I've spent the last five years caregiving (again). This time for my dear mother, who insisted on celebrating her 98th birthday and then departed for heaven the next month. Somehow, I couldn't bring myself to write about the incredible challenges of getting adequate care for her. Writing my other blog, Dwindling Light, about my husband's long decline from dementia was enough. I couldn't do it again.

Between caregiving and the plague years and then settling my mother's estate, I didn't do much else until recently. But I did write. A lot. Three book manuscripts, four short stores, a myriad of poems that need editing.  And now I feel ready to share my work with the world again. But what to share? 

What would provide some succor, some strength, maybe some levity, to others in this very difficult passage we are all rowing through together? The waves are high. The rocks are higher. Our boats seem small and flimsy. And the dark tide runs fast into a future that, frankly, doesn't look that appealing. No dawn-drenched quiet bay ahead. At least not for awhile. 

But there is this: we have each other. We have a loving God. At least, I think so. My focus during this Lenten/Ramadan/Passover season is to let that God love me. To simply open my aperature wide enough to let the warm comforting light in. Just for now, to stop yelling at God. To stop asking why?, why? and why? both personally and in terms of our collapsing climate, the horrible internicine wars of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, or the continued flood tide of racism, autocracy and neo-fascism. 

In the midst of these, there are shifts in focus that can help me (and, I think, anyone) find something like peace. Not for more than a few moments at a time, and not in the distractions of electronic media and fan-dom. But perhaps in an early walk on a still chilly spring morning, rosy-fingered dawn and all; perhaps in a few minutes of play with the neighbor's lopping half-grown puppy; perhaps in taking deep breaths while listening to lesser goldfinches cheep and whistle, and the creeks bounding down to the nearby river.

These are not ways to combat sorrow. The ache in my chest remains--for the children of Gaza, the hostages' families, for subSaharan Africa, for families sweltering in camps at the border, for tigers and penguins and stranded whales. But these gracious time-outs revive my soul. 

It's such an old word, soul. Saxon in origin, related to zeal. Unrelated to the gendered Greek forms, anima and animus. How much do we think about soul in our daily lives? The very liveliness of life? We forget that there is more to our experience than its physical impact, more to grief than the heaviness. There's a soulfulness to being here. The soul that's at the same time observing thought and action and also communing with other souls, and the Great Soul Creator. 

Maybe that's why we are so stricken with these sorrows all around us. Our souls are not protected from them anymore; the internet brings them to us in all our waking hours. It's been a long time since we've legitimately been able to plead ignorance of evil. And our souls are watching, sighing and hurting when we pretend we don't know, claim it's always been this bad. 

It's always been something, sometimes very global and very terrible, like smallpox or the plague, like World War Two. But now the terror has sunk into our bones, our animal memory. I think that's why there is such a craze for science fiction and dark fantasy, especially in the young. They are hunting for a way to normalize, at least regularize, the likelihood that the world will be in very bad shape by the time they are responsible adults who will have to somehow fix it or cope with it or hide from it. It's escapism, yes, but also maybe training.

The problem is when anticipating darkness actually creates that darkness. That's my concern about people's response to global climate collapse. That the appeal of dark authoritariabisn will pull us into the maw of the thing we fear. that the desire to go unconscious may shape a future of passive horror, like Nazi Germany but a hundred times worse. 

So the hope has to lie in encouraging the human capacity to remain awake, to rest and re-soul ourselves in a loving God, to talk together about how we feel at this dreadful moment and what will get us through the dark passage, into the light.

Oh, my goodness. Five years? Has it really been five years since I put fingers to keyboard here and shared my thoughts? I should catch everyone up. I should come up with excuses so any agents or editors who read this will not think I've totally slacked off and left the writing world altogether. No, I haven't. And there aren't really excuses. There is just life getting hard.

