Mourning Doves

Yesterday as I stood perched upon a ladder applying a new layer of paint to the windows I have been scraping for the past month, a mating pair of mourning doves alighted on the electric wire a few feet above my head. They landed in that noisy way they have of squeaking with each wing beat, as if the palpitations of their wings caused their lung to force out air. I looked up and they just stood there watching me, bobbing their heads as if nodding in agreement and complimenting the work I had done. After a few minutes, they said goodbye and flew into my yard to forage from underneath the small birdfeeder I have installed there. As I walked through the back yard a few minutes later they looked up briefly from their meal, but did not run in fright. They knew me; they knew I was not a threat. The goldfinch on the feeder itself wasn't quite as sure and rushed off bobbing through the air in a bouncing trail of whistles and complaints. Solo male goldfinches are more cautious and more jumpy than mating pairs of the same bird; an extra set of eyes brings a greater sense of security. When I was painting the back window, I heard a familiar screech and looked up to catch a red tailed hawk in a broad glide above the millpond. He or she disappeared in an instant, perhaps having found the desired prey or having moved on to more promising ground. This is the second time I have seen this hawk overhead this week. There is a family of crows living across the street as well. A fledgling just learning to fly, coached out of the nest by his parents, glided overhead a couple of days ago. All of these lives in this small plot of ground surrounded by a few trees and perhaps a single thicket. Everywhere we look, life persisting. How many birds and other fellow creatures live in the unnoticed spaces around you?

What is this talk of reverence for "life" by those who merely revere human fetuses and others who claim to be of their kind? That's not respect for life, that's suicide, religious xenophobia, and misanthropy, never mind the complete dismissal of 99.9% of all life that actually is. Life, as changing and varied as it is, is always expressed as balance and hope in the natural world. Their philosophies are premised on hatred and fear. The mourning doves visited and greeted me with kindness. Where have those who claim the Gospel of love as their guide been hiding? I don't feel them genuine.

Cut Light

A chilly morning and reasonable temperatures again. The sun is trying to break free from high clouds bisecting the sky into white and blue, but they lurk in the southern half, blocking its way. Out my back window I could be farther north for the spruce trees reaching into the sky and filling my view. A white and a Norway, content in their 40-50 year growing places, harkening back to mid-century, after the world war, when coffers were flush and Americans retreated to their protected hovels and houses and built fences and planted trees and stopped asking hard questions of their government. That history has been witnessed by these silent sentries, a world transformed, a culture, fully materialized, consumption, replacing political freedoms and civic pride with acquisition of more stuff, empty promises of meaning through wealth. There is a murmur underneath the great roar of commerce, questions shooting in from every side. Is this the true path of life? Are these the values that we intend to live for, perhaps die for, fight for and protect? Who has won in this dawning century? Has the poison of greed and self-interest completely consumed the better nature of human kindness and generosity? I am not innocent myself, feeling less than generous toward those I perceive as misguided, toward the great mass of corrupted men and women, even, at times toward neighbors and friends. It is difficult to stand like sentries, to merely witness the changes and not feel moved to push back. When do we break? When do we flourish anew?

I notice three species of oak growing within ten feet of where I sit in this urbanized settled little town of Maynard. Here, where earth has been filled and packed, where a century of lead paint has drained into the ground, trucks have driven, buildings have have been built and removed, not once, but twice. Where smoke and soot and pesticides and hebicides have been dumped, three species of oak stand tall, taking their place in my landscape. Reminding us all. Challenging us to remember.

