Skip to main content

Covid19 Journey Day 32


April 22, 2020

Today’s observation – Never could we have organized such a significant 50th for Earth Day as we have stumbled into today! The skies around major cities are clearer and cleaner than they have been in decades. People have slowed down consumption and are traveling less (especially by plane). Wildlife has been able to recharge populations and vitality, returning to pathways and life cycles without our disturbance.  On-campus, students, built two large garden boxes and pushed vegetable seeds into dirt-filled egg carton cells. (learning how Americans grow food at home) Our hands in the dirt, our project was like a spring tonic. I asked them how they celebrated Earth Day in their countries. One from Morocco shrugged, “we don’t.”  Another from Vietnam coyly shared that they turned off lights when no one was in a room.  I suppose practicing conservation is a beginning prayer, inviting in more and more reasons to appreciate our spaceship planet. I remain amazed at the ever-unfolding bounty of blessings that we are just beginning to scratch the surface about really understanding.  Muir once wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched up to everything else in the universe.” Science walks up to that mirror endlessly. The quality of life might have improved by living smaller. Still, In this quarantine isolation period, we have begun to suffer from a deficiency of community we relinquished for the common good. Muir’s idea resonates as we come to realize how much the interruptions of our favorite connections feel like a loss or even amputation; the ghost limbs ache. And salamanders have demonstrated, limbs grow back.  What remains are the touchstone memories bringing us back to what matters, we are building them now.  Rebecca Solnit had an essay in the NY Times this week, “Every disaster shakes loose the old order…many disasters unfold like a revolution.”  Let a post Covid revolution be colored with the memories of clean skies and a slower pace of life, of sea turtles having a robust nesting season, of how birdsong sang louder in cities as the roar of traffic dissipated.  Let us smile in a recall of how many kids were able to have Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Becky Thatcher moments, playing outside on a school day just before noon. Let us hold onto images of empty shelves where flour was displayed and yeast because people began baking bread.  Let us reminisce on  our ingenuity for sheltering in place at the state park. This 50th anniversary was the Earth Day when coincidence and happenstance helped us get closer to being Earthlings, to feeling more connected, in countless subtle and not so subtle ways, with everything else on the planet. I pray that when the bustle and noise return, as the air fills again into the aerial ocean of gray and brown, that we will feel the absence of nature, and that the feeling will turn into a tug.

Today’s image – My patron saint for Earth Day 2020 –hooded merganser. I have long admired these ducks from a distance with the help of binoculars. I took a seat by the river, as much to feel the air on my skin as to watch the stout currents rush downstream. In an eddy before me, this male merganser glided in, skidding to a stop on the water. The crow-sized, thin beaked diver gave the impression that he’d dropped in to chat with a pair of Canada geese in the same eddy. I was only a few meters away, and soon he appeared as curious about my pup and me as I was of him.  Mergansers excel at travel in water and air; his anatomy is not suited for walking or waddling on land.  He launches into flight by running across the water’s surface. Oh, I am adept at land walking and moving in water, but no real talent for flying unless I board a noisy gas hawk. Imagining what message he could pass along to me, I also consider mine to him. His obvious advice is to keep swimming, keep diving, with high praise for a fluid life.   I would tell him that we all spacewalkers, and the land is just more substantial water.  There are reports of a man walking on water; he counters that it happens everywhere!  Water striders, lizards, mergansers, snakes.  I can walk on water in January and February.  If this duck were an omen, what would that mean? A visit from a wild duck tells me it’s time to connect with family.  John Muir put him up to that.

Today’s idea - We attract, are attractive, and even magnetic.  I sit here in a moment that is an expression of my line of choices, woven into my family’s choices, which is weft to my country’s choices, all fluid and rooted in the universal becoming. In one hand, I hold serendipity and sacrifice, in the other, genius and folly. I think I attract what I need, even if I don't know I need it. Happy Earth Day!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.

Covid Journal Entry 14

April 4, 2020 Today’s image – Exploring social cohorts. So, on campus now there is a small village of us living together, the remnants of those in residence this year.   We are an international population: seven from the US, six from Vietnam, five from China,   four from Morocco, one from the DR and two dogs/three cats.   We share four large buildings where we live, take our meals, study and exercise, on a five-acre campus. The rest of the two hundred and sixty or seventy odd community members are sheltering in their homes; some of the teachers and administrators dropping by during the week to work in their offices.   We have had little or no contact with them so far.   Our chef and his crew of two come in by rotation to prepare and serve the daily meals, a maintenance duo tend to the essential tasks and repairs, the city services haul away trash and recycling, the postal service, UPS and FedEx still deliver mail and packages.   It’s Iowa and the gove...

Covid19 Journal Entry 13

April 3, 2020 Today’s idea – I want to follow a suggestion of looking at my situation through different lenses. A macro lens magnifies my considerations of things, hopefully so that I might notice what I’m overlooking. Peering through these eyes, I see life slow down and seem more intentional with the extended solitude of quarantine.   The introverted place in me is mostly fine with this state of things, until the longings for companionship or just hanging out with friends stirs up unruly emotions. These vex me because they take on the old voice of negative self-talk.   In this head space I can turn normal feelings of missing my family, particularly sons and granddaughters into an old loop of “they don’t mis me so much anyway because I’m not around like most good grandmothers are.”   I’ve even given myself a moniker, VAG, visiting aunt grandmother.   Somehow it makes me feel less consequential but still adorable.   We live out our choices and our strokes o...