To Converse With Dreams

I once asked my dreams to
whisper to me
of the unknown,
of what it means
to be alive.
So they did,
in shadowy, faceless messages,
faded to deepest indigo.

These dreams showed me
more of the world
than waking eyes
ever could.
No one was there,
in my thoughts,
in my dreams,
to sternly hiss
while their fragile hands
pulled tautly on my
eyelashes.
No one told me how,
or why,
because that was in their head.
Not mine.

And so I heard this call;
look for what is real.
I saw entire histories,

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soaked with blood,
unravel into nothingness,
and realized that we often
worship nothing more
than someone else’s thoughts.

What is money, to me,
but a symbol?
In itself, it is less than
dust.
Worthlessness is commonplace
to those who see
the hideousness of concrete,
and the gravely red
shade of the sky
at midnight.
Things
are just things,
and they are not alive.

It is my eyes that see the world,
shouldn’t my ideas accompany them?
Shall I run, breathless,
into the forest,
where the wind
catches in the ferns,
and the orange needles
crunch beneath my feet?

Some may say
that we are better off
being made of metal,
but stand back and look,
just for a moment.
Look at how bizarre
our existence is,
how distant it is from
what is truly feeding
this reality.

Life matters,
more than riches,
more than the made-up things
that bind us to being
who we are now,
rather than being
who we could someday be,

so long as I know
what matters
what is real
what is mine.

Listen, I told my dreams.
The purpose of culture
is to make sense of the world,
but I don’t want their meaning;
I want my own.
Listen, I said. So they did.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Freedom is found
precisely in the point
between earth and sky;
among the breathing,
living, spirits,

the lacy leaves
whose edges
drink the milk of the sun.
Their perished
ancestors are now
the softest soil.
Below every wind in this world
there are endless sights
to stretch your arms around.
And below us, below your very feet
is a presence
so ancient that it seems to sing
of fire
of redwood trees
of dawn curling over wildflowers
of hummingbirds chattering above pebble-lined creeks.

Of us, maybe.
And with it, the truth;
that we are here; that
we are the deep green of cedars in the rain,
we are the rough, spotted underside of ferns,
we are red currant blossoms being kissed by bees,
we are the quick, black eyes of  barred owls.

We are nature,
children of this world,
and so long as the great sky
drifts over our eyes,
we forever shall be

free.

Summer

(With apologies to E.E. Cummings)

in Just-

summer when the rocks peek
out from the unswollen river the
naked sky is

bright blue not white

and sunbands come

singing from maple leaves and

cottonwood shadows and it’s

summer

when the steller’s jay is screeching

the red

sunset sky is

clear purple not gray

and starlights come whispering

from ursa major and Venus and

it’s

summer

and

our

sun choked

summer sky is

bright

blue

never white

The Story of Why

 

Go back… go back, and I will tell you how it happened. First we, as humans, were hunter-gatherers. Foragers, traveling nomadically in bands of people we loved. Everything was shared, everyone was equal. Then we began to plant seeds, and let the rains water them. These we planted with our own hands. We let their remains return to the earth, let the native species return. Then we moved on to tend a new wild garden. There were leaders, at this time, and they led by example. They always gave back to the people.

Soon there were animals trapped behind fences, and fields of crops watered by distant rivers. What need was there, now, to reserve land? Use it all, use it all for farming and to house our growing population, they said. We don’t need it anymore. They stopped depending so heavily on the wild things. It was a secure way of life, though it took more work. An illusion grew, an illusion of control. Reverence shifted from nature to man. Until one day, when the snarling, selfish  leader sought to claim elitism. That he was noble, and the others were commoners. He kept taking, but stopped giving. He did little work and kept the wealth for himself.

The newly-branded commoners went along with it, because that was the easy thing to do. Over time, they forgot the old ways.  They forgot the wide open valleys where every plant and animal belonged to all of humanity. Where there was no distinction in wealth because those who had too much gave to those who had less. Now they worked, not for their own sustenance, but for their leader’s.

More food meant more people, which necessitated more control over the masses. Governments and religion grew. They tried to make everyone forget the goodness of nature,  to increase their reliance on this new lifestyle. They succeeded. Those who think less are easier to manipulate. Trade grew, and people knew how to do  less and less. Their lives were spent making things for other people, receiving meaningless tokens in return. With this money they bought the food they could’ve been capturing themselves.  There was no sense of accomplishment with this. No freedom to it. But why would they do this? Why? Because they were raised that way. Enculturation is a powerful thing.

Soon there were too many people, more than the world had ever seen. They took too much. Hardly anyone knew each other, just hoards of faceless ghosts. Resources began to decline. To produce more food, beastly machines were invented. They spewed poison from their mouths. Pesticides, herbicides, genetic modifications, and synthetic fertilizers were created to keep up with the food demand. More food, more people, more food, more people.

But this can’t go on forever. There will come a time when there is not enough land to grow enough food for all the people. We can’t cover the whole planet in farms. Especially not when we’re taking up so much room with this excessive population.

