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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