At my training session at JT’s gym, I swing open the glass door and call out, “Oh, thank God she’s here!” to make him laugh. He’s killing time waiting for me between clients, running on the treadmill to keep himself in shape. He laughs, pretends to check his mileage monitor as the treadmill slows. “Gee, only 17, eight-minute miles,” he sighs as he turns it off. I laugh at the lie, then I plop down in the chair next to his desk.

“What’s up?” he says, pulling out his chair as well and yawns while he waits for the latest installment of my past week’s activities. 

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” I say. 

He nods, yawns again. “I wake up every night at 3:30. But the good thing is, it doesn’t affect me at all.” 

“Yeah, I can see that,” I say. “Are you anxious about anything?” The dreaded cable pulls are behind me, waiting as I settle in. “We should talk about this.” 

“Nice try. Get up,” he says, ending the best of my delaying tactics. “Let’s see whatcha got.”

JT has learned the art of revealing nothing while having a conversation, which makes sense since he has to talk to someone new for an hour at least 8-10 times a day. At the computer all day, I am a boundary-challenged bean spiller. Do not confide in me—the brain hates to keep a secret—it’s spelled s-t-r-e-s-s. The alternative spelling is s-t-o-r-y, and we live for it.  

After demonstrating the way I am to lift some weights while simultaneously lunging, JT stands aside, and I take the stance, trying not to tip over. Yesterday, I spun around with my eyes closed in the shower and thought, Uh-oh, this could have gone badly. So, I tell him that maybe we should work on balance and not strength today. He is already on it, dragging over the heinous half-ball thing on which you must balance, much like trying to stand on one foot in a bouncy house while some kid jumps up and down right next to you.

JT and I feel the same way about virtually everything except politics, so we never talk about that, but our attitudes are often apparent in our responses to other things. 

“They’ve just discovered another rogue planet not connected to any solar system,” I report, excited about this discovery. He eyes me as if scientists are tricksters out to get us—their ulterior motive–to fool humanity about everything from planets to platelets. “How do they know that?” he asks.

“And tomorrow is the shortest day in history,” I add. “Thanks to the Earth spinning slightly faster, it’ll be 1.34 milliseconds less than the standard 24 hours.”

“How do they know?” he asks again. “Says who?”

This is often the response to facts I share, and it’s one that I can’t answer because I can’t reproduce the corresponding research proving this fact off the top of my head. I read it, but I just can’t retain it. I guess I only have the mental bandwidth to remember the fascinating end product of research, so that’s what I share. 

For instance, the Appalachians are far older and were once taller than the Rockies. I remember they are lower in altitude because they have eroded centuries longer, but I don’t remember how scientists know that. 

Being able to explain how seemingly impossible things could be true is something I’ve surrendered spiritually as well. I’ve experienced enough miracles not to need the “how.” Likewise, when I pray, I ask for what would be impossible for me to accomplish on my own, trusting that it is effortless for a power greater than myself. I see it as done– this healing, this reconciliation, this grace. Strategizing means I still think the universe needs my input. 

Hard pass, says the universe.

JT takes me off the half-ball and tells me to walk the length of the gym, heel-to-toe, lifting a 10-pound weight extended over my head. I do this easily, my confidence returning. “Want me to go faster?” I ask.

“No. I want you to close your eyes and do it backwards,” he says.

Our relationship is one of balance. We are so far apart politically we can only 

acknowledge that fact with a laugh or a joke once in a while. 

But I often ask what JT did on the weekend and it’s what I did, as well. And he has two daughters he adores, and I have two daughters I adore. And I listen to him put their welfare ahead of his own desires, week after week, and I know I’d walk backward and blindfolded across the Bay Bridge for mine, so there’s that. 

He loves a dog who is a real pain, and I love one of those, as well. He has a roof that needs replacing, and I have one, too.

I was recently told that my soul’s purpose in this life is to experience all forms of love—parental, romantic, for humanity at large. In this life, I needed to love as a sibling, a spouse, and a friend —surely, we all do. But that’s easy love. I don’t think it counts toward being a good person. Love like that makes you a regular person. It’s the least you can do.