And we certainly can’t go back to the old ways now. Not all of us. The Earth doesn’t give enough for that. If we hadn’t discovered agriculture, we would never have had this problem. We would have regulated ourselves through what nature provided. On top of that, look what our aftermath has wrought. Polluted water and air. Decimated animal populations. Loss of habitat and ecosystems.

Everything is connected – this is proven by science. Everything is affected by something else. You see, we still need nature. Even with industrial agriculture. We need it for water, for fertile soil, for regulation of weather. For breath, for rain, for the pollination of bees.  For all the little things we haven’t even realized yet.

The elite still have their hold over us. They’re not going to question this way of life. Why would they? They have all the superfluous material goods that simulate happiness. If anyone is going to be content with detachment from nature, with its eventual ruin, it would be those who “benefit” from it. But do they really, in the long run?

What’s been missing for the last two thousand years or so in Western society? A reverence for the natural world. We don’t really have control; we never did. There is a necessary sense of caution that has been absent when tampering with nature. Look at all of human existence, and two thousand years of forgetfulness no longer seems like much. We live in a way that makes us no more liberated, no happier, than our foraging/horticultural/pastoral ancestors were. We are detached in all senses of the word. From the Earth. From each other. From our very selves.

Go forward in time… go forward. Maybe people living a few hundred years from now will look back at history, at our generation, and say, those are the ones who remembered.

Speak, Abandoned Can

I don’t belong here.
I told you that,
I told you and now you’ve wrapped me in
your thorns.
Oh, you fiendish blackberry vines,
you ignorant weeds.
No one loves you!
Here, lost on the slant
of old mud
of torn plastic shopping bags
under this bridge.
Who would ever pay for you?
Who would spend their good money
on stinking white pith?
You are not your berries, you know.
While I, molded of aluminium,
came shining and fresh
from a humming factory;
I, who was filled with bubbles
of colored sugar?
And then they chose me,
exchanged their precious money
for me,
reaching into the glass box
that never let warm air touch us.
There were others… others like me…
sometimes it was nice,
nice just to know that they were there.
But the hands came, you see,
they pressed their lips against me,
drew out my insides.
It didn’t hurt,
but now I’m quite hollow.
After all this, all this,
the hands tossed, me,
my empty body,
now so light,
over the molding bridge.
Like I was nothing.
…
Well, blackberry bushes.
Well, you vagrant nothings.
Here we are.
Seems that maybe they didn’t choose me
after all.
I’m just the shell.
The carcass.
I’m not my soda, you know.

The Middle of Nowhere

I’ve heard people scorn at passages of wilderness. “There’s nothing there, nothing to do. Out in the middle of nowhere,” these people have said, their eyes still turned to a television screen. “Much better to stay near the city.” But what, may I ask, do you do in the city? Upon dark roads of breathless concrete? You spend money. You close your windows because it smells like car poison. And you sit in front of screens. Surrounded by man-made falsities, and by lifeless men.

And what would you do in the open forest? In a grass-stroked valley between blue hills? Would you whistle to the song of the song sparrow, or brush your fingers over a quiet stream’s surface? Maybe lie in the meadow grass and feel how the sky spins. Feel the ancient rhythms of the earth itself, and of all the life that sways over it. Aspen trees that color the wind. Velvet thimble-berry leaves. Hidden ants and hummingbirds and deer who count their beginning same as yours. Then glimpse, in the clear tongue of dreams, the truth. That there is no place more real, more fragrant, more beautiful.

That there is no place more worthy of being called somewhere.

Dogwood Tree

Everywhere I walk, I look for a Dogwood tree. How I found one, today, skinny and weak! It was growing beneath a cedar tree in the former mayor’s yard. Those bright, flat flowers sprung into my eyes, held onto me for several minutes as I hovered behind the log fence. Strangers, strangers are all these people who live in these houses. And this concrete, too, is foreign. But the trees, the plants… the red currants I discovered up the secret stone stairs along the river. The winds that sing from both directions, speaking of rain. Those dark, rich, clouds, that add texture to an otherwise white sky. Look at it all! It is mine. It is no one’s. As are garlic-mustard groves, bitter but edible. Those hundreds of non-native plants that compete against those that were here first. We are all natives of somewhere, aren’t we? Aren’t we, sky? It’s not the plant, it’s the place. But before they became native, they were just visiting, too. It takes time, but there is still much to fix. So teach me the names of plants, the black cottonwoods that such us the wind, the flowering Dogwoods. Let us see. Let us forget the made-up things.

 

 

Modernity

 

As the wind called
down from full moon’s heaven,
burning cold, pink spikes
on withered grass,
I heard them drum, drum,
olive drums,
pulling silence from their sleeves.

So it was in the beginning,
when the Earth was still a woman’s chest;
before they dipped their fingers
in pools of fragrant, sleeping blindness
then licked the poison-fingers clean,
with mouths cut straight from velvet.

Minds too great,
and closed to pictures
floating in the night,
once showed me dead crab skeletons
braided on lengths of
careful strings.

The theory of a thousand eyes,
dying softly in the dusk,
came to them in
faded dreams
born of fire, earth, and dust.