What happened is this: A year after my husband died, I became the executive director of an environmental organization and fell headlong into a whirlpool of overwork and activism that burned me out, when I was already burned out from a decade of caregiving and grieving. But I also wrote a novel, a chapbook's worth of poetry, and a score of essays for the local paper. And I had cancer. And sepsis. And various organ removals. Sorry if that's TMI, but sometimes reality hits back, hard.

Like Forrest Gump, that is all I'm going to say about that.

Today, I'm in the midst of researching a new body of work--it will probably turn into multiple books on a new topic, good environmental news from America and elsewhere in the world. I invite you to go to my new website and blog, Good News from American Places, to read about interviews I am doing with stand-out individuals and groups in small rural communities, mid-sized towns and larger cities. Ranging from carbon sequestration to complete utility conversion to localizing food distribution and economies, these people are accomplishing a great deal to offset the impacts of the global climate crisis that is now upon us. They are providing us with models that can be used in other communities and that can be scaled up for the nation as a whole.

There is nothing that feels more important than introducing anxious and even hopeless people to these successful centers of hope and life for our country and our planet. I am thrilled to have this project underway. I hope you will follow me at goodnewsfromamericanplaces.net, which will be live shortly. Thanks for reading!

Summer in the 70's

Summer is a place for me. I know it's a season, a recurring bout of hot weather, free time, long evenings. But it's also a cache of memories, sudden images that whisk across my mind when I smell hot pavement or pine sap, or when I hear certain songs ("Tiny Dancer," "Mandolin Wind," Rita Coolidge's version of "Desperado"). When I think about my twenties, it's always summer. There are things about that time that I miss with a sharp yearning, as if I could almost re-experience them. Almost not quite.

The ridiculous media images of the seventies--polyester, encounter groups and Farrah Fawcett hair--isn't what I remember at all. What I remember is a kind of settling of the sixties into people's actual lives. It suddenly became okay to date someone who was a different color, or to swim in the public pools if you were black or brown. Growing vegetables, making your own bread and yogurt and using the sun for heating your home became a real alternative, even in the city. People tried living in groups, or at least forming food coops in their neighborhoods. Instead of the formality of traditional church, Christians and others began to meet informally in each other's homes, reaching back to the very early days of the faith to find a community founded in relationship--with God and one another.

It was a time when, in some places and for a moment, the old courtly ideas of neighborliness met with the new desires to turn our backs on the greed and the hustle of onrushing urban life. Community associations grew; Democrats and Republicans alike promoted environmental causes (Yes, they really did!); politics was based in the slogan, "Think globally and act locally."

Yes, there was the bad stuff--urban and random violence, terrible predations by ever more addictive and mind-wrecking drugs, thoughtless sex that  wounded a lot of young hearts, broke up marriages and, by the end of the decade, began the spread of AIDS. Berkeley in 1975 wasn't the friendliest or safest of places, and I do have some dark winter memories stashed there, but also some very happy ones.

As I said, for me it seems now like it was summer most of the time during that decade. I remember riding to Yosemite in a VW van, wearing cutoffs with my bare feet propped on the dashboard, the windows open, "Honky Tonk Woman" blasting, hot Central Valley air sweeping through. In those days, you could still see what John Muir referred to as "the shining wall of the Sierras" from Pacheco Pass in the coastal range east of San Juan Batista.

I can feel the wild freedom of bicycling down a country road through the redwood forest with the young man I loved then, laughing and taking chances as we raced the long slopes dappled with deep shade and dazzling sun. I can almost recall the content of long discussions of values and meaning with a group of Christians I belonged to, in a little cabin perched at the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Later in the decade, there are memories of an old-time music festival in Harmony, Indiana, a bluegrass festival in Texas--actual love, peace and music. More cut-offs and flip-flops, both boys and girls with long hair in braids. Hot summer afternoons at Barton Springs in Austin, in the days before the city had to use chlorine, helping Central American refugees who fled the murderous chaos of their home places. Cutting cheese with my sister for the food coop we ran out of her kitchen.  

