The world is changing at a rapid clip. Whether I like it or not. (And I do not like it!)
And yet—I continue my practice of meditating on peace, even on days where peace seems impossible. Which is every day.
This past weekend, I held another session of the now-monthly Climate Meditation and Writing Workshop. It’s becoming a community, with changing members, but always a handful of returning folks. One of the people who came mentioned that she is trying to notice what leaves her feeling better, and doing more of that. What makes YOU feel more centered, more present, more awake? Notice. And remember to do more of that (why do I sometimes forget?).
For one of the prompts in workshop, I read aloud “Wild” by Maggie Smith, followed by “In a Country” by Larry Levis. Both poems invite readers to consider how to love the world and also, how to imagine the future. As the poems were read aloud, we underlined words and phrases that caught us. And then, weaving in some of the bits we underlined, did a twenty-minutue fastwrite where we imagined a future, simply letting ourselves find flow. Writing our way back to peace, even if fleetingly.
Here’s my fastwrite:
Go on then, said God. And foolishly, we did. We invented a world built of hubris, all teeth
and need. Our own. And now, there will be trouble.
Good trouble, sang the wren from the boughs of her little poem. We all said she’d come to sing
us hope, though she would have said otherwise.
For a while, we seemed to be getting closer. From the crest of the ridge, we could see the fields
unfolded across the hills in neat squares and rectangles, a few trapezoids and triangles—green, gold, brown, striped with budding corn, soy. Through the orderly quilt, a shiny creek snakes, with a soft boa of bushes along the bank.
On occasion, pulled by a child or a dog, we walked out along the creek, where choirs of birds sang in thorny caves of underbrush. Always smoke in the distance. Always, the grinding of gears and spinning of wheels on the road that knifed through the fields, roared over the creek.
Today, it is snowing heavily. Beneath a polyester-spun blanklet printed with deer and pine, birches
and vines, we lie in our dream fields, dreaming of the future. We see washed-up cities greened by trees of heaven and honeysuckle. It is quiet here. Or, if not quiet, a different sort of noisy. No air brakes on overpasses.
A fox tears across a crumbling roadbed, a red comet across a cracked sky.
Geese honk; deer graze.
And the wolf tears open the throat of a fawn. And there are many hungry mouths, as there have always been hungry mouths.
From a heavenly exile beyond describing, we smile and watch the squares we laid out disappear
into soft-edged chaos.
(I wrote this piece a couple years ago. It is sadly not an isolated example of injustice when it comes to household violence against children and women in particular. I recently edited and read this essay at V-day at Women Writing for (a) Change, in Ohio, so I am publishing the edited version here.)
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