Author: Rae Spencer

A Deer in the Suburbs and a Science Major in the Humanities

Rae Spencer1 Comment

We live in the suburbs. In the most suburban of suburbs. Our house sits in the end of a cul-de-sac within easy walking distance of two schools, three strip malls, an embarrassment of restaurants, a clamor of gas stations, a smallish city park, and a pair of naval bases.

Suburbia hasn’t overrun all of the fields in our area, nor every wooded lot, but there’s nothing that resembles a wilderness corridor. So the young stag that landed in our yard, in October of 2019, had scrambled across miles of sidewalks and pavement before getting trapped in our cul-de-sac and scraping over our fence.

Only to find more fence, on the other side.I don’t know why the deer decided to stay. Maybe he was exhausted. Maybe he didn’t like how it felt, going over a fence without knowing what was on the other side. Maybe he was relieved to find a yard with no dogs, a pair of small water gardens, some weedy pollinator beds, and a few spots of semi-cover.I was delighted to have a deer guest. Even more delighted to run into an animal control officer who was cruising through the cul-de-sac. She had been alerted to the deer’s mid-morning residential antics and seemed delighted, herself, to find him. She advised me to let him rest for the day, if he would, then open the gate at dusk so he could find his way out. I did, and he did.

In this metaphor, I am neither the deer nor the suburbs. I’m the long-unemployed, middle-aged woman who lives on a cul-de-sac, is trying to give her yard back to the earth, and needs a new skill set.

I have a bachelor’s degree in biology (BS), a doctor of veterinary medicine degree (DVM), and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). I’m a BS DVM OCD.

I didn’t know about the OCD until I was in my late twenties, though it started affecting my study and work habits while I was in school. I floundered through an internship, where the pace and stress exacerbated my symptoms and resultant anxieties, then lucked into a great job.

I loved my job and my clients and my patients, and I developed coping mechanisms for the OCD and anxiety. But love and coping mechanisms only got me so far. Eventually I fell apart, changed my work schedule, and fell even more apart. I retired from veterinary practice when I was a young veterinarian, and I’ve been unemployed since.Unemployed, but not idle. I’ve taken care of myself, my family, and my tiny acre of world. And I’ve written many words.

Poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, nature rambles, random histories of veterinary medicine, random histories of randomness. For more than a decade, I collected thoughts into words and words into files and researched whatever caught my interest. I submitted and published some of my writing, and I was once paid $5 for a poem.

And, while I’ve stopped submitting and publishing in recent years, I’m still writing. Since January of 2020, I’ve been studying professional writing through Old Dominion University’s online Graduate Certificate program.

A science major in the humanities silo. What next?

Hopefully, next will be a yard given back to the earth, a deer surrounded by less fence and more wilderness, and a world without educational silos. (More on these in later posts.)

Mine is a story of immense and unearned privilege, but it is also a story of gratitude and listening. My hope is that, in the end, it will be a story of kindness.

I regret that I do not have a list of links for this post. Much of my reading, over the past two years, has been books instead of internet content. Here are a few of them. If you’ve read these books, I would love to hear your thoughts. Recommendations for further reading are always welcome.

Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind by Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov

How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn

From Black Codes to Recodification: Removing the Veil from Regulatory Writing by Miriam F. Williams

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Historical Capitalism by Immanuel Wallerstein

Trans-Kin: A Guide for Family & Friends of Transgender People edited by Eleanor A. Hubbard and Cameron T. Whitley

The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments by Beverly Sauer

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

Productive Creativity and Creative Productivity

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It’s been two years since my last post. Two entire years of an ongoing search for balance. Any and all versions of balance.

In this search, as with everything else, I fail more often than succeed. But failure is, of itself, productive.

Except, the word “productive” is problematic, isn’t it? What, exactly, constitutes productivity? If the results of my labors are largely invisible, even intangible, have I truly been productive?

“What Heisenberg discovered was that the limit to our ability to observe the universe determines the boundaries of reality. Physical reality and observability are tied together. If you and I cannot observe it, it does not exist… or is it perhaps, if it exists, it is because you and I observe it?” Evan Harris Walker in The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life (1)

Maybe some adage applies, based on the laws of thermodynamics. Maybe I create and destroy in equal measures, so the sum of my productivity is zero. A cancellation of balances. Any and all versions of balance.