Was it just our young naivete?  So many of us were young then--it seemed like all the world was at a beginning point, that we could take the past and the future and create something that had the best parts of both.  It didn't all collapse, even though in the dystopian 1980s and the dishonest and desperate decades that followed, it sometimes seemed that idealism and naivete were one and the same.

What remains, forty years later?  We've discovered that the ecologists and climate scientists of those years were right in their predictions.  The solar and alternative energy technologies that were then in their infancy are finally yielding their promise against huge push-back by the oil and gas industries.  Greed has gone beyond all limits, but the 99% have done their own pushing back.  The US is approaching universal healthcare.  More people than even in those halcyon days are growing organic vegetables and fruits and keeping backyard chickens.  There are a dozen new National Parks.  Co-housing is a reality all over the US. The Internet, for all its privacy encroachments, provides vast resources of information for people who want a smaller carbon footprint, who want to connect with others and make some kind of community, who still think it might be possible to change the world.

Whole lives have been lived in the decades between then and now.  My food coop managing sister and my fine woodworking husband are dead from diseases probably fostered by environmental pollution.  Whole forests have been wiped out by bark beetles, droughts and fires.  Cities like New York and New Orleans have been overwhelmed by floods.  But I still feel a certain lightness when summer comes, a longing for an old VW bus and an open road, for the hum of bees in my organic garden.  Summer rouses a kind of hope that the years don't tarnish, a sense of the possible, of sunny days and friends gathered in creative community,  All of us still believing the promise of new life.
  

Place: The Human Need for Home

I used to own a home. It was a small wild place, made of red fir and adobe mud, set on five remote acres of piňon above New Mexico’s Rio Grande gorge. Off the power grid, lonely and really only half-built when I moved in, the house and land became mine over the ten years I held the deed. I knew the redshafted flicker that nested in the eave above my bedroom window, the cottontail rabbit that crouched outside my fenced garden, eyeing the squash leaves and carrot tops with obvious longing. I knew the color of morning there, summer and winter, the scent of the mountain lion that lived somewhere out among the rocks. I walked in the glittering snow by starlight. I harvested my own piňon nuts. I knew the wildflowers’ names.

Now, I’m homeless. Not without a roof sheltering me, but without a place that’s mine by deed, that feels like home. It’s unsettling, to be part of a middle-aged, quasi-middle-class couple who both grew up in family homes, mine passed down through three generations, and yet have nowhere to call our own.

A few generations ago, for the San people of southern Africa or the Lakota of the North American plains, this need for one’s own place would have made no sense. Every place in their homelands was their place, every waterhole, every camping ground, every sacred rock and tree. The whole beloved landscape was their home. For the Australian (aborigine—get the tribal name) geography is holy—the watering holes and ancient paths mark the routes of the old ones, the physical connection between past and present, spirit and body.

The idea of a home place isn’t entirely foreign to Americans. We are the ultimate mobile people, scattering coast to coast for livelihood. And yet we carry with use an idea of place, one that transcends our ownership of a particular patch of land or condominium. That allegiance may be to a geographical region—the South, New England, New York City, the vast West—usually the part of America where we grew up. We too hold on to a geography of collective memory—Grand Canyon, Indiana woodlands, the Sierra Nevada.

When I was small, my grandfather ran a ranch north of San Diego. Although it had been divided among the descendents of my great-great grandfather, Grandpa’s share of the ranch was still, to a child’s mind, immense territory. Sometime between mid-February and the end of March, my mother would take us on long wildflower identification walks. Dodecatheon, brodeia, monkey flower, winecup. Not knowing that these flowers would one day vanish under housing tracts and computer factories, we picked bucketsful. Their fragile beauty and mysterious sweet and pungent scents would fill our house in the city for a week or so.

As we walked, the particular salt and clay scent of the soil rose around us. We kept a look out for rattlesnakes, watched coyotes loping across the greening hills and red tail hawks rising on air currents into the hazy sky. We marveled at the smooth dark red skin of the Manzanita, the wild spice of feathery “old man,” the dangerous spines of yellow-flowered nopales, the prickly pear cactus.

