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31
Aug
2021
This poem came about when we finally got some serious rain, ending months of drought, fire, heat domes. Somehow it turned into an exercise in alliteration.
Instead of reading it silently, try rolling the words around on your tongue, See if it makes any difference.
Moisture seeps into the soil.
Invisible fungi wrap filaments around roots
that thread through the dry debris
of former life; they suck sustenance
back into the synapses of the forest floor.
The green fuse lights; sap creeps into
capillaries long closed for self-defence.
Tree tops wave triumphantly.
Categories: Poetry
Tags: rain, rejoicing
20
Thursday August 19, 2021
Everything is personal. Everything. Even whatever happened 13.8 billion years ago -- if it weren’t personal you wouldn’t be here to read these words.
Or, to put it another way, there is no such thing as impersonal information. Abstract terms describing theoretical concepts -- like civil rights, climate change, government corruption, and foreign aid -- take on meaning only in a personal context.
Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not advocating personal attacks on someone’s appearance or morals. Rather, recognize that whatever you say, the person you’re speaking to will take it personally.
If they don’t, they’re not listening.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: communication, Language, personal
Sunday August 15, 2021
Another school classmate died last week. David Scott died in Washington DC August 5.
David and I went through our first six grades together at a school in the foothills of the Himalayas. Then we lost touch.
I left India with my parents, and have only been back briefly. David, on the other hand, spent most of his working life in India -- four decades with the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries. He was professor of history of religions in theological colleges, a chaplain, and a study-center director.
I didn’t get to know David again until I attended a school reunion some 40 years later.
Other classmates were much closer to him. So I don’t write this column deep in grief. I write it because David’s death brings into sharp focus the harsh reality of growing older. We lose friends.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: aging, David Scott, friends, loss
13
Thursday August 12, 2021
Over the transition from July to August, I spent about ten days on Vancouver Island. Five times, I went hiking in old-growth forests. Massive trunks soar upwards, 200-300 feet, so straight, so vertical, that they might have been laid out by an engineer with a spirit level. At the top, the canopy of branches opens out into a fretwork vault, lacing the sky with a canopy of needled embroidery.
I took pictures, of course. But pictures cannot capture the awe engendered by an old-growth forest. I need Emily Carr’s exuberant brush strokes, her explosive splashes of colour, to bring out the sacredness of these trees.
But it’s not all about the cathedral image.
Down below, fallen giants nurse new seedlings. Young hemlocks, mostly. One such nurse tree had become a day care for over 30 young hemlocks growing along its length,. The death of an old matriarch had opened a trapdoor of sky to let the light in.
I wondered what that forest might say to us, if it could speak.
Tags: wisdom, forests, Wohlleben, Simard
Sunday August 8, 2021
Seventy-six years ago yesterday, the world’s first atomic bomb seared the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Writer Tom Englehart makes Hiroshima personal.
In a column in TomDispatch, he described a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which, he says, “can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home to New York City, I could barely talk about it.
“While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust. Hiroshima took place in seconds, a single blinding flash of heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even centuries of heat.”
Tags: climate change, Hiroshima, Englehart