Delicious Day

High wispy clouds and dry cool air as if we have been transported to early fall in western Montana. An extra layer of cotton is necessary to feel comfortable in the morning. Exposed flesh gathers goose bumps with the gentle breeze. It makes the blood pump harder and everything pick up steam inside. It colors the land in the most delightful blue coloration. One stands directly in the sun, the balance between its warming rays and the cooling vacuum of space in perfect harmony with a balance sought by spirit and flesh. Today we are prepared to face head on those monsters who ravage tradition and ethical conduct. They cannot fog our minds with their double speak, and their lies have lost their lift. We may push back, ever so slightly, turning their momentum, piece by piece, and slowly there by freshening the air and cooling the humid breeze of corporate oppression and the heat-soaked goals of efficiency. The green canopy works double time today, pulling and storing and preparing. The plants sense the shorter daylight better than we with our artificial climate and our artificial sunlight. They know the season and make their subtle adjustments in due course. We are always lagging, but today we have a shot at redemption. Today we can see clear-eyed through the atmosphere, to the farthest horizon and beyond. The waters reflect and they ripple, the branches and stalks tip and sway, chattering amongst themselves about seasons to come. Birds make plans, even while they continue to celebrate the day. We are almost upon our transitional time again and the sense of hopeful exuberance is palpable in the sounds of morning, in the rising afternoon.

Let them call it a struggle and a not a war, let them make false claims about their successes, let them lay the whole set of traps that will be exposed and unavoidable when the tide pulls back out to sea. The breath of redemption is a cool mid-summer breeze after weeks of too much heat and humidity.

Cooling Winds

A cold front moved south from Canada last night, bringing some rain, though not enough, and cooler weather. One can move more and think more clearly with a bit of chill in the air. But the draught of this summer is starting to tax the plant life in neighborhood. The choke cherry trees across Front Street have begun to drop their redundant leaves, yellowing and falling to the ground. Even weeds are wilting and loosing their lowest foliage. These plants will not die, they merely adjust to extant conditions. This can go on for some time; even with broad swings in temperature and rain, the life here will evolve and adjust. But one must sense change and be perceptive of alterations in order to allow living systems to make the shifts they must at times. In a human world that runs from such sensitivity, we have locked ourselves in place, sheltered ourselves from the knowledge that is there to be learned. It is a point I keep returning to, because I believe it is important to our long-term well-being. We have ceased to adapt ourselves and set ourselves on a course of forced stasis. We build and develop and grow and plan as if nothing is to change. There may be flexibility in the way today's modern managers approach the internal society of their corporate culture, but there is none with respect to the world outside. We hear of declining biodiversity and changing climate and toxins in every American and we do not change. We know the consequences of our actions, and we lie to ourselves about them. We make ourselves increasingly, perilously unprepared for the world we have made, and not for ignorance or an inability to predict, but because, at bottom, we would rather live a few moments in false control, than give in to the realities we are embedded in. It is a truism on the social and the personal level, her in the (dis)United States. We no longer look to the world around us for information and knowledge, we turn to the glowing screen, and it has an interest in other goals than our long-term survival. We are such delicate natures, and yet treat ourselves and our fellows as if delicacy were a thing of the past, as if we could erase 5 million years of evolution through the brute strength of steel production and highway building, as if our natures were not cultivated on this rolling, spinning, globe. Who has the energy to swim against the tide of conformity? Who has the courage to change?

Entertainment

In a nation where most people believe their first order of business is to be entertained, to have a good time, and to take life unseriously, truth seems dour. It's odd in a way, because truth can be empowering and uplifting and full of hope -- you are part, you are life, you have potentials you haven't even begun to tap -- and yet so many see nothing but work for themselves or suffering. We mustn't pay too many taxes, we need that money for our gas costs; we mustn't criticize the things we have questions about, no one wants to field awkward conversation or look straight at what is to be seen. Blindered we advance and blindered we erode the very thing that keeps us up. If through my personal life time I can maintain the belief in whatever I choose to believe and it makes my own brain satisfied and my own emotions soothed, what more can be asked of me? Tell that to the cattle and the hogs and the chickens and the insects and weeds of the midwest and the rivers of the far West, and the children condemned to the isolated ghetto and the marginalized around the world. Tell them your philosophy and see what sort of understanding they can find for you. Tell them that you need your SUV and global climate change inducing energy supplies and biodiversity destroying agriculture. Tell them that it would be too much for your pampered disposition to have to suffer in any way. Explain to them why you are to be more privileged and provided with more material, even if it came from their back yard. Explain why you must be overweight while their children starve and suffer, their people die brutal deaths with your tax monies (that you are willing to pay). Explain why injustice is not an idea you extend to their lives. Why you must come first in every instance and never have to give a thought to the other lives around you, watch them understand your plight and feel a pity for the risk that you may have to give up some small part of your over-consumptive life-style if they keep asking for justice. Justice will hurt your privilege; explain to them, you will have none of their foolishness.

