allegiance to beauty

"Perception...is a blood sport. Life itself sometimes hangs by a thread made of nothing but the spirit in which we see. And with life itself at stake, I grew suspicious of my eyes' many easy, dark conclusions. Even the most warranted pessimism began to feel unwarranted. I began to see that hope, however feeble its apparent foundation, bespeaks allegiance to every unlikely beauty that remains intact on Earth."
-- David James Duncan, My Story As Told By Water

downriver

Thanks to the creek at Big Tesuque


when wind first woke me with a whisper
time to leave the mountain shoulder
brave the boulder currents
join the ride downriver

I was unready to release my hold
small but anchored to a homeground
where I hoped to thrive not trade
connection for detachment
or a place for motion

yet she sighed me roots and all
screeing off my steep glissade
tumbling sliding sidling over
spring-fed mountainsiding fall
joining water's season

drawn reluctant from the verge
to spin and spiral and submerge
surge, resurface, pooling
spilling over each obstructing edge
again be running rapid

others find the current
skimming perfect likeness of the sky-map
still reflecting on the depths
leaf-mold algae lichen
sunparched needles aspen parchments
silt and sifted grains of granite settle
gaining ground one granule at a time
gypsy seeds alight where earth assembles
germinate convivial pauses where at last to
hold our ground where only water flowed before
now something starts to grow

you
catch on too as you scrape by
gliding homeward on the run
going with the flow
stick with me if I'm stuck here
drop what burdens we were ferrying
mid-watershed seed exchanges
decayed debris lodged with us
flotsam converts to fertile home
in drifts chinampas islands
and finally new shoreline
we recast the riffle then the current
then we rift the water
shift the stream by aggregating
far downriver from our origin
the offering of invisible mountains
where we first released into the flow

unkindled

one full season's memory of honey sweetness
embodied sunlight sings the deep kiss of vermillion flowers
the gathering work of a thousand slow and purposed hours
essence of greengrowing, nearly still alive
with care distilled from secret safety of the hive
purified and shaped while still spun gold, mutable

each light given its pair to shine with
twined to shared center potential
two radii turn hidden heat to radiance
only awaiting the strike of a match
touch flame to inner core

but now it's stilled, cool, quiet
solid where joyful dissolution should be
though they sing the sunglow's golden shade
the light within is hidden
this flame will not ignite
this fire is left unkindled

I too sleep on this quiescent shelf but
you still burn me to the wick in dreams
of flowergold and timeless blaze expanding
over all the gifts you shared but never gave
only in that other realm I shed -- my only hope --
superfluous exterior with each igniting
finally requiting weight of outer layers
leaving only sweetest honey smoke as proof

poverty3: past interest

Why in this world did I think it was a good idea to ask for more awareness of the world's poverty? Whatever was I thinking? Nothing. I was feeling. Feeling the planet's incredible injustice. And the undeniable need for more empathy.

In no way does my own poverty, if I can even call it that, compare to the world's.  But I have this dilemma in common with a part of humanity: while they don't create a dire survival mode, the struggles of my everyday are exactly complicated and distracting enough to leave little or no hope of forward motion.

Here then is what I got in the last two weeks, for that well-intentioned asking: a job that pays a wage so low I have been embarrassed to tell it to anybody. 40 hours a week for more or less the same income I had as a part-time driver. And yeah, I was spending far too much on gas before. But the days also had room to read, to think, to take care of the business of life. And now they don't. Working every Saturday and one Sunday a month means effectively giving up almost all the community events that makes living here worthwhile. And working for so little, I know from past experience, can quickly lead to paying for the past while you're still earning the present...

I asked for a quiet, peaceful home-space. And I got a place that's noisy, roach-infested, and has been under plumbing renovations for two weeks now, with no end in sight. (But yeah, it's all mine...) Every morning I rearrange the stuff that's not already piled in a heap, so the workmen have easy access to the closet, to the bathroom, under the sink. I try to do my stretches, make coffee, greet the morning sun while ignoring the holes cut in the walls for new pipes, the film of sheetrock dust on everything, the dirty tracks on the floor. I try to focus on the four tiny seedlings in the window-boxes, and the so-far empty pots that hold more wishful seeding, and not the barren, dry disconnect with the earth outside. I try to forget, every day, the house I was living in 3 months ago that had almost half an acre of garden, two wells, a chicken coop, and far too many earthy dreams for one weary, overworked, barely-grounded person to act on alone.  Alone in the company of 4 other people.

I asked, it seems, for another chance to deconstruct this incredible inexplicable tangle that, in my world, is relationship. And got, simultaneously, another yes and another frayed knot. Another round of all the things we're both too afraid to ask for, or too self-protective to offer, or too caught up in our own chaos to share. But also another try at friendship, and this intense concentrate-of-conversation which, hopefully, we can keep diluting to a drinkable strength.  Alright then. How many potential presents can one painful past sabotage? And how much not-quite can two people possibly create together?

