hopes and dreams

     We have to talk about our hopes and dreams with our friends and listen to bird songs as they were meant to be heard – a part of everything, including our hopes and dreams. 

They are not backdrop or incidental. They are a part of everything.  

 Borges is right, “All writing is dreaming.”   

All dreaming is becoming part of the song.

a blue streak about white bricks

The red bricks were painted white. An old kind of white paint mixed and rolled on the bricks before paints had so many names and stores competed with artist pen sets for all the colors one can find on a palette.  Milky white, white before the crystal shines through it; off white, egg shell, satin white, oyster. Every expression of color a competition for how mozzarella will tickle your tongue or niacin will creep through your blood and itch your neck. Any clam shell she had ever seen was white like a clam shell; not like milk; or every broken wave lighting white when the sun was at three or four o’clock and set to focus on the breakers like a spotlight. Rolling white and roaring white, as the blue green wave rolled through. It is not the water that moves but the energy through it.  Every wave is an illusion of movement; as if the water is moving from one area to another. The Indian Ocean eventually coming to the Jersey shore and every wetland on the coast holding something of the Mediterranean and the Aegean within. The Pacific, one Jupiter-sized ocean, carrying every river and Lake Baikal from Russia, even water off the deep sturgeon and all of it rolling into every otter’s paws like a cabbage of energy, that is really, layers and layers of energy and detritus of many oceans and currents, rolling into their paws or filtered through the feathery gills of baby clams.  Every leaf a wrack line and watermark from the Yangtze, the Yellow or the Seine rivers.  Why not bring Paris into it? After all, those kicks of the Follies surely moved the air and birds’ preening feathers loose caught this wind and moved onto the Seine and into the ocean and through the currents, rolling, rolling to the Jersey shore. Why not?  Or the Danube, blue dancing on the edges of the red cabbage. Well, where else would that blue come from except the Danube?  Dancing on the red cabbage like the white moths touched by yellow but owned by the air and moving through space, time and energy to your garden.  Wave and crest, colonies of Monarchs, moving through time’s patterns since their own generation did not make the crossing but left it to cascades of sparrows to wing through the air, stir up the cosmos and move the whole pilgrimage along the curve of energy, the ladle of abbondanza, the plenty crowding out of the great Horn and all of it, ending in the colors of the evening, the deeper blues before the dark, the warmer reds, the sweet colors of skin with summer on their nets and the lunar curve of children’s calves and thighs walking through the sand; small sprays of grains whisking past their toes, as one or maybe more look back for the dolphins, always ready to come to the surface when you’re not looking; always there the day before when you should have been.  The summer feeling like always.

Some of the voices in the song of the earth

Today, we know that major dams, the largest constructions in the world, can cause seismic activity. We’re talking earthquakes. But the earth’s health is not even just about this sort of thing anymore either. It’s about how we’ve become threatened by our own existence. 

     Every day we hear about new extinctions.

     How do you talk about this enormous loss that all of us are facing?  Those that have little ones. Those that like to think about futures.  Like to think about the summer sun or kitchen gardens feeding families in Kenya.  The movement of people and animals. Rhythms.  Maybe the drumming of the caribou influencing our music.  We don’t really know how any of the subtle or even the strong rhythms transform or change the flow of the blood in our veins. What we do know, we know so well that we’re starting not to hear it. We know that mountains in Switzerland have to be covered to protect them from melting.  We know that bugs that have natural enemies are free to destroy because the cold that would suppress them no longer does. 

     We know that our opposable thumb is unopposable. 

     How do you talk about this and relate this to the loss of someone you love without making it seem like you’ve made too much of a leap and that people aren’t important?  When people rank priorities of life, we’re always at the top of the list. Do people have to be the most important? Of course they are to you. Those that love you; those that give you meaning, and gravity and ground. But what about all those other beings and bodies living on this planet that sustain all that you love? What do you know about that?  How close are you to it?  Is your ear to the ground? 

     Enki, in ancient Sumeria, the place that gave us writing, meant wisdom. Enki literally meant your ear to the ground. Can you hear the smooth turns a salmon makes up a winding river?  While in the belly, salmon eggs learn how to follow the river and to mind their way back to the open ocean.

     Every day another extinction.  Aldo Leopold said an intelligent tinkerer saves all the pieces.  We’re losing the pieces.  Rhythms are changing.  Some of the sounds that make up the song are disappearing.  Some of the movement in the river is stopped by dams and diverted waters. We should celebrate our differences. But we have to distinguish between difference and loss.  We know that the Earth has tremendous capabilities of renewal. Some people call wetland habitats the earth’s lungs.  If given a chance wetlands not only transform toxic wastes but thrive again and become open invitations to ducks flying overhead to rest during their migration.  Every being is a significant part of this world. Every living being, every body of water, every parcel of land. How do we learn how to hear what we’ve put into the background?  We need to start listening again.

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