Dear Friends,

LISTEN TO THIS WEEK’S PROGRAM:

(01:33) Our take on Barbenheimer, with Kathy Byrnes;
(18:00) The new peace movement, with Caleb Stewart;
(42:40) A reflection from the 2014 Great March for Climate Action;
(53:53) “The Terra Cotta Camel,” with Kathy Byrnes.

Reflections, reflections, reflections. So many coming to mind this week. I’ll share with you an excerpt from my book, Marcher, Walker, Pilgrim. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, visit this page on the Climate March website. I’d be grateful, and all proceeds go to the March’s continued climate work.

From Chapter 26:

My tent along a muddy creek in Nebraska during the 2014 Great March for Climate Action. And yes, ridiculously, that is my computer leaning against the tent:

In the spring of my 22nd year, I flew to Ireland with $800 in my pocket and fifteen pounds of gear on my back. For the next eight months I traveled through Europe and the Mideast living mostly on air, kindness, and creativity. It was a journey with no specific destination or goal, an unstructured spiritual quest seasoned with wanderlust. I often worked in exchange for room and board, staying at monasteries and other venues attractive to the spiritually curious — places like Taize, L’Arche, an Israeli kibbutz, and the compound of a cult disguised as a latter-day hippy commune. 

I also stayed with “friends,” defined as anyone I’d spent ten minutes with who’d put me up for the night. Sometimes, I’d make my bed on a park bench, in the corner of a train station, behind an organ in an airport chapel or, more comfortably, on a mattress on the sand with Bedouins under the rich, starry-black night of the Sinai Desert.

The adventure began with a two-week walk across southern England along the Pilgrims’ Way. I followed the route of the colorful cast of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales through amber fields of rapeseed and forest floors carpeted with bluebells. I camped in places I imagined the Miller, the Parson, the Friar, and Chaucer’s other heroes and ruffians had laid their heads after a day of modest walking and heavy drinking.

My tent was a rain poncho staked to the ground, a stick on either end raising the middle just enough to direct rainwater off the sides. When it rained — and it rained often — the poncho kept either my head or feet dry, but not both. I was certain Chaucer’s pilgrims had enjoyed more comfortable lodgings.

A few weeks later while hitchhiking through Belgium, I thumbed a ride with a pleasant woman my age. We chatted about God and life, and by the end of the thirty-minute ride we were “friends.” She invited me to visit. A week later, I did. Two days later, she fell in love with me.

Her name was Annika Duthoo, a born-again Christian who unabashedly declared both her commitment to pre-marital abstinence and her desire to eventually bear seventeen children. I liked Annika but wasn’t in love with her. I enjoyed her company but had no desire for marriage, a horde of screaming fidgets, or her brand of Christianity. What I wanted was a traveling companion, and when Annika suggested we spend her six-week vacation in Scandinavia, I agreed.

The adventure didn’t last long — less than an hour, in fact. Annika’s mother and father objected vehemently to our trip, and when the emotional impact of parental scorn caught up with her twenty miles out, Annika broke down. She sobbed uncontrollably as we drove to the home of an evangelical minister to seek his consolation and guidance. They met privately while I wandered off to sit under a bridge and ponder my predicament.

Filing my nails on a slab of concrete to the rhythmic pulse of overhead traffic, I knew there was one obvious, intelligent thing to do: grab my backpack, hitch a ride eastward, and let this mercifully brief spate of relational drama fade into the setting Flanders sun.

But I couldn’t leave without at least saying goodbye. Annika emerged from the minister’s house, and before I could announce my intention to leave, she presented a new proposal. We’d stay at her parents’ home for the next six weeks and make day trips to various points of Flemish interest. I glanced at my shoddily filed nails, stared at the open road beckoning me toward the heart of Europe, and in what would prove to be the first of many bad decisions I’d make in the realm of love, I accepted Annika’s offer.

