This Spinning Miracle

      

                                             

This morning my dog Brando was very much out of it: disoriented, frightened, breathing strangely. (He had been under anesthesia most of yesterday) I fed him fresh salmon and some rice and then went to the downstairs area of my house, opened the back doors and he came down the stairs gingerly. 

He walked out onto the deck, freshly wet from the rain and took a few sniffs. I observed him closely...his ears perking up at wild sounds, watched him taking in the scents I could not even hope to pick up. He shifted slightly, his body twitching a bit and then my little white dog spotted a squirrel running up the redwood and took off after him. All his senses were alive again. He ran like the wind. 

 I cried not so much that Brando had returned to the world (although that matters to me in ways I can not explain) but because this is what the natural world accomplishes for every living thing. But especially now for human beings. We will perish without it being alive and thriving and available to everyone all the time. It is not for the wealthy alone to be engaged in the world around us. We must stop the exploiters and elite dead in their tracks. This world is not just for rich humans but for all species on this planet. 

Brando and I will go for a short walk today and I will feel gratitude for the air that costs nothing and the sky that costs nothing and for the trees that cost nothing. In the end, your environment, the NATURAL world, is all we really have. And it must be free to everyone. Such beauty and wisdom in trees, and sky, and ground and all living creatures. That's the only "political" platform that will matter at some point. How well we were stewards of this earth. 

This spinning miracle.

 

The Boogey Man Virus and The Pestilence of Americans

It's Tuesday 7:53 in Berkeley. I wake up with a stuffy nose and a headache. For the past two weeks, I've endured the effects of stress, lack of sleep and a dull constant fear. Outside Trader Joe's yesterday, the faces of strangers were mask-like, their downward glances as afraid of me as I of them. We didn't smile and say hello. We didn't make eye contact. We are not the same place we have been for decades. We are in the midst of a pandemic. And there is no place to hide.

Schools are beginning to shut down. The University of California just announced all classes will be taught at a distance - electronically.  Except, of course, for the performing arts. Those classes will meet.  The arts are as insignificant as ever here in 2020 America. The welfare of a few theatre students apparently doesn't matter much. Or perhaps there's not as much of a threat to the health and safety as the media sources would have us believe. It's hard to say.   

Self expression, the radical, resistance to the current aesthetic of Apocalyptic streaming shows has become even more of a clear and present danger to the regimentation of the masses now that we have a Boogey Man virus. End times. It's everywhere. The desire for the end of the way things have been. To begin anew.

It's in our human natures when we have ruined any relationship to want a second chance. A third chance. A last chance. If a virus infestation starting with the Chinese can get us there, all the better. The Chinese are often the Boogeymen in the American consciousness. Like the Japanese once were until they became more like us. Like those damnable Russians. Or Iranians. All dirty rotten scoundrels according to American made movies and shows.

It is critical we know the enemy. The real enemy. But who is that in the days of pestilence and Corona? It can not possibly be us. We are the innocents.

There will be cuts in public education once again until eventually any radical ideas of multiculturalism are erased forever. There will be cuts in Medicare and Social Security. There will be further degradation of our environment. We will cut down too many trees and build too many high rises. We will have more detention camps.

Our local and national government is ineffective at dealing with a pandemic. We will find a new use for the military besides invasion of other countries. We will invade our own country. 

We already have.

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