I learned something else from my illness - that my brokenness and the world’s brokenness are no different. We in the dominant culture are broken because the culture is broken, insupportable, and based on power and greed. Society raises us, raised me, to be disconnected from the earth and from other life forms, and we then go on to wreck the earth. We live in dark and desperate times.
This summer,
water use in our dry
northern California
will be restricted.
My little pomegranate tree,
only two years old,
just burst out with
three deep red flowers.
Last year the tiny fruit fell off,
too heavy for the spindly
young branches to bear.
I don’t want the baby tree to die
from lack of water, so I will
catch shower-heating water
in a bucket and save the liquid
from steaming artichokes
to dribble onto the dry soil.
The rains do not come, cannot come.
No rain to evoke sadness
or a flow of memories, but sadness
and the ghosts of memories arrive.
What comes from the sky is dust,
what water arrives is in our eyes.
Looking up for omens and comets,
we struggle to see, to hear something,
to wait for a message, to change.
And still, I love the earth.
The earth Is not the world.
The world of drought and fire,
floods and reckless storms
is of our making.
Our tears are salty and insufficient.
The blown dust and ash clog our eyes.
Yet despite all the horror, all the brokenness,
the redwoods and pines draw up
and display their good green life.
The earth still and always reminds us
to keep on, to love anyway,
to sit down with our ancestors’ ghosts,
to keep telling the stories.
The earth has everything, bears everything –
us, the trees, the life-giving waters,
the myriad other beings.
With all that we have done to her,
can we do any less?
How to figure out what comes next, what to do to heal the earth, what to do to heal this fear? While I wait, I pass a little time each morning by drawing a SoulCollage® card. The card becomes a guide for the day. Interestingly, the card I drew today is of a woman in a dark place full of pomegranates. She is bent over, peering into a cauldron. The cauldron belongs to Hecate, who is a guide for Persephone and Demeter. She is also the goddess of the crossroads.
Sitting here is like being at a crossroads, trying to figure out the way to go. Waiting and writing, writing and waiting, it is essential to trust whatever flows from the pen onto the page.
Here are the words that come: Real fear is necessary when you are in danger; anticipating or imagining danger and going into fear is self-torture.
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