the world and a little state called Arizona
This entry is half-journal, half-prose translation of a poem I recently wrote...
Inaction has been on my mind a lot lately. What ever happened to doing? what happened to movers and shakers, those names that everyone heard on the radio or television or read about in the papers? What happened to people who made a difference? I've been overly-harsh on myself about this lately. Or maybe not. I get so angry about environmental issues, and yet what do I ever DO about it? Very little. I mean, I recycle. Nearly every product I buy is organic and biodegradable. I bike when I can. I am trying to learn about sustainable living, and make good choices by not supporting companies that dump toxins into the ocean or take advantage of third world countries. But in terms of stopping the (for lack of a better word) rape of the desert? I haven't so much as signed a petition. I get angry and vote against people like Bush. I get angry seeing my childhood become housing developments and Walgreens and Conoco. I get angry when people kill coyotes and javalina and mountain lions for still hunting the land they happened to build their house on. I get angry seeing the filthy Phoenix air and the light pollution that didn't exist 5 years ago. I get angry seeing the desert torn down.
And lately, getting angry hasn't been enough.
There are memories of past wrongs that live in the desert, and these wrongs haunt people who ignore them. People who, in their frustration, defile the Earth with backhoes and cranes and try to smother the screams of ghosts with concrete. Call me crazy, but in my pony-girl youth, I went free-birding through mesquite and jojoba and creosote on foot, bike, or horseback. I heard them. I saw them. I was a night owl, a rebellious filly with palomino mane and a coyote laugh and I prowled the desert at night. I saw the shapes that trembled among the shadows, shapes that were not anything from this world. My blood is in the desert. Maybe not by birth, but I've left a trail of myself all the way from the borderlands up to flagstaff. Even immersed in Spanish on a tropical island, i dreamed of creosote-saturated rains and the light sticky-sweetness of mesquite pods.
I don't want to wake up to a destroyed world one morning and realize that I MIGHT have changed things, even if ever so slightly. I want to do something, besides have high blood pressure every time I drive to my Mom and Dad's. I look out my window and I see Gaea, and I see abuse, and I see people who just don't seem to care that in 50, 30, 10 years we will have to change our lives drastically or asphyxiate in our greed and abuse. I want to take sledgehammers to blacktop and brick and exhume the spirits suffocating beneath. Give a place back to the homeless creatures who wander through streets, confused by walls and cars.
these things have been on my mind. I don't plan on becoming an eco-terrorist by any means, but I can't just sit here anymore.
where, pray tell, does one begin when they want to heal the world?
Inaction has been on my mind a lot lately. What ever happened to doing? what happened to movers and shakers, those names that everyone heard on the radio or television or read about in the papers? What happened to people who made a difference? I've been overly-harsh on myself about this lately. Or maybe not. I get so angry about environmental issues, and yet what do I ever DO about it? Very little. I mean, I recycle. Nearly every product I buy is organic and biodegradable. I bike when I can. I am trying to learn about sustainable living, and make good choices by not supporting companies that dump toxins into the ocean or take advantage of third world countries. But in terms of stopping the (for lack of a better word) rape of the desert? I haven't so much as signed a petition. I get angry and vote against people like Bush. I get angry seeing my childhood become housing developments and Walgreens and Conoco. I get angry when people kill coyotes and javalina and mountain lions for still hunting the land they happened to build their house on. I get angry seeing the filthy Phoenix air and the light pollution that didn't exist 5 years ago. I get angry seeing the desert torn down.
And lately, getting angry hasn't been enough.
There are memories of past wrongs that live in the desert, and these wrongs haunt people who ignore them. People who, in their frustration, defile the Earth with backhoes and cranes and try to smother the screams of ghosts with concrete. Call me crazy, but in my pony-girl youth, I went free-birding through mesquite and jojoba and creosote on foot, bike, or horseback. I heard them. I saw them. I was a night owl, a rebellious filly with palomino mane and a coyote laugh and I prowled the desert at night. I saw the shapes that trembled among the shadows, shapes that were not anything from this world. My blood is in the desert. Maybe not by birth, but I've left a trail of myself all the way from the borderlands up to flagstaff. Even immersed in Spanish on a tropical island, i dreamed of creosote-saturated rains and the light sticky-sweetness of mesquite pods.
I don't want to wake up to a destroyed world one morning and realize that I MIGHT have changed things, even if ever so slightly. I want to do something, besides have high blood pressure every time I drive to my Mom and Dad's. I look out my window and I see Gaea, and I see abuse, and I see people who just don't seem to care that in 50, 30, 10 years we will have to change our lives drastically or asphyxiate in our greed and abuse. I want to take sledgehammers to blacktop and brick and exhume the spirits suffocating beneath. Give a place back to the homeless creatures who wander through streets, confused by walls and cars.
these things have been on my mind. I don't plan on becoming an eco-terrorist by any means, but I can't just sit here anymore.
where, pray tell, does one begin when they want to heal the world?