The house is tiny, 40 miles from town, off the grid. It sits on the high plateau south of Grand Canyon, on desert grasslands dotted with pygmy junipers and pinyon pines.
This morning, warm orange light from an oil lamp washes over the death’s-head painting on the wall, and seeps out the windows into the last hour of blackness. A wood stove chases off the nighttime chill.
Outside, one of two neighborhood coyote packs announces itself, following its hunger toward unlucky mice and rabbits. The dog stretches on her bed by the stove and groans with joy. I sit in the dark and breathe, that’s all.
Later there will be eggs and green chiles and tortillas. Later the dog will chase a half-dozen black Angus cattle, maybe the ones that ate my lilac bush last spring. When I call her back she’ll be grinning, proud of herself. The eyes will shine, the tail will twirl full circles in the morning sun.
Right now, though, there is just this quiet, this breath moving in and out of my body. To the east, the first light of day bleeds silver into a purple sky. The light swells and rises, rolling back the carpet of stars. This is a good day.
And this is a bad day. There are people I love–here and back East where I grew up–who will wake into this day to do hard time, dealing with sickness, the struggles of parenthood, the trials of old age. These realities come to us and we do with them what we will. We keep breathing until we don’t.
In Tibetan Buddhist art, human skulls are everywhere. They remind we the living to Be Here Now, as that overworked saying goes. Well, for me, the here is warm and quiet and washed with lamplight. The now is this sheet-metal stove ticking as it cools, the low whistle of juniper smoke drafting up the pipe. In my little home town in Central New York, it is already full daylight. Here, the eastern horizon grows a little brighter, the stars begin to fade and disappear.
“Each day is a god,” the writer Annie Dillard tells us, benevolent and wrathful by turns. We awaken, we breathe. We open our eyes to a world of contradiction. Beauty is everywhere, and so is pain. Pleasure and hardship live next-door to each other, great kindness shares the stage with unspeakable brutality.
There is Gaza, there is Ukraine, there is the long and always growing list of tragedies. But there are also the heroic human beings who risk their lives in war zones to ease the suffering. There are Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee, all the humanitarian groups struggling to hold societies together in the face of humanity’s fatally flawed approach to resolving conflict.
Today, the least lucky will wake up to breathe fire, to be burned raw by the predictable losses of aging, or by the random horrors of human behavior. But in this moment, at least, I breathe easily. The death’s-head is just an artist’s image hanging on my cabin wall.
Even now, though, there could be rebel cells in my body conspiring against me. Maybe what feels like a sour stomach is really the beginning of cancer. Maybe some god-drunk believer is plotting my fiery end. Or it could be that I’ll live to be a hundred, still shoving logs into this wood stove, still looking forward to breakfast and a walk with my dog.
For now, I only know that I have this breath, until the moment it leaves my body. And then? Your guess is as good as mine. Some say they know gods other than the one Annie Dillard talks about. I am not among them. For me, this breath, this sunrise, will have to do. I can live with that.
Here and now, in this world of beauty and barbarity, of joy and immolation, I am enormously lucky. Unlike millions, billions around this world, I am safe and well-fed. No one’s shooting at me. Dawn rises up like breath itself. The horizon has turned orange as the lamplight.
“Be joyful though you have considered all of the facts,” the poet Wendell Berry wrote in 1968–the year of My Lai and the assassinations of King and Kennedy. But 1968 was also the year three Apollo astronauts circled the moon, and for the first time in human history, men saw the entire earth in one view. They read from the Book of Genesis, and we listened to it on TV.
The sky is turning pink now, turning crimson, turning colors I don’t have names for. It shines like an altar. I lean toward it and bow.
