Around 4 million people, many of them students, but all ages, protested around the world yesterday.  They gathered to speak in protection of the planet on which we live, an organism that needs to function successfully in order for us to survive.   

On June 20, 1979, Democratic president Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the White House roof to use the rays of the sun to heat water.

When Republican Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he immediately had them removed.  

The United States has produced more emissions than any other country since the start of the industrial age and yet we have a president now rolling back 85 environmental regulations.

Reading the list makes me sick, so maybe we’ll expire in an ingestion of disgust so it won’t matter that our air is unbreathable and our water polluted.

Meanwhile, 16 year old Greta Thunberg has stepped out of the classroom to speak.  Our leader has risen, our Joan of Arc.

Each of us is a process; our planet is a process, a “systematic series of actions directed to some end”.  We’re not helpless; we’re here with a purpose, a community of interdependence stimulated and programmed to evolve.

On Wednesday, Greta said this to members of Congress in the House Ways and Means Committee.

“This is not the time and place for dreams, this is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history we need to be wide awake.”

“This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced, you cannot solve a crisis without treating it as one. Stop telling people that everything will be fine. As it looks now, everything won’t be fine.”

“If it continues like that we’re not going to get anywhere, actually transform words into action — the action we need now.”

And on this beautiful day, as we in the Northern hemisphere tilt toward fall, the leaves are changing color, preparing to drop, and in that letting go, enrich and protect the roots in the ground.  They show us the way. We can drop into awareness of the crisis, leaving the branches of support open and clear. We’re led by nature, and the natural processes that have given us Greta. She inspires us to act.

It’s Global Climate Strike Day.  It’s beautiful here. Mother Earth is offering her support for the day, the early morning light touched with gold.

Yesterday I walked in twilight through the forest duff of Old Mill Park to the Mill Valley library which looks out from full length windows onto redwood trees.

That might be enough for an evening but I was there to hear two poets read.  

First, Matthew Siegel read, and then,  Padraig O Tuama, an Irish poet, who headed Corrymeela for years.

Unfamiliar with it, I checked out their website: https://www.corrymeela.org

Corrymeela is Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organisation. We began before “The Troubles” and continue on in Northern Ireland’s changing post–conflict society.  The organisation grew organically from the original Community members, and today almost 40 full–time staff and dozens of volunteers work alongside the eleven thousand people who spend time in our residential centre every year. 

Following the reading, there was a question and answer period.  

Both men agreed that Ilya Kaminski is the poet of a century.  If you haven’t read his poetry, do.

They spoke of knowing and exploring the one thing, that one thing that each of us comes back to when we write to explore, discover, and share.  

Padraid said, Poems have a certain hunger around which they circle.  

He also said spirituality comes from the breath, that language helps us breathe, so write what people can turn to,  do things with words that help us breathe, then finalize a poem with a spark or a demand. I sit with that, no small task, though perhaps trusting the breath, it is.

Naturally politics had to come up when an Irish poet is in the room.  Right, now the world is twisted on arrogance. As you might imagine, he didn’t have anything good to say about Britain, the Tories, or Brexit.  He called the explorer Captain James Cook, a murderer. He says Ireland didn’t have a potato famine; they had a policy famine.  

They were asked if cell phones are destroying writing.  They pointed out that texting is writing. We send emails.  We are writing, and writing is about attention, and that is the point, attention.  

They both agreed they are inspired by this poem by Rilke, and by Emily Dickinson, of course.

Widening Circles

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

Book of Hours, I 2

That leads me to Jane Hirshfield’s poem, the perfect poem for this day. 

May our lungs breathe in the clean air of fact.

ON THE FIFTH DAY

by Jane Hirshfield

On the fifth day

the scientists who studied the rivers

were forbidden to speak

or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air

were told not to speak of the air,

and the ones who worked for the farmers

were silenced,

and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,

began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak

and were taken away.

The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent. 

Now it was only the rivers

that spoke of the rivers,

and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees

continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,

and the rivers kept speaking,

of rivers, of boulders and air. 

In gravity, earless and tongueless,

the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,

code writers, machinists, accountants,

lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,

of silence.

Today I lean back, lean back to receive.  Physically and psychologically, I’ve felt the momentum in leaning back to then, when called, lean forward, and rise.

I’m entranced with Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old climate activist claiming her autism on the spectrum to Aspberger’s, as her Superpower.

She is clear, no dissonance on what she knows is true, and she leads the way.

Friday, September 20th, is a day to lean, rise, and stand on the bench of her example, as we rock connection with the waves of change.  

Do you see the Golden Slippers?  I walked to the bay this morning before my doctor appointment.  This guy was super friendly as he waited for lunch. He wasn’t using his slippers to stir up prey, seemed content to wait on the rocks.

At the end of the 19th century, wading-bird feathers were worth more than $30.00 an ounce, twice the price of gold.  The American Ornithologists Union estimated as many as five million birds were killed a year.  

Why?  To decorate women’s hats.  

The feathers of the Snowy Egret, Golden Slippers,  were especially prized for their softness and delicacy.   This could have led to extinction but in 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt established the nation’s first national wildlife refuge on Pelican Island, Florida, specifically to protect wading birds from plume hunters.  As more protections were put in place, the birds were saved, and our waterways are augmented with a niche filled with beauty and grace.

Our days and nights are warm for now, the ripening before the dip to the shortest day and longest night, and then return to spring. We circle like the roundness of the moon as it shines in the sky tonight.

A friend shared this quote by Alan Watts with me, and I was reminded that he was a student of Charlotte Selver, my teacher of Sensory Awareness, and that they taught together, sometimes rejoicing in tossing sticks off his houseboat in Sausalito and watching them float with the tides. Excitement, joy, and fulfillment are everywhere.

“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god? And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?”

~ Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are