Inequity in nature besets entire communities who pull their pieces together and hold tight to a kind of imbalanced equilibrium. Not stasis, mind you, but changing stability. Life persists. Modern isolation has left us ignorant of these deep rhythms, severed our present from the deep past of human habitation and knowledge of place. In our air-conditioned movie theatres we bombard our senses with the sights and sounds -- but none of the consequences -- of violence and aggression and narrow escapes. Carrying those ideals into our air-conditioned automobiles and our air-conditioned houses and why are we so intolerant and inhumane and miserable with our station? Why do we turn from the truth as if some unwelcome neighbor at our exclusive party? What are you really afraid of?

Obscured

Wind all morning, low pressure pulling air with forced gusts out of my house, pressing shades against the windows as the whole atmosphere creates a vacuum. Sun obscured by high gray clouds, threatening, mildy, rain, perhaps. But maybe not. The sun cracked through for a short glimmer and disappeared again. The air is as dry as yesterday and Saturday, but this morning it has stayed cool, radiation absent in sufficient levels to bring it up. It flattens the colors, yellows the greens and brightens the rest. Not washout, but paler than the stark blues of the sunlit day. Fall again seems immanent, although the tomato has only just begun to fruit and the squash has only just begun to flower. I was told they would catch up in good weather, but I think they have fallen behind, or the weather is confusing me. Some days there apear clear baselines and regular patterns; other days, who can say what is to be seen? This mass hypnosis, mass psychosis, culturally sanctioned individualism that disconnects the individual from that which lifts and supports and affirms and creates. I am not my body, I am not this Earth, I do not need awareness or sense of place because I am the only one, singular, battling against the rest of life, so unknown to me, so unusually interested in such other things besides me. I will dress better and drive faster and speak louder and take more, lest some one senses the fear that drives me. I will obscure my own existence by building artificial walls of sound and structure never imagined by the life, and only constructed to hide the secret that each of us hides. I am not my shit or my piss, I do not consist of bones and flesh and systems beyond my ken. I am only me, singular, alone, fighting the good fight for life. I am spirit, then, and only one, this one, aware here of my needs and my wants and my fears, disconnected. These are the lessons we learn.

And sadly untroubled, disgest with our morning news. Five to the head from the once unarmed bobbies. No apologies. Innocents must die that the guilty feel fear. These are the manifestations that follow.

How long to re-learn what is actually true?

Perfect Saturday

A breeze, cool air, and bright sunshine, not a drop of humidity in the air. The heavy haze of yesterday blown out to sea, replaced by air and light and temperatures that are in perfect balance with body temperature and skin sensation. One could live a thousand days like today and never complain. The green of the trees and grass and flowers has a lovely blue hue to it, reflecting the sky above. Cool dry days carry more blue, hot humid days like yesterday are more yellow and orange. There is still no rain, nor any forecast, but the existing dampness in the Earth and in the leaves does not seem threatened as yesterday. Plants do not look burdened or leaning toward cell collapse and wilting. Instead, everything appears crisp, full of life, purged of the bad odors and heavy pall of mechanized human society with just the steady gust of Canadian wind.

But appearances are only one level of reality, a fact exploited by the authoritarian regime housed in Washington today. Beneath the apparent purity, we know too many toxins flow. Children and babies are carrying a broad range of chemicals and heavy metals in their tissue, residue from the ongoing misguided battle to subdue everything truly natural. Where ancient wisdom told a people they were out of balance with natural cycles and they learned and adjusted, this so-called modern civilization hears only potential defeat and so fights harder at its conquest. Are random plants filling places in a perfect lawn? Spray them with death-o-cide. Do insects feast on your mono-crops? Kill them, kill them, kill them. So much knowledge and wisdom of the Earth lost in this all-consuming culture of hate and greed and sanctioned lunacy. It is no wonder we send our young men and women out to do more killing; it is all we know anymore. No ears to hear, no eyes to see, no mind to change, simple plodding foolishness. Nothing more.

