Autumn

In the Northern Hemisphere, we move into Autumn. The arc of the sun shrinks on the horizon. Days shorten. The light becomes sharper on clear, dry days.

It is easy to ignore the turning of the seasons in an urban environment. Our lives, tied to illuminated panels, large and small, are less impacted by the shrinking hours of natural light. The projected world, a transmitted construct of bytes and code, fuses with the natural world in our distracted minds.

Get out. Look around. Breathe deeply. Leave the iPhone at home. Walk (not ride) in the world and look at the houses, the trees, the gardens. Meet the eyes of your neighbors. Stop and talk with someone who is working or sitting in a yard or on a porch.

The time is coming when this activity will be more difficult, less attractive. Take advantage of the season. Be present in your natural environment, whatever and wherever it may be.

Flowers

cut flowers, dead things,

once glorious sex pots,

then reeling in fat bees,

in vases, drooping limp,

in fungus-funky water,

sweet. rotting, fragrant

spores poisoning the air

of new lovers, courted,

soon abandoned, wilted.

Flooding

Here in New England, we have had quite a bit of rain lately. Many of us are bailing out basements and mopping up cellar floors. After hearing a considerable number of these stories, I spent some time thinking about the whole process in relation to the cycles of life and death. I summarized my thoughts in the following poem:

iFlood

by Paul Creeden

veneered with flood water
mottled gray basement floor
not deep but seeping up
from under earth beneath.

cannot push it down, away.
must suck it up and spit it out
down the back walk asphalt
to the gutter storm drains.

dead things, decomposed, stay.
the soup of deep water dried
shows brine and bacteria skin
around the rough cellar edges.

scent of drying decay reminds
how we are just bits together
until we die and soak and rot
to parts of low ground water

someday after some heavy rain
somewhere not too far from here
my bits may visit you invisibly
rising with the damp under foot.

don't hesitate to flush me out.
travel will be my way of life.
from pump to drain to sea mist
and back to flood water again.

.

Summer

Eniko, poet/friend,
inspired this.....



Summer has come for an extended visit.
He's sweating on all the furniture and weeps,
in thunderous showers. The plants love him.
The bees and wasps are frantically building.
I sit in my new patio space and watch him.
He seems determined to topple the tall lilies.
Those weepy outbursts and windy tantrums.
When he leaves I won't miss him 'til January.


________________________________

Reality

This is the age of the virtual everything. I believe most people are living in their minds to the movie themes of their iPods.

There are 16 rain-saturated inches of new snow outside my house. I do not own a snow blower. I shovel. Lifting scores of shovelfuls of wet snow is real. Walking to the train or the market, which are only one mile away, in the cold and the muck to avoid using my buried car is real. Being wet to the skin with rain and exertion is real.

I focus and cherish these realities and their accompanying difficulties as part of my practice. It is the practice of being human, a small, mortal animal on a large planet in a larger Universe, subject to its actual elements and their effects.

Snow

I thank the snow for its weight, its cold, its pure whiteness.

I thank the snow for slowing the mechanized inhumanity.

I thank the snow for bringing me home to my human scale.

Fire

The media interest in the recent wildfires in California has been focused on the rich and their losses. Multimillion-dollar homes destroyed near the beach. The obsession (attachment) of the society with money and things is reflected in these stories.

Fire, like flood, is a predictable force in the environment. It is man's dysfunction in Nature which worsens the effects of fire. Nature is not the enemy. That attitude is responsible for the deterioration of our planetary environment.

Overpopulation, greed, selfishness, materialism...these are the enemies of the planet, which will adjust to their onslaught with pure, unprejudiced physical and chemical reactions. It is not a moral, or even human, struggle. We are one species, a species which has intentionally abused the planet and many other species.

Effective practice for personal evolution demands confronting these realities daily in your own life. Practice includes taking responsibility for your own relationship to the planet. Without contact with Nature and education about it, there is no understanding of your own place in it.

Wilderness

Wilderness frightens most human beings in this time. This is a sad commentary on our species. Wealthy humans will flock to undeveloped countries where amputees have to beg for their food on the streets before they will try to hike in wilderness. What does this say about our regard for the natural ecosystems from which we emerged? What does this say about our evolution as a species?

I was led to these thoughts after hearing a radio story about the forest fires that have disturbed people living on the edge of national and state forests in the West of the U.S.. The lumber industry, which has plundered all available old growth forest they have been allowed to exploit. now feels they should be allowed to 'thin' the national and state forests down from 1,000 trees per acre to 50 treees per acre. They see this, in their greedy little minds, as a public service, which just happens to yield them great profits. Only in times of a demented relationship between humans and environment would this suggestion be considered long enough to be reported on a national media outlet.

Take a walk. Look at the sky. Find a patch of trees somewhere near you. Reacquaint yourself with your true roots, the roots you have in the soil of your Mother Planet.

Light

The solstice approaches in the Northern Hemisphere. Light slants and throws long shadows in the middle of the day. The clarity of this light is noticeably sharper than the light of Summer. This light is blue and cool. It is not the light of evolving life. It is the light of pause and reflection. With this light comes the cold. The cold wind chastens. It disciplines the haughty and self-indulgent. It makes the strongest shoulders contract to conserve body heat. I am learning to walk in this cold. I am learning to stand erect in it, to breath its harsh bite with deep and measured breaths. I am learning to open my eyes wide in this cold, to survey its magnificent lessons about Nature and Life. Facing Winter is facing Death. It is part of my practice.