I dig the grave in a light rain. It’s a small hole for Paco. Elsewhere in the world, people I love have suffered losses that brought down the sky. Here, in the central highlands of Mexico, I bury my cat. He was Paco. His namesake is my grandfather, who eloped from Guatemala to New York with his bride, Amalia, in 1916. We sprinkle Paco with chicken-flavor treats and I quickly cover him with dirt and tamp it down. “Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,” writes César Vallejo of life and suffering. “I will die in Paris with a drenching rain.” My salty drops tumble from an atmospheric river, the Congo, the Amazon, the Orinoco of tears.

Paco’s grave in the garden is perhaps 15 feet from the base of our abuela jacaranda, grandmother tree. She was a sapling three decades after Paco and Amalia fled on a United Fruit steamship, and she has grown and spread those many years. Her green crown shades our garden, terrace, and roof, the gardens and rooftops of the houses on either side, and a section of El Nigromante elementary schoolyard behind us.

Digging, I thought how our cat, placed in the earth between abuela’s deep roots and her branches, will at some time be absorbed by her, his still flesh disassembled by the action of moving things: water and bacteria, fungi and worms and insects. Paco, remade as essential molecules, moving up abuela’s thick bole and dividing in two, then quickly again into her five climbing trunks, articulating and balancing, stretching and elaborating her body out to her tips. Paco will be there.

Some months from now, after abuela’s feathery leaves die and trickle down, her bare branches will become spectacular—for Easter, say the Catholics, to honor Christ’s rising, our abuela will express herself in royal purple. Throughout San Miguel, generations of jacarandas will bloom, flowers will fall in their millions, to be replaced by more purple in the trees to fall again, showering what’s below for weeks. When this happens, abuela will cover the fieldstones of our garden. Bees will dip among the fallen blossoms. I will walk to his grave and feel Paco is here in this purple carpet, beloved.

 

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Three days after Paco died, a city bus, an urbano, was making its tight uphill turn from Calle San Francisco; I was waiting in my car to turn downhill. San Miguel sidewalks and streets are stone and narrow. Even with the wide berth I gave the urbano, I admired the precision of the driver’s turn with not a hair’s breadth between me on one side and on the other a high sidewalk. The bus passed and as I made my turn I glanced left and saw a small white dog in the street at the curb, standing preternaturally still. As my eyes turned downhill and I rolled on, I realized I had also seen the dog standing in a blood-red puddle. Caught between stone and bus, the dog was crushed and upright for a moment, the moment I saw it, before collapsing.

Little white, fluffy dogs are common as dirt in San Miguel; a kind of invasive species that has taken the ecological niche of the chihuahua—on someone’s lap. But this dog, this mutilated animal, was suddenly personal to me. That heartbeat on all fours, in shock, eyes unseeing, then toppling. Here is the close grinding of the material world which, right place right time gets you, say, a bite from a Chilean recluse spider, or gets a salmon a bear’s mouth. We’re made of the moving world and so Buddhism aptly names these afflictions the suffering-of-suffering. It is everywhere at all times and instinct is to look to our own; it often takes a specific incident to evoke compassion in us. But I believe that lovingkindness and taking joy in the joy of others is our natural state. There will be contradictions—we are a contradictory species. We mourn pain and death in others even as we sit down to enjoy a meal (which wiser cultures honor as the sharing of other forms of life). If we’re fortunate, we feel our interconnection because it’s an emotional reality. Es lo que hay, we say in Mexico—it’s what there is.

We are given separate bodies and individual things comprise our lives and it’s all quite true and real. But Carl Sagan’s much-quoted “We are star stuff” is worth restating. I have a Chinese-Canadian friend, whose name is Yu-Ping. She’s new to San Miguel and enthusiastic about making friends. She’s also aware that “Yu-Ping” is something of a riddle to many people, so when we met she said, “Hi, I’m Yu.” I was thunderstruck—I’m You! Yes! Everyone has the same origin—we embody an exploding star. Knowing this inspires compassion, for ourselves and the rest of creation. If we receive the universe with each in-breath and renew it with each out-breath, the true response to all of this is love.

The star, its atoms, the Chilean spider, the salmon and the bear, Yu-Ping, we all of us inhabit a physical scale called space-time that grows with the edges of the universe. But turn around, look to the scale of the smallest, and we see interconnection more elemental than fusing hydrogen atoms in a star’s core, and a unity deeper than the parts of the hydrogen atom itself. At the scale smaller than space-time—a strange and awesome phrase—we find a deeply simple turbulence. On/Off. Yes/No. Matter and Anti-Matter manifesting and exploding spontaneously into a seething quantum foam. I’m-You because individual things don’t exist in this energetic churn—not neutrons or protons, not organic molecule chains, not cat or jacaranda, not solar systems or galaxies. In this mysterious quantum dance, everything is a subatomic alternating energy/matter mambo that emerges into space-time as the swinging hips of the universe as it expands.

Difference and no difference, both. Compassion is our original state.

 

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Journal entry: Sept. 16, 2020

 

            I cover my eyes with my hands and think of a U.S. Marine in 1951, crouching in a shallow trench in the Nevada desert, three miles from the blast tower of a bomb test. He tucks his head into the crook of his arm to protect his eyes from the atomic light. When it comes, so bright is it that he sees the bones of his elbow joint through his closed eyes, his dark goggles, his fatigues, his flesh.