I saw a greeting card the other day that said, “One of us is right, the other one is you.”

How do we find common ground when it feels as if our very morals conflict?

I don’t know. It’s like finding my way backward and blindfolded to those with whom I don’t agree. But I can place my attention on judgment and strategy, or I can ask that love magnifies all that we share.

Rumi wrote, “Out beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field.

 “I’ll meet you there.” 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Anthropologist Jane Goodall, whom I greatly admire, died recently.  Until Jane, we believed we were the only species on the planet to make and use tools. Of course, Jane was a single, blond, 26-year-old female when she proved otherwise through her patient observations of a wild chimp she had named David Greybeard, so her discovery was discounted by the established (read primarily male) scientific community for years. Eventually, we (they) had to admit, Holy cow, that little gal was right. We aren’t quite so unique after all. 

She also proved that we are not the only species to kiss and to beg. Interesting juxtaposition.  

We are falling from the pedestal of our self-proclaimed uniqueness. We had to learn that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, that the Milky Way is not the center of the universe. We may not be the only planet upon which life has arisen, and we are not the only species to reason, feel affection, and gratitude. Perhaps we are not even unique in this last bastion of distinction. After watching chimps discover a waterfall, then stop to gaze at it as if mesmerized, Goodall speculated we may not be the only species to feel awe. 

We are, however, the only species for which nearsightedness has become a global epidemic. In the U.S., there is a national surge of over 36%, and globally, 224 million people are highly nearsighted, meaning they can’t see things clearly that are far away.

Another word for nearsighted is shortsighted. Ahem.

We are in the middle of the 6th mass extinction event; did you know that? We are losing biodiversity at a rate 1,000 to 10,000 percent higher than would occur naturally if humans were not affecting the environment. Humanity itself may be dying out. There is currently an unprecedented decrease in birth rates worldwide, with fertility rates falling below replacement levels in most countries. Statisticians report that the effect of these trends will be felt on a global scale in about 60 years. 

There are cultural reasons for this trend, and many reasons we could still reverse. “How is it possible,” Jane Goodall asked, “that the most intellectual animal to have ever walked on planet Earth is destroying its home?” Talk about shortsighted.

In 1977, NASA launched twin Voyager probes into space, weeks apart, carrying identical golden records imprinted with a message from humankind to any intelligent life form in the cosmos who might find them. 

The records carry both audio and visual messages that represent Earth’s diversity of life and diversity of human life, with greetings in 59 human languages and 115 images. Sounds include footsteps and whale songs, laughter, and thunder, a rain forest teeming with life, and the heartbeat of a woman in love. Voyager 1, carrying that greeting, is now more than 15.6 billion miles from home, sailing in silence through the constellation Ophiuchus, still seeking someone to tell: we are here, we are here, we are here.

This is who we are.

Goodall’s last published work is “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times,” but she warns that the window of opportunity in which to reverse our path is closing. How accurate will Voyager 1’s message be if it is ever found? What if 59 languages have become four, and back on Earth, no one recognizes the sound of a rainforest? Or the heartbeat of a human in love?

If we are losing our ability to see clearly what is approaching from a distance, we should at least see clearly what is right here: the precious, rare beauty of this Earth and the interconnectedness, the holy interdependence of all who inhabit it. 

Interestingly, for all our lack of uniqueness, there is one thing that it seems only we do: bury our dead. Not for fear the body might attract predators to the campfire, but with ritualistic reverence because those who died were loved and their loss mourned. This practice dates back at least 150,000 years, to the time of the Neanderthals. How do we know?

Because Neanderthals didn’t just bury their dead, they filled their graves with flowers. 

If the Golden Record is ever found and decoded, I hope the message it carries remains true. 

We are a blue planet orbiting a yellow star, 26,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way. We teem with whale song and laughter, babies’ cries and thunder, and evidence that we have loved each other for a long, long time.  

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

It is October, the month in which both my daughters were born. I guess back in March of the year in which each was conceived, I thought that to have an autumn birthday in Maryland would be to celebrate the rest of your life in the prettiest month of the year, and somehow that worked out not once, but twice.  