In summer, the ranch seemed to exhale a pervasive seduction of the senses that became embedded in memory—still embodying after 100 years something of the old Californio genteel and slow-moving lifestyle. It bordered Highway 101 on the coastal side and spread inland as far as San Marcos. Its original 25,000 acres comprise d two of the many shelves that rose in the Pleistocene as the vast inland sea retreated. We found shells everywhere. Not just from the coastal Digueño midden piles, but mixed into the heavy clodded dirt of the orange grove, the sandy road that snaked around the eucalyptus forest, the upper layers of huge clay pits that pockmarked the mesa. These pits had once yielded quantities of the green clay prized by florists and turn of the century Arts and Crafts potters. Later, they were found to conceal the massive bones of a mammoth and deeper, fossil dinosaur bones as well.

I identify each of these soils with a particular scent—dust and salt, an odor of decaying vegetation and sulfur. The Spanish land grantees, whose family name was Marron, had named the ranch for its sulfur springs, Agua Hedionda. When I was little, the springs still bubbled up behind my grandfather’s apple orchard and across El Camino Real, near the original hacienda. In summer, a faint but perceptible rotten egg scent, mingled with the sweet odors of sun-burned grass, ripe oranges and eucalyptus flowers, building a complex identity that imprinted itself in my brain. I can still conjure the smell of the place. If I actually inhaled its fragrance again, all the memories would rise up like  holograms.

Scent is memory, as science has discovered and anyone who has ever rubbed cocoa butter on sunburned skin or eaten barbequed ribs can attest. It brings us back to places in a particularly vivid way. Orange blossoms, eucalyptus method, the odor of cut hay and ripe apricots are all evocative of the place that I can scarcely hope to convey on paper. The ranch was mine in an emotional ownership that has long outlived my grandfather and his generation, the warm hazy days of summers forty years gone, and—it was in Southern California, after all—the place itself.

Most people could conjure equally rich memories of their favorite childhood places— a park in Brooklyn where a patch of grass stayed wet year-round, giving off rich chlorophyll fragrances, the Santana heat of Los Angeles in October, when the piercing dry wind carries mingled odors of smog and pine, the rich sorghum scent of east Texas in summer, the pinon and cedar smoke of New Mexico in winter. And scent is only part of memory. Color, texture, the particular quality of light unique to places, the angle of the stars and the way humid or dry air feels on skin. I always thought that the European painters stylized their landscapes according to the mode of the day until I went there and compared the haze of the Netherlands with Rembrandt’s landscapes or the golden wash of light on the Tuscan hills with Leonardo da Vinci’s backgrounds. Each painted what he saw, and beneath that, what he felt about his earthly home place, which made it divine and lovely.

Why does place have such a grip on our souls? Because we are creatures of the familiar. With the madly rapid change of the last few decades, it’s easy for us to deny that this is so. We are in love with the new and cast off the old—old clothes, old electronics, old news—almost daily. It’s only within the last century that any but the most adventuresome could travel to distant places. Only since World War II has mobility for work become a requirement of the labor force, as if we were all suddenly labeled “migrant workers.” Only since the 1960s has urban renewal and suburban development remade cityscapes and landscapes to such a degree that they become unrecognizable and un-navigable to those who return after a few years’ absence.

Several years ago, my mother and I visited San Diego and decided to see what had become of the ranch. The last parcel of property had been sold by my grandfather, my uncle and my mother about ten years earlier. We drove up old El Camino Real, now a four-lane highway occasionally marked by stoplights. On the north side of the road, some of the old family property was still intact. We could see the massive eucalyptus that overhang one of the original haciendas, which now belongs to a cousin of ours who has redone the adobe structure, maintaining the jacal and courtyard and cool dark interiors.

