The Bricks to Love, in the Family of Things
Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
One of the tallest mountains I’ve ascended isn’t a mountain. It was launchpad 39B at Cape Canaveral, Florida. I’m one of only a handful of people to ever do this, most of whom are astronauts. I’m not an astronaut. I was surprised to see graffiti scrawled on the side of the elevator that has taken astronauts to the top of the launchpad, destined for the moon’s orbit. Like who exactly writes “going up?” in that elevator? Neil Armstrong?
This is a story about aloneness.
I was a baby reporter at CNN, at a time before 9–11, before The War on Terror before the Columbia disaster, before Donald Trump, and before COVID-19. To say they were simpler times and the world was our oyster is a vast understatement. I can’t even, to this day, believe we had this kind of access. I flew out to Johnson Space Center a few weeks before these pictures, went through an extensive health screening, and hung out with the astronauts going up in this shuttle, the Atlantis. I observed them in zero gravity simulators, and then flew to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to see how the space shuttle was made. Most of the white you see on the side of each shuttle is actually a kind of woven protective fabric covering baked bricks, built to withstand an enormous amount of heat on re-entry. It was also fascinating to see how it was moved, on a massive super slow “crawler” from the assembly building to the launch pad. We walked with the Atlantis for the 4.2 mile stretch at 1mph.
The space shuttle is also a relic of our past. It no longer flies. The Atlantis, which you can see approaching while we wait for it atop 39B, was also the very last space shuttle to fly into space. And I got to stand right next to it. What an honor and privilege.
At the end of its final mission, Atlantis had orbited the Earth 4,848 times, going 126,000,000 miles or more than 525 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Talk about isolation. I’ve always respected the focus and hermitic resolve of astronauts, especially those who do long stints in the International Space Station.
As you may see from this photo, the launchpad wasn’t meant for tourists. There are catwalks with barely any grating where you’re looking down 200 feet. Despite my love for mountains, I am not great with heights. But I try to face my fears, and I did on this day. How often do you get a chance to walk out on a catwalk, alone, and watch a space shuttle arrive in its perch to blast off and break the “surly bonds of Earth”, just for you. Ok not just for me, but it felt like it. And we had to get the shot. It was a mountain most don’t get to climb. And I did.
I remember being struck by how empty and isolated the launchpad was. It wasn’t meant for people. You could only really hear the wind blow. It also occurred to me that this was the last bit of Earth astronauts see before heading into the abyss of space, the ultimate isolation. The vastness. Ironically, studies have found that it isn’t the isolation in space that gets to astronauts, it’s the interpersonal conflict among the few people aboard the spacecraft. Yet, their very lives depend on their interconnectedness, their looking out for each other, even if they don’t like each other.
Remember when the government was afraid to reveal the first satellite image of Earth, for fear humans would be mortified at our isolation? As society, as people, most of us shun being alone. But we have to remember the difference between loneliness and aloneness. Bear with me.
All of my reporting on space at CNN, with the late great John Holliman as my mentor, helped me understand how interconnected not only all living creatures are on Earth, but how interconnected we are to the stars and universe. That may sound nuts, but our interconnectedness is what life is about: universal consciousness. We have to care about each other.
As communities across the world come out and clap, and in Marin county, dogs come out and howl at dusk to honor hospital workers, I’m encouraged that we may emerge from this moment, actually caring about each other. We may never ever again witness a collective global action to protect our most vulnerable fellow humans. What a beautiful moment.
Then I see this.
When deaths and cases rise in Atlanta, and profits are put before people, people clamor to feel “normal” and its every man for himself. Feeling “normal” in America means status and consumerism, and apparently looking pretty.
“Fuck old people and people with diabetes,” this woman might as well be saying. “I (emphasis on
“I”) have a RIGHT to look pretty, fuck everybody else.”
I believe this moment is teaching us to care not just about our fellow humans, but all living creatures and the Earth. This unprecedented global crisis will teach Americans that health care is a right, that we should care about strangers in fundamental ways that transcend politics, religion, war, and guns. America will finally face its roots of racism and socio-economic extreme disparity, and elemental hubris. This is cause for hope.
One thing I discovered while covering space over the years was that the Monarch Butterfly has been grown on the International Space Station. The Monarch Butterfly migration patterns in America have been called “one of the most spectacular natural phenomena in the world”. The western populations happen west of the Rocky Mountains to overwintering sites on the coast of California.No individual butterfly completes the entire round trip. Female monarchs lay eggs for a subsequent generation during the northward migration. Four generations are involved in the annual cycle.
How’s that for “in-it-together”? Ants and bees act the same way for a common goal. Why can’t humans en masse? That question has perplexed me for as long as I’ve been alive.
Now, on a day when we are facing epic, cosmic changes, we are starting to see out of season Monarchs in the Bay Area. Major transformation.
The butterfly has long been an important symbol in my family. It conjures the traditional idea of evolving, transformation.
My Mom sent me this butterfly to indicate that my grandmother, Mamma, had made her transition to the next life. My Mom likes butterflies. And lighthouses. Lots of lighthouses.
