddenly find ourselves belonging to and enjoying this planet together? Staying home with our families, playing with our children, cooking dinner, marveling at the simple, visceral pleasure of clean air? I didn’t feel very environmental before Covid-19 made the headlines, and I can say now with certainty—it’s because I couldn’t feel the environment. It was so obscured by the pollution of a healthy economy and everyday life, I had no idea what it felt like or that it could feel like this.
That cup of tea moment today was a seamless mix of meditation and contemplation of my surroundings. In citified life, we practice meditation to connect with the nature we might find within ourselves when it is unavailable in the world around us. When there is nowhere to belong, we can stare at our living room walls and at least belong to ourselves/our bodies/our breath for a few moments. But the contemplation that I experienced today flowed directly from the meditation of life around me because I was connected to the world around me. When the air is clean, and the sunlight moves with such beauty over everything, you take a single breath and you know you were meant to be here. Every breath affirms your right to be alive, present to and presented with the incredible gift of this world.
Alanna Lin Ramage is a singer-songwriter, writer, and performance artist based in Los Angeles. She performs under the moniker FASCINOMA and her alter-ego Chairmeowww, runs The Los Angeles Department of Writing and Power online and off. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, she returns often to visit her family and stare at grass.
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