The World Needs You

 

Gaea was holding out both hands imploringly, rather than Uncle Sam’s commanding finger in the “I Want You” poster, but this poster’s meaning was just as emphatic, and just as manipulative. It was a plea for young people to join the UNESCO reclamation service, to labor to preserve human habitat and what remained of animal habitat in areas suffering the worst of global warming.

I’d hung it in my classroom at the beginning of the school year more because I thought I’d enjoy seeing Gaea’s sad face in moments of abstraction than because I thought it would have any beneficial effect, but to my surprise over the course of the year several students had asked me about how to get in touch with UNESCO and what their requirements were. More surprising still, a couple of teachers had as well. I’d directed them all to the web site listed at the bottom of the poster.

Now, I was clearing out my things at the end of the school year, and I wasn’t going to be back in the Fall over what I considered to be a ridiculous misunderstanding, but which had tarnished my reputation seemingly beyond redemption. I looked at the poster and read the address at the bottom of the poster, looked up at Gaea’s sad, anxious face and said, “Okay, you got me.”

 

https://www.facebook.com/silvermoonshaman/posts/758775088115698

It Was After Dinner

 

I was washing the dishes, thinking over my options for the rest of the evening, when I was suddenly struck with an appalling feeling that I didn’t like any of them. That I hadn’t really liked any of my options for a very long time.

I felt an urge to drop the sponge in the sink and walk straight out the door, not even pause to put on my hat, just grab my pocketbook and go. Head on out and take off down the road and stop at a motel when I got tired, or just sleep in a field if I felt like it. Watch the Sun rise in a strange place and watch it set in a different one, just for the pleasure of seeing it happen. I wanted that.

I really did want that. Wanted it so badly that it scared me. I could barely feel the dishes in my hands as I continued to scrub them and rinse them, the blood was coursing through my arteries so hard.

I finished the dishes, just barely. Managed to get the last of them into the drying rack without any of them falling to the floor, somehow. But what was I going to do? I knew I couldn’t stay, no matter how much I loved my husband, I just couldn’t go on living in this house, going through these same motions day after day, any longer. I needed to get out and get moving.

I walked into the living room, and was slightly surprised to find my husband there. He was usually closed up in his study at this time of the evening, at work with his papers.

He put his arms around me and said, “Teddy, what do you say we close up the house for awhile and hit the road, just the two of us?”

I guess that’s why we’ve stayed together all these years: we can read each other’s moods so well, sometimes it’s downright eerie.

 

https://issuu.com/dolbychadwickgallery/docs/stay_inspired_single_pages

You Have Permission To Dance

 

I climbed off the table slowly and carefully.

“Are you in any pain?”

“I’m waiting for something to begin to hurt, but so far, nothing does. That’s miraculous, but also kind of…eerie, considering what I’ve been through. Not just the room full of gas that ate my skin off, but what I’ve been through for years before that. My knee doesn’t hurt, and it hurt for a long time.”

“We replaced a lot of things besides your skin and your lungs, yes.”

I ran a hand over my arm.

“By the way…am I always going to be this pink?”

“No. Your normal pigmentation should come back in a few months. Also your hair.”

I flexed and bent and reached.

“This really feels amazing. I feel like dancing.”

“You have permission to dance.”

I laughed, and executed an about-face, and then another, winding up facing him again. I dropped down into a squat and leapt up to touch the ceiling, then did begin actually dancing.

It felt good. So good.

 

https://www.altaredbygrief.com/blog

And Numberless Blades of Grass

 

The editor looked at the painting, which showed an astronaut walking toward a spaceship, with a trail of discarded objects behind him, representing parts of his life which he had discarded on his way towards his goal: a brightly-colored ball, a book of poetry, an Army rifle.

“I like it, but . . . put some grass on the ground, so it doesn’t look like just a Surrealist abstraction.”

I sputtered, “But it is a Surrealist abstraction!”

He glared at me.

“I hate Surrealism. Put some grass on it.”

I sighed, took the painting back, closed it in its cover and left. I took the train home, fuming, trying to concentrate on my book, thinking about grass.

Back at home, I set the painting on my easel and began adding grass to the painting. He wanted grass, okay, I’d give him grass. I painted blade after blade after blade, turning the elegant surreal landscape I had created into a grassy plain – which was plenty surreal itself, as I recalled from having crossed it hitchhiking years before. Man, there was a lot of it. A surreal amount, one might say.

I painted grass and I painted grass, first around the objects and the astronaut’s feet anf disturbed grass in a trail behind him. Then I spread the grass out to the sides, left and right, into the distance. Hours passed, and I painted grass until my hand ached, and I thought I might have permanently used up my brain’s grass-painting chemicals, but I painted me some grass.