And still the breeze blows and the cool air comforts and I continue to write because I continue to hope. May truth re-surface through these murky waters of modern times and save us from our present fate.

Summer Haze

Nothing but heat today. Sun rising in the brilliant blue sky and just a moment of cool air before its radiation cut through and raised temperatures into the 90s. Even without heavy humidity, the air hangs like a wool blanket, forcing every pore to loosen its internal faucets. Plants kept captured in clay pots suck up every ounce of water before noon, before the heat can evaporate what's left, by 1:00 they've wilted, loosing internal cell structure to transpiration. Brown patches appear on the lawn, and one looks for shade at every step. The sun gives energy to life, but the sun challenges our limits as well, fogs our brains, overheated and exhausted inside warm skulls. It drills into our vision, closing pupils and creating indoor blindness after a few minutes in the outside. But this is the existence of being here on Earth and I would not trade it for artificially cooled rooms, artificially dry, like those who live within them, sequestered from reality and so living unreal. It is no wonder here in the (dis)United States of North America we can barely find the time to know our neighbors or understand our colleagues or love our children. As everyone pursues the dream of conquest in their own personal fiefdom, they lose something vital. And this is just the citizens, the leadership, now even further removed, knows nothing of life, nothing of Earth, nothing of being true. The whole system rests upon a lie, and no one has the courage to point it out. For those who do are marginalized, ostracized, and otherwise rebuked. Who wants a culture of fear but those who stand to gain from it. And so, each excuse and every act of cultural loyalty marks you as a traitor to your deepest known truths. You may sit there and deny this, but you can not escape its grasp.

The Harkening

In January, there were the first signs of spring. This morning, the cool air and muted sun suggested fall to me. Each season anticipates the next in kind. There is plenty of summer left, mind you, but here in late July I feel the first suggestion of autumn. Indeed, the days have already begun a quiet shortening, and some of the earliest leaves of spring have yellowed and fallen off some of the trees in my neighborhood. What are we to make of these changes embedded in an otherwise consistent time? Is it not the overarching pattern of life itself? Like the plants that seem dormant while building energy and suddenly exploding from one day to the next, or the quiet seed that starts it all? These are universal patterns and as an active member of this universe, I cannot help but think the culture of human beings might be exactly the same. These deadly times, this misguided leadership (though I hate to use that word to describe them), the fanaticism that drives power and power's enemy, the myopia and fear, these are the dominant trends. They have been growing in influence since my first political awareness in the 1970s. They have been growing in influence, in fact, since the 1960s. Their seed was planted and it eventually flourished. A reactionary, mysanthropic, frightened, paranoid, life-denying set of ideas that have gained prominence. Their simple-minded statements of certainty appeal to the under-educated and the greedy alike. And so they have put down roots and grown their tree of evil. But all things pass into the next, like seasons and life itself. And I believe the seeds of a new world and a new culture are being planted today. We are in the final flourishing, perhaps the mid-summer, of fanaticism and fantasy politics. I will criticize and complain, but in my soul I must believe that change will come and I will help it rise. I hope you too will take the time to notice and care and perhaps be a part of cultivating the good life to come.

Let us work for an end to this unnecessary and brutal ideology.

Rhythms

The morning sun cut an orange sliver of light on the west wall of my bedroom this morning. A mid-summer greeting as it reached precisely the point on the horizon when its rays could make their way from the east window on the far side of the bathroom, through the hall and onto that wall. It did not shine there yesterday, it may not shine there tomorrow. Just this morning, this moment, this day. There are constants and there are variations, there is stability and regularity and there is flux and constant change. They say that a colored sun in the morning portends a storm, but in this case I think it is just the humidity, thick enough on the horizon to bend the white light into its second of seven visible colors. It will be hot today, oppressively. This means that I will move slowly, but it means that energy consumption and thus a contribution to the overall warming and heating of this great ball in space will rise as the pampered and disconnected feed themselves artificial cool. The birds, the rodents, insects and animals all bear the conditions in their various ways with their various strategies and continue to subsist. We would do well to learn a little from that.

