Author: admin

Cave paintings at the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh in India.

By Joshua Sokol Feb. 5, 2021 in the NY Times

This phrase so struck me,
“Over time, art styles shifted. Human figures donned clothes. Horses and elephants sprouted riders. Wars danced across sandstone faces. Today, many of the cave walls are now palimpsests, with medieval warriors covering Chalcolithic art on top of even older Mesolithic drawings.”

This is the recorded history of the changes wrought by major shifts in human history, does the record show us becoming clothed? Or perhaps the ability to depict a clothed human. But most amazing is what seems to me to be the indisputable record of domestication directly recorded unmistakably by the folk who were there.

I found myself, one time, in my Poke Boat against the shore next to one of the remaining oyster shell middens in Maine. I picked up an oyster shell and felt guilty and was flooded with awe, the last time this shell had been touched by a human, and it was unmistakably a shell that had last been touched by humans one to two thousand years ago. The river banks there were lined with tall mounds of oyster shells left from generations of locals who shucked each and every one. They shucked ’em out, as the sad truth goes, we are recently bringing back oysters to the area. The mounds were so vast, that they were mined for the calcium content for chicken feed in the 1880s until most were gone.

https://www.maine.gov/cgi-bin/online/doc/parksearch/index.pl?search_radio=1&state_park=&historic_site=80&public_reserved_land=&shared_use_trails=&town=&distance=&submit=Go+%BB

This poem and it’s attribution was posted on my local NextDoor Neighborhood website.

I’m dancing. 
Dancing my grief, my rage, my helplessness.
Needing to move my body and move the energy so that the fight and flight response can dissolve into tears and I can soften again.
Each.
Impossibly.
Tense.
Muscle.
I’m dancing in my prison of privilege.
The roof and floor that I call home. 
The nest – now burning, or burnt, or lost for so, so many. 

I’m dancing the realisation of Covid Hell for those literally trapped inside – when sheltering in place for me was doubling the size of my veggie garden. 
And becoming a fledgling bee keeper. 
You were trapped and I was free.
Now.
I.
Feel. 
You.
I’m dancing the prison industrial complex. 
It’s the first time it’s come to show itself to me.
It’s landed in me. It’s inside me. And I’m screaming. 

How do you trap a soul in a cell with no window and expect it to heal? Unless eternal damnation was the plan all along? Unless compassion is a concept on paper but theory for humanity. 
I am them. 
I am the prison walls reflecting impotence, trappedness, inconsequence at a time when our world needs everything they are. 
I am the helplessness. The agony turned inwards. The betrayal of a system.
In.
Every.
Way.
I am the wailing and the ears too deaf to listen.

Only I’m listening.
I dance the burning of the camp in Lesbos. The misery, the rage, the horror. The homelessness. Again. The unwantedness. The no place to go. 
I am that. It’s here inside me for all to see.

These fires that are burning here – but warming your world there….they are screaming injustice. Separation. Dominance. Separation. Thoughtlessness. Separation. Carelessness. Separation. Apathy. Separation. Ignorance. Loss. 
Unthinkable loss. 

SEE ME life cries – from every prison cell, every trafficked child, every factory farm, every slaughtered forest, poisoned ocean, damned river…

Our world is screaming for us to wake up to the sacred pact we ARE in this life. The pact to recognize the sacredness of ALL. 

ALL. 

There is no ‘them’.
There is no ‘over there’. 
It’s.
All. 
Here. 
I dance to tear down the walls within me that have kept out the horrendous suffering of others – for there are no others – and THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. 

I dance while impossible smoke holds me prisoner so that I might feel how billions live daily, in levels of pollution that we leave them to endure. 

These fires have ripped open my felt experience of social injustice in ways I could never have imagined. On. So. Many. Levels. 

I am burning

Although Maine had had huge fires in the past, this is the view that is more impressive than the one I saw yesterday looking east. What I saw was a huge cloud of smoke billowing up between 2 peaks, this was taken about 2 hours away from me through a mountain pass.

This is looking towards the east through a pass in the Cascade Range of mountains. Portland, where I am is much greener than that side of the range because the Cascades comb out most of the moisture and it curled up and back to us.
Meanwhile our sky is obscured and the trees at the back of my property are in a haze. I gather that not only are we getting the smoke from the fires out east, but also dust from a dust storm the winds have kicked up on the other side of the Cascades where they have a lot of it.

Be well, all.

Last night I want on a small adventure, a trip to Ingrid’s Scandinavian Food a restaurant which, not surprisingly, serves nothing else. Now start reading this as though Sir David Attenborough were talking. I ordered a salmon wrap, the bread used for the wrap is lefse, a potato based bread which was delicious and only 9 dollars. I ate as the sun began leaving the sky, sitting at a table in a parking space on a beautiful late summer night. But that wasn’t the only reason I was here. I was drawn by the promise of an annual celestial event I’d missed last year. The return of the swifts.

The chimney swifts or Vaux’s swifts, or both, have been coming to chimneys in Oregon in September for years. Before that, they nested in hollow trees, which were a lot more common 300 years ago. I read that groups of roosting swifts can range in size from just a few individuals to as many as 35,000 in some larger smokestacks. They returned to one particular elementary school for 30 years and then one year they shifted to another chimney and have returned to their “new” roost every year since. So those hollow trees must have lasted a while themselves to allow the birds to learn to memorize their particular tree. Or, more likely probably, all migratory birds can geo locate, I just never thought of it as being that specific, but it may feel just like the family who own camps or cottages. I wonder if it’s anything like opening the door for the first time in a year, smelling the smells of the place and sitting on familiar rocks and looking at the small familiar places, a crease in the rock, a returning daisy, the glint off water or the setting sun making an easterly, bosky hillside glow. The comfort in returning to familiar places, and, I suppose, dear chimneys.