But to the south, where my grandfather’s ranch had stretched toward the Pacific coast, there were rows upon rows of high-tech manufacturing plants, boulevards lined with tropical landscaping trees, parking lots, Starbucks, office buildings. Where we had once turned up a dirt lane past our corrals and ancient barn with its roof like a pair of half-folded wings, another boulevard ran into a maze of subdivision houses, neatly lawned and walled, one abutting another. The barn was long vanished, its wood carried away by makers of bird houses and who knows what. The ranch house, swimming pool, orchard, even the surrounding hills were gone as if they had never existed.

We drove through the subdivision in a kind of shock, I think. I have no memory of the houses. They were like a stage set imposed on and crowding out the world I knew. In a strange twist, we drove down a dead end street where the subdividers had been unable to change the topography enough to continue building. At the guardrail, I stopped the car and got out.

Beyond the railing lay the old world as I knew it, a steep canyon that once had led to my grandfather’s hay fields. Even a stretch of the sandy dirt road was there. I could almost imagine a tractor overturned and rusting alongside. It was as if the old place lay hidden and waiting underneath the asphalt and sidewalks. I have felt few things as eerie and sad. 

And when I think about the ranch, I only see it as it was; I cannot grasp the superimposition of this new world on its back. The world as it is is one dream; the world as it was is another, deeper, engraved on the heart.

Displacement

     What happens when people lose their place? I often think about the permanent pain that refugees carry with them. We read about the displaced thousands from Libya who have fled to Tunisia, Egypt, Malta, the internally displaced in Japan whose summer harvest won't happen this year because their soil and water are radioactive. According to the World Bank, there were 15,200,000 refugees in the world in 2009, 27,100,000 internally displaced persons and 1,000,000 asylum seekers whose cases had not yet been adjudicated. And these are only the people displaced by war. The numbers don't include the Haitians, Chileans, Chinese, Pakistanis and Australians whose houses are no longer standing or liveable because of massive earthquakes, floods or fires.

     Even though I've been something of a vagabond all my adult life, I think of home as a stable place, the place where everything is familiar--the scent of the local dirt, freshly cut lawns and native plants, the quality of light and the color of the sky, the native birds singing, the roads and houses and corner stores that you carry like an ancient blueprint in your brain. I like familiarity and I assume that most of the 43,300,000 external and internal refugees in the world do, too. So what are their lives like, when they know that they cannot go home, either because they would be imprisoned, tortured and killed, or because the place they called home isn't there anymore, isn't a place that is stable, secure or viable?

    According to a well-known celebrity who works with refugees, "In countries where people have to flee their homes because of persecution and violence, political solutions must be found, peace and tolerance restored, so that refugees can return home. In my experience, going home is the deepest wish of most refugees." (Italics added).

     The displaced remember. Their loss is not erased when the plane lands in their new country or the truck pulls into the refugee camp or the detention center. Forcible removal doesn't include memory loss. And even if the memories are compromised by terror and trauma, there are still those whispers, the longing for a certain scent of wildflowers or bread baking in the communal oven, jungle earth or sea salt. Grief for one's native place is a permanent scar. "The refugee life is very challenging. It's like pulling a tree out of the ground and trying to replant it" (Rosalind Rivera, refugee worker).

    What does this mean for Americans, with the roots of so many families ripped from other homelands, by choice in some cases, forcibly in many others?  We are all replanted--is ours a culture cobbled together by the displaced? Is that why we have such trouble staying in one place, why the pioneers restlessly kept pushing west, displacing native people, depriving others of their homes? Why must there always be a frontier, and when there is none, why we must go and make wars over oil and the lands that lie over it, pretend we can happily colonize other planets, fight over ideologies, continually live dissatisfied lives, longing for whatever we don't possess? Does the consumerism that feeds rampant corporate capitalism somehow prey on our need for home, on the primal longing for familiar places? Unless we are indigenous people, our roots are usually not more than 200 years deep in the American soil, but that's long enough to make a place home. Even a decade can create a sense of belonging.

