I've been seeing a lot of post on social media lately about the inevitability of civilization's collapse, mostly due to climate change, and the world to come wherein the rich are miraculously saved due to their wealth and the hoi polloi masses are resigned to a post apocalyptic ruin of strife and misery. The doomsayers have put me in mind of our species as a whole, in that we have always feared the looming future (each of our deaths most of all) associated with the perceived threat at the gate, the annihilation of everyone - God, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Huns, Goths, Black Death, Moors, Nazis, Commies, Swine Flu, Aliens, Terrorism, Judgment Day. Consciousness seems to mandate that we perseverate on our destruction.
I went for a walk today. I visited the town garden, food from which would go to aid the seniors at the local old folks' home up the street. I sat on a wooden bench inlaid with a mosaic of tiles that spelled "ART". There were some tourists there, a group of three women, discussing the flora with respect to the region of their own living. I went behind the row of trees to where, only two weeks prior, there had been a bevy of fledging magpies perched in the trees, all fat and short tailed and bushy still in their down. The birds made lots of noise at A and Uly and I and one of the parents came to deliver to one of the chicks a cracker gleaned from somewhere. The newly flown birds had gone and none of their number were about. I went to the bar for beers.
A former student messaged me recently to ask about a new and fast moving relationship and I tried to go through some things with her about self-worth and critical thinking and boundaries and trust. All things I've miraculously failed with in my own life. I tried to tell her the importance of maintaining in this life, and the ridiculous knowledge that her ancestors had persisted in a frozen waste for millennia with only the help of stone age technology and the wisdom of fire and that she was imminently strong and capable. Truly, I hope those words, the same that I tell all my students, will enkindle some sort of magic flame inside them and they, despite their varied and traumatic pasts, will be okay, as much as any of us are.
This morning I went to the cafe and felt on the precipice of a mental breakdown. It was almost as if I felt like the real me was a prisoner inside my skull and I needed a hasty exit, like a pupa grown too large for its chrysalis, to split open and emerge into some new, higher ordered thing. I walked more and found this note binding the trees. I can't explain how grand this is, and if you can't glean that for yourself, I'm afraid you're outside of my light cone and all information I have will never reach you and vice versa. I've come to this realization a lot lately and the loneliness of it fills me up in a way that I hope you, too, can also understand even if my photons can't ever reach you.
I walked home in a wood, the path of which had been manufactured by machines. There were mosquitoes about and if I walked quickly enough they were unmolesting. I, by degrees, found myself in a rolling meadow of partially mown grass where I stumbled through an ambush of nettles that burned the exposed skin of my sandalled feet and shorts wearing legs. Finding the path again, it was strewn with cottonwood fluff, a blizzard in June, and so much information blanketing the ground. The internet tells me that the internet itself houses 1200 petabytes of data. Paltry when in comparison to this life stuff, all swamping the planet. Moving forward, I made for home.
Home. Respite. Solace. I sat in the hammock and smelled the rank acridity of my unwashed being. There were flies visiting the grass flowers of our uncut lawn. A butterfly flitted toward a bush. In the street there were dogs and a woman and children. A triad of bike pedaling children, two girls, one boy, headed home, the boy with a plastic bag dangling from his left handlebar. Inside the house Captain mewled for release. The sky overhead cleared, clouded, cleared. Lilacs clouded the breeze's aroma. I watched a solitary cottonwood seed drift down, into the grass, where it clung to a seeding stalk, a scant inches from the earth below, the rest of its cousins yet coasting on the wind.
This afternoon I sat in my living room and watched the quaking aspen outside my window. Facebook reminded me this morning that I've been a homeowner three years, and the thought that I was now ten percent owner of the structure gave me pause. I suppose if you rationed it out, that would be equivalent to one of the bathrooms or maybe the front porch. The bank owns the rest and I'll likely never stay long enough, either in it or alive, to be full owner. The lifestyle choices you make, I suppose.
A has been out of town with Uly for the past week, due to be out another two and I've had to fend for myself. It's been a strange trip, one in which the substances have flowed and my consciousness has become seriously altered, my body victim to those changes in the long run, like some Dune universe guild navigator given over to the spice gas chambers' enhancement. The things around me that I notice, self included, seem in their infirmity to not exist in any objective manner. The simulation reality persists, and fake or not, it's the best jam I've got. So the groove maintains.
After I completed the chores I'd set for myself today - laundry, dishes, weeding my home garden, bed made, package sent, lawn weed whacked, plants watered, floor swept, cats fed - I biked to town in the fade of a serious elevation. On the way, in my neighborhood, was a bearded man mowing his lawn while cradling his toddler, a girl who watched his workings with a great seriousness. I ventured on to the community garden and weeded the patch for which I had obligated, then biked on to the arboretum, past a couples' tennis match and tree swallows acrobatting in the overhead grey. The arboretum isn't under new management as I had feared, and a recently expanded easement offered access to the familiar arboretum sign that had been uprooted from its previous location. There was a candy wrapper from the recent Colony Days parade near the lilacs and I took this with me on my walk through the trees only to deposit it in the city offered trash can in the new parking lot.
The chickadees laid a clutch in our birdhouse the second year running. I don't know if they are the same birds as last year, but I was anticipating hearing the brood grow in body and instruction, their parents piping out the "dee dee dee dee" staccato that I took to be the chickadee word for food when the parents returned to the nest. The adults had abandoned the house after the chicks inside had been silent for some time. Yesterday, I opened the birdhouse and cleaned out the nest. This year's birds had outdone the last year's construction and the nest was a four inch high brick of mixed bedding, mostly lichen, with a deeply recessed hollow where the eggs had lain. The chicks there were shriveled raisins of bodies, wings splayed and face down. I wept like a bitch.
