I try to write in the morning. I am always starting from the same place. I am inside a house with my partner and daughter sleeping. Inside a house on a street that in one block has as many sleepers in the little boxes of their bedrooms – as many people within a stones throw here as there were people in the little towns I grew up in, in South Dakota and Wisconsin and Minnesota.
I’ll always be fascinated with New York, the way I am awe-struck by the world. Being here I have the world in my windows, looking out from this endless pile of boxes with windows and people dreaming…. I heard on the radio with my pre-dawn coffee that the President’s wars are impacting the price of fertilizer and tractors… and suddenly I go in reverse back to the farmlands where I come from..
And my writing has only one subject: How to admit the Earth into my life, not easily done from the city but not easily done from Eyota, Minnesota either, the problem of our USA tribe is so baked in. How different is walking in a field full of chemically-treated soybeans from standing here on the pavement in the sleepers in the city that never sleeps?
The global heatwave, the tsunami of extinction, is the Earth’s dire symphony now, and we don’t know how to tell ourselves about it. How the agony of burning children in Iran effects the popularity of politicians in the agriculture sector is flowing from the radio. The news should be that wars are bad for all life on Earth, including humans. How does that cover-up work? Even the new democratic socialists can’t bring themselves to mention the Earth. They say that affordability is the urgent issue today. Yes, and education and health-care and and free buses and stop ICE.
These certainly are the issues of today, our return to public compassion. Got my vote. Kurt Vonnegut said “For godsake, you’ve got to be kind!” We are remembering how to be kind today. But how will it go for kind action taken today, if there is no tomorrow? What happened to tomorrow? Now, there is a writing problem to solve. There is some serious speaking and listening work to be done.
Earth! Earth! Give us one more storm! Would that do it? Or – maybe you could put some dreams into our sleep, dreams with tomorrows coming into our lives!
Rev. Billy