The Cor Age

Reintroducing a riddle and an invitation (This rabbit walks into a rat, is visited by a dragon, and contemplates the proximity of a snake). Some thoughts on navigating a shipwreck.

Prologue

Brain fear history time tyranny reaction response what me now know no not circle cycle oligarch coup internet attention breath practice asking listening safety hiding power connection community emotion reason right left numbers patterns geology
geology wind sun crossing a bridge when it comes protecting a bridge that you are likely to need to cross faith hope love acceptance willingness
courage

Part I: A Riddle

Making meaning and a lot of wood

I was born in October of the year known to my parents as 1975 (Anno Domini) and raised in a culture organized around this invention for delineating the human experience of time. Numbers are very orderly, but I have my favorites. I like 12 because it contains 1, 2, 3 and 4 and 24 contains all of those plus 8 (I don’t care a lot about 6, but it’s there too). I like flexible numbers. And also 7.

My birth occurred during the year of the wood rabbit, according to another calendaring system. I was aware of the rabbit part. That there’s an element that modifies the animal was new information (to me) as of last Wednesday. It was also news to me that wood rabbits are considered the luckiest of the whole menagerie.

Last Wednesday’s new moon marks (in fact, determines) the beginning of the lunar new year. From this moon on, 2025 is the year of the wood snake. It is also the year within which I will turn 50.

I am a southern-US-born, Episcopalian-raised Scotch-Irish-English-French-German-Norwegian-Spanish-Greek person (those are the traditions I descended from), so wood and rabbits is a framework for interpreting life that I have learned about as an adult. I am not of that tradition, except in being human and trying to make meaning and liking animals and the elements and feeling there is something for me to learn by considering life through these concepts.

My brain, like all human brains to a greater or lesser extent, is a meaning maker, looking for a story to belong to. The element of wood, associated with trees and fire, is associated with both my birth year and the year we’ve just begun (a milestone year for me, according to my culture, though through another lens just another day).

And what’s that I hear crackling merrily in the next room?? Well, I’ll tell you. After ten years of living in this house that we bought for certain features, we have — only days before the start of the year of the wood snake — installed a wood insert into our now functional hearth. This contraption has been busily converting four-mature-oak-trees-worth of wood circles into efficient, cozy warmth.

I’ve told you about the backyard wood circles before but here is a picture of less than half of them.

The wood horse and the five elements

So I’m meaning-making next to the suddenly functional fire, the wood that I’ve written about, the wood that has been an ongoing question mark (what is the story of the wood?) now burning, bringing warmth through the center of the house, pulling us all in to sit together in its orbit.

1975, wood rabbit. 2025, wood snake. Wood = trees and fire. Turning 50. The world.

(Dear God/universe/higher power/great connector/energy of life/gut flora, please help me figure out what to do.)

(Please help me to know what I ought to do.)

We moved into this house in 2014 during the year of the wood horse.

Wait, what’s going on with all this wood? There are 5 elements in the Chinese zodiac and an AI just told me that wood is the element for (lunar) years ending in 4 and 5.

According to The Economic Times:

The Five Elements Theory, also known as Wu Xing, is the source of the Chinese Zodiac Elements. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water... This philosophy explains how everything is related to and dependent upon everything else.

The other tree

I haven’t written here, yet, about the other tree. The one that fell. That was in 2024. The year of the wood dragon.

That was my tree. And that was my neighbors’ car. As the tree was crushing the car my neighbor (the wood-cutting fairy you may remember) pulled his 10-year-old daughter from the backseat, flung her to the ground, and covered her with his body. He ran towards the car as he heard the tree falling. That is something a human can do.

Before I learned that everyone was safe, all I could hear was a high-pitched shrieking that didn’t stop. Writing these words, my eyes sting. There is a story to tell of this tree but the story, unlike the tree, wants to be unearthed thoughtfully and with sensitivity. This does not feel simple to do (though every story is merely one word and then another). It is a story of shame and fear and helplessness and smallness, of loneliness, and a story of care and reverence, of memory and bravery, love and support. I am not the same after this tree’s falling.

I had lain awake in storms, praying about my trees. Now they are all gone, or stacked into a massive pile of potential energy, a fungus farm or salamander sanctuary.

On fact and fiction, madness and meaning

Rebecca Solnit wrote of a pile of apricots: It was a riddle and an invitation.

