Looking for Peace in the Garden

From The Flower Child’s Garden Planet:

Everyone knows who the flower children were. The iconic photo of the girl putting a daisy in the gun barrel of the trooper at the peace demonstration says it all. Peace and love sums it up nicely. 

That girl has probably grown up and has grandchildren, if not great grand children by now, but the message is as fresh as this seasons’ daisies.

Around the same time as the iconic flower child photo appears, the humans from Earth first see an actual photograph of the whole Earth from space, another moment marking photo. It is the beginning of an era.

We are all globalists now. The time of taking sides is passing because you can’t take sides when you know the world is round.

And what goes around, comes around. And around. Everything is not just connected now, as it always was, really. We are connected visibly, in real time. Causes and effects are accelerating. Images, each said to be worth a thousand words, now fly around the world by the billions daily. 

A single meme, story, event, or image that once produced a wave of reaction and response, now is just another blip in the roaring tide. The cacophony is now a constant storm on a choppy sea. Even the big waves come one after another, without time to recover or process the impact.

I once nearly drowned. I got stuck while swimming in the surf off the coast of Mexico, in the place where the waves repeatedly broke over me and pounded me into the rocks. Each time I stood up, I was hit again. The water was not deep, but the waves were big, and I was little.  If not for the big strong Mexican man who noticed my plight and pulled me out of that zone, I would not be here writing this now.

The world feels like that to me now, as I sit here, in the eye of an enormous human caused climate change storm, as the waves of global pandemic crash over us, and the flames of firestorms across the West lick at the door of my town. We are in the stage in this drama now of realizing that things have seriously gone awry and we must do something. 

We need help. We have got to get ourselves back to the garden. All one planet garden. If there is not rescue, things will not get better. We gotta stop the way we’re going, or we just might arrive. We long for peace. The answer is still love.

“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.” -Michael Pollan

Getting Woke

Global warming gets real when it comes to your house. The whole left coast is on fire, from the bottom of California to the top of Washington, skies are orange. The sun is vermillion even at high noon, that is, when you can see it at all on this otherwise sunny and theoretically cloudless day. The air quality is toxic for all.  

That’s it, I say to myself. I’m moving. I’m so outa here. I’m moving to...

Um...

Another planet? 

There is no place left to run. I’m out here on the wet side of the left coast in the most progressive neighborhood on the planet practically.

Fires are burning all around us. There is no landline phone service, the power is down, so no internet, and no water because that’s powered by electricity. 

If a fire came up through the forest where we are, we might not know it, because visibility is so poor. No one would be able to come to help put out the firestorm anyway, they are triaging and only able to warn and evacuate people right now, if that. All of the firefighting crews are overwhelmed. Whole towns are burning to ashes in an hour or two, just upwind from here. Ashes of these towns are falling like snow on our portable folding solar panels, which are just barely and intermittently charging our phones, to keep a connection with loved ones.

The radio is our main source of news, with disturbing noises alerting us to announcements of evacuation areas and routes. This is a level three alert, they warn of a nearby area. “Do not stop and gather your things. Leave now!”

We hear of friends who barely make it out because they evacuate too late. As they run away, they turn to see their cars blow up.

These things happen fast. The forest has been drying out in a half continent sized mega drought going on decades now, a result of climate change. 

Actually it is dying out. These trees burning now will be changed out by nature for more dry climate trees, the kind that live south and east of the wet coast, pines for firs. New animals will come to replace the ones who have lived here because the habitat will be different.

But when the hot east wind came up a few days ago, the sky turned brown and the air turned smoky. A balmy blue sky on a quiet afternoon became a hell world in minutes. All night we hunker down with the radio left on, half sleeping while the howling hot wind slams tree bits onto the house.

It’s funny what you think of putting in the car and the go-bag at such a time, if you have the luxury of having time to do that, which we do, so far..

The dog and cat carriers sit by the front door, of course. Then you wander around the house in the dim amber light of mid day, rating the objects you may never see again. Oddly dispassionate, I pack a few bits of clothes, all of them blue, from my overflowing closet, some daily body care items like toothbrush and so on, and move on to my studio with my art and tools of my art. 

Many years of my artwork is here. Many carloads. Much of my life’s work. I can fit only a tiny fraction of it in a car. I end up putting only a few of the projects I’m actually working on, right now, into the car. I feel I have to finish them! That is where my heart is with them. A few of the materials and tools I will need to do so as well. 

The rest, well I already finished them. Funny logic, if that is what it is.

Later I sleep. In my nightmares, I dream of my packed car rolling into a lake. All is lost. Then I cry. 

I wake up, with my head throbbing from smoke inhalation, glad to see I’m still at home, with the strange orange light in the sky and the red sun again, coming in the window. 

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” 

 

Greta Thunberg, 16 year-old Swedish Activist