Why we need a resistance movement right this very minute

The forthright and brilliant Lierre Keith is now blogging at Mother Earth News.  On acknowledging the darker and most frightening truths about the oil spill:

Call it what it is: a war. It’s not a mistake. It’s not even a set of loopholes that some naughty boys in a bad corporate culture exploited. Whether the oil gushed or was pumped and then burned, the result would have been the same: a planet destroyed — pelican by penguin by Ogoni child — for the benefit of a wealthy few.

It’s time to remember the animals — brave and hungry and loyal — that we are. So with your front paws, turn off all the corporate media flooding our culture and our children with moral stupidity and go dig in the dirt. It’s your dirt, our dirt, the collective home of a tribe called carbon. It’s our place, our people, an indivisible part of the story of us.

Burning intimacy

Alice Fulton commenting on her poem Claustrophilia in the New Yorker:

‘Moxibustion is an ancient Chinese medical treatment like acupuncture. I stumbled on the word while searching for something else, as so often happens. In moxibustion, an herb, traditionally mugwort, is burned very close to the skin as a means of relieving pain. The idea is to get as close as possible while carefully avoiding any painful contact. I keep coming back to proximity in my poems, and the concept of moxibustion suggested another way to think about closeness, intimacy.’

Claustrophilia

It’s just me throwing myself at you,

romance as usual, us times us,

 

not lust but moxibustion,

a substance burning close

 

to the body as possible

without risk of immolation.

 

Nearness without contact

causes numbness. Analgesia.

 

Pins and needles. As the snugness

of the surgeon’s glove causes hand fatigue.

 

At least this procedure

requires no swag or goody bags,

 

stuff bestowed upon the stars

at their luxe functions.

 

There’s no dress code,

though leg irons

 

are always appropriate.

And if anyone says what the hell

 

are you wearing in Esperanto—

Kion diable vi portas?—

 

tell them anguish

is the universal language.

 

Stars turn to train wrecks

and my heart goes out,

 

admirers gush. Ground to a velvet!

But never mind the downside,

 

mon semblable, mon crush.

Love is just the retaliation of light.

 

It is so profligate, you know,

so rich with rush.

Silent Spring, Silent Summer

From a review of Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain and Ireland:

Almost half a century ago, in 1962, the American writer and biologist Rachel Carson published a short work of non-fiction called Silent Spring. Over the next decade, it not only became a bestseller, but achieved something very rare in the book trade: it changed the world

At the 11th hour, people on both sides of the Atlantic woke up to the dangers posed to wildlife by the widespread use of agricultural pesticides. Following a major campaign, the British and US governments banned the most dangerous of them, DDT. The populations of insects, wildflowers, mammals and birds – some, like the peregrine, on the brink of extinction in both North America and Britain – began to make a comeback. The environmental movement had, in the nick of time, saved the day.

Except that it hadn’t. DDT may have been banned (at least in the developed world), but the drive towards higher farming yields, and the incessant clamour for cheap food, continued. Over the past 50 years, this laid waste to the countryside, which has now turned, in some parts of Britain, into little more than a food factory. Because of this, and other threats such as climate change and alien species, our native wildlife is now in even deeper trouble than before.

Fading to a ghost: coral bleaching

Another irreplaceable loss of global dimensions:

Coral reef monitoring teams have reported mass bleaching of coral reefs off the coast of Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia while the Maldives, Sri Lanka and reefs off the coast of east Africa have also been hit.

With ocean temperatures reaching record levels and combined with the end of an El Nino episode, scientists fear there could be even more damage to corals as the year continues.

Scientists in Thailand have reported reefs suffering 90% of their corals being bleached and up to 20% of the corals dead.

Olivia Durkin, who is leading the bleaching monitoring at the Centre for Biodiversity in Peninsular Thailand, said: “This year’s severe coral bleaching has the potential to be the worst on record.

“Extensive bleaching, death and disease are reported not only in corals, but giant clams, sea anemones and soft corals are also losing their symbiotic algae.”

Corals are a delicate combination of animal, algae and rock that form intricate undersea structures, providing shelter for thousands of brightly coloured fish and also acting as nurseries for the young of many larger open sea fish.