Our time together was a blast until I wrecked my back in a game of soccer. Annika’s parents let me hole up for another six weeks to recover, but with little improvement. The family doctor recommended I go somewhere warm. Ignoring the fact that, from a medical perspective, this advice was absurd, I took a train south and stayed with various friends and strangers along the Mediterranean Sea for two months.

With still no improvement, Annika offered to loan me the money for a plane ticket home to the States. I spent my last cash on a flight to Brussels and landed there on a cold, wet night in November, my back screaming epithets at me. I called Annika from the airport. She told me she’d changed her mind, didn’t want to help, and didn’t want me to visit.

I was devastated, physically a wreck, alone in a foreign country — 3,500 miles and one very large ocean from home. I had no money and was in near constant pain. I could sit for only short spurts before my back sent intense nerve pain pulsating down my right leg.

My singular obsession was to return home and get medical attention. In a strange twist of circumstances, I befriended a Russian dissident who helped me secure passage across the English Channel. I then found my way to London where my friend Phil Sowden lived as a squatter in an abandoned apartment. Each morning, I’d catch a train from Phil’s place to the London docks, determined to stow away on a ship crossing the Atlantic.

News of my dockside desperation came to the attention of Maureen Impey, an Irish cousin living in London. Maureen tracked me down and chastised me severely. She then bought me a plane ticket and sent me home, mercifully ending a miserable adventure that had started with such promise.

——-

The Climate March is now less than 30 miles from Lincoln. We score a peaceful campsite in a park far from the auditory clutter of trains and traffic. I pitch my tent away from others, down a gentle slope by a muddy, ambling creek. The night is as black as prairie loam, the air resonant with the music of insects and frogs. There’s a soft splash — some fish, reptile, or amphibian — which class of creature, I can’t tell. It’s followed by a series of deeper, softer splashes, as if the creek’s heart is pumping life from within the rich mud to its surface.

Tonight’s white noise is comforting. Listening intently to the pulse of the water, resisting the temptation to sleep, I think of the human heart and reflect back 34 years to that European adventure turned sour. Like the March, it started with a walk. Like the March, it lasted eight months. Unlike the March — I hope — it ended in physical agony for me.

What I’ve come to realize is that it also ended in an agonizing heartache for Annika. Back then I had pity only for myself, feeling scorn and contempt for Annika. I was outraged that she would lure me back to Belgium, penniless, then abandon me. Now, across the span of many years and thousands of miles, I feel pity for her, too.

Why is falling in love so often a one-way street? Over the years, I’ve traversed both sides of that path. Now it’s easier for me to understand Annika’s uncontrollable sobbing, her indecision, her irrational compulsion to cut me off suddenly and emphatically.

Of all the forces that drive human activity, love is both the most powerful and least comprehensible. What psychic dysfunction compels the Universe to make a person feel deeply attracted to someone who doesn’t feel the same? It’s as if God finds some sadistic entertainment in setting up both parties for failure — one convulsed in heartache, the other wallowing in guilt.

“Damn you, Universe, or whoever you are,” I say aloud to the insects, frogs and whatever being stirs below in the creek. “You’ve made humanity as dependent upon love as it is upon air, water, and food. Damn you. I’m tired of having my heart broken, tired of breaking someone else’s heart. So there.”

I slip back into silence, content that I’ve bitch-slapped the Universe’s highest existential power, feeling smug that I sent it cowering into some remote hole in a distant galaxy. At least from the perspective of a privileged American, the quest for love is tougher even than the daily quest for food and water. Many times I’ve been tempted to give up, to stop trying, to resign myself to a life without a love-partner.

But just as we persevere in the fight against injustice, we persevere in the search for love. We have no choice. Life without struggle, without love, is the rhythmless dance of the living dead. It is existence without heart, water without movement, night without desert stars or prairie fireflies. So, for the sake of love, for the sake of justice, for the sake of life itself, we keep going, one day at a time, one step at a time, hoping to get it right — if not this time, maybe the next, or the next, or the next.

——-

Thanks for reading, listening, and taking action.

*******

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Ed Fallon