In a recent training with Deena Metzger, one of my friends told a story about going on a retreat near Lake Erie and being dismayed by seeing turbines around the lake. Deena then said something that has stayed with me: The lake has to live with it. It can't leave.
She went on to say that it's impossible to hold the awareness of what colonial mind has wrought, and yet we must hold it. To revision things, we must move into a different mind.
And so, this poem:
Glowing red
in the night sky,
the turbines’
hellish light
reflects in
the calm waters
of the winter lake
that can never escape
their intrusion.
The lake must bear
what pollutes it.
We can walk away,
leave the fiendish glow,
but we still
carry its shadow
with us.
Lake Erie at night