Coral colonies are made up of polyps, which secrete a stony skeleton that forms the intricate and delicate looking structures. A microscopic algae known as zooxanthellae live within the coral where they convert energy from the sun into food for the coral animals.

Bleaching usually occurs when ocean temperatures exceed a threshold that is around one degree higher than the average seen during the warmest summer months.

Dancing towards your Lughnasadh, our Imbolc

Stood out on a terrace overlooking the despoiled mountain valley yesterday and searched for a breath of spring. No new leaves on the oaks or vines, no apple or almond trees in flower yet, no birds returning from summer on other continents. The chef was serving delicious, indigestible cassoulet. Winter still gripping the  landscape and it looks like a cold dry spring that may be slow in coming. The full moon is huge in the evenings, but aureoled in mist. More rain is needed before we can welcome the heat.

The other night, passing through a friend’s living room, I saw on the television screen a group of women whirling and leaping in a night scene from the film version of Dancing at Lughnasadh. Brian Friel’s play with the five unmarried sisters dancing together, a vanishing pagan Ireland glimpsed by a small boy in County Donegal 1936.  The Wheel turning for the Harvest of Grain, the Ripening of First Fruits, the bonfires and handfastings. An echo of the old Lammas Fairs, tribal northern memories stirring in me.

Fire too in the darkness of Imbolc, birthing fire in darkness, a promise, a light. The season of Candlemas, a candle placed in the window,  The Wheel turning, the poles of opposites and contrasting seasons, renewal and decay, waxing and waning.

Although it is now dark, I come seeking light.
In the chill of winter, I come seeking life.

Full moon in Aquarius beckoning

And astrologically we have an ‘exalted’ Saturn in Libra bringing sweet reasonableness and balance, a breath of fresh air. And the Sun is entering Leo,  an expansive and rejuvenating energy abounds. At nights the moon over my valley is waxing towards its fullness in Aquarius on July 25/26. I sit with pencil poised over my  charts as I munch toast and homemade green  fig preserve, finding that alarming cardinal T-square with Uranus and Jupiter in Aries opposing Saturn in Libra and both opposed to Pluto in Capricorn. There is the impression of a crossroads and I never forget that crossroads are dedicated to the goddess of prostitution, the sensual trickster, trading the body in bad faith, some commerce in sexuality, something to do with shame and power intermingled. Not to mention the Sun in Libra oppositional to the Moon in Aquarius. Energy, passion, fierce intentionality contrast with coolheaded reason. And peering harder, I  see all these retrograde segues: Jupiter in Aries  into (retrograde) phase making a square aspect to transiting Pluto in Capricorn (retrograde), Saturn/Uranus in Aries (now retrograde) opposition. No guessing which turbulent energy  might triumph in my topsy-turvy  little corner of reality!

Saturn in Libra calls for structure — Libra is my birth sign (as far as I know) and any full moon is for me a symbol of visibility, bringing the hidden out into the light, the things of darkness illumined. This is where the element of Air appeals to me — the moon brightening the skies, the clouds flying overhead like white birds at night, the stars spinning and giving off sparks, the bright dreams caught in a losse web of sleep. Time for another full moon ritual of smoke (smudging lavender, rosemary and sage) and the  light of candles and a small fire: airy reflections on desire and flame and healing, the gust of freedom. Opening windows to the night breezes drifting across the veld, the cries of birds overhead, long-lost voices carried on the wind. the moon’s clear cold eye on the dark crossroads.

Damsel in distress comes home

 

Catching sight of a beauty on its return….

 This delicate, blue-hued insect has re-appeared in the UK after an interval of more than half a century.

The dainty damselfly, a smaller relative of dragonflies, was washed away from its single East Anglian pond in the severe coastal floods of 1952/3.

Now, a few individuals have been found at a site in north Kent.

I remember when all this was trees

Exhilarated to witness Banksy at work in an abandoned packing plant in Detroit.

Flying a flag of truth in my heart

An interview with the Burmese poet Saw Wai who was released from prison in May 2010 after spending more than two years behind bars for publishing a poem in “The Love Journal” that contained the hidden words: “Power-hungry, insane Gen Than Shwe.”

