Prairie Fire

The restored prairie near my house was recently burned.  My children are fascinated by this, as, indeed, am I.  We were lucky enough to see a bit of the burn as we drove past: the workers standing around in fire-fighting gear, the emergency equipment at the ready, the trails blocked off and the fantastically orange flame that formed the line between the charred, blackened ground and the pale, non-descript ground covered in last year’s now-dead prairie grass.  To me, a one-time ecology student and lover of nature, this was a moment of wonder and terrible beauty.  To my children, it was those things as well, but also it was completely puzzling.  Why are they burning the park?  So we have had several conversations about how a native prairie relies on the occasional burn, once manifested in an uncontrolled prairie fire and now in the form of a carefully controlled man-made event, to clear out the plants that are not supposed to be in the prairie, to kill off things that are brought to the prairie from other places and that might out-compete and kill off the native plants if not for the fires that prairie plants have evolved to survive and even, in some cases, depend upon.  It’s how we, who have destroyed most of the prairies, make our little attempts to return prairies to what they ought to be.  I have promised my concerned three-year-old that although right now the parklands are large swaths of black, char, and ash, in a few weeks, it will be a lovely yellow-green, and by summer the plants will be four feet high and dotted with white and purple and yellow flowers. 

For now, the land is almost 400 acres of black.  It smells like soot and destruction.  When the winds pick up, as winds do in early spring, they lift ash into the air, and it gets into your nose and throat.  It burns, figuratively as well as literally. 

I am tired of being confined to my house, to missing out on the subtle shifts of the season and even the chance to be nasally irritated by the prairie burn, so, in spite of some pain, I walked to my 5:30am kettlebell class on Monday morning.  I walked along the burned prairie and noticed these things—a little bit.  Mostly, though, I noticed that my left foot, one of only two feet I use to walk, hurts.  It hurts more than I think it should four weeks after surgery.  This is, at this point, both a bad and a good thing.  Bad for obvious reasons.  Hopefully it’s not infected.  Good because the Boston Marathon, for which I am both qualified and registered, is taking place in two weeks.  Good because the pain makes it absolutely out of the question that I might have been able to make an attempt at the 26.2 miles.  In truth, the marathon has been off the table for a couple of months.  But the pain in my foot saves me from feeling like maybe I should have left it on the table, just in case.  That’s the kind of second thoughts to which I am prone.  It is absolutely not going to happen.  Yes, the plane tickets and hotel reservations were already cancelled, but the pain makes the change of plans a physically experienced certainty. 

Good.  Because lately the Boston Marathon is calling me and mocking me.  A couple of weeks ago I received via e-mail my race number and wave time.  Last week I received via USPS a thick packet of race information which I have not touched.  I cannot decide if I should open it or toss it directly into the recycle bin, and so it sits in my family room and gets in the way and reminds of what I have lost.  Today, another e-mail.  Yesterday, the mom of another student in my daughter’s tumbling class was talking about doing her last longish run before Boston.  That could be me.  It is not me.  This morning the lane two guy who almost lapped me at the masters’ swim said that he’s doing Boston this year to make up for the Boston he ran last year.  Boston Boston Boston. 

Limping along in the chilly dark of pre-morning, through the blackness of a burned prairie, the pain in my foot made me accept the fact that those Boston Marathon people are not me.  Evidently, Boston is not my thing.  My time is almost certainly not good enough for me to get in under the new procedures that will be in place for next year’s Boston.  And then the qualification times get even tougher.  So it’s entirely likely that I will never get in.  The raised standards are not in themselves a reason not to try again, of course, but with this injury following so closely the previous long-term injury, it does seem that maybe I’m just not meant to run marathons.  Maybe marathoning is not “my thing.”  Perhaps it is sour grapes, but perhaps it is realism to admit to myself that even though I have long defined myself as a runner, maybe I’m just not that good at it, at least at that distance.  I was just barely good enough at it once, and now good enough has slipped out of my fingers, has raced on ahead far enough that I may not catch up.  And, truth be told, I’m a little too demoralized to see myself trying.