We lived in a neighborhood that had long been a working-class fishing community but as waterfront property became coveted by Washington professionals willing to commute, the peninsula was becoming slowly gentrified. At the time we brought our firstborn home, however, it still possessed an eclectic diversity we were drawn to as young adults, but worried about now that we were parents. There were sirens at night, and once, gunfire right down the street. 

We pulled up in front of our white stucco Victorian with the picket fence I’d painted in the last days of my pregnancy, and I lifted my two-day-old daughter from her car seat for the first time. This was to be a private homecoming, with my mother arriving after we got settled to make us her Hawaiian chicken for dinner. Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated Mrs. Rosman next door. She was old and eccentric, unkempt in an unpleasant way, and her silent, staring husband was very strange. I was young and superficially friendly but kept my distance.  

What I didn’t know was that she had been waiting for this moment since seeing me lowered gingerly into the passenger seat of the car and an overnight bag stowed in the back. She emerged from her house with the sagging sofa on the porch, and hobbled out onto the sidewalk, her thin hair lifting in the breeze. 

“Let me see the baby,” she demanded. She stared critically at the little face. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s a girl,” I said, leaving the blanket partially covering the baby’s mouth like a miniature surgeon’s mask. I smiled and tried to turn away, to get to the safety of my own front door, when Mrs. Hosfeld’s claw-like hand grabbed my arm and twisted the baby towards her. She lowered her face and planted a big, wet, germ-laden kiss right on my new baby’s face. Hormones surging, ready to cry at everything, and completely irrational, I was horrified. “Oh my God,” I thought, with all the sense of the sleep-deprived, “She just ruined my baby!” 

Once in the house, I needed to take a shower. Should I bring the baby into the bathroom with me? The idea of not being in the same room seemed intolerable, like breaking the law. I think I thought I had to carry her around in her carrier like a purse.

Over the next few weeks, I realized protecting my daughter was more immediate, more irrational, and more primal than love. The need to keep her safe, encountered for the first time there on the sidewalk, was the first fierce attachment I had felt as an adult. It was in the following days of feeding, rocking, diapering, and bathing that protection took on its true identity, which was, of course, profound and abiding love. I have thought about this often since then, having learned that love can be inspired by service, not the other way around. But there was another lesson here. 

Sometimes we are the recipients of miracles and too distracted or oblivious to notice. It is only years afterward that it dawns on us that, but for an alert stranger on the beach, we might have drowned, or two seconds later into that intersection, we might have crashed. 

So, it was years later that I realized I had not thanked God for the biggest miracle in my life. 

The night this child was born, I’d been in prodromal labor for the preceding 24 hours, where you suffer contractions hour after hour that do not move the baby down. Eventually hospitalized, with some intervention, labor finally became productive, but she was a very large baby and had been unceasingly active in the womb most of those nine months.

 By 3 am, I’d been pushing for two hours, and my doctor wanted to leave for a hunting trip on the Eastern Shore in the morning. The decision was made to use forceps for the last couple of pushes to get this show (and him) on the road. It worked. But until that moment, no one realized that the umbilical cord had been wrapped tightly around the baby’s neck throughout the entire ordeal. Not wrapped around once. Not twice. But cinched around her tiny neck three times like a belt, strangling her through all those crushing contractions and hours of pushing. 

“Jesus!” the nurse exclaimed as the doctor uncoiled loop after loop after loop. 

They put her in my arms, and all I saw was a perfect baby. It didn’t occur to me then or for years how easily we could have lost her. And it makes me want to heap retroactive gratitude upon the universe for sparing me that near-miss tragedy and for giving me that joy. 

How many miracles have gone unheralded? Having missed this one, I’m assuming on principle that my life and yours have been flooded with them.

 Like having been lucky enough to live next door to an elderly lady who had waited all night and all day to welcome home the new little life next door. Who gave the only thing she had to give: a kiss. 

And just like learning that service generates love, retroactive gratitude is now a continuous wave, a spiritual practice, especially in October, when I find myself saying thank you for the gifts I recognize, like you, beloveds, and for all those I will become aware of in the fullness of time. 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.