A lunch hour walk beside the South Platte River about ten minutes from the office: red-tailed hawk perched in a tree on the other side of the river watches. A few ducks are left from the great floats of six weeks ago. A widgeon's soft buff brown; a pair of goldeneyes with their striking white cheek patches rising from the cluster of shovelers.
Walking on this broad concrete "path" along the river – shallow from the scant snow in the headwater mountains, with a slight aroma of old washing machine water – leaves a "natural" experience still to be desired. On the non-river side of the path, a trough is filled with rip-rap – chunks of red and black rock that extend to a bank topped with a chain link, three-strand barbed wire topped fence. Down-right homey. I haven't crossed over the rip-rap to see what is on the other side but I'm sure it's another pond since ducks take off from that side and fly to the river and back and there are no buildings. A giant transmission line crosses the river and the path.
The hum of traffic is somewhat fainter, but always there. No trees shade the path, though there are some cottonwood saplings on the river bank ringed with woven wire mesh to keep the beavers from gnawing them down. And there definitely are beavers along the water courses.
Driving back to the office, crossing over I-25, the artery that runs across Colorado from Wyoming to New Mexico, down Greenwood Boulevard to Dakin Street, I am struck by how sick I am of all this urbanization. How much my soul longs for a low-traffic dirt road running through woods and along green fields and ponds and streams, that lacks the artifice that surrounds and is this place.
I realize that perhaps I have been holding myself together – barely – in this place by not allowing myself too much recognition of how much it deadens the spirit.
The ever building cities do not recognize how much open space they should keep open in order to give their residents the experience – and the breath -- of nature. Pathetically small areas are left open for the tens of thousands of residents. Once plowed fields are scraped bare and wait with their lines of machinery for the next flush of dollars for the streets, the curbs, the eight-foot boundary walls, the junk. Bounded by houses and shopping areas, the open green places shrink and shrink as the people pile in.
I should go stand with the Women in Black; my sign could read:
What about the children?
No nukes is good nukes
Reduce teen suicide rates: create a peaceable world
Stop fighting – start listening
It starts with you – change your warring thoughts
Babies should not have to grow up to be soldiers
Grow in love, not in nukes
The folks on the other side – they are human too
Mother Earth to all children – stop fighting; take a permanent time out from war.
Twenty-five years ago and it all returns. You can never trust that anything is safely resolved, not with the men we seem to be electing – or not, as the case may be.
Listening – listening – listening – the hope is in listening as did the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after apartheid was officially ended.
Earth Charter #1: There shall be no wars fought based on religious creed. There are no infidels. Keep your religious creeds to yourself and tolerate others' right to do the same. Infringe those creeds on no one without their permission.
Oh, gull, bright shining in the sun
Lend your lifted wings to the hurting one
To keep beating through the pain
Beyond the pain into the rush of spirit-filled wonder
And release of worries
I wonder at the beauty and the love
I wonder at the light and the darkness
There is love in the world
Sharon and his ilk know not of the love that surpasses
Neither does Arafat, bin Laden,
the numerous other petty dictators who
Presume that war and killing and devastation are the only
Sources of power in this world
There is a great source of power
It is love – unconceited, unbounded
That loves its enemies into a new understanding
I stand with a toe in the Christian church, singing songs of myth
That many people believe in implicitly
Yet I would sing songs of Merlin
With as much belief and fervor
Songs of shamans and wizards
Songs that sing of springing equinox
Songs that echo love, not death and dying