Read only a few pages of The End of Poverty this morning. Sachs describes one of his investigatory travels as a consultant, to western Kenya. After yet another concise and clearly-detailed outline of the (very possible) actions that would bring this rural region out of its poverty, he offers a fascinating (and deplorable) pair of statistics (as of 2005, the time of the book's writing). Current international donor support annually to Kenya amounts to about 100 million dollars. And Kenya's current debt service amounts to $600 million a year. Can you dig it? It doesn't matter what well-meaning rich countries are giving, intending, or recommending. The people can't climb out at this rate. They can't even pay the past's interest with what they are receiving from the present.

...and, in the moment, I think know exactly how that situation feels...

poverty2: diminishment

When I started reading The End of Poverty two weeks ago, I made this request of Life: open me up. Make this more than an intellectual effort. Books are such portals, given the chance. It'd be well-timed with other openings in my little existence: show me, to whatever limited extent I'm capable of knowing it, more of the lack that so much of this world knows as living. Tune me in to the poverty frequency. If You think I can take it.

And Life, being ever so compassionate and creative at once, has answered that request in the most surprising and bearable ways. My job, just after increasing my hours, had a problem in accounting and only gave us half our earnings on the last paycheck. The other half will be along in two weeks, they said. In the meantime, every dollar gains just a little more value than it already had, becomes just a little more weighty and unwieldy. Every purchase a momentary cause for contemplation. Next, my apartment building, home now for three weeks, has to be replumbed. We're asked to clear space for the workmen, to put up with noise, and to expect them coming into our homes at random over one to two weeks' time -- just when I was starting to feel settled again. And finally, I asked my friendly neighborhood anarchists for a mattress to help with the chronic insomnia, and when they kindly gifted me with a most comfortable futon, it turned out to be home to a thriving population of bedbugs. At least I think that's what it was -- online research turned up a couple of simple fixes that worked well (steam-ironing and then vacuuming). And the work became a surprisingly joyful meditation on all the abundance that I have (even/especially the free and recycled abundance), as well as a prayer for all those living on the street (odds are this bed gave a homeless person rest at at least one point). All the men and women who don't even have the simple human option of bathing as often as they need to.

Okay, none of that's suffering, really: just stress. An upward twist on the control knob labelled 'Insecurity'. An accumulation of diminishment that's a threat to nothing more than tangible wellbeing. But then Life breathes in my ear: so, you're alright with the practical opportunities. How ready is your heart to open more? And then leads me to a dear friend in Santa Fe, who I haven't seen in several months. He's from central Mexico, but has lived in the States about half his life, pursuing that American Dream with a gusto and a struggle that most of us only heard about from our great-grandparents. Today he tells me that his younger brother, who lived with him for a time and then went to California, was recently deported. Like my friend, this 27-year-old had come here legal-fair-and-square, but unlike his brother who's by-the-book conscientious, this young man was living on an expired visa. He had a fairly successful contractor business going, my friend tells me, and had to sell everything. How long, I ask, over the sinking sensation of an empathetic punch to the gut. How long did he have to do that? 3 days, is the answer. They arrested him on a Friday, and by Monday he was back in Mexico.

If nothing else, he went back to family, and to a homespace. Their parents, unlike so many, haven't lost all of the old rancho that the grandfather left them. I never met the guy but I'm glad to think that at least he's not alone, or homeless. But an odd comparison occurs. Maybe it's because, at the moment I hear this story, I'm on the way to work at my dad's house. My dad began his meteoric career path with the government around age 40, after a bankruptcy and a nasty divorce. He's pursued his progress with the kind of wholehearted dedication usually expressed by immigrants, refugees, or others who in their own fates have previously lost everything. Just recently he accepted yet another fabulous promotion. I'm gearing up to play the personal assistant in organizing his next move, as I've done a couple of times already. This image crossed my mind (and not without equal sadness in contemplating): my dad, leaving work one afternoon, is accosted by armed men who tell him that he has three days to liquidate his assets, make a couple of personal calls or visits perhaps, and then he has to go spend the rest of his life in the depressed, backwater small town we all grew up in. He'll be free to move about once there, to seek employment where he likes (Wal-mart and the tourist industry have long been significant employers); he's even got family there, so he won't be alone. And this is all, unfortunately, necessary because a few months back he let his driver's license expire...