The last time I had to face up the likely loss of myself as a runner, I joined a concert band.  I am still in the band, and this concert cycle we are playing songs that may be the hardest I’ve ever played in my life.  I think it may be a cumulatively harder concert than I ever played at the peak of my career back in college.  So there too, I fail to measure up.  I did not bring this to mind on a chilly Monday morning to berate myself for my shortcomings as horn player.  After all, I did put my horn away for a good decade, and truth be told, I do not get around to practicing it every day now, as I should.  I could improve, with some effort, and I will have to improve by early May.  But the reality of the situation is that although I may be able to get myself to a point where I can survive this concert and not infuriate my conductor, I will be acceptable at best.  It may be that had I decided to major in horn performance in college, had I practiced hours per day since then, I could be an honest-to-goodness horn player.  Who knows?  The reality, though, is that I did not do those things, and therefore I am never going to be any better than an acceptable musician.  It’s too late for me now.  Horn playing is not “my thing” either.

If, as Robert Frost proposes, life is a path off of which “way leads onto way” and one usually does not get back to the original path and the original set of decisions, then I am too far down the path already for a number of things.  Although I once envisioned myself as a scholar or a researcher or an intellectual, the reality of my current situation and responsibilities and, yes, loves, is that I took other paths long ago, and I will probably not intersect again with my former aspirations.  Professorship is not “my thing.”  Since third grade I have wanted to be a writer, but it turns out that I don’t have all that much to say beyond my own experiences and my own self.  I am not as creative or edgy or appealing or prolific or poetic as I would need to be to really be a writer.  I missed that path too, somehow, even though I thought I was looking for it.  And so, walking/limping in the dark, I quickly mentally compiled a good list of pursuits at which I have failed or at which I have been nothing more than mediocre or that I somehow missed, and now I am too old to make any them “my thing.”  Sigh.  What to do with my life.

And then, out of nowhere, an asinine sentence popped into my head: “You’re never too old to make Jesus ‘your thing.’”  I actually, limping along in the dark through a burned prairie, laughed out loud.  God (and I mean that both epithetically and as a form of address,) what a cheesey, hokey sentence even to think!!  Where did that come from? 

My answer came later that day from a trusted friend to whom I confided this embarrassingly Bible-beater sounding story.  We had been discussing the Holy Spirit, certainly the part of the trinity to which I devote the least thought and about which I have only a vague and shifting non-understanding.  My friend’s comment was that the Holy Spirit is the thing that whispers into your head, that nudges you to speak or act.  Oh ho!  So HS would be the guilty party in that silly Jesus thought, not me.  Phew.

Wait.  Phew?

  Luke 3:15-17 (New International Version, ©2011)

 ¹⁵ The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. ¹⁶ John answered them all, “I baptize you with^[a] water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with^[b] the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Crap.  And ow.

I’ve had this thought before, that maybe, darn it all, maybe such and such an injury that takes me away from running is really a good opportunity to do such and such….  Yada yada yada, grumble grumble.  Been there; had enough of that.   Except that I haven’t had the thought in quite the same way, nor while walking through a scorched restored prairie.  A prairie which, if I’m remembering correctly, gets burned every year.  Every year.  Again, crap.  Every year burned down to nothing but ash and blackness and, we know from experience although we cannot see it now, some roots and seeds that will, in time, grow to be just as green and beautiful and tall as ever they have been.  In theory, they will be even more green and tall and prairie-like than if they had never been burned and if the invader species had been allowed to grow unchecked season after season and out-compete the native plants and turn the prairie into something other than what a native prairie should be.    

Sigh.  So maybe (sigh again) I have a few non-native plants that are keeping me from being what I ought to be.  Yes, I’m pretty sure there are several, and they are good hardy ones.  For example, that darn pride thing keeps growing back and repeatedly needs to be stripped off me, by force, or fire, if necessary.  Maybe it’s good for me to have to get back into the pool and get almost lapped in lane two while swimming 200m repeats.  I’m not talking just about how it’s good for me as an athlete or a well-rounded person, a Jack-of-all-trades.  I’m saying maybe the HS is right.  Maybe I need to be stripped, repeatedly, of my reliance on the identities I try to make for myself, my attempts to define out loud what “my thing” is.  Maybe once all of last year’s dead growth is burned away, between this burn and the next one, the right me will grow back, preferably a pretty yellow-green, or something with flowers.  But there I go again.  Perhaps I am not to be the judge of perfection.  Maybe I should just wait and see what my native seeds are, what I was designed to be before I was even old enough to be striving after any particular goal or status or label. 

Maybe this is what sanctifying grace feels like: like a prairie fire.