Or maybe words matter less than I imagine, and imagination matters more, when shaped into words.

“…nature is a chaos of forms and colors and shapes and forces, and the various ways in which that chaos has been untangled and made legible should never be taken as nature’s truth but rather as nature’s possibility within a human imaginary.” Rachel Poliquin in The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (2)

Independent of my blog activity, independent of words and definitions, the yard’s wheel bugs flourish and die and flourish and die with seasonal regularity.

(Catalogued in the family of assassin bugs, wheel bugs are considered beneficial predators. They possess a long “beak” for stabbing their prey, as seen in some of these photos. The same beak can be used defensively, and people who have been stabbed by wheel bugs report the bite to be “immediately and intensely painful”.)

The first generation I followed, in the summer of 2017, never knew life without my looming camera-presence. I found their egg clusters in the winter of 2016 and photographed them through their own egg-laying.

But I largely abandoned my camera the next year, so the next generation escaped my looming camera-presence. Can I prove that they flourished, without photos? That they were overtly and conspicuously productive? Populating the live oak and pear tree, the wax myrtles and pollinator beds. Always hunting and molting, destroying and creating.

Always, in my imagination, a chitin metaphor to be used in a future poem or blog post.

When I began planning this post, my long-awaited wheel bug post, I discovered what I should have expected all along. The yard’s current wheel bugs, unaccustomed to a looming camera-presence, are difficult to photograph.

These last photos, all taken yesterday, are the result of two weeks’ searching and stalking and standing quietly under the live oak. Two weeks for a set of blog photos.

Two weeks of productive creativity. Because I did other things, during those two weeks, but I approached each task with a bit more creativity than usual.

And now, a blog post! At last!

A brief moment of imperfect balance, two years in the making. Word-shaped and shared.

Quotation sources:

(1) Walker, Evan Harris. The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life. Basic Books. 2000. p 54.

(2) Poliquin, Rachel. The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing. Pennsylvania University Press. 2012. p 9.

Recommended reading:

Here are three of my favorite recently-read books. Have you read them? What did you think?

Poetry: Painting Czeslawa Kwoka, Honoring Children of the Holocaust by Theresa Senato Edwards and Lori Schreiner

Fiction: This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Non-fiction: Stein on Writing by Sol Stein

The Cat Eulogies

Rae Spencer9 Comments

Vanna (1999-2016)

When we lost Scamper last spring, we were already in the process of losing Vanna, too. Vanna had been diagnosed with intestinal lymphoma two years earlier, and, after thriving for longer than expected under the excellent care of her veterinarian, she was beginning to lose ground.

Vanna had been my mother’s cat, which undoubtedly contributed to the depth of my attachment. She was a living link to an unrecoverable past.

What’s more, she flourished in Virginia. In Tennessee, among Mother’s four cats, Vanna had been the neurotic one. The reclusive, skittish one, rarely glimpsed by visitors.

In Virginia, she became the dominant personality in our household.

When the cancer finally overwhelmed her, almost exactly a month after we said goodbye to Scamper, I stumbled into another depression.

Our lively household of three cats had been reduced, in a month’s time, to a quiet household of one. I couldn’t write about Vanna’s death. Could barely talk about it.

Within a year we were losing Sabrina, too.

Sabrina (2001-2017)

Sabrina was the sweetest, gentlest cat I’ve ever owned. Perhaps the sweetest and gentlest cat I’ve ever met.

She and Scamper had been rescued, at only a few weeks of age, from a construction site.

She suffered a serious injury at about twelve weeks old, losing one of her eyes and undergoing multiple surgeries to salvage the vision in her other eye. She lived the rest of her life with a slowly advancing cataract, but didn’t seem bothered by her limited vision.

She played and romped through adolescence, survived an episode of liver failure in early middle-age, and settled into her senior years with the same calm serenity she had shown from kittenhood.

I had hoped, of course, that we might have a few more years with her, after losing Scamper and Vanna in such close succession. But in November Sabrina began showing signs of discomfort while defecating, our first hint of the rectal tumor that, while repeatedly testing benign on biopsy, was likely malignant at its core.

By March she was too uncomfortable to continue. So I made yet another last trip to our wonderful vet and said yet another goodbye.

