May it Break Your Heart

Learning from a Garter Snake and Aldo Leopold

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose!

In just a few months, my small Substack has reached over 150 subscribers, including 5 paid subscribers. Thank you for helping me reach this milestone. I am paying my gratitude forward by becoming a paid subscriber of Suleika Jouad’s Isolation Journals. If you remember, I wrote about Suleika in my pocket about grief and gardening. Suleika is cultivating a space which fosters creativity, vulnerability, and community across the globe. I am trying to do the same thing in my small pocket of the world. Thanks for being here.

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

actual oriental poppy in my garden- before blooming

I had a little trouble with this week’s pocket. Have you seen The Great British Baking Show? If not, you really should treat yourself. It’s a delight of a show where amateur bakers compete to be star baker, but unlike other reality shows, everyone is super kind. There is still, though, the pressure of producing under a time crunch. (Okay, kind of like dinner in our house every night, but still…) If my pocket were a pastry, it would greet the bakery shelves every Sunday. Thus, by Saturday morning, it would be on the cooling rack, ready for some candied citrus, crisped sugar or maybe even a little meringue. This week, though, I am not the star baker, I am the sad, sad baker, who all the other kind bakers step in and rescue, because after repeatedly popping my head in the oven door wondering what was taking so long, I finally realized, I forgot to turn the oven on.

There are a few reasonable explanations for my struggle to write this week, and sadly they are not because I was binge watching The Great British Baking Show, which I recommend doing by the way. I am an instructional coach and a teacher. I teach mostly seniors, and it is May, and every day that we inch closer to graduation, we also inch closer to the edge of our sanity. During 6th period this week, one of my students got up to leave the classroom with 45 minutes of class time remaining. As she started to make her way to the door, I asked her where she was going, and she told me her sister was getting a tattoo, as if this was a suitable explanation for the situation. To be fair to her, we were at the end of a week of two-hour block classes, due to endless testing, so I kind of wanted to leave too. Another possible explanation for my writer’s block is that because it is May, I tend to spend every waking moment I can in the garden, which means less attention to everything else, mostly housework but also probably writing. Mary Oliver used to hide pencils in the woods. Perhaps, I should do the same in my garden. I think the real reason though that I’m struggling with my writing this week has little to do with distractions. I think it’s the subject matter. Ada Limón, in the poetry workshop she did with us, said that she doesn’t believe in writer’s block. She thinks that when we are stuck in writing, it is not because we don’t have something to write about, but rather it’s because the thing we are trying to write about is too big. This week, I’m trying to write about Mother Earth and a balanced ecosystem. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. So, I will take Ada’s advice when trying to write about big things, and I will start small.

I will start with a poem about a garter snake.

Photo by Aaron Fernando on Unsplash

Have you ever seen a garter snake swim?

She is a thing of beauty

Swift, circular, lovely

Like a roller coaster on the water

Her tongue leads the way

And her tail follows suit

She sails on top of the water

regal and joyous

I stand on the shore

Between my two children

So thankful we are here to witness such beauty

Knowing their awe and amazement match my own

we have been given a gift

Seabass, still slightly afraid of snakes, is the most moved

So cool, so lovely, so beautiful

We hate to leave this spot

but the garter snake has moved on

and so must we

We walk together up the quiet road

still marveling at her beauty

Her motion, her joy

We gaze at the lake

thankful for the wonder we have witnessed

pondering the many wonders that remain unseen

As my eyes return to the road, I gasp

On the asphalt lies another garter snake

crushed

Her tongue twisted, her tail split open

She was making her way across the road

so quick, so regal, so joyous

When someone drove by

too fast

to spot her, to see her, to notice her

to say how cool, how lovely, how beautiful

She was quick, but the wheels were quicker

“Don’t look,” I say to my children

and immediately wish I had said nothing

Because don’t look basically means look

so they do, and on the walk home

They are pondering this loss

which feels more significant after bearing witness to the garter snake’s magnificence

My heart breaks for their heartache

My instinct is to protect them from pain

but to bear witness to life

is to bear witness to death

and perhaps, if they feel this loss a little more deeply

Perhaps if it breaks their hearts a little

Perhaps this is not the worst thing

Perhaps they will learn to drive slowly,

or not drive at all

Perhaps they will tred carefully

understanding that the creatures among us are worthy

of attention

and space

They are not simply sidekicks

to trod upon

Perhaps they will even grow into people who keep their eyes open

and pay attention

to all that is cool, lovely and beautiful

and all that is not

In a traditional Hasidic tale, A disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does the Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon our hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”

Brokenness can sometimes be a beginning.

my actual garden, my actual awe

Parker Palmer, one of my favorite sages and writers, describes two kinds of heartbreak, one that is brittle and destructive and one that is life-giving. He says that violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering, but if we can allow ourselves to be soft in our brokenness, we open ourselves up to the possibility of something else, the possibility of leading a more whole, beautiful, compassionate life.

May the beauty and brokenness of the world break out hearts.

Here’s what I’m reading and re-reading this week that’s changing me and helping me think about how I can make my pocket of the world a more hospitable home for all creatures.

What resonates with you this week? What are you reading that’s changing you? Where are you finding beauty? What is breaking your heart?