What was I thinking about climate / the environment 60 to 40 years ago compared to the way I am thinking now? The facts were there, the writing was on the subway wall. We saw this day coming, I swear, but I wasn't feeling quite so claustrophobic. It wasn't so personal. Maybe that's the biggest difference that happened on my watch over time. I think, even we doom-sayers, visionaries, prognosticators and junior futurists were always thinking that if worse comes to worst we can always retreat to a safer place. Remember that song that James Taylor popularized "Up on the roof"? "When this old world starts getting me down . . . I climb way up to the top of the stairs / and all my cares just drift right into space"? That would have been my move from Baltimore to northern Vermont in 1988, two years after Chernobyl. Vermont was my climb to the roof.
My feelings about war and peace seem to be inextricably enmeshed with my feelings about climate and the environment. It's holographic. If you look deep enough into the problem of universal, endless war you wind up looking deep into the problem of the downgrading of the environment and climate chaos. It's always about ecology, a playing-out of our warped relationship with Life on the planet, with Nature, a playing-out of how we value life or not and how we see ourselves in relationship.
In relationship? Yes, in relationship, with everything!
The dead zone or No Mans Land between North Korea and South Korea, so I have heard, is an Eden for animals. Wherever humans are not there is a possibility of renewal for Nature. (Albeit there is that tiny detail that all of No Man's Land is a minefield.) After humans leave a place, detox and recovery have to happen but if we simply go away Nature will repair Herself. The time-line might not be convenient, but the bottomline is, we are the problem.
Just yesterday I was driving past a barn that was abandoned years ago, and every year there is less of the actual barn showing. First it was half covered with vines. Now there are small trees growing out of the holes in the roof. One time driving home from Virginia we passed an abandoned farm with one of those ceramic barrel-banded silos that were built to last a hundred years+ and there were some very healthy and happy-looking trees growing out of the top of the silo. It took them 40-50 years for their canopies to clear the opening, but, hey, what's the hurry?, if you catch my drift.
The other image that comes to me is the ant who has enough sense to climb out of the frying pan. But now that the frying pan is the world, what is a smart ant to do? I'm going to try and do something! But right now I want to track my ant-smarts over a 25-year period of my life spanning 1961 - 1988.
Let's see what I was writing while those trees were growing toward the opening of that silo in VA.
1961 (excerpt from my poem: "The war children")
We are the war children
Ebony and Lilly
Laughing beneath the stuffed belly
Of the moving sky.
We hear the sweet songs of birds
We feel the soft petal of a flower
That has erupted like a steel lance through concrete
And in answer to the the terrible question
That sprouts in cellophane flames
From the furnace of our delicate dreams
"Are you thankful for the beautiful peace?"
We answer, "Yes. Yes. Yes,
But why are our parents crying?"
1968 (excerpt from my poem: "Homecoming", the refrain)
Dance, dance, dance
Around the castles
Of the ants.
The last dance will be
The most deliberate
Around the home fires.
1981 (excerpt From my Blue Man: Poems for the late Nuclear Age)
Children are not born
like those pill-flowers
that we used to grow in a glass of water;
science is not that fertile.
The downward creeping rain
raises the poison level each day.
Nor will anything beautiful
shoot its roots into industrial compost;
The flowers that film out
of those cavities shaped like steel drums
take root in us . . . .
1988 (excerpt from a journal; my dawning awareness of the need for a spiritual point of view:)
"My comprehension of the environment is old-fashioned. I see it as a series of interpenetrating spheres. How it all fuses together is a mystery that isn't likely to be penetrated by me until I have gained more insight into how the individual self-archetype synchronizes psyche and physical processes with universal patterns that encompass my existence. Gaining some kind of perspective on my significance with respect to the world at large and the universe is one of the benefits of a religious viewpoint. A non-spiritual outlook would seem to have no chance of comprehending the scope of the empathy that our world requires to survive the environmental insults wrought by this century. Egoists, atheists need not apply."
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