Howdy, friends, and a good Earth Day to you. I hope you’ve had at least a few minutes to get outside today to pay homage to our mother planet. I have always imagined a future world where Earth Day is celebrated as the supreme holiday—world-wide with eco-friendly parades, with marches in the streets demanding wiser political and corporate stewardship of land, and with farmers, fishermen, intellectuals, conservationists, school children, and religious figures hand in hand declaring their love and allegiance to this living world, recognizing at least for one day how rare and precious an opportunity it is to be a living thing on this planet at all. What would a world joined together by the love of nature look like?
Sadly, we may never know. This isn’t the world we occupy now. Everyone went to school and work today and maybe mentioned Earth Day to someone passively. Some of them told jokes calling it hippie day or tree hugger day or something like that. “I thought Earth Day was the same thing as 420,” one of my students said today. Those of us who love the earth might’ve been stuck inside cinderblock buildings with these people, loathing their humor, making too-passionate speeches to anyone who dared listen.
The earth has a culture problem. Our civilization is less than civil. We live in a world of run-away industry that moves in front of us in time doing irreparable damage. We have a gross dependence on fossil fuels, which quite clearly, quite objectively, chokes out the biosphere. And yet we cannot come to any sort of meaningful agreement on this, much less a plan of action. We produce and consume too much and we train our children to follow, and to expect, this devastating path. We keep blinders on to what is painfully obvious, some calling the destruction of our wild spaces, our beloved mountains and forests, progress.
When will we wake up to realize that we are the earth, and that whatever we put into nature, we shall receive in our lap? When will we take an honest survey of what has been lost and seek not to grow our economies infinitely but to restore the majestic aesthetic, and the practical functions, of the natural systems?
I am not sure this will happen in my lifetime. Short of some major catastrophe that delivers us back to horse and saddle, I’m not sure it is possible. But I do still believe in the power of brave, creative, and passionate individuals to spark personal and local change. I have seen it, and when it happens, it’s a thing of beauty. We can all do our part everyday by being a little more intentional, by thinking of what kind of systems we honor and support with our dollars, and by choosing better ones. We can live in simplicity and in harmony with our surroundings, and we can learn to love selflessness.
Since today is the meeting place of poetry month and Earth Day, and since I didn’t have time to finish a longer essay-style reflection, I wanted to share a few earth-loving poems I’ve written lately. Please let me know what you think if you feel so inclined. Since we are nearing the end of Earth Day, it seems suitable to point out that we should wake up each day full of love and gratitude for the earth, for our very lives, for clean air and water and soil and plant life, for what we’ve been offered to squander. God knows no glory like a plant.
The following five poems are from a new collection I’m putting together called Never Let the World Take Your Wildness: Poems Against the Machine.
An Ode to Shattered Glass
These old roads we ride on
were built by the dead
They are too straight
and too narrow
They’re occupied by machines
that become more grotesque
with each year
and there we are in them
more grotesque
with each year
not thinking of why
or where we’re going
so I started thinking
what Ed Abbey thought before
that we should find the roadside
pull the damned thing over
next to a field of flowers
or beside a forest
which is waiting for us
We should break out
and take a look around
and turn back only
to throw a rock
We should write an ode
to shattered glass
We should walk away
walk forever away
into the older wood
into the pathless place
With our feet
we should make a new
more lovely, more profound,
more enduring trail
Nature is a Proper God
She both gives and takes away
You may enjoy a pleasant walk
through some ancient grove
bathed in moments of bliss
to later find a tick
embedded in your beltline—
In wildness, there is resilience
and there is death
There exists a kind of
animal fervor, a wholeness
that tells no lies,
doesn’t promise to be
something it isn’t
After its dark slumber
life hums again, emerges
with crystalline body
from the muck
Consciousness arises
in the world
Out Beyond Civilization
Out beyond civilization
there is another world
that calls to us,
its lost children,
to come home
Earth
Don’t we all seem
like one big
dysfunctional family?
At least
we’re
family
What if everything is perfect?
What if everything is perfect
exactly how it is
flat tires and round
characters
you and your broken wares
rings round your eyes
getting sober in your late 30s
all corruption and indecency
God’s plan for us
The planet burning
another scene in the act
What if peace is a wheel
without spokes
unable to get going
all the flowers
melting before the sun
What I really want to ask is
What if you are free
pretending like you’re not
your sadness the key
to the great gateway
of mystery
the brutality of your life
a perfect door
to harmony
(Did I say 5? Here’s a little two-liner to end on.)
What I have learned
I have learned this at least in life —
it was a privilege to stand amongst the cudweed
These are so so wonderful, James - I can’t wait to read more. Thank you for sharing your poetry - it’s a balm & a fellow witness.
A privilege indeed ... enjoyed your reflections and your poems. Look forward to reading more from this collection.