Convergences

For all the promises of spring, the swelling buds, the announced nuptials, the drenching rains, mating cardinals, and the freshness, for all of these, it is still, decidely, winter yet. The snow falling outside my house this morning made that case clear. The cold lurking in the air despite a full six hours of sunlight, demands that we remember the dominant temperature of the universe. Spring and summer are merely gifts of life itself. Given a choice, a planet heats up to unbearable temperatures in the face of the sun or its own morning star, and drops to treacherous cold facing the rest of the universe. Unbearable extremes. But an atmosphere (ours the product of life itself) with its own flows and rhythms, can preserve that heat, and hold on to just enough cold. Someone once wrote that the image of Earth from space that graced the cover of Life magazine in 1969 made all of us environmentalists. The thin layer, the film really, that preserved us could be seen in its relative position with the general nothingness of space. That knowledge of frailty helped us somehow. And it hurt us. As I know and feel my own love for this place, this wild and living terrasphere, I hope my own expressions can open eyes and ears and senses of others. I am no idle worshipper, nor easily led to reverence. But, the wind in the pine boughs, the drifting clouds, the sprouting flowers, the budding trees, the migrating birds, and even the softly falling snow. Nature is its own excuse; we can only find our way, or choose not to.

20 more dead in Bahgdad since I got out of bed this morning. And a smug, dangerous, and fully corrupted prince looks the other way, giving companies new protection from the people they harm. Clothing isn't the question, the emperor has no body, no substance, we cannot even fight back effectively because the discourse and the politics and every calculated action is beside the point. Now, more than ever, our own vision of where to go must be articulated. The men who have grabbed the reigns of the United States' mighty government have so carefully crafted their coup that for us to simply respond or reject their overt public acts is to feed them more fodder for our own demise.