It is beautiful to acquire skill – through meditation, through prayer or patience – to simply live with emptiness when it arrives. To inhabit your wisdom like a good father or a good mother, not become fragile and frantic like the little boy whose mother has left the room, like the little girl who doesn’t yet know her mother will return, a moment later, with a smile and something sweet, with her warm arms security, with nourishment.

In response to a friend’s question: “What kind of Mark would you like to make on this world?”

I was selected to participate in a poetry workshop some years ago, with British war correspondent & poet James Fenton. He held strong opinions, no doubt informed by atrocity and explosion, and his work ranged from doggerel to deep, from limerick to libretto. His writing was always clouded by a shadowy lining, even when he was being flippant. I was riding my old BMW motorcycle to an event down the Mississippi river road, and he – not being much for tame avenues – thumbed a ride. Indochina, he said, rode bikes a tenth the size of mine, with three times the cargo; I had spent time on Java, so I shared his appreciation of smooth pavement, limited traffic, and 900cc of German engineering.

Late last night I arrived home after looking for Home: here the footprint, here the small harvest, here the collected years of living; there (wherever There is), the path leading on, the planting for spring, the arrow’s arc.

I see that, as experiences accumulate, the urgency of a moment is softened slightly. Or, if I am the agent of my change and not the world, I take ownership of the softening: I begin to mistrust urgency. So many use emergency as proof for arguments that have no basis… when it’s only another mask for fear, and one that we don’t often recognize. It’s only a fear of time, when time defines us.

A couple of years back, Amherst architect Tullio Inglese spoke to our ecovillage group about ways to build greenly: these materials, that insulation, this heating source, those solar panels.“But,” he said, “pouring money into a system that gobbles energy doesn’t solve a thing. You have to begin by USING LESS.”

Not a new idea, and wonderful to hear it again and again. One reason we are protagonists in war is our hyper dependence on oil. One reason we are leaning over an economic precipice, and our poor human non-heroic legislators are hog-tied and unable to affect change, is because We the People are arguably (and measurably) the most materialistic and consumptive culture the world has yet produced.

“… but I do begin my sentences mid-thought…” she thought; and thinking about thought was to look in a mirror that reflected another mirror. She was a tunnel of faces that began at her glance, peered around the corner of the glass at another, inner face, and after that a smaller other, and another and other and other. She raised an eyebrow and a million eyebrows rose: “… that might be a tunnel into my soul - but shouldn’t I see a light at the end…”

Lessons can be learned by watching.

A system is only as strong as its weakest link; make a nuclear containment structure (theoretically?) plane-proof and bomb-proof, still the generator sits outside, its water source exposed, and a shut-down reactor cannot power itself; powered by fission, not fusion, its “steady state” is detonation, not stasis.

A viable solution to the nation’s energy crisis (finite fossil fuels, unsustainable sources of electricity) and a response to a near-universal consensus that global warming is a dire reality (universal to everyone without vested financial interests) must not rely on building more, but on learning to live with and use less.

Some art is as trivial and ephemeral as our youth: its willful innocence soon outgrown, and without resentment, but with a kind and condescending turn of heart, to be dismissed as a passing, as a light distraction.

Other pieces are soon discovered: those that remain with us are an artist’s masterwork, which once open our youthful eyes, a door to something larger than we know, larger than we are; and as we age into their beauty and their wisdom they make their way into our hearts along the lines of fracture and remorse we earn through our hard living.

There is an assumption that we hold as we approach relationship. Or: an assumption that holds us, often so deep inside that it seems to be the fabric of our lives, woven into us, inextricable. Perhaps it arises from our earliest days after birth, when what we need is provided for us: our food, our shelter, our warmth and clothing - for most of us, all provided, after some fashion or another, by our mother and our father. Being nurtured is a “given”.

Arriving at the far end of the day
the passengers who had not stepped from the train
composed their books and closed their eyes
and sighed: we have arrived.

as quickly as our sight is shuttered
the blank horizon of the mind is lit
as though a sky inside, through sudden sunset
brightens with those quiet constellations
that seed the canopy of inner night

We survived the challenges of day
- those who, lost in thought, collided
- or, lost in fear or sickness, were derailed
and reassure ourselves that we were right
in all we did: we have arrived.

-- The wind swept north and as the weather lifted, my spirit lifted, as though cloud held the weight of me, and sun held the lightness. Is it that easy? A wind? I wanted to believe it was heartache, it was joy brewing in my heart; but maybe heartache and joy are related to weather in the same way the setting of fruit or wheat’s harvest or a flower opening or wilting are related. The sky calls, the heart answers, whether the heart of a man or of an apple or of a grain or of the stamen.