Unknowns

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. […] It is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”

—Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002

May, 2023. The tree was a sign. A confirmation, maybe. It had been my anchor through several stays at the campground, including my first, buzzing-with-excitement voyage in the van. Every time, it had been the true North my compass turned to every morning, every evening, with every shifting cloud.

In 2023 I barely looked at it for six of the seven days I camped beneath the mesa and huge skies it calls home.

Image shows a gently asymmetrical piñon tree standing sentinel atop a sandstone bluff against a backdrop of cloudless, azure sky. Joe Skeens BLM Campground, Grants, New Mexico, 2023

I once wrote about The Tree—about change and constancy, about identity in different settings. In 2021 the tree had shown me each moment of the natural world in fresh light. In 2023 it showed me myself.

I was tired.

From what I didn’t know. “Run of the mill” illness, just like for the last 27 years? The van? Adventure? I once read, “It doesn’t matter if you think the glass is half full or half empty. If you’ve held it too long, it’s just heavy.” I felt like I had been holding a glass for a long, long time.

I’ve heard, “Nomads are usually running toward something—so by definition we’re also running away from something.” I had run toward family, discovery, community. I had run from entrapment, isolation, emptiness.

Running from chronic problems doesn’t work. 2023 was the year I discovered that the van wasn’t my miracle cure. Illness still emptied most days. I had lost ground.

Was it time to seek a fixed dwelling again? I would have fewer unknowns to master, week after week. Maybe running on autopilot a bit more would lighten the glass.

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Image shows the living space of my van, complete with cushions, tea mug, and notepad.

I have not been writing. Writing is its own adventure into the unknown. It can be, at any rate: a quest for truth, for the chime of connection, the sympathetic resonances between things that otherwise seem unalike.

I love writing to discover those kinships, listening for the chime and following where it leads. It’s why I struggle with practical prose—how-to posts, top 10 lists, and the marketable niches of “known knowns.” In writing, I love unknowns, and the unknown isn’t practical.

The unknown requires attention, and attention requires energy. It is easier to close off than to open up and listen.

If only that made the unknown go away and stop clamoring. Ready or not, it lies around every corner, every second of every day. It might bring danger, delight or dullness, but it requires response. Energy.

Closing off takes energy, too.

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We could die today.

Image shows an elk skeleton amid forest growth. Pike/San Isabel National Forest, Colorado, 2021

That is the heart of the unknown. Do you consider it a downer? Truth is just true. Our response to it—avoidance, denial, fear, control—that might be a downer. Few souls face the unknown fully, freely, lightly, without trying to wrestle it into a safer shape.

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I’ve always said that how you cope with the unknown determines how you will cope with chronic illness. When you don’t know whether you’ll be able to cook dinner, meet an obligation, drive safely, or carry on a conversation without ending up in bed for three days, projects and goals become meaningless. Your plans will be derailed. That is a known known. Which ones? When? With what consequences? Will you recover? You have no way of knowing.

My strategy for dealing with that over the years has been to “live within my means”—to reduce the calls on my energy so that I can meet the demands of daily life alone. I thought that meant I was handling unknowns well—I made sure that whatever arose, I had the reserves to handle it. Was I coping well with illness—managing the knowns so the unknowns didn’t broadside me? Or was I denying that unknowns are…unknown and likely to be difficult?

How well do I handle the unknown?

I don’t know…

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April, 2024. I have reduced the parameters again—or so it seems. I have purchased a lifetime lease at an RV park in a community of lovely artists and am acquiring a Tiny Home on Wheels.

I’m excited in a way, and at peace with the choice. Still. Why does this “more” seem like less? Why does stability feel like running? It’s really just practical, as a winter of POTS-related medical problems proved. But it seems like a retreat from adventure back to the cage of being housebound. It feels like a move from life to mere safety.

Long ago I wrote a blog called Microcosm, rooted in the premise that adventure and meaning could be found in the tiniest leaf of a tiny garden. At some point I could no longer find adventure there: the relentless sameness of the known overwhelmed me, even amid moments of beauty.

