Sunday, September 18, 2011

Dark Clouds

 
Although the internet gives us the ability to know virtually anything we want,  I stay away from specific areas where I don't think I can handle the information.  I am afraid that if I knew the true state of certain things, I couldn't go on making my little plans, celebrating my little successes.  Instead,  I would be paralyzed with depression or consumed by anger.  Those unknown facts are sensed to be things that I have very little chance of changing, yet are horrible.  One of those subject areas for me is "fracking."

 Fracking is not a clever way of writing the other "f-word."  It is shorthand for a terrible way we are tearing up this country in a gold rush for natural gas.  Seduced by good reviews, I watched the movie "Gasland," a documentary about this topic.  Although a well-made movie,  I am now consumed with rage over our political indifference to the plight of citizens and the land itself, against the thuggery of corporations.  But I'm not even going to get into it.  If you are interested see the movie or google fracking.  Enough said.


In another sad tale, I must report that I once again have gone around the block of dissatisfaction with the organization that employs me.  It seems like businesses are exactly like families in the way they can repeat the same argument over and over, without anything new being said.  If there were not outside forces pulling us this way and that, we wouldn't be able to change at all.  I only have myself to blame of course, for not finding either a way out or another way through the points of contention.  But like the topic above, it seems like something I have little control over, and hence the unhappiness it causes.

Perhaps it is just the weather affecting me.  Today was the first real rain in about two months.  This signals the end of summer and the beginning of our very wet winter.  You would think I would have found peace with the changing seasons, but I hate to see the warm weather go.



       

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Beachy


I grew up on the beach and if sand isn't in my veins, it is at least metaphorically in my hair.  So I was happy to score a beach house for Labor Day weekend, and hopeful that the Oregon coast would come through with at least a couple of sunny days while we were there.  Amazingly, the sun was out most of the time, and on Saturday a hot east wind made it reasonable to immerse briefly in the ice cold ocean and then lay out on the sand, soaking up the heat.

Oregon actually has a relatively high rate of skin cancer, because of moments like this.  With so many cloudy days this summer, an opportunity to bare skin is a religious moment for some of us.  I lay down on a towel and dug my fingers into the warm silky sand, remembering all the childhood days when I did the same thing, loving the surf filling up my ears with sound.  I actually fell asleep for a little while, which is rare indeed. Later I took a walk after sunset and engaged in another childhood pleasure-- walking with my eyes closed.  As far as I know, the beach is the only safe place to do this.  

Walking on the beach always gives me a chance to think expansively.  Perhaps the ocean stretching to the horizon pulls thoughts out and strings them together in long sentences that can be grasped better than when they run around the little tracks in my cranium.  But I came out of that weekend with a firm intention to focus my efforts on one interest at a time, instead of a dozen all at once.  Hence, I have gone back to an old project--getting all my poems in one virtual place, even if I have to type them all again, into this computer.  This task has been about two thirds done for about five years.  But until I have it all the way done, I can't decide what can be done with them, and what can be done next.   Tonight I opened up the box with all the pieces of paper with poems on them, sorting which are digitally preserved and which are not.  I still am filled with intention, and here is a poem from the collection.


Meditation

Air slips over sand, surf thumps
applauding each wave lipping the beach.

gulls butcher sandcrabs with a crunch
and garnish of seaweed

quartz runs fine like bathwater
through my fingers,

light stretches elastic across the sky
saturating sea and the dome behind my iris

each angle unbends toward the horizon
until I know nothing more.