Spinning, spinning, spinning
... and, in the end, dreaming yet.
As I write, if I turn and look out my window, I see a gorgeous autumn day, the sky a crystal blue with classic fluffy clouds, leaves late-turning, and the hydrangeas across the street still in their autumnal lime-green bloom.
In fact, much of the vista is green: trees of several mundane varieties; mowed lawns, most of them expertly groomed to subdivision perfection; vines wrestling with their circumscribed reality, convinced they can bring down a fence; and what might have been majestic yews were it not for the neighbour’s annual barbering, prim and proper compared with the ragged tops of my own, untrimmed, unkempt, and still living their dream of reaching the sky one day.
The rest is civilization: carefully chosen boulders, trucked in and perfectly positioned to define a front garden; asphalt from roof shingled top to paved-road bottom; brick and vinyl siding laid over plywood houses that will be long out-lasted when the yews go feral; and, every so often, a vehicle of some sort passing by, either heading for or coming home from something most subdivisions don’t provide – a corner store, a pharmacy, a coffee shop, their children’s school, a local pub.
This is the world in which I, and millions like me, live. Designed. Built. Regulated. Every bit of it is under the scrutiny of neighbours first, and local legislators later, should the need arise. Popularized over fifty years ago, developers still covet the “houses here, shopping there, business downtown, industry anywhere else” design principles that built our automobile-dependent communities. It is in one of these housing communities – suburbs – that I live. I don’t despise it. But I ponder its affront to history, to the human community, to nature, and to the future.
When I was fifteen, I spent a summer working as a “Mother’s Helper” in Magog, Quebec. I think my mom was weirded out by my boyfriend at the time, a gentle, artistic soul who, over the course of the summer, wrote me dozens of love letters, mostly on Alphonse Mucha cards, others in gold ink on thin blue airline paper. I took care of three boys, learned how to make proper scrambled eggs, and spent hours in my room reading the most romantic love letters ever written.
Yes, this is one of the letters. Don’t ask ….
It’s not the romance I want to highlight. It’s the letters. That they came through the mail. That it took time to write them. That they were perfect but became so only after pages had been written, wrinkled up, discarded, and written again, the pen dipped in gold ink over and over again. That they took days to get to me and that I anticipated their delivery with impatience. That my every response was walked to the post office with an 8-cent, licked stamp affixed to its corner. Everything was slower. Everything took more time. Everything could be thought through, tarried over, considered, and reconsidered. Even the romantic expressions of teenagers’ love.
We moved at a slower pace back then. Most of the houses I and my friends lived in were double-walled brick or stone. Children shared bedrooms, read books borrowed from libraries, fought over the family’s single telephone, took five minutes to decide over juicy fruit gum or sweetheart candies at the corner store, played board games in the evening when homework was finished, wore clothes, mended and handed down, cooled off in the backyard with homemade popsicles in the hot summer, and skated unsteadily on the lumpy winter rinks dads made in their backyards or those the city set up in local parks.
Photo: David Trinks, Unsplash
Dinner was made of the raw materials of vegetables, meat, and dairy foods, groceries purchased at a local store. Bread and pies and cakes were baked. Nothing was shrink-wrapped or pre-cooked, and nothing delivered, not even pizza. The world was different. But it was still much like the world our parents had known and grown up in, only a few domestic steps beyond the world their parents had known and grown up in. Technology had not yet claimed the systems that had slowly evolved over generations – education, medicine, household economics, business. Only a very few – if any – had an inkling of what was about to explode into and around our lives, its complexity providing us access to goods and services with a speed and variety we never imagined, the cost of it all not yet realized.
We cannot claim ignorance now. While the many continue to cocoon themselves in a blissful dismissal of reality, the rest of us feel the brazen condemnation of our generational comforts as we spin toward a future that will be far more challenging than anything humanity has ever known. Although we’ve cycled through several civilizations, each with its own wondrous cresting and catastrophic fall, this time things will be different. We’ll have altered the nature of the planet’s capacity to support life as it has emerged and developed over millennia. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence can build a future in which both humanity and nature thrive, but I am skeptical. No. Worse than that. I worry my hope is not strong enough to support the sliver of optimism that routinely struggles to survive beneath the weight of that too-genteel beast the skeptic claims they can control.
Those who build the next civilization will do so under a sun perhaps more brutal but no less indifferent, will gaze over empty seas, and wrestle with as yet unimagined realities. And the earth, oblivious to the needs and dreams of those who walk upon it, will remain in its millennial orbit, spinning along in its measured pace.
Back to back, our heirs will yet be watchful, shoulder to shoulder, they will still stand strong against the forces that cause their fear. Perhaps that sliver of hope will find its strength in the power of the human heart to wrap itself around lost arts, the baking of bread, the growing of seeds, the gathering of warmth in stories shared around a blazing, mud-banked fire. Though golden lettering and tissue paper promises be long forgotten, the human heart will never leave the truth of love behind. And it, as it has always done, will use its power to bring our successors together, breast to breast, to wrap around one another in intimate and vulnerable moments, shattering any individualistic arrogance that they might build, as our every ancestor has ever done, a shelter for the rebirth of beauty, goodness, truth, and hope, and invite the human story to move on.
Orb
From a distance,
this tiny blue ball,
shimmering in utter darkness,
holding its own
in a sea of nothing/somethingness.
Captivated by our apparent solitude,
we yet live pressed close against one another,
and ease the pain
of that too dreadful reality.
Back to back,
we are watchful.
Shoulder to shoulder,
we are strong.
Breast to breast,
we are vulnerable.
May our living
shake the everyday stuff of our lives
out of us
lest it tragically define who we are
and reduce us
beyond recognition.
And may we be cast upon the unknowing
that is our most terrible truth,
and so live each step,
each breath,
as though it is a wonder.
As those who choose to walk with courage
upon a lonely, spinning orb,
we dream.