Recently, when I was visiting my family in Georgia, I was putting together a puzzle of a butterfly with my Mom. I’m awful at putting together puzzles. My Mom can put them together in a snap. Get it? ;) As she kept putting pieces in at the pace of 3 per second, I told her to stop, that I would finish it. “Look for the edges first,” she said. So I did. And stayed up til 3:20am putting together a small butterfly puzzle. I got to the final piece at 2:59am and could NOT find it. I looked for a good 20 minutes. So I left a note that I could not find the final piece, and went to bed. When I got up the next morning, the puzzle was put together, and there was a post-it note that said the missing piece was on the chair I was sitting in. My family never allows the opportunity for a good metaphor to pass. My parents asked me what I thought it meant, and I said “sometimes, the missing piece is right in front of us.” “Hmm,” they said. And didn’t expound.
For my birthday they sent me the butterfly puzzle mounted to this board, with the missing piece out to side.
There was a note with the puzzle that said “no, the missing piece isn’t in front of you. You ARE the missing piece. You are enough.” Enough. I am enough. That’s the most transformative statement I’ve ever heard. I am ok, alone. I will be OK. I’m learning, finally, to love myself, and stand strong in the broken places.
Much of my early investigations as a baby reporter touched deeply on topics of nature and Earth and indigenous cultures, but now that I look back on it, put me in places with amazing views, alone, contemplating isolated cultures. It was before the time of click-driven journalism, and when journalists could let curiosity be the driver. So I reported on things about which I was curious.
One of the first mini-series I did for CNN led me to the Four Corners area where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet (yes I put a limb in each state). It took me to Mesa Verde, where I was trying to figure out what happened to the Anasazi Indians, who mysteriously vanished from the face of the Earth around A.D. 1200. I couldn’t figure it out, and basically concluded abduction by aliens made about as much sense as anything. The stories from archaeologists are dark. Violence and even cannibalism, but University of Colorado archaeologist Stephen Lekson says something “very unpleasant happens,” around A.D. 1200. “The wheels come off.” I spent time in the cave dwellings of the Anasazi Indians and contemplated their isolated lives in caves. Maybe they went nuts?
As part of this time, I spent time with the Ute tribe, for which Utah is named, and had to gain their trust, I went into the “kivas” with them and learned about their deep connection to the Earth.
The Ute believe in a Supreme Being and lesser gods, the gods of war, peace, thunder and lightning, and floods. What I found interesting about the Ute is how they frame good and evil and the afterlife. They believe in an evil spirit called the skinwalker, who can change into coyotes and sneak into enemy camps. Ute believe skinwalkers can steal a person’s soul. It’s a precarious balance. Death is the ultimate loneliness. The Ute believe a good spirit will lead them to the Happy Hunting Ground when they die. That is their hope.
Turning tragedy into triumph is our current challenge. Someone who taught me about that was the late, great Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Indian Nation. I interviewed her during this same period at CNN. It was very important to her to bring a female perspective to leadership. What did that mean? “Being of Good Mind.” She also said the most important challenge for women today is to “continue to fight for the right to define for themselves what it means to be a woman. The women that lead the happiest and most fulfilled lives are women who are whole themselves, and aren’t constantly looking for someone to fill a part of themselves.”
I bring this up now, because I believe strongly, that in this “womb” of Earth, the future is women. As we are going to continue to be guided more by feminine forces, and leaders, it’s important to think of what it means to be “whole”. To stand on your own two feet, and be alone, but not lonely. It’s a concept we all should learn, not just women, and I’m learning it now, alone in my house in Berkeley Hills, between the eyes of the Great Turtle.
Aloneness is different from loneliness. Loneliness means you want somebody. Loneliness means you have not planned to stand somewhere with other people gone.
Sometimes I think it is not possible to be alone. You are with you. And pulse and nature keep you company.
The little minutes are there, building into hours: the minutes that are the bricks of days and years. I know another aloneness. Within it there is someone. Someone to ask and tell. One who is Mary, Willie, John or James or Joan. Whose other name is love.
— Gwendolyn Brooks
My hope is the wheels aren’t coming off in America. I certainly know no one is at the wheel. How will we emerge? Will we learn to both be alone, strong, and be ok, and take care of each other? I think the two are connected. The universe is compelling me to go inward, and confront my demons, confront my shadow world, deal with my fear of abandonment, and love myself, getting comfortable being alone, so I can be there for not just the people I care about, but all living creatures.
My experience with the Space Shuttle Atlantis proved prescient. I would later move to San Francisco, which, by some accounts is home to the lost souls of the ancient city of Atlantis. Plato framed Atlantis as a city of hubris to counter his “perfect” state in The Republic. One might argue San Francisco is a microcosm of the haves and have nots, and it’s still wrestling with the hubris of the tech industry, the crazy money, and a culture that values wealth over worth. In a way, San Francisco, as beautiful and important as it is as my spiritual home (there is so much good here), is an emblem of our failed American state, the division of race and income. But San Francisco is facing this. Is America?
We can’t face these issues together until we look inward, not from a place of fear and loneliness, but from a place of aloneness and wholeness. We all want to be loved. Even Earth. Even the trees, which can’t walk. But they can flower.
Just as the fields of the Bay Area. We can check our hubris in the fields.
I recently hiked a poppy field in Las Trampas Regional Wilderness Park near Danville, California. Peppered in the sea of California’s state flower were blips of purple, which, as you might recall, God gets pissed off if you don’t notice.
I looked at these flowers and loved them. The California poppy “…helps the soul to gather its forces of light and warmth so that they can radiate within the chalice of the heart.” These flowers, this day, loved me back. And I wasn’t lonely.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
— Mary Oliver
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To read the next chapter in this series, go here.
To read the other chapters in this series, go here. (Read from the bottom up, if you want to read in order). Bottoms up!