Is that fair? Is that far too simplistic? If so, somebody let me know why, cause I can't figure out the difference. Other than that one man and his laminated paper abstractions happened to be born here in the world's richest country, and the other wasn't. That one happened to have great-grandparents that made of their entire lives that struggle, so that by the time of his own birth he didn't have to. I realize there's some fundamental principle of political-entitlement-by-birth that I'm failing to include here, because I fail completely, as a human being, to grasp it. And sadness has my reason not exactly at its most expansive at the moment. While I'd never for a minute wish such a fate on my dad, I wish he could see for one second my strange vision of his life that won't happen. If only for the chance to reconsider the support and assent he gives, despite his generous nature and thanks to the culture of his workplace, to the deep toxicity of the extreme conservative agenda.

At the moment, I'm trying to remember that poem we all learned in high school. The 'no man is an island' one, you know? Which, okay, it's about a more permanent loss. But I'm thinking of 'Every man's death diminishes me'. Is that how the line goes? Personally, internally, I feel diminished for this story I heard today. It's one thing, and an easy one with our more and more, to talk of living with less. Another altogether to contemplate, essentially, the taking away of a person's life. Their chance at being alive, in all the ways we supposedly define it in this country. This reality, even as remotely and collectively as its tide washes me, is an aspect of poverty I don't feel remotely ready to tune in. Only empathetically, on the wave of sadness it brings.

poverty1

Conversation among the inner voices, recorded this morning:
"How can you sit in a lovely, safe space, enjoying the luxury of a hot breakfast cooked for you by others, and read a book on poverty?"
"How can I not?"

I'm on the way to work (for the 6th day in a row). It's the weekend as well as spring break, so free computers are in short supply at the moment (I'm writing from kinko's). My laptop just died, but there are too many observations and other blessings to let exorbitant computer fees stop me (on occasion). Here, then, are just a few lines that astounded me this morning from Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty. I offer them out of their (very astute) context of discussion, but hopefully something of their impact will communicate here. They're taken from a series of insights onto the causes and factors at work in global poverty. So many things which I for one never considered; others whose phrasing brings unexpected new light. By which, in some cases, I was almost moved to tears.

I suppose, for the moment, I only ask/invite you to feel into this subject with me, although it's a difficult one. Next time I'll try to summarize some of his very optimistic but convincing arguments on what can actually be done about it.

For now, the quotes:

"Consider the plight of inventors in an impoverished country."

"There is no margin of income above survival that can be invested for the future."

"It is no coincidence that Mexico's assembly sector is right along the Rio Grande River, since Mexico's economically relevant "coast" is its border with the United States."
(talking of the contrast of geographical and political, natural and contrived: the fact that we, among other wealthy countries, began life as a nation with the immense benefit of extensive natural coastlines for trade, yet have converted our neighbor's "virtual coastline" into a militarized "border" instead...)

"...the government may lack the resources to pay for the infrastructure on which economic growth depends...the population itself may be impoverished, so taxation of the population is not feasible."

"Children can be treated for disease to better ensure their survival, meaning that parents can have fewer children, feeling secure that they will survive to take care of their parents in old age."

And of course this line almost brought tears of a different kind:
"Americans, for example, believe that they earned their wealth all by themselves."

meant to say

Almost every single thing I've written here has arrived with regrets. Second thoughts, second guesses, second third and fourth revisions. Missing phrases or single words that didn't arrive til hours or even days later. I suppose writers much more skilled than me contend with this.

What a medium is this charged real-time electronic page! Bringing to light how solid and how mutable words are. Clear, and ever open to interpretation. Ready, and never complete. And for the sincere mind that wants to speak something useful into being, what a current of potential found and lost constantly circulates - on the page and in the blood. And in the mind, where those inner voices have their way and their play with it.

Today the voices in my head are saying I spoke too simply, that I was facile even, on a weighty subject yesterday. Some of them must be those activist voices that found their way in thanks to various heavy-minded acquaintances. I'm gonna start calling them 'reactivists': that's more their style. Always a word for what's wrong with the world, with the scene, with me, and never an affirmation. Never a truly original thought.

I know good and well it's deep water I was skimming over yesterday. So deep I can barely stand to look into its glassy green depths. But I'm gonna go deeper. This is certainly my intention. Every prayer-full night and every listening day. I'm gonna go deeper, in understanding, just by reading this book on world poverty and inequality. And when I join friends later this week, to plan the year's community garden for immigrant families that are barely making ends meet. I'm constantly asking Life to speak to me, with these and other currents of the Now, about how much longer I can be just another person working for a living. Or whether for the life in me I need to take a more significant path in the world. In this little wordspace I only hope to practice a few minutes of affirmation. To sidle up to the depth on careful, maybe philosophical, maybe even humorous terms if I'm lucky. To polish a tiny pane of light in all this dinginess. To speak to what IS, in all the NOT. That's the sort of word I meant to say -- the sort of uncapturable thing I dared to hope words could sort of capture -- again yesterday.