But learn we do not. Is it possible that an entire culture can suffer from rampant narcissism? Possible? Actual. Even those who know better, and you know who you are, are too cowed with fear or denial of the real true consequences to opt for a better world. Your noses are brown and souls are shamed as you quietly comply, safely ensconced in your air-conditioned office, doing nothing of value, and collecting your check. Is it any wonder that violence and depression and obesity and misery are rampant in the United States? We are a culture lost, completely convinced of our own legitimacy. What is that nagging doubt you hear whispered in your mind during those rare quiet moments of honest reflection? You know.

Climate

The humidity has been heavy these past two days, layering a haze of suspended water particles just above the earth. They jump out and stick to anything cool, perhaps they even nourish these green plants who haven't seen root water in almost a month. The season of summer is upon us. The plants in full regalia, green of every hue, and us stripped down to our bare minimum, exposed flesh, perspiring skin. For plants this is the busy season, for mammals, we slow down. Everything with its cycle and season. These rhythms move slowly, almost imperceptibly, but persistent nonetheless. It was but a hundred days prior, a hundred rotations of the earth and a third of a rotation around the sun, when this very same patch of ground was locked in ice and cold. When weeds and flowers lay dormant beneath the snow as energy-bearing root mass or the potential of seed. When trees were barren and gray, holding fast to their stored sugars well below the frost line. That time is all but forgotten in the lush green of summer. And it is as if it will never be upon us again, though we know that it will. I have noticed that plants themselves consist of varying cycles, even in their flourishing months. There is a period of slow growth or no growth when, I am guessing, the plant gathers up stored energy and pulls what it can from the sun, and there are periods of rapid, almost frenzied growth, when this energy is quickly converted into leaf and stem and stalk, a gathering and an expression. To be always on the go, Nature seems to show, is unnatural.

I wonder how we have removed ourselves so completely from these facts of life, these truths of healthy existence. I have no doubt we have. I know the myth of the need to conquer nature, I hear the parable of modernity that says before we had all these trappings, the technology, the climate control, the transportation and communication infrastructure, we suffered and starved and led lives of misery. I think history, however, has been foreshortened in these tales. 500 years, or a 1000 have come to stand in for tens of thousands of years of sustained human habitation. That they have made their domination less miserable does not negate the domination. We are too short-sighted in modernity, and, in truth, we still suffer and starve and lead lives of misery. It is these lies we have been drilled to believe that harm us most.

Lurking

It has threatened rain now for days, high clouds yesterday and today. Heavy laden with rain, but semingly unwilling to release their burden. This has been a long, hot dry summer since the solstice, without the artifical supplements provided by my own paid for water supply most of my flowers and trees and vegetables would be suffering for water now. They are not as adapted as the wild flowers that continue to creep skyward across Front Street. The things we desire, the aesthetics we aspire to, these are always more work than taking what has come to us and finding beauty there. Against the judging eyes of my neighbors, however, I have not cut my lawn every time it seems long, but let the grass hold its moisture. Do we know how to manage our mini ecosystems even? I see chemicals and exotics everywhere I look up and down my block. I let wild flowers flourish and neighbors ask why I'm growing weeds. How we come to the life around us, I think, tells us how we come to our own fact of life. We struggle for control and achieve something less.

As in my yard, so it is in the nation. Fools embrace foolish ideas, uncritical claims of superiority and unquestioned acts of brutality and injustice and still she shops for a brand new SUV and pushes her gas-guzzling Navigator out into traffic with air conditioning blasting her senses and the DVD player keeping the young ones quiet in back. How can we come to know each other or what we live for under such conditions? It may not have been a conscious plan, but conservative America has dumbed us down and prepared us to be good consumers in their economy. George Bush is evil, but all the citizens of this once great nation who have been snowed into believing otherwise are the real culprits. Ignorance is no excuse, even if the markets try to tell you it is. Shame. Shame on you. You know who I mean.

