Lighthearted enough to fly

Walking composition

Yesterday I went for a long walk along the river after an exhausting couple days full of demands and weighty darknesses, and was rewarded by being able to watch a bald eagle’s long flight overhead, strong wings carrying him through the air with only one brief beat downward. I watched him until it looked like he would keep on going out of sight, but instead he hung around after tangling with a couple of crows. Or, they tried to tangle, but he kept somersaulting as he flew, the curve of wings and tumble through the air repeated over and over as the crows followed him around in a wide circle and I watched from under a willow by the river.

I’ve never seen the mating fall that bald eagles perform, where two birds grip talons and tumble down through the air, but seeing this lone bird flip around with such ease, without being thrown off-course or disoriented, was breathtaking. I can’t think of many humans who even come close to that level of bodily confidence. Certain athletes, maybe, like gymnasts and freestyle skiers and circus performers. What weighs us down besides the density of our bones and lack of wings?

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When I was in grade school, the boy who lived two houses down from me and who was my same age started trapping me next to the schoolyard right after we got out for the day. He threatened to beat me up if I went home, and after making sure I understood that he meant it, he left for home himself. I waited until I was sure he was long gone before walking home via a different route.

I can’t remember what his given name was, only that everyone called him Bud. His home was not a happy one, but somehow I can’t think of many homes in that town that were happy. Even most of our teachers seemed miserable; some time after my family moved away I heard that the PE teacher had been fired for breaking a kid’s arm. It didn’t come as a surprise. I remember trading certain kinds of stories with my friend Maggie while we were trying to avoid a loose dog that kept knocking kids down on the cut-up town ice skating rink, which sat on an empty lot near my friend Cindy’s house. Cindy with the awesome tree house, whose mom once washed my mouth out with soap when I let out a swear word, whose neighbor hated kids, and whose goldfish I accidentally killed through over-feeding.

Bud didn’t threaten me after school for very many days, and never got around to beating me up. I did once see him in a massive fistfight with another boy after school when we were in fifth grade. Looking back, all I can think is that he was a miserable kid. The kind of desperate, unhappy rage that leaked out of him feels familiar now that I know what it looks like, what it means a person might be carrying. This could be entirely wrong, a projection onto the past, but my memory is convinced that he was hurting. That he felt a need to exert some control because his life was unwelcoming, and I was there.

Personal pain can spill out onto others in so many ways. For several years now, my younger sister has practiced and given trainings on trauma-informed management, something I now wish a lot more people knew about. One thing I’ve learned from her work—and from living—is that it’s always more likely than not that any person I meet or talk with is carrying at least one specific or chronic trauma, one I might never know anything about. And that the enormity of any given person’s trauma might be beyond my comprehension. I might never know what pain they’re in, what kinds of weights have attached themselves to their bodies, or where.

We moved away from my original hometown when I was ten, and I haven’t thought of Bud or his younger sister (who was my friend—a mean friend at the time, but a friend nonetheless) in decades. This memory came back to me as I was on my way home after walking my own daughter to school this morning, looking for bald eagles and wishing we could all shake off the weights of grief and trauma as easily as I’ve seen eagles shake off crows.

I wondered what happened to Bud, to everyone else in that family. And then I remembered something that happened to his sister due to yet another unhappy home and another unhappy boy, and wondered whether these cycles ever stop. If one of those cycles, at least, has now stopped, or if that brokenness and pain is continuing to spread itself out into the world, as so much brokenness and pain does, on down through the generations.

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I write a lot about property and land ownership, about the suffering caused by a few people insisting that they have the right to own far more than they’ll ever need. Of what it means that laws are written to allow those people to refuse access to land and water and everything else needed for survival, simply due to the legal fiction of ownership.

What about emotional space, what people spill out into the world around them? (A question that has infinite layers—even ownership has its own compelling emotional components.) What about a child who couldn’t figure out how to deal with his pain beyond spreading it—even ineffectually—to someone else (and likely inward to himself, too), who for all I know became an adult spreading it to another generation right now? What demands do I myself make of others that’s an unfair draw on their own emotional capacity?

Somewhere in the last couple years here, I wrote about Riane Eisler’s book Nurturing Our Humanity,* which is one of the few I’ve ever read that really digs into how an upbringing saturated in private household domination helps to perpetuate authoritarian cultures. On psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick’s “F scale” that measures an individual’s compatibility with fascist rule, Eisler wrote that,

“People who scored high on this F scale had typically grown up with a great fear of punishment in families with powerful authority figures. . . . In short, her findings not only foreshadowed Milgram’s and Earl’s later findings that people from authoritarian backgrounds tended to follow orders regardless of how much they hurt others, they also showed that these people were prone to vote for and support authoritarian leaders.”

Later in the book, Eisler wrote about the strange but widespread belief that “what happens in families and to children is of little if any real importance.”

I watched that bald eagle fly and flip its way around the bothered crows for a long time, far longer than I usually get to watch eagles—their flight path almost always takes them out of my sight relatively quickly—and I think it’s one of those memory-hours that’s going to stick with me. I’d just come up from a public dock where I’d been sitting with my feet in the river, wrapping myself in temporary relief from others’ needs of me, watching the light that reflected off the water ripple its way along the undersides of the willow branches while swallows and red-winged blackbirds demanded attention.

And then the eagle came by, with his combination of strength and ease that made my own spine and shoulders feel stronger for a few minutes. Like I, too, was flying even if my feet stayed on the ground. What would it be like to have the strength for all the world asks of us, and yet be able to move with such joyful lightness? To release all that we carry without making it another’s burden.

*Flipping through my marked-up, Post-It-noted copy of Riane Eisler’s book, I almost wish I’d waited to read it until further along in my own writing of No Trespassing. I also wish more people would read it. There’s a lot of important research there and I’ve already forgotten much of it.