How many goodbyes, now? Four, since starting this blog. Indigo. Scamper. Vanna and Sabrina. Before them, Spice.

Spice (?-2008)

Spice’s years as a feral cat ended in 1994, the moment I saw her huddled in the back of a cage with a vast, scabbed wound covering her neck and shoulders. She nosed forward to sniff my hand, speaking in unmistakable cat-language. My name is Spice, and I’ve been waiting for you.

Spice was my constant companion for fifteen years. We shared a dorm, an apartment, a duplex (with my future husband), and, in her final years, a house in the suburbs.

She taught Sabrina and Scamper how to be cats, and they kept her young longer than time should have allowed.

Losing her closed a door on my twenties and thirties. I would never be twenty or thirty again, and I would never have another cat like Spice.

All those that came before

Before Spice? The list is long, stretching through memory into the hazy nostalgia of childhood. Mischief and Jackson. Diana. Gizmo and Annie. Morgan and Shere Khan. Sadie and Daisy. Sheena and Poppy. (This list is far from complete, and includes none of the dogs. I’ll save dogs for a later post.)

Many of our cats were named for characters in books and movies. Some came to us already named, relinquished by owners who could no longer keep them, owners who were happy to let an eager young vet assistant adopt the cats they were losing to eviction, a family illness, or one of life’s other jarring turns.

Some of the cats materialized out of thin air, simply showing up in the yard. Others were dumped on the driveway, plucked from parking lots, and chased down in ditches by a trio of sisters who found it biologically impossible to just keep driving. Mother simply sighed and made room for them all, a tide of cats drifting in and out of our lives, in and out of the house each morning and night.

They were never all in the house at the same time, thankfully. Most preferred the yard, sheds, and pasture, most of the time.

 

Cats have been one of the few constants in my life. They’ve shared all of my memories, every place I’ve ever called home, and almost every job I’ve ever had. I don’t know how to be without cats. In the end, loving cats is part of how I love myself. So…

Meet Duchess and Marie

Cat Team 7 is a local rescue group who work primarily with cats living at Naval Station Norfolk. The majority of their mission involves a Trap-Neuter-Relocate program, but they sometimes have adoptable kittens.

Duchess and Marie (two of a group named for the Aristocats) were trapped in a warehouse in early June, along with two male kittens about the same age. I saw their photo on social media, contacted Cat Team 7, and the rest is happy history.

They were quite shy, in their first weeks here.

Duchess (or Dutch, because sometimes she’s more Killjoy than Aristocat)

Marie (just Marie, because it fits)

It didn’t take them long to settle in. They have plenty of windows, soft beds, toys, and treats.

They are closely bonded, more dependent on each other than Sabrina and Scamper were. They’re rarely apart.

(Except when Marie plays fetch. Dutch, who has no interest in fetching, stalks the action until she can tempt Marie into a thunderous, romping game of chase.)

And me? I’m sharing my life with cats again. That’s enough for now.

 

Recommended reading about topics that are more urgent and more important than my cat memories:

Finally, here are three of my favorite recently-read books. Have you read them? What did you think?

Poetry: Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? by Shonda Buchanan

Fiction: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Non-fiction: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman (I haven’t finished this one yet, but it’s already one of the best books I’ve ever read)

Not Much and Everything

Rae Spencer12 Comments

All of my reading and research keeps circling back to a frustrating conclusion: America’s current crisis runs deeper than I am capable of understanding. There are too many facets, too many fractures, too many nuances.

What I do grasp makes me want to hide, to retreat into my fiction reading list and never pick up another non-fiction book, never read another article or essay or blog post.

It feels as if everything I care about is under attack and there’s nothing I can do about any of it.

And, while nothing is an exaggeration, not much is the hardly-more-comfortable truth.

Even so…

Not much might be a fragile incentive, but it’s compelling when everything is at stake.

I recently read The Next American Revolution by Grace Lee Boggs. She refers a number of times to a quote from Mahatma Gandhi… Live simply so that others may simply live.

This, at least, I understand. Live simply.

Facets, fractures, and nuance.

I can help by living simply.

It is, indeed, not much. It’s also a tiny piece of everything.

“With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.” Grace Lee Boggs in The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first Century (Updated and Expanded Edition)

Recommended reading (and viewing):

Post-Election Changes

Rae Spencer2 Comments

I am part of the problem. I have always been part of the problem.