            This is the second time today I’ve capped my eyes, aftershocks of learning that United States government agents are transporting immigrant women hoping for asylum and sterilizing them without their knowledge. No wonder that the field of bioethics emerged from the Nuremberg trials.

It is fall in the last year of the presidency of Donald Trump.

            I don’t want to feel this pain but it rolls through me and I weep again. How can life be so ghastly? No matter how I shield my eyes the burning light is there.

 

 

It does take some getting used to, that acts of cruelty are low hanging fruit on this particular tree. The convincing illusion of our separateness gives rise to the most extraordinary transgressions against others. On this Earth tears are a given. Perhaps in another world or parallel universe this isn’t the case, and I sympathize with the fervent wish that things, just sometimes, would not be as they are.

So far, our only successes here have been in mathematics and imagination. The multiverse, multiple universes, was introduced to me through science fiction. My love for this genre began with the boy inventor Tom Swift, a literary project with foresight enough that Vol. 6 is entitled Tom Swift and His Wireless Message from 1910. There was a  break in publication from 1941 to 1954, and the young hero entered my life several years later with Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster. Not long after, my father, coming in to say goodnight, surprised me with Tom Swift and the Asteroid Pirates. Right then I surrendered my soul. It was a luminous experience. What joy reading about these astounding inventions and the people who wrestled with their consequences. The multiverse, that many-headed theory of alternate realities, fits right into the bookcase in my wheelhouse.

The seminal multiverse concept arose with the ancient Greek atomists of the fifth century BCE. Some years later, in 1950, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wryly stated that his equations seemed to describe something that “might seem lunatic.” In science fiction you can point to Edwin A. Abbott who, in 1884, wrote “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” and browsing any bookstore you will find examples of similar thrust: many separate, fully-formed and developing realities existing side by side. However, as compelling as the equations are to those who understand them, no evidence verifies anything more than our singular universe. “Nothing is wrong with scientifically-based philosophical speculation, which is what multiverse proposals are. But we should name it for what it is,” wrote George Ellis in Scientific American.

However, with laboratory precision and free of speculation, I can attest that multiverses are actual, and there is ample evidence to prove that they walk among us. Each human being is a self-contained, fully elaborated world view. Some communication between these unique worlds is possible. There is sharing and even understanding, but we cannot fully inhabit the reality of another living creature. This compelling experience of our private universe drives us to conclude that separateness and disconnectedness are life. In the extreme, and without difficulty one finds extremes, the boundary of the body is the sum total of concern. Self-preservation is paramount, no disputing that. But there is also no disputing that instinct can defer to something outside the skin, something I’m-You. The temptation is to ask what drives one individual to sacrifice themselves and another to willingly sacrifice everyone else. It’s an intriguing question but beside the point; reasons are like stars in the firmament—no end in sight.

The more pressing question is this: if compassion is our birthright, how do we withstand the inevitable pain it brings? I believe the answer has to do with Asteroid Pirates. An interviewer once asked the venerable Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh how, after witnessing so many horrors and cruelties during the Vietnam War, how could he teach joy in the face of so much suffering? In his quiet voice he answered with the gentle supposition that “maybe it’s because suffering is not enough.”

During a normal day, or especially in the midst of suffering, if we can quiet the mind, open ourselves to the moment and all it contains, joy is accessible. See there! Bzzz—a green hummingbird appears midair iridescent. See there! The young woman on the dance floor, with cinnamon skin and Mayan profile, grooves to the X-Files theme played techno-cumbia. Remembering my mother’s smile, watching a falling jacaranda blossom, breathing another breath—these matter. Opening to our deep connection with creation vitalizes our being. These things nourish and bring resilience to our life, battered as it may be. Feeling this happiness, finding it, helps us open our hands in love and service to the world around us. This, in turn, generates more joy.

As boys in 1950s Mexico City, my cuates and I would flip a 20-centavo coin and call ¿águila ó sol?, corresponding to its two faces: the Mexican national eagle or the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuácan. The minted images have changed but each singular coin still has two sides and, strange days indeed, this shop-worn duality sparkles in the right light. ¿Águila ó sol? Suffering is everywhere but so too is joy, and as the greatest gift, we ourselves can create more of it. If we see only pain, we’re flipping and always coming up águila. Those are false odds: the real ones remain fifty-fifty. And ultimately, eagle or sun is itself a limiting choice; there is only one coin. Together águila and sol have something to teach. In this very moment águila’s talons pierce and hold sol, which blazes and penetrates even the hardened claws.

There is a cat buried in my garden. I covered him with dirt and tears. He was Paco and together we shared eleven years of happiness. Just as the rewards of a ripping good yarn brought me a lifetime of reading pleasure, it’s also through reading I learn of bloody Ukraine and withering glaciers. Our pain, keen as it is, arises from a keen love—of self, of close ones, of those far flung we’ve not met. Our suffering is born of unity with the walking, swimming, flying, photosynthesizing beings that are the organism of this Earth. Sorrow penetrates our hard-shell universe and softens us to the same in others. Joy gives us strength to reach out with love. We bear witness with gratitude for all of life, suffering too. Águila and sol are our lot, interconnected always.