Summer Solstice, D plus 1

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.