Daily Archives: June 3, 2014

Dreams

Nocturnes

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

Nocturnes. That’s how I think of these nighttime posts. They come from a desire to add closure to the day, to respond to the peace around me. If they were music, they would be raw jazz of the sort played by John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk. Not intended to express thought, but to evoke emotion.

A sense of quiet elegy, the poetry of stars and high cirrus wispy among them, an owl in the distance. These are interiors, moments of the slow merging between consciousness and the inner world, when the dream songs begin to sing themselves into existence, waiting only for sleep.

The passing between seasons, between waking and sleeping and sleeping and waking are fraught for me, at times with a simple longing to remain either awake or asleep, in winter or in fall; but, at other times with melancholy and the darkness, states that obscure the inner life, even cause it pain, or come from the pain it creates.

Tonight the music plays low and sweet in the background, the lights are going down and the time for the set to finish has arrived. Good night.

(Alphonse Osbert – Les chants de la nuit)

Colorado, Commentary on the news, Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

An Underlying Question

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Beltane                                                              Summer Moon

As I saw the video and read the article on fire in Colorado, the underlying question became slowly evident to me. Here it was couched in hotshots, firemen, national forests and parks employees and the complex budgetary manipulations of the Forest Service. Along the ocean coasts of the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific in this country it will involve underwater construction crews, builders of seawalls and levees and drainage systems, the Coast Guard and numerous other federal and state agencies and their employees. And the underlying question is this: how much money, state or federal, and how many lives will we spend in defense of neighborhoods, businesses, cities built in predictably dangerous environments?

Climate change has begun to push the numbers of such places higher and higher: whole nations like Vanuatu and the Maldives, large portions of heavily populated coastal areas, those spots where humanity, in wealthier and stupider times, has planted itself in defiance of environmental barriers like deserts (the American Southwest and California), wildfire, and many riverine settings.

(from the Phoenix city guide: Phoenix rises from the floor of the northern tip of the great Sonoran Desert)

This is the question of adaptation, how much will we modify our current reality as the climate changes, as opposed to the question of mitigation which the EPA has put on the front pages of America’s newspapers. It is not a question of doing one or the other, we will have to do both. But. How much should we do to defend poor decisions on the parts of others?

(The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs last year.)

There are, of course, as always, a lot of gray here. It’s one thing to buy a lovely forested home in a Colorado red zone and another to have an apartment built years ago near the Atlantic Ocean. Much of the change will be gradual and the costs to adapt can be made gradually, too. This is true of sea level rise, though the sums of money involved are enormous. But. There are others, like moving into wildfire habitat as its frequency escalates by factors as high as 400%, that are not gray at all.

Colorado, The Move

End Times

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Beltane                                                                    Summer Moon

It must be a little like dying. When I touch something here and imagine the last time, the last time planting seeds in that raised bed, the last time coming down these stairs, the last time leaving our driveway, a hint of sadness gathers around my fingers. Not yet, I say. Not yet.

It is not the same now. And will never be again. Not here. Last month I touched these things and imagined my stewardship of them, how today influenced not only tomorrow, but next year and ten years. Not now. Now I wonder how new hands will care for this soil, the carpet on the stairs.

How will the house feel when it is not our feet that walk its floors? Will it miss our pressure and gait, after all that’s all it’s ever known? Inanimate objects, you might say, are inanimate, but I wonder.

Right now Kate’s playing music on the parlor grand piano. The sound feels lonely, as if it wonders why it has to go. Why can’t it stay with these hands, feel the music played as she plays it? Perhaps it will be sad to go. Or, perhaps it will end up in the hands of a rock and roll, jazz and blues sort who will tickle it in ways it’s never known. Could be. And, it might like it.