Image shows a pea pod in the Microcosm garden. It is backlit by sunshine, and the baby peas are silhouetted against the pod. (They are adorable.) A teeny bit of blossom clings to the tip.

That loss wounded my belief in the power of choice—in sheer willpower to find or create meaning in life as it is.

I thought my van could outrun the crushing sameness of a tiny life. Only it couldn’t. Now here I am in southwestern New Mexico, starting again.

What is the difference between emptiness and the unknown?

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Gene picks up, his voice cheerful through tinny reception. “Hi, Stacy!”

He’s overseeing the tiny house build. Neither of us has ever done this, and we have details to hash out.

I’m in the van when claws scrabble on the roof. I have become fairly good at identifying the featherweight hippety-hop of finches and the scratch of Stellar’s jays, but these are new—talons raking for purchase. In another moment, a kestrel lifts off toward the snowy Chiricahua Mountains.

Weeds are sprouting. I don’t know what they are, just that they are forerunners of what will become a habitat garden. I will sow wildflower seeds for spring and fall blooms, as I still want to travel in summer.

I have not outrun all the unknowns here, thank goodness. They still present new possibilities. But the same illness lingers, with the same constrictions. In a slow, grudging way I am becoming perversely intrigued by its lessons not to look elsewhere—not in a tiny garden, not in a van, not in writing—for meaningful days.

I don’t yet know where to look. Occasionally I sense that moments and days might be meaningful without our trying to make something out of them. They might be meaningful just because they’re true. Our efforts to wrestle them into another shape might be the real burden. Need an empty moment be a downer, if it’s just true?

Is adventure anything more than attention?

How long can I pay attention to emptiness?

Guard and Defend

Only the jumping chollas are out to get you.

Image shows a handful (ouch—wrong word, sorry) of densely prickled jumping cholla cactus fingers looming over you as you look up into a partly cloudy sky. Saguaro National Park, March 2023

Everything else just wants to be left alone.

Image shows a dense, geometric web of red and gold spines protecting the thick flesh of a Coville’s (?) barrel cactus. You can hardly see the flesh through the spines, but very few spines point outward, and even those are curved to cause minimum offense. Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, February 2023

The jumping chollas want to use you first, and then be left alone. Their prickles will grab hold at the slightest touch and stick to socks, trousers, skin, fur, hide. They will cling so tightly that a stem segment breaks off from the parent cactus. Once you have freed yourself, with much cursing and yelling (pliers help, too), and hurled the stem away, it will root where it fell. It will water itself with its own flesh until the original segment shrivels.

Image shows a shrub-sized jumping cholla from a safe distance, surrounded by offspring growing from cast-off stem segments. Kofa National Wildlife Refuge

Amputation can’t be an easy way to reproduce, but there you are. Desert plants can’t afford half-hearted action. Having walked through fields of dead, dried, one-inch tall cholla seedlings, which sprouted the normal way via flowers, birds, and bees but didn’t outlast their first dry season, I see the chollas’ point(s).

Image shows a battalion of ferocious, long, star-shaped prickle clusters protecting the skinny fingers of pencil cholla. Kofa National Wildlife Refuge

You get used to desert plants being hurtful. People who crave the soft greenery of rainy climates are often uncomfortable here. They feel defensive; they weary of having to be on guard, of being injured when they meant no harm.

For all we know, desert plants experience you the same way. As the tongue-twister says, “A skunk sat on a stump. The stump thought the skunk stunk. The skunk thought the stump stunk.” It never hurts to remember that your perspective is a narrow one, and not necessarily the best because it’s yours.

