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Covid19 Journey Day 37


April 27, 2020

Today’s idea – Maybe teaching environmental science is taking a toll on my psyche.  The topics line up in our textbook like a steam roller with chapter titles that sound like a funeral dirge.: Environmental Pollution and Human Health; Air Pollution, Climate Change, and Ozone Depletion; Solid and Hazardous Waste;  Water Pollution; Human Population and Urbanization; Mining and Energy Resourcing; Saving Ecosystems. Humans have been hard on the Earth for the last few centuries. I have to go to the woods to heal my heart, yes, and to revive some sense of propriety as I look here for windows onto homeostasis and reciprocity with no dollar signs. I only have to kick up a bit of duff on the forest floor to find affirmation that the world is not broken; just a fever to kill the infection, nothing fatal.  Being a seeker, I comb through piles of information each day, like puzzle pieces, it brings together a broader view.
Last week, I asked myself, what will I learn from this pause? Now even in my dreams, I am tinkering with the answer.  I know I can live with less, and I can give more. I’m practicing fortitude, how to live in the mystery.  Today another question pushed up?  What if this is the beginning of our civilization’s collapse?  Our empire’s tumble. I can’t hold this improbable thought on my own; I call my eldest in Oregon.  He can handle these thought grenades from me. I don’t launch it right away.  I ask him what he’s up to; it’s late morning there.  He fills me in on his current project, something with laser cutters and CAD design. We toss out a couple of opinions on the state of things, and then I sneak it in, “Have you ever considered that this might be it?  The beginning of the fall of the modern roman empire?” He takes a moment to consider the question; I hear him chuckle.  His redirection is beautiful, giving me some advice that I gave him one time.  “I just do what I can do right now, what’s before me, and managing a major collapse, well I wouldn’t know where to start with that one. I’ll have to give it some thought.” It was a great echo twenty years long.  We don’t need to spend more time and energy with my mad but salient query of the day.  I’m almost to the park, and he wants to finish things up before lunch. I thank him for indulgencing me. “Love you loads. Bye.”  The courting songs of toads and cricket frogs by Cody Pond settle and center me when I finally take a seat outside; I begin to draft the notes for this journal entry.  The subsistence system that I have settled into, the way I supply my life is looking thin, feeling shaky.  Starting a model garden project here has been a fine way to get primed for more cultivation in Tennessee in another month. I will start a kitchen garden for my mother. 

Where is your water? Know your garden.

Maybe my mad query is just another spring emergent, whose blossom cycle takes hundred years, a moment in geologic time.

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