Recovery

It's four a.m. when the birds note the changing light, ever so slight, that indicates a new day. From their perches around the neighborhood they begin an insistent song. Is it celebration, or do they believe their own voices are needed to arouse the sun? This ceremony has such regularity and gives the heart a boost. Better than we, the birds appreciate this life, this earth, these rhythms. They are not immune to reconstructing nature to their needs, building nests and pulling life from the Earth to feed their young, but they do so with a kind of deep honor not seen among humans today. Reverence and humility, joy and appreciation. For us, the mornings are blasted out of alarm clocks and cold showers and a deep desire for another vacation. I see the workers in their dress shirts and ties heading to another day at the computer terminal, sweating off the last remains of last night's alcohol, the necessary elixir for drowning out that psychic pain, that sense of unfulfillment, the dying hope that someday, somehow, somewhere, life will be about something more than this incessant grind. I know there is more. I watch the white spruce behind my house slowly build its seeds in this mast year, more than it will need, the squirrels will eat well this winter. I see the mulberry tree at the bend in Front Street dropping its profligate load as well, feeding insects and birds, and even the molds and fungus. All life truly lived contributes more than it takes. Our modern desperation is part of a big lie, a treadmill to nowhere, the slow desecration of the human soul in the interest of greed and power.

This disease is thick among us now. I can point to some who who suffer completely and wonder why, and even others who suffer completely and believe they are well. I know one man who lives so deeply in his lies that each pitiful move he makes appears to him as progress and light and yet, the smoke and mirrors are everywhere. Titles and false accolades, so he believes, can lift him into places where he does not belong and has earned no place. The tragedy, of course, is how terribly it will drain the last remnants of his withered soul when the truth come clean. And the truth always comes clean. Always.

"When we are unhurried and wise, we percieve that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, -- that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality," Thoreau wrote in _Walden_. And the petty have read this and not noticed it is refering to them. I find this fact curious.

Exposure

And then it was summer. The Norway maples are putting out a second generation of leaves despite the absence of real rain for weeks now. Even the Catalpa has completed building its massive heart shaped leaves and finished with its lantern-like flowers. The season of copulation has passed and now the slow work of energy gathering begins. In the Pacific Northwest the oceans are too warm this summer. Here in the second week of hurricane season, a second major hurricane has begun winding up its power and strength. Instead of doing the moral and ethical thing two weeks ago, the leaders of the eight major global nations let terrorism blight a promising dialogue. Four suicide bombs in London. No one saw it coming. So much for heightened security. The word of the day for days thereafter was "resolve." Resolve to do what? Hold up a corrupt corporate economy? Continue to institutionalize poverty and criminalize race? The argument the Senators used to make against social welfare programs was that you cannot just give money to people and expect them to be active parts of today's economy. Today I wonder how those aristocrats, all of whom inherited vast fortunes from their forefathers, managed to get off their own asses…and, really, when you get right down to it, did they? It seems their logic doesn't really hold and is really just a thin disguise to justify hierarchy and punish the down trodden. Conservatism in America has lost all of its moral fiber.

But moral fiber is in short supply these days. Even in the remote corners where one would expect to find it, instead there is only fakery and chicanery and insults to the best of our literature. Power, it seems, and narcissism are the only rules. But power and narcissism without the courage to be true to its own impulse. The worst of the worst then, cowardly narcissism, self-interest that pretends benevolence. Cynicism at its worst. Give me a Rick Santorum any day over the kind of posers I've had to deal with for the past two years. Without integrity, without intelligence, without reason or knowledge, tadpoles suckling the last waters of a drying vernal pool. If they don't believe in karma - which they surely do not - they haven't done much self-reflection about a dozen years of failures. And so they lie and pat each other on the back about all the false things they need to hear. It's tragic really, but unsustainable and spiritually depraved. No light there.

And so the energy gathering months are upon us. As Thoreau said, “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” Not false pretense or loyalty or tempered manners, no, goodness. And for some, I can only think: good luck.