This week: are we headed, perhaps, out of poetry and back into the world of stone-cold facts?
Not so.
I am here to remind you that facts can be very poetic, and poetry quite factual, and that biology and feelings are not dual poles but mingled juices in your pumping, loving, heart.

In ecology, the term disturbance is used to describe an event that disrupts ecosystems and communities. The event itself —a wildfire, a flood, a storm— might be short-lived, but its consequences are often broad and long lasting. Although disturbance had historically been considered in negative terms— vegetation destroyed by fire, animal populations killed or displaced, entire stands of trees decimated by invasive pest— ecologists now embrace the ‘non-equilibrium theory’ which acknowledges disturbance as a critical ecological process, necessary at some level of intensity and frequency for the long term benefit of most ecosystems. “Many organisms… exist because of certain catastrophic factors… and not in spite of them.”

On the last segment of our drive up to the beautiful Catskills today, I spotted the skeleton of many an ash tree decimated by the ash borer, some isolated meadows probably carved out of the woodlands by pioneer farmers back in the 1800s, and mile after mile of native and invasive plants commingling with abandon —sumac and goldenrod in bloom tangled with mile-a-minute vine and Japanese knotweed— The fruit of disturbance was everywhere and I’d have loved to stop, putter around, and ponder, but we were zooming at 65 miles an hour and I was enjoying the kids’ shrieks as I took hard turns on the small mountain road, our suitcases bobbing on the roof, and Sam next to me in the passenger seat, feigning nonchalance, actually puzzled as to why I now like to drive.

As a young woman in my 20s I felt like a baby ecosystem, unsure of what was to grow in me. I remember a sense of deep uncertainty as to when real life was meant to begin and what that might feel like. I imagined a future, validating sense of growth and groundedness. How different I feel now: I know that non-equilibrium runs our lives as much as it does everything in nature, and that midlife is not at all to youth as mature forest is to grove of saplings. Ask any woman about to turn 45, 50, or 60, and she will tell you about disturbance. Ask her about her wildfires, her tornados, her pests, and her floods. A woman at midlife has no choice but to take a hard look at what disturbance has left her with and what that means for her ecosystem. She’s like Suzanne Simard’s Mother Tree, nourishing a whole cast of offsprings via a network of underground mycorrhizal fungi, but she’s also been cracked by lightning and half-uprooted by a flash flood. She knows she stands by her own strength alone.

A gift from the universe: upon getting to the cabin, finding an old copy of the sweet book ‘When Things Fall Apart’, by Pema Chodron. Here’s the voice of wisdom on disturbance: “Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something to come in and interrupt all that…To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest… To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that’s life.”

Having a high tolerance for uncertainty as well as an childlike curiosity for what stands on the other side of trying-things-out, I find joy in her confirmation that disturbance is not to be received begrudgingly but as whole-heartedly as possible. Disturbance is the universe shaking you upside down to empty all the dust out of your pockets.