Last month I went to the zoo with Jack, and we discovered the indoor tropical exhibit. The first cage held an ocelot, which I had never even heard of. I took one look at it and immediately told Jack three things:
1) I want one.
2) If I were in Harry Potter my patronus would be an ocelot.
3) That face just turned my insides to goo.
It was seriously the most beautiful creature I could imagine:
A few weeks later I was sitting in class thinking about ocelots when it hit me: what do the babies look like? I googled, “Ocelot babies” and found out that two kittens had been born to the Woodland Park Zoo ocelot in September. I immediately gmail-chatted three things to Jack:
1) Ocelots have babies.
2) Ocelot babies are near my house.
3) There is a God.
Yesterday my friend and co-student asked if I wanted to go to the zoo and talk. It seemed like a good place to go on a February afternoon. Because February is tough, especially for students. It’s a good month for ruminating and brooding. I liked the idea of brooding with Grace while watching otters play. It seemed like such a ironic, both/and, already-but-not-yet, ambivalent, “hold everything in tension” thing to do.
When I saw the sun this morning I thought, “No no no, this takes away February’s usefulness. How can I possibly brood when the sun’s out?” But of course, it was wonderful. The animals were displaying their best quirky/horny spring behavior. AND. The ocelot kittens were to be in their exhibit at 2:30.
We had an hour to kill, so we meandered towards the day-and-night exhibit and talked. February has been hard. Grace talked about her tears, and how she had hoped that Mars Hill would erase them, but instead people call them a gift. I’ve been realizing my own secret fantasy that Mars Hill would teach me how to be bold and outspoken, so I could be seen and heard and fully accepted.
Mars Hill is not known for fixing problems. One of our professors says that a therapist’s job is to make things worse before making them better. I’m beginning to think that the “better” is much more beautiful and painful than I can now imagine.
There’s a little walkway between the zoo’s indoor day and night exhibits. The walls are painted with dark, shadowy forest against a night sky. A Wendell Berry poem leads you from the day exit to the night entrance:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
We stopped. “I’m reading that really differently today,” said Grace.
Yes, I thought, me too. It’s not just about bats and owls today.
Maybe things don’t get better. Maybe I will be lonely and unseen. Maybe Grace will always have tears. Maybe everything is always and forever dark.
We paused, and Grace finished both our thoughts: “But it’s been traveled before.”