     Jobs, school, marriage, military service--so many necessary parts of our lives as Americans, particularly the economic parts, pull us away from the families, the communities and the familiar environments we were born into. What do we lose when we move from the places where we were born or raised or bore our own children? Is this why we forget to value the natural world around us, to value the neighborhood, to pretend that we don't need community to raise our children or care for our old ones? Is this why cyber-place seems as real as the solid world around so many young people today?

     I remember a place that was my home once upon a time. A place that had been in our family for five generations. Not long at all in the reckoning of the native Kumeyaay, but very long for white people in southern California.Thousands of acres of heavy gray soil, bunch grass and non-native wild oats, dodecatheons and brodeia in the springtime, fog banks and the warm scent of ripe oranges in summer. The familiar sank into my bones--sounds of horses grinding hay with their big teeth in the stalls below us as we sat on top of oat hay bale towers in my grandfather's barn, the millions of stars that we watched swing overhead as we slept outdoors, listening to coyotes chatter and sing at the edge of the orange grove. As a child, I had no sense of this land belonging to me--I belonged to it. And I still feel that way as I push through middle age, though the land is long buried under subdivisions and semiconductor factories.

    Event though I've been back, have seen it--in James Taylor's words--"all spec house and plywood...all torn up, tore up good," that's not how I see it in my mind. I see the land intact: the arroyos and hills; the dirt road I walked on with burning bare feet; the old ranch house and barn; a herd of half-wild horses grazing on the mesa. My native place is as intact in my memory as first love. I have to remind myself that it isn't really there, because, in some time-out-of-time way, it is.

   Next entry, I'll try to talk about how I think this endemic placelessness has made us undervalue nature and overvalue individualism. I'd also like to begin formulating what might be a useful and palliative response, one that might help us learn to locate ourselves, care for the places we live in, and be better neighbors and citizens. If you have any ideas, please share them.
   

Easter Week

Rain for Easter. Lilacs dripping in the cold early morning. Snow on the mountains. Restored sight for my husband after painless cataract surgery. I remember that such surgery left my grandfather blind thirty years ago. A call from a high school friend.  Dinner with old friends in Taos. An unexpected gift that was exactly what I needed. So many simple miracles crowned this resurrection weekend. As they should.

The sense I had in church was that of being gathered together in an ark. It was enough to be together, to smell the lilies, hear the alleluias, hear again the women weeping at the tomb, the men breathing faster as they stoop to look in and see...folded linens. Who folded them? Did Jesus do it before he ordered away the massive wheel of stone and strode or burst out into the rising sun? It makes me smile a little to think that he would stop to tidy up first. My mother would like that. Or maybe it was the two angels who Mary Magdalene found sitting at the head and foot of the stone shelf where his body had lain, making sure that it was perfectly clear that Jesus was gone, not from his body, but in his body.

I love the earthiness of the resurrection. I don't get it, in terms of biology. But it makes pretty good sense in terms of physics. If we are all energy, anyway (mass at the speed of light squared), then God can surely rearrange that energy which is his own, pull the elements back together in molecules, atoms and cells that creat that mighty buzz and hum we call life. The living body. The resurrection proclaims the body good. Later churchmen got it quite backwards, in their Platonic wrong-headed way. The body was always good. It was the willful mind that spoiled things. Jesus loved his incarnation. He came back to it, claimed it back from death. And made it possible that somehow in creation, all things will be made new. We will all get to claim back the innocence, the rightness of our original selves. Not apart from embodiment, but in it as it ought to be.

My view of the ultimate redemption of the world is half-baked and eccentric. It is this: Jesus' second coming does not happen because we eagerly make a mess of things to ensure it and finally blow up the present creation so that no one but him can fix it. It is rather the occasion, chosen by his sense of timing, not ours, of our second chance. The end that is really the beginning--when we get to start in on pollution, child slavery, the abuse of women, men, the poor, animals, water, soil, air, the economic inequity that is the root cause of war. It's when we finally get to realize our long-held dreams that poverty curtailed, our great ideas that political expediency denied.