…as soon as I was put in prison, I started demanding to be allowed to read and write. And I told the prison authorities that I wanted to open a library. I was allowed to do that, and I set up a library with about 1,000 books in Insein Prison hospital. When I was transferred to Yamethin Prison, I made the same demand. The prison authorities allowed me to set up a library with about 1,000 books there. We had more readers in Insein Prison than Yamethin Prison. So I had to persuade my fellow prisoners to read. After 18 months, more prisoners were reading books. In Yamethin Prison, there are about 400 political prisoners and about 120 are regular readers. That’s one of the things I did in prison.

I am flying a flag of truth in my heart when I create art. This truth is disliked by tyranny. This truth is disliked by the rich. This truth is honored by the honest people of the world.

New moon in Cancer leaning over my shoulder

Dark red spires flowering on a tough little aloe in the garden: there are flaming spires of aloes alongside the roads and on hillsides in the veld. I have been moving harmless whipscorpions and orb spiders to new tree homes, watched by overly interested insect-eating sunbirds and flycatchers. The simplest way to move spiders or other insects around is in clumps of epiphytic orchids or tillandsia, a temporary branched  refuge while the arachnids settle in. Yesterday I planted some agapanthus to shore up the crumbling banks near a stream running through the kloof — those tenacious roots slow erosion all over southern Africa, along with the protection offered by clumps of  clivia in forested areas.

Gardening is a way of grounding — to work with my hands in chilly damp earth, tugging, lifting, settling the plants. A knot of roots in the good earth. I myself put down roots with each plant I settle. Squatting, the ache in my legs, the winter sun on my shoulders. Aware of dragonflies and carpenter bees like a murmuring humming dance in my vicinity, the darting silver movement of lizards in the new green grassiness after rain. Lustrous pearly spiders in the hollow white sheaths of the arum lilies.

I go on gardening, grounding, listening, breathing in the wind and dirt and scent of wild water until after dark. Then I come back to where there are young kestrels in a badly lopped camphor tree and look upwards, scanning the dark skies for a fragment of moon. The moon has dispersed into flickers of starlight — no, that is just a metaphor that comes into my mind, factless and footloose. Gardening, like grounding, anchors me in reality and the accuracy of naming. What is visible and what is going on just out of sight. Nematodes thickening the young carrots in the raised beds, a friend with a tumour growing in her brain, the cellular wisdom so often inaccessible to us, a bodily knowing that may be imperfect or reliant on dimming eyesight. I am growing older and this is both a comfort and loss, the gleaning of wisdom, the ebbing of energies.

A youngster killed  in a car accident this past weekend, speeding on a lonely country road. His sister has not eaten or changed her clothes since hearing the news of his death. She sits on the edge of her bed, smelling of old sweat and  acrid disbelief. Her parents ask me to make barley soup, chicken soup, tomato soup, a soup that might tempt her appetite and I take some homemade soup along to the grieving family — but I know she won’t touch it. I wouldn’t.  My presence is not required, the soup goes untasted. So much depends on knowing when I cannot help, when my help is not called for. Sometimes we, the outsiders and sojourners, are called to fast and sit shiva, to accompany the dead in transition across worlds, to keep vigil with the living who are bereft. But this time, my name is not called.  On a walk I pass the place where the car went off the untarred road in darkness and I pause, but there is only the clean grassy wind and silence. No work for me there, either. But I stay receptive and that is all any of us can do. At some point there may be an opening for a small practical kindness, a gesture of warmth. What I would wish done for myself.

Met with some concerned people from an informal settlement in the river valley to look at the problem of overflowing graveyards with graves that have subsided after flooding — the graves are now too close to the river, but there is nowhere else designated for burial. Soaring death rates because of Aids and multi-drug-resistant TB. Coffins of plywood and cardboard, a rising water table, the risk of pollution, contagion in the summer heat a few months from now. We stand together, helpless and concerned, sharing the uncertainty and distress. We need more land for burial, since the plague of dying will not stop any time soon.

Each day my practice is about the simple, unimportant but crucial stuff,  what keeps any of us human, animal, vegetable, women together, people in community, friends and neighbours. To respond and stay responsive, to listen out for what is needed. There are no easy answers but hope continues like a steady flame, the will to resist and keep working for needed change, for rootedness and growth and  the new moon swelling like a white cup in the night skies.