It was my intention at the inception of this newsletter to write the story of a ratskin bracelet. The bracelet, buried under the fig tree, feels just like a riddle and an invitation. Though, in fact, the bracelet is the decaying pelt of a rat. It’s just skin, hair and two buttons, turning into soil and doing what decaying things do. That’s the whole story.

Jennifer, that’s the whole story. Why don’t we move on?

how everything is related to and dependent upon everything else

I had a bracelet.

I made a bracelet.

I took a class where I was taught how we learn to understand life, one way.
With little scalpels we subdivided the insides of a white lab rat
to see how the machine worked, its components.
I used the skin and hair to make a bracelet.
I kept the bracelet for multiple decades, in my drawer of special things.
One day the bracelet said: bury me.
Afterwards, I developed a fascination with rodents, especially beavers
with their link to water, flow, and the feminine.
So many of them made into hats.
And now I believe that this buried bracelet is a teacher inviting me towards something I am calling the Cor Age.

In fact

I was legally required to be at school each non-summer weekday for many years.
I chose to take advanced biology, I was 13 or 14 years old.
One course activity was dissecting a rat.
I did it.
We were invited to wear the pelt to school for extra credit.
I did it.
My ratpelt bracelet had an intact face and two pearlish buttons.
I kept this in a drawer (different drawers) for more than 30 years.
One day I opened the drawer.
A lot of thoughts happened in my brain.
Some time later I dug a hole in my front yard.
I buried the bracelet along with some other garbage that my brain made up stories about.
I put a few rocks on top of the soil that was on top of the bracelet + trash.
I keep thinking about it,
as if it’s my destiny.

Part II: Invitation

Prey-ing for courage, boys with guns, and the art of being the game

As a contemplative practice, I sometimes draw pictures of words on pages I tear out of an old book. It is a book of my grandfather’s, copyright 1949. The book was in a house fire (there’s fire again) so the leather binding is damaged which makes me feel less bad about despoiling the insides. For flavor, here’s a bit from the book’s foreword written by Ding Darling:

Here, then, is the lure of the open as presented by the best outdoorsmen and writers of the country; men who have followed the trails of wild game and who have fished the waters of the world, telling their stories, giving of their skills and experiences, that you may enjoy the Lure of the Open.

You’ll never travel in better company.

It’s a sort of menu of North American options organized into: Salt Water Fish and Mammals, Fresh Water Game Fish, Upland Game Birds, Waterfowl, Big Game, Small Animals and Predators and then a Dictionary and some Outdoor Tips for Sportsmen.

So here’s my practice. My brain makes up some word that I tell myself is important for me to consider. I open the book, my hand flips the pages and my eyes scan around until my brain makes up an association for its own reasons. Sometimes I just open to a page with the same starting letter (fear and fishing) (warmth and walrus) (being and Bea-Bla) (beaver was on that page) or sometimes that doesn’t fit the bill and I flip around until something else happens (curious and the white-fronted goose).

I had listened to a conversation between Paul Hawken and Bayo Akómoláfé and for several days afterwards was contemplating: How would I live if I were living with courage?

I decided to draw a picture of courage and opened the book to choose a page. I think I started somewhere in the C’s. I remember considering a page describing some large animal, one with a tough guy reputation. But then I thought, does it take a lot of courage to be a crocodile or a shark, what with all the teeth and jaws?? Eventually, I landed on Small Animals and Predators, RABBIT – Continued. I don’t usually read the text on a page when I’m choosing one and that day was no different. I reach a page. There’s a feeling of rightness (something like, I think I will learn something by following this particular practice using this word and this page). I pull out the page and start by painting the chosen word across it in watercolor. Then I add cray-pas on top of the watercolor and then I scratch whatever I want out of the cray-pas using colored pencils.

So I was about to begin painting the word courage. My large watercolor letters are usually oriented with the page turned horizontally so the letters are perpendicular to and covering the page’s text, but on the chosen page there was an illustration of a leaping rabbit (presumably drawn by Ding Darling, an award-winning cartoonist). So I painted the word with the page in its intended vertical alignment which meant that I could still read this text at the top of the page:

Probably best known to us is Molly Cottontail whose range blankets most of the regions between Canada and the table lands of Mexico. She is prey for every boy who ever carried a 22 rifle into the neighborhood brush patch. Bobbing along ahead of yelping, scurrying beagles, the cottontail flaunts her white tail until the going becomes too hot, then dives into the first convenient burrow. More cottontails are killed each year than any other game, yet their numbers increase.

