Sunday, September 8, 2013

The Sunshine Act


I spent the weekend at the coast, which was blinding with sunshine, disinfecting the mind of every blackspot of sadness, every mold of regret, removing the entire past and replacing it with  the full spectrum of light.  (This is an obvious quote of that amazing movie title “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”) But after many hours on the beach, I went to see the new life that Deb has made in the undergrowth of the coast, where she has wrested a house and a studio out of a swarm of laurel and ivy.

Deb is an artist,  who has developed from medium to medium, from photography to pastels, to painting.  Meeting in college, over the years, I caught her at art shows, and signed up for her email list, but in those quick contacts, mostly we reminisced, about those couple of years where we suffered the shock of the freedom of choice that strikes young adults, let go of their parents.  But through the years she has been important to me, representing what happens if you choose your path, rather than just follow a trail.

Recently married to a fellow artist, Deb and Carl have conquered so many obstacles of house husbandry, and they would be forgiven if actual creation of art was subsumed by pouring of concrete, diversion of streams, and slaying of holly.  But no, taming of the land is entwined with pictures of green growth and lives of people within the land. Yet, amidst the success of love and land and art, is the recognition that life is always hard.  As long as we live, we must let go, of friends and family and places we held dear.
I drove back to the city on an unfamiliar road, one bordered by recent clearcuts, a wholesale destruction by chainsaw and bulldozer.   Although every Oregonian is inured to these sights, propagandized by the claim that prosperity depends on the transmogrification of landscape from life to commodity, I stopped at the sight of a stump so big it needed the step cut in the trunk to allow the faller to get high enough to make a good cut.  These were commonplace in the historical stumps still visible throughout the state on the old growth giants felled before my tenure here.  Hating to think about that big one being taken even now,  I scrambled into the overturned geography without trees, their branches scraped into piles for later burning.  The air was sweet with pitch.  I noticed the tender understory, still freshly green, soon to die without shading fir branches.  I dug under a fern, with new bright green fronds, and untangled its roots, deciding to save at least one orphan from the slaughter.


We all make choices as individuals and as societies.  We almost always think we have made the right choice.  And yet, many of us are not happy, the atmosphere is filling with unbreatheable gases, and we kill off other species and our own for very little gain.  I thought that it is not enough to acknowledge suffering is part of life.   We must struggle to conserve what has been created and in the face of destruction, create anew.  



No comments:

Post a Comment