Climate Awareness

Climate isn’t just the about the weather—a sunny day or a cloudy one.

Climate awareness Is a synonym for survival.

Gross levels of pollution slap us in the face,

Plastic bottles on an ocean beach.

Degradation of climate is subtle and devastating.

Increasing carbon in the atmosphere from human consumption

Traps the solar heat.

Ice melts, wildfires burn, breathable air diminishes, habitats diminish, hurricanes linger…

We of this Earth are all affected,

But none so greatly as the impoverished.

Who find themselves unjustly in the vanguard

Of those harmed by  global warming.

And people of color suffer the burden of systemic racism,

Often forced to live in areas of our cities

Deemed least habitable and most unhealthy for body, mind and spirit.

First step, awareness. Second step, action.

How can you open to climate reality, of our own making, in which we are caught?

Now, what actions will you take to make a difference?

If a conversation would help you to move forward,

Or you are struggling with the heaviness of what climate degradation

May mean to you or to those you love.

A Poetic Vision of the Future, from Wendell Berry 

If we will have the wisdom to survive…

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

To stand like slow-growing trees on a ruined place,

Renewing, enriching it,

If we will make our seasons welcome here,

Asking not too much of earth or heaven,

Then a long time after we are dead

The lives our lives prepare will live here.

Their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides,

Fields and gardens, rich in the windows.

The river will run clear, as we will never know it.

And over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be green meadows,

Stock bells in noon shade.

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest

An old forest will stand again,

Its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields.

In their voices they will hear a music

Risen out of the ground.

They will take nothing from the ground they will not return,

Whatever the grief at parting.

Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove,

And memory will grow into legend, legend into song,

Song into sacrament.

The abundance of this place,

The songs of its people and its birds,

Will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.

This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility.

Poetic Encouragement, that we not lose hope, from Denise Levertov

Beginners

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla

‘From too much love of living,

Hope and desire set free,

Even the weariest river

Winds somewhere to the sea—‘

But we have only begun

to love the earth.

We have only begun

to imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?

—so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?

—we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,

only begun to envision

how it might be

to live as siblings with beast and flower,

not as oppressors.

Surely our river

cannot already be hastening

into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot

drag, in the silt,

all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet—

there is too much broken

that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other

that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know

the power that is in us if we would join

our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must

complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.