I brought the painting in the next day. The editor liked it. He bought it. I was able to bring home a load of groceries, and pay the electric bill.

Grass….

 

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "It's work."

     https://madlyinlovewithlife.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/rabindranath-tagore-the-stream-of-life/                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Which Is Why We Have Songs Of Praise

 

"Life isn’t easy and straightforward. It’s full of challenges and difficulties. Trouble will come to us uninvited and without warning. Man is prone to trouble as sparks are to fly upward, and under much the same circumstances: as the result of invisible forces surrounding us. But it is precisely because life is like that, that we should choose to embrace it and be grateful for it. It is because life is a damn pain that we should be glad to experience it.

“A prisoner of war once looked down in disgust at the bowl of slop and weevil-infested crust in front of him, and then noticed his cellmate saying grace over it. He said, ‘You’d say grace over a meal like that?’ His comrade looked startled and said, ‘Yeah – thank God for that!’

“It is in that spirit that we should each of us embrace the problems we face and be glad for the opportunity to work through them. We should not merely accept and endure our flawed lives, but rejoice in them. That is why we have songs of praise for our life in this fallen world.”

 

The Magic Eight-Ball Says, "Because screaming all the time makes your throat hurt."

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2017/10/and-bob-dylan-too-poem-by-mary-oliver.html

My Son Is In The Hospital

When I answered the robocall, I wasn't sure whether the call saying "a family member" was hospitalized was genuine or not. Instead of calling the number provided, I looked up OHSU online. Yes, it was true. And it was Tes.

It's been three years since I've had direct confirmation that Tesfaye (Tes-FA-yah) Desta Burt was alive. My guess is, he's been on and off the streets in that time, probably in Portland, still unable to lead a normal life because of his schizophrenia, choosing to silence the voices he hears with alcohol rather than taking the medications prescribed for him. People had said that they thought they'd seen him, but this was the first time that legal authorities had confirmed his existence.

They confirmed that he'd been in and out of jail and hospitals in that time, and that while in jail on one occasion, he had been assaulted by another prisoner and had lost an eye, which reminded me of Oscar Wilde saying that if this was how Her Majesty treated her prisoners, she shouldn't be allowed to have any.

He'd been found unconscious on the street, having survived either a hit-and-run collision or an assault, with head injuries and a torn artery. His brain had suffered a shock and was not functioning normally. He was unable to walk, speak or sit up unassisted.

When I visited him the first time, he seemed to recognize me but was unable to speak. He could make a few seemingly random vocalizations that sounded more like speaking in tongues than actual language. He was also held in restraints to keep him from falling out of bed.

The next time, he was using single words correctly, and a few days later he was speaking in complete sentences. He was also able to get up and walk in the hallway. His restraints had been replaced by a mesh enclosure which allowed him freedom of movement within the bed but prevented him from falling or from taking off walking unescorted. It was only unzipped when there was someone in the room with him. He'd also begun feeding himself, although he was using his hands rather than utensils.

The plan is for him to go into a two-week intensive rehabilitation program once his body has made a sufficient recovery. Where he goes after that is problematic: each of his sisters lives in Portland, but neither of them can provide him with a room of his own, and each has a rambunctious three-year-old. He could come here, where there is more room and more quiet, but I tire quickly these days. I don't know what to do.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Reply hazy, ask again later. I hate this."

You Were Wild And Gentle

 

My lovely creatures, how I wish things had been easier for you. You came into this world at such a difficult time. We were in the middle of such a difficult period, trying to survive a crisis we had created in the planet’s biosphere through our own carelessness and selfishness, meddling with the germ plasm of hundreds of species for fun and profit, prodding the next planet over in a careless fashion without really committing ourselves to doing anything with it, and then you came along, and at first we didn’t really give you the attention you deserved.

We should have set firm priorities, put the climate first and you second, since in the latter case we owed it to you for having brought you into being, an intelligent species, and in the former case we owed it to both you and to ourselves. Instead we neglected both and the results are as we see them: the planet is reduced to this sadly diminished condition, our species is fallen to a fraction of its former population and survives only in pockets, either as miserable hunter-gatherers or as tiny enclaves who preserve the ancient technology but won’t for much longer, trying to share what we know with you, since you are in a better position to thrive in this world.

You were sweet and joyful creatures when we first met you. Much as we probably were when our own species was new. It seemed a shame to have to break into your innocence with knowledge of ecosystems and energy economies and invasive species, but we had to. We could see, as you proliferated in the world we could no longer survive in, that you were well on your way to re-creating the same blunders we had made.

Good luck, young ones. Take good care of this planet, and the new ones besides. Share Earth’s life with them, as we had hoped to.

 

https://poems.com/poem/night-on-the-island/