The bridge that is paradox

It seems like a paradox exists between hope and change.  Actually, it appears more like a rope bridge between the two – linked by cross pieces and knotted ropes holding it all together.  The connection strong but over a tenuous territory. Maybe it’s about hope and chance and luck has everything to do with it.  This is what an old friend told me once.  She is my mentor too.  So I listen.

I imagine walking across this bridge as I would an Adirondack path.  Danger in each vibration and all that holds me to the world is a tenuous connection between rope and rock. Now I’m thinking, “What is a paradox after all?  A dock on either side of the abyss.”  Nothing in the middle making sense but when you come from one side to the other, how right, if unconsidered before.  What is a paradox?  A new partner, an unexpected guest, a friend’s revelation, a new friend after a personal holocaust when a moment before, it would seem, nothing would grow, as if salt on the ground at Nineveh? For all I know Nineveh is now an orchard where oranges bright as dice pulse pectin through their thick skin.  Oranges turn their colors in the night.  Imagine the desert illuminated by these juicy globes.  Who would have thought such sweet light would cast shadows on these wretched plains?

In the crevasse between left brain and right you’ll find the jump, the spilt milk of synapses, the positive charge of hope connecting through the gray matter, the knotted rope bridges within our skulls, to the other side, where the negatively charged chance waits; pausing at the edge, a hopeful caesura, which is the poet’s way of saying, “Stop – but don’t, stop.”

When Lynn was little, she was certain, as she came upon an abandoned lot surrounded by a metal fence in the Bronx, that she had discovered the Iron Curtain.  She also moved towards the wall when in bed to leave room for God, who was probably very tired and needed a place to rest his head.  And, she once told me about the time she ran home from school to check the oven to make sure God wasn’t dead because she was told that day that God was everywhere. Decades later, her stories give me hope in innocence; faith in what freedom from prejudice can bring – compassion, caring, simple worries about mighty beings.  Hope often seems tenuous when we ache for the tangible. The other night I felt my mother’s hands in mine.  It was completely unexpected.

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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.

fresh start

            “In the beginning everyone is a beginner.  That’s the first thing.  Some think the conventions of time can save you if you get a handle on the arm of the clock.  You only need that if you’re talking the thin kind of time that rushes past you so quickly that you feel you might go over the rapids.   That thin time really slides but of course it’s no good.  No good at all.  And besides, now people just get swept away.  Now there’s not even the little hand to grab hold of.  Digital  changed all that.  Now they’re just doing some serious numbers crunching.  Try to survive that.” 

            “First we got turned around chasing the spheres in the sky.  Then from the sun and moon going through all their phases like the stilted, speedy rhythm of time lapse photography folks got dizzy. They had to sit down till the swirling settled.  Something had to be done.  Someone called for organization”

            “Too bad everybody forgot about the options we had.  Now so many are just rushing down the road hoping boulders don’t drop a dime on them.  Hoping it ain’t their time yet.   Thin time, what’s known as linear time tends to pull us into pieces.  We become fragmented and even separated from our own experiences.  Our conception of time is now a pale, melted Dali watch.  There are deeper layers of time, richer than this surface tick tock telling of events.  Do not deny the shadows.  The spaces between.”

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the song of the earth

When I was growing up the word ‘pollution’ was something people actually heard. It didn’t put your mind asleep. You had to twist it around your head.  It forced meaning upon you. It’s totally different today. We’re shut down to words like pollution and cancer. Everyone in my family has died from cancer. These are big words meaning big things; entire eco-systems, our bodies’ immune system. 

     Entire regional ecosystems are in danger. It’s not just any longer about how many hectares or acres a tiger needs in order to be a tiger.  It’s not just about the curves in a river a salmon needs in order to be salmon.  Finally, in our lifetime, we’re seeing some dams taken down. We wait for the salmon to wiggle waggle up the river again.

     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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