Category: earthling

Sanctuary

Protection is a delicate dance.

After the wetlands disappeared, many feared the cranes were gone, too. Extinct, many believed. The horror of this. What are we without our cranes? They are our loyalty, our longevity. And when they dance! A wonder to behold.

Farmers on the island began to sprinkle corn. Schoolchildren would perform this ritual every morning. Superstition, an outsider might say, this feeding of the disappeared.

But then the birds began to return. Encouraged by this glimmer of hope, more took up feedings. Ah, says an old woman now, I can’t go anywhere because of these birds. I worry about them if they don’t show up, but of course we want them to fly off, be wild again, whatever that means.

Some dig wells to create ponds for the cranes. An old man, bringing smelt to one of these ponds, spots a crane couple. He waves his arms and one of the cranes waves back, as if to dance with him.

***

Inspired by, and using borrowed phrases from this wonderful article by Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida in today’s New York Times.

Among Ancients

Old growth wisdom.

The Pando, a trembling giant, is the oldest living organism on earth––also the largest and most dense, its name means I spread, which it does over one-hundred and six acres.

How old? I wondered. Some date this clonal colony back 80,000 years, a moment that roughly corresponds to the first known human burial. This seems significant.

There is a woman who travels the earth photographing the old trees. Time is the trunk, she says. Notice the split, she says, pointing to one of the ancients. To accommodate the storm.

She looks and looks. In each careful frame, she watches the old souls, how they shape the light. Making a record, she says. Lest people forget who they were, in the event of further collapse.

In their presence, she finds a reminder. There is still grace. There is still beauty. There is something and it’s made of grief but also beyond it, and it is still here.

***

Inspired by this article on photographer Beth Moon’s quest to photograph ancient trees, and also by this articleabout the world’s oldest clonal colony of aspen. I learned about the earliest known human burial here.

Rituals

From one palm to another.

What grows here is an open hand. It catches shade from remaining trees like falling rain. Cup the view, wrap a fragile forever in time, hold. An old ritual: pull back the sun. It can’t be helped, the impulse to pry a closed fist into an open palm, for heat or to signal an invitation. Like, Stay.

***

Inspired by the sculptures of Lorenzo Quinn. And everything else.

Life and Limb

Seeding the resistance.

With blasts on the horizon again, I want to know the woman who grew a forest around her to show the world its trees, offering a resistance. These ones are harder to kill, she said. She called them sacred and some jeered. 

We don’t know, she explained, what we destroy.

What’s in them, anyway? someone asked.

Time, she answered. Time.

***

Inspired by the work of Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, as discussed in this article.

Dark Matters

And other enigmas of being.

You can try to name it with an austere smile or sprinkle it over the garden; count the universe in years, a galaxy in stars, a recognized species in projected numbers to a beginning or end; you can wave self-proclaimed insights with the strength of an eye pressed hot against an iron will, claiming the inconstant sun like a trophy in a body’s feeble attempt to make itself into a direction. But then comes this spinning and the compass will not hold, and all the fragile parts of a theory of everything collapse into the gap between the last exhalation and the next breath.

Underground Music Scene

Subterranean symphonies.

To listen through soil is to be reminded of the inadequacy of words for sound, the curious choral cacophony of those out-of-sight creatures so easily out of mind, the soundtracks of springtail, of mellifluent moles mirroring the melodies of mice amid mesh of mycelium; these reverberating roots a revelation, calling a body back to unknowing. This is what the birds are turning their heads to listen for, plainchant of these porous depths, resounding.

***

Inspired by Ute Eberle’s recent Knowable Magazine article about the emerging field of soil bioacoustics, which some prefer to call biotremology or ecoacoustics.

Walking

A lesson in surrender.

Before the iron star,

earthquake snaking 

over the far side of 

dreams, listening for 

butterfly whispers 

in the hard blue of

a desert sky, a child 

holds a foot over a 

knee to examine a 

thorn. For a moment, 

all is the space  between

his hand, his foot,

and the tiny barb. What

follows is a long 

discovery: how 

a body can learn to 

abandon itself to 

pure endurance.

Truth and Mystery

Creativity and dark ecology.

The other day I found some much-needed encouragement from one of my favorite living philosophers, Timothy Morton, in All Art is Ecological. With characteristic wit and verve, Morton observes that while the bend of the authoritarian machine is toward capital-T truth, the bend of an ecological society (of the sort that must begin to emerge if we are to survive) is toward a much more sublime, surreal, and shapeshifting state, of “truthiness” which necessarily elevates that which cannot be grasped. They have not said this (yet, anyway), but the strong suggestion through this reader’s lens is that pretensions toward capital-R real, like capital-T truth and capital-A authority, are necessarily lies. Someone whose every attempt at telling an honest story completely evades clean lines, take heart. As Lorca observed, “Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.”

Winter Gestalt

Whispering landscapes.

Story of ages, these quiet ruins now submit to the embrace of twisted oak limbs. What solitude erupts through the ghosts of former sermonizers when somber winds replace old battle hymns. From twilight to light on this reticulated branch, snows drumming winter suddenly stop. What music now?

***

Loosely inspired by the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), whose work has been credited with capturing “the tragedy of landscape.” He is said to have inspired painters such as Dali, Rothko, and Munch. His Moonrise Over the Sea is reported to have inspired Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.