But look how they turn and point
and sneer,
and let the sky stay hidden
above their heads,
leaving kisses on paper slips
to keep
for when the world is dead.

Oh, and listen to their beating
tongues,
that once sang to the life
in animal hearts,
now seeking with vengeance
and prime authority
infertile rows of mounds of dirt.

Dirty weeds and rainless skin
are all they want for children’s
folds of fat,
to lose the first
and last
and only,
the thousand ancestors who bathed
sweet words in sunlight.

Days upon millions
in the great lobes of
forward, backward
time,
what does it mean to be anything
when all of it is from their
minds?

And if all of this is to see existence,
I should like to see it
not with yellow, glowing streetlights
but with the space
behind the eyes
that holds the template
of this universe.

There are no mirrors
in the forest,
there are no reflections
in the bark of trees.
To come from many cultures,
there’s only one
that they can see.

Outside,
inside,
vanished smile.
Speechless,
you are empty to our
sterile graces.

Speechless,
you are open to follow
the winds that wander
below blue-spirited
cedar limbs.

Mmm, and crouch
and coil
the fallen leaves,
like cloaks of veins of
spider webs,
between your shoeless feet.

Far too many passages of breath
slink up in smoke,
to above,
where they see the same
old face,
clothed in different cuts of
dry and weary cloth.

Weaved and woven and
will to weave again,
of crying, ancient passages,
wrote in a trembling hand.

How does this mean anything,
when it comes from human’s
furless minds of might,
that take and kill and
mold the earth
between teeth stained with
metal-tasting sheets of blood.

I am just a person on this world,
just one person in all history of thoughts,
not just me, but so are they.
And so they have been, and will always be.

Looking, with one eye dead,
for seeds and caves and cars
for them to conquer.
But don’t they hear the leaves,
in the falling, sculpting wind,
the leaves that are
drumming, drumming, heavily,
against the still night air?

No, they don’t,
they don’t,
they hear no birds.
Nor greet the sun,
nor watch the mountain
turn pink at sunset’s setting.

They search and groan
and clip away the earth.
And only if there was nothing left,
would they have what they were looking for.

The Last Star

The girl and her grandfather walk
across the concrete land
across the filthy, broken shadows
to the very edge of the city.
There, where screams are lighter,
like air,
they stare into the night wind’s face.
“Don’t you see it, there?”
The man points his shaking finger.
“Right at the edge of the sky?”
She looks, she squints,
blowing wind from the side of her lips.
“Grandfather,” she mumbles.
“Nothing is there but blackness.”
And she turns away,
with swift steps toward the city
that creaks and burns
with light.

Even Then, Would It Be Enough?

Sometimes it all comes at me. All the things that need changed. The air and water pollution. All the toxic chemicals and pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and industrial emissions and oil spills and wastelands of trash that will never rot. Habitat loss and deforestation. Death by the thousands.

Even if I buy less stuff I don’t need. Even if I recycle, and reduce my waste by using reusable alternatives. Even if I choose organic food – plants grown in tender plots of poly-culture, free from toxicity.

Or food from the farmer’s market. Produce that never had to rely on carbon dioxide to fly across the world. Locally raised, free-roaming beef. No more need to worry about the water it took to grow grain for them to eat. Or the synthetic fertilizers that nourished the dead soil. That were washed with the rain into nearby rivers. Or the pollution exuded by the trucks that transported their food, and their own carcasses.

Even if I used less energy, or bought everything energy-efficient. If I drove less, or bought an electric car. Even if my energy came from sun, wind, or water.

Even then, would it be enough?

Storms are wilder. More frequent. Glacial ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. Droughts, and therefore famines, are worsening in dry lands. There is pressure on all areas of the environment. Whether we’re the greatest cause of this or not… does it matter?

I can’t pretend to know for sure about global climate change. Yes, the average temperature is getting warmer, globally. Part of this is definitely due to the Earth’s natural cycle. But how much? It’s happening too fast, scientists say. We’re putting out more carbon dioxide, more methane, than would naturally be in the atmosphere. It must be contributing something .

Some people seem to think that more carbon dioxide means more trees. Since trees “inhale” it. Since life thrives in warm jungles. But so many factors affect the growth of forests. Trees can only absorb so much. And heat isn’t conducive to abundant life. Deserts, certainly, are also warm.

Whether climate change is solely our fault or not, it’s happening. And even if you don’t believe in it, you can’t argue that we aren’t doing other harm to the environment. Our lifestyle isn’t working. This hundred year old way of life… it’s flawed. Don’t we get it? Don’t we get it, yet?

But it can’t change overnight. Especially not when the biggest problem of all is the population of this planet. If it wasn’t so substantial, our actions would hardly impact the environment so negatively. And as more and more people spring from the soil, our resources won’t grow to match them. At one point or another, the population will reach its maximum. Then gradually decrease.

So what now? I won’t have ten kids someday, that’s for sure. In the meantime, I’ll keep my lifestyle as natural as possible. Because, even if there are seven billion of us, if we all do just that? Well… then maybe that’s enough.