The desert’s prickly and thorny plants have this edge on humans:

Image shows the edge of a tulip prickly pear pad, dotted with starlets of prickles with large, medium, and small spines pointing in every direction, so that if one point doesn’t get you, the others will. These pads (with the spines and glochids removed) are staples of traditional southwestern cooking. Ironwood National Monument, March 2023

They never set out to do harm. (Except for the jumping chollas. Obviously.) Their weapons are purely defensive. And what do they use them on? Not insects, bats, small rodents, birds, and the like. No. They use them against those who would mine their flesh for its life-giving waters. In other words, beings like you.

Image shows a beaver tail prickly pear with large, flat paddles. This species doesn’t have long spines, just the short (and plenty nasty) glochids. A ground squirrel has eaten away half a pad, laying bare the spring-green, succulent inner flesh. Kofa National Wildlife Refuge

You, my friend, are a pestilential threat. (It’s okay. ❤️ So am I.)

The problem is that desert plants interpret any contact as attack; they cannot discern peaceful intentions. Their defenses are structural, not voluntary, developed in infancy and maintained day and night their whole lives. They are hyper-vigilant even in death.

Image shows the desiccated, golden-brown flesh of a dead, fallen saguaro. About half the areolas are still radiating prickles. Gold Nugget BLM near Quartzsite, AZ, February 2022

The scarcity of a resource determines the intensity of defense. Harsh situations call for harsh measures, a ruthless prioritizing of energy. Going leafless altogether; blooming a handful of days a year or once a century; reproducing by amputation—those are all pretty harsh. (Are they any more extreme than a “normal” tree that loses leaves and goes dormant for six months a year?)

If you hang out with positive, cheerful, chirpy people, you have probably encountered the “abundance vs. scarcity” mentality: the idea that whether you have one or the other is a matter of perspective. Yes, our sense of enoughness can hinge on our attitude, especially when our needs are, in fact, met—when we take food, water, and shelter so deeply for granted that we forget they are there. We can sometimes point to people in dire circumstances who contrive through superheroic resourcefulness to meet their own and their communities’ needs.

Image shows a mature, multi-armed saguaro with three or four holes where birds once nested. A Gila woodpecker, flaunting a dapper outfit of black and white stripes, climbs the main trunk looking for food. To the left, a few palo verde branches can be seen; the tree may have been a nurse plant when the saguaro was a seedling. Ironwood National Monument

I’m a cheerful, chirpy person, by and large. But I’m also reasonably perceptive. To my eyes, dearth is sometimes a reality, and superheros are exceptions. If seeing your fellow humans living with unmet basic needs—whether that means food or the time or strength to prepare it—isn’t enough to show you the shape of scarcity, you might try spending a few months in the desert.

Sure, plants thrive here, in exciting, resourceful, vigorous ways. In this water-poor economy, they have abundance—as long as they sacrifice something else. As long as they are willing to lose a lot of their plant-hood in the process.

Image shows thorns radiating all around an ocotillo stem. The thorns are longer than the stem is wide. (Ocotillos aren’t cacti, just thorny plants because Desert.) The stem itself is greenish with chlorophyll. Ocotillos only sprout leaves briefly after rain, then lose them when the weather turns dry again. Kofa National Wildlife Refuge

In our personal economies, the three finite resources are time, money, and energy. Sometimes we just don’t have enough of these resources, whether because of workplaces that abuse our time, shrinking wages, mental or physical illness, or other circumstances largely beyond our control. In seasons of dearth, all our creative work-arounds can’t make up the deficit.

How do you avoid growing prickles to defend what is left? (Should you even try?) In your resourcefulness, how much normality can you sacrifice before you become twisted, grotesque? Before you lose some of your humanity?

I don’t know. I certainly haven’t managed it. Only a saint could deny that first instinct. (Saint: Another word for superhero.)

One thing I am learning, though, is that if someone turns prickly on you, it’s worth asking what scarce internal resource they’re protecting.

Image shows another ocotillo stem, this one with tiny green leaves. The thorns extend far beyond them. If I had sweet, baby leaves like that to protect, I’d be ferocious, too. Kofa National Wildlife Refuge

It’s worth asking: are you a pestilential threat?