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Monarch Butterfly (September 9, 2016)

I am a white, straight, cisgender, educated, agnostic, middle-aged, middle-class woman from the South–recipient of more privilege than I have earned. And this year, while I raised my summer butterflies, I watched America’s Presidential campaign with growing dismay.

Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny are not new to America or American politics, but overt displays on the campaign trail are rare in my memory. How and why Donald Trump’s campaign thrived while exploiting the language of white supremacy has been widely discussed since the election, but the answer seems simple to me: far too few listeners objected.

Some, undoubtedly, agreed with him. Some didn’t recognize the language of white supremacy, never having spoken it. Others, like me, knew. I knew, and yet I remained silent.

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Monarch Butterfly Egg (August 1, 2016)

My particular silence was one of guilt and shame, complicated by the oft-repeated advice that beginning writers should avoid talking about politics and religion, lest they alienate half of their potential audience. But in this matter I am not a beginning writer. I am part of the problem. I have always been part of the problem. And, in this matter, I will no longer keep silent.

“Will Rogers said it a long time ago: Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Thomas L. Friedman in The World is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (1)

As a child, teen, and young adult, I heard the language of bigotry at school and in the community. My parents and siblings didn’t speak the language, nor did most of my friends. But I heard the words anyway. I learned them and I used them. And I slogged into college in a miasma of willful ignorance, dangerously unfit for adulthood.

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Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar (August 5, 2016)

In college, my instructors and classmates recoiled in horror when my ignorance leaked into the open. (Some, I suspect, were more frustrated with my inability to hide my ignorance than with the actual fact of it.) Despite the shame I feel when recalling those years, they mark an important change in my life–I began an ongoing effort to pry open my closed mind.

At every point along my journey, I have found guides. Most were women with gentle and luminous souls. Some answered my calls for help, others appeared unbidden–standing in the mist with hands extended, patiently waiting for me. They answered my endless questions as if they had nothing better to do than help an ignorant young woman expand her horizons.

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Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar (August 10, 2016)

(I know that this, too, is a hallmark of privilege. Such help was easier to find because I was white, straight, cis, middle-class, and educated. I will have more to say about privilege in future posts.)

As I worked through various stages of educating myself, I began trying to escape the stigma of hate by claiming that I had never embraced the malice of bigotry, only the language. I didn’t hate anyone.

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Monarch Butterfly Caterpillar (August 10, 2016)

Except, the language of bigotry is hate. It is not possible to learn the words without absorbing the hate. This has been my hardest lesson and is my most painful admission. I once spoke the language of bigotry, which by definition means I practiced hate. Years ago, when I finally accepted this fact, I retreated into silence on the subject.

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Monarch Butterfly Chrysalis (August 13, 2016)

But silence solves nothing. In dreading discovery too much and valuing discussion too little, I remained part of the problem.

“We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love.” Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2)

Unlike the Monarch Butterflies that emerged in the yard this summer, I cannot flutter off to a mountaintop in Mexico and sleep through the long, cold winter ahead. (The irony is intended to be painful. I detest our President-elect’s disparaging comments and damaging “promises” regarding immigrants and immigration.) But I can use my privilege for something besides sharing my own writing and my love of nature. I can use my voice and this blog to promote the words and wisdom of other writers.

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Newly Emerged Monarch Butterfly (August 20, 2016)

I’ve already asked for help from my friends, but I’m also asking for help from my readers. Hold me accountable. Fact check me. Fact check my sources. Correct me when my ongoing ignorance shows. Correct me when I’m wrong, which I will, inevitably, be.

For starters, please read my new comments policy. It’s not perfect, and I could use your help with it.

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Monarch Butterfly (September 9, 2016)

Then read some of these poems, articles, and posts:

As a final note, it takes me a long time to compose a post like this one. Most of my posts will continue to focus on nature and writing, with occasional publication notes, as in the past. (i.e. My poem Duality recently appeared at vox poetica.) But I plan to add a section of links to each post, highlighting authors, articles, and books that have enlarged my world. Please share your own recommendations in the comments.

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Monarch Butterfly (October 14, 2016)

Quotation sources:

(1) Friedman, Thomas L.. The World is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007. Print.

(2) Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Revised Edition. New York: The New Press, 2012. Kindle Edition.