For Marion
As the winds of sulphur and nitrogen dioxide bring acid rain to our rivers and streams, our urban peoples breathe thickness and residue.
Close your eyes.
As this auto waste joins with pesticides to wash into our reservoirs and streams, the oceans are filling with oil.
Close your eyes.
We have overgrazed and poisoned the Earth beneath us, robbed her of nutrient-giving forests.
Close your eyes.
We have played with fires so hot that entire islands will be radioactive for 25,000 years and huge portions of the former Soviet Union remain unlivable, while oil fields burn on in Kuwait and warheads are lost into the sea.
It’s not over ‘till it’s over.
We are killing the fish, the animals, the birds and the trees. To think we are not part of their ecosystem is sure death. The regenerating elements of water, earth, air and fire can no longer protect us from our blunders. We wait as the sun watches with viral intensity; slowly the ozone thins.
It is not intelligent to disrespect the balance of ecosystems.
Take my hand, friend.
There is no way out of this mess, but there is a way to move the situation with a positive force.
What we must hope for is something more complete than any one of us has ever dreamed, as life-giving as only all of our dreams put together could fathom.
We must strive to mutate into a species that understands balance, that is responsible for its actions, that listens to itself, whose work together is as collective, intricate and divergent as nature herself.
There is a way.
People are using other people, stealing their resources, working them to death, violating their bodies, not only making them appear to have no valure but making them believe that they have none.
Open your eyes.
People are living in fear of other people just because they are not like them.
This fear is driving them to hate, to kill, to rape, to rob themselves of the immeasurable wonder of knowing someone deeply and without brutality.
Now. Open.
People are numbed by generations of the horror and trauma.
They are possessed by a desire to fill the internal void of illusory valuelessness with any haunt that sings a promise. Money, Drugs and Sex rule like Gods, publicly worshipped in every town and every city on the planet. Bring us the stuff! Bring on the erotic clothed in emotionless armor! Make us high! Make us happy! Make us feel loved for a moment!
When we are involved in these things, we can’t, really see.
Wholeness and balance is the way to healing, friend.
It’s the hardest way there is, in the short run, but if you’ve ever known a drug addict as he stepped into the River of Changing Ways, you’d know the long run counts more than the alligator’s teeth, and that the alligators in the River of Changing Ways won’t kill anyone, as long as they climb up the opposite bank they came in from. We will have to change our ways, too; our attitudes, the basis of our lives, the way we perceive and finally, if we are lucky, our thinking.
When this happens, in small ways and in big ways, the spirit inside us will sing, our relationships will sing and some day, the world will sing, too.
There are so many windows to look through. Jesus had answers. Buddha, Yahweh, Karl Marx, Gandhi, Martin Luther, Malcolm X, the Goddesses, Mother Teresa, Great Spirit, Tao.....each—answers.
Their stories are the salves of prophets to soothe us during our global crisis. Their lessons are vital sutures needed to synthesize the truths that are screaming for us to listen without fear, so that some day we may pull our own force of destruction back into balance.
When it’s all said and done, the forests will creep back into being. Clean waters will flow.
Technology will be developed in the art of giving as well as receiving and the world will be our friend. We will feel more akin to total strangers, because through our rebuilt culture we will have come to not only understand but experience the other as ourselves; and yes, there will be peace.
There will be new ideas for new challenges in the time of our children’s children’s children who will remember how to laugh and play and think hard and cry when there is cause for crying.
I can see it,
and I know you can too,
because I am white.
I am yellow.
I am blue-black.
I am brown.
I am red.
I am black and blue.
I am you.