Day: April 27, 2013

It is the season of color and light, and one of my jobs is to find it and bring it to you. Light heals and color inspires. I did my sacred work this week, I encouraged two people to live the lives they were destined to live. Today, at Battenkill Books, a long time reader of the blog called me up from the Midwest to talk about books. She told me some compelling stories about her life and travels – she spent four months wandering the roads of Alaska last year – and I asked her what she did with her writing, and she said she stored it away, nobody ever saw it. Do you have a blog?, I asked her. She said not, it was too technical for her.

I said no, it was not, and besides, she admitted her husband would do it. I knew that was not the problem, she thought nobody would want to read it. I said it was a shame to keep her writing hidden, I urged her to consider sharing her travels, opening up her life the way a blog can often do. There are no guarantees anybody will ever read your writing, I said, but so what? Put it out there, engage with the world, affirm your own sense of life and your own thoughts and observations.

She said she just might. I hope she will. I told her she can have a blog up and running tomorrow, and if she does I will link to it. Encouragement is one of the most powerful fuels in the world. And one of the rarest.

I sat on my porch tonight and heard the frogs stirring in the last night,

saw the hawk give up her rounds in vain, head up to the trees over the hill.

Bombs are not the only thing that kill people, they just get the most attention.

On my porch I gave my pledge of allegiance to the new nation,

the Corporate Nation, and said my prayers.

I prayed for the people underwater, lured into their homes,

then chased out by the bankers still collecting their bonuses.

I prayed for the stolen holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas,

sacrificed to the mood of the stock market.

I prayed for the millions who have seen their work stolen and sent overseas,

and I pray to the new worker ants of the global economy here,

who scramble in giant warehouses to get us our two-day

free shipping, they can’t give those jobs away.

I pray for the farmers run off their farms, condemned  by the economists as

too inefficient in the global economy, a capital crime, and run off their land,

I pray for their sons and daughters, driven to jobs they hate in distant cities.

And for the land, turned everywhere into black holes, bottom less pits,

garbage dumps.

I pray for the children who cannot imagine better lives than their parents had,

and for the people whose beaches and oceans have been stolen by developers building

the mansions that no one else will ever see.

And I pray to the old sheep, the humans distracted by their likes and notifications,

their tests and pills, pressured into ever longer lives and surgeries they can’t pay for, and then

blamed for not having the money to pay for it or for wealthy children to sacrifice themselves.

They are underwater too, pray hard for them.

I pray for the congress that protects us from people marrying freely, but

makes sure the angry and the disturbed can buy machine guns to shoot our children.

We don’t build monuments or statues any longer, but garbage dumps and strip

malls and we rape and insult the Mother Earth while our carbon seals the sky.

We abandon higher purpose or spiritual consciousness to a world driven by machines, our new

priests and rulers, our real representatives.

I care about you, but can no longer speak with you.

Please call customer service or leave a message. You mean a lot to us.

Brother, can you spare a “like” for peace? Or maybe declare war

on the rest of the world, they are not like us, they cannot be human.

Perhaps we can “share” what it is that people are really for? And “tweet”

a short prayer for Mother Earth, you can hear her weeping and see her tears from my porch.

Bombs are not the only way to kill people and steal their land and farms

and work. You can do it every day and never see blood,

or hear a siren, or get on TV, or arouse the wrath of a congressman, or

get chased through the streets by armies in black helmets,

pouring out of trucks.

On my porch, I pledge allegiance to the people underwater, whoever they are, wherever they are.

Your government is for sale. There are lots of ways to kill people.

The tub is overflowing.

When Red comes into the pasture, the sheep all gather around Zelda, who gives us her famed Zelda stare. This used to mean a lot of trouble – either Red or I, sometimes both, would end up on our butt, Zelda would lead the charge right through us. Now she just gives Red a stare, meets his eye – very rare for a sheep to meet a border collie’s eye – and seems to be challenging us to do our best. But usually, she obeys. I love her look.

 

Very suddenly, it is green. Last week this road was lined with yellow and brown grass, dormant though the winter. This week, green has erupted everywhere, the last gift of a fading April. It changes everything, especially the landscape of photography. The end of the winter pasture.

Real farms are beautiful places, orchestrations of chaos, where junk is utilitarian, nothing is new, nothing is ever thrown away, everything is used. Farmers use up every spare inch of their barns, their stuff and machines spilling out into driveways, pastures and yards. Farmers are obsessive tinkerers, they are always patching, stitching, welding and praying. Real farms have always been beautiful to me, manifestations of family, values, individuality and the hardest imaginable work.