Well then, I thought.

That feels, informational, I thought.

Certainly encyclopedic.

What can I learn about courage, I wondered. I colored my picture. I thought about rabbits. About the roots of the word courage. About the word game, and other words. I kept thinking about it.

The Cor Age finds me

A few days later, sometime in mid-December, I looked back at my drawing and wrote this in my journal:

Molly Cottontail
is what they called her.
Prey
for every boy who ever carried
a 22 rifle into the neighborhood bush patch.
Bobbing along
ahead of the beagles, yelping,
she flaunts her white tail,
so it was said,
until the going is too hot
(too hot, they said)
at which point she would dive
into the first convenient burrow,
excepting for the ones
who over-flaunted
who liked it hot
those Mollies
together with their sorority
(apparently all cottontails then were female)
were killed
in larger number
than any other
Game.

what is courage?
I’m looking for an easy answer,
a villain and a path to
safety? somewhere shame-free?
rightness? regardless of what comes feeling
I was good?

I’m imagining a boy, my boy
given a gun and out with his dad
they see a bunny, smooth, quiet
shhhhh, the dad looks with his eyes
he nods gently in her direction
oh the boy wants to be strong
like his dad
he has watched the bunnies
from his window, nibbling and darting
the larger bunnies and the smaller
watching the babies get bigger
he raises the rifle
sweating
and squeezes.
Her body is still.
He feels a hand on his shoulder
his father almost remembers the feeling
capability and
horror.

Where is courage?
I was born in the year of the rabbit,
a sometimes symbol of mercy, elegance and beauty
mercy as courage
beauty as courage
cor = heart
and what about rage?

In a story where the boys are sent out
armed
with their dogs
playing a murderous game
with molly as prey
or call her customers
or call her views
revenue streams
voters
I’m sorry to introduce these
uncomfortable words
these cold words
used for
calculating
for allowing the boys
to pull the triggers

Still I’m asking
how is courage?
my cor knows
rage
but I am looking
into the burrows
the hobbit holes
the safe haven
underground
(though the idea of safe
brings to mind
a shovel)
I sit here with my
pen
comfortable
my white tail
out of the sun’s shine
seeing the story
a story
one story
and asking for the
courage
to write
another

Maybe a story
for the cor age

Once upon a time

Once upon a time there was a rabbit. The rabbit had heard much of dogs and boys with guns and she lived comfortably almost hidden in a dark and sometimes lonely burrow. All the rabbits were getting horses, it was quite a responsible and astute choice for a rabbit in her position so she thought she ought to as well. Horses in pictures were so beautiful.

Owning a horse was a lot of work. Training it to be acceptable, the right kind of horse. And all that work, that proving and approving, in some ways, kept her separate from something in life. What was it?

One day the rabbit was visited by a rat (well, a rat’s skin) who spoke to her as a ghost with this promise: bury me with a 1975 penny and an old bandage and I will help you learn how to live with your horse, or I will show you why you cannot. The rabbit was hopeful because what other choice was there? A dragon came, its mighty tail struck at the rabbit’s illusion of control and prediction, of responsibility and rewards for good behavior.

The rabbit dreamed of open space, of a long table, and a cozy library. Of emptying burlap bags filled with treasures, giving them back to their rightful owners, and to herself when they were hers. In her burrow, warm and lit by the fire of trees past, she was given a word by the dragon: courage. She peeped her head above ground and saw a snake, almost guarding the entrance, coiled. And what will she do next? How to face and enter into the cor age? What will the rat (and her sister the beaver) show to this rabbit? And is writing the best way to find out?

Yours truly,
one wood rabbit
shipwrecked in this moment of history
thankful to be here with you

Notes:

Paul Hawken and Bayo Akómoláfé in conversation on courage

Hair and fur are the same thing, per a scientist

There were roughly 121,030,095 wood rabbits born in 1975. Wood rabbits are cheerful, patient and courteous (people pleasers) with a complex inner life (you don’t say)

Sometimes I remember John Nash as portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and wonder, if I taped all these thoughts and pictures up on the walls, what the walls would look like

Economic Times, Chinese zodiac sign and elements is not a recommended resource for learning about the topic, just a source I saw with a quote that interested me

To say I feel lucky to have been born a wood rabbit is circular