It is our hands that remake the creation, that rewind the great reel back to its original innocence. But only because it's His hand that guides ours in renewing the world. All the possible wondrous inventions will be turned to good--like spears hammered into pruning hooks. The earth will flourish, life will be creativity and joy and work that is praise. Our suffering and sighing will be no more, because God walks again with humankind and helps us end all the evil we have made, so that there is nothing more to report but...good news.

Happy Easter. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. 

Holy Week/Holy World

It's Holy Week 2013. The crabapple in our backyard has burst into luscious magenta bloom. Bee buzz is the very sound of the air. A faint aura of sweetness hovers around the tree. My tulips shout hallelujah along the front walk. Perfect clouds race each other across a perfect blue sky, and vanish east of the mountains without leaving a drop of rain. It's beautiful springtime. And it's dry as dust.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed that Good Friday and Earth Day coincide this year. The day of sacrificial love conjoined with the day of action on behalf of our ailing planet. It's tempting to rephrase William Jennings Bryan's great populist statement about humankind crucified on a cross of gold--the whole earth is being crucified on a cross of greed.

How appropriate, too, that the news is full of retrospectives on the monstrous Gulf oil spill of two years ago which has to date cost BP multi-millions and the people of the Gulf their livelihoods and the creatures of the Gulf their lives. Does anyone remember? Or how about the Fukishima power plants that are still oozing the Lord knows what dreadful radioactive slush? But they've left the front page. So does that mean there's no danger? No cost? No impact on the planet's species, oceans, islands? Are we unable to see anything that lies deeper than the surface of our narcissism?

Last Saturday, I committed a sin. I reacted in anger to a rally at the plaza in our town where a thin blonde woman dressed in red, white and blue whipped up the Tea Party crowd by proclaiming that "The Environmentalists" had stolen the American agenda over the past forty years "while the rest of us were raising our children." As if environmentalists don't raise their children, but simply abort them or abandon them to be raised by wolves.

I hollered back at her from my car that it was her crowd that had stolen America's agenda--the climate change denying politicians, the short-run focused oil and energy corporations, the bought and paid for media. I felt such rage--it lasted for hours and perhaps still lurks behind these words, though I did turn it over to God and try to quiet my heart by imagining that I could become a Republican, infiltrate, transform from within. I mean, I believe in free enterprise, small business, the values of Abraham Lincoln. If Arlo Guthrie can do it, I can, too.

The thing is, the public view of the environment wasn't like this forty years ago. Who proposed and signed the bill that created the Environmental Protection Agency? Richard Nixon, for heaven's sake! And when he announced his plan for the EPA, the joint session of Congress stood up as one person to applaud him. Can you imagine anything remotely like that today? Is there one Republican today who would come out and admit that climate change is a reality, let alone sign on to legislation that would do something about it? Republicans Pete McCloskey of California and Mark Hatfield of Oregon both championed environmental laws in their day and were praised for it. Pete's now a Democrat, of course.

But the final word isn't politics. The final word is the Word. And what does God say about his creation? "The earth is mine and all that live therein." "Consider the birds of the air. Consider the lilies of the fields." Will there come a time when there are no birds outside of aviaries, no lilies growing wild? I know romantics have asked these questions for years. The Pre-Raphaelites, John Muir and the early Sierra Club, the back-to-the-landers of the 70's, Greenpeace, and others. But how is it that Christian people cannot seem to see that the creation they ignore, misuse in the pursuit of wealth, pretend is infinite in its ability to heal, belongs to the God they worship, not to them? That anything created by God is itself holy and therefore not available to be abused, raped, used up, polluted?

The earth is the Lord's. The earth includes glaciers, polar bears, vegetable fields, cattle in stockyards eating reprocessed manure, garbage dumps laden with computer waste where hungry children separate heavy metals and plastics, streams polluted with PCBs, pristine mountain lakes where the frogs are mysteriously dying, children with autism, tide pools that have lost their sea anemones. This earth was born from God's omniscient mind and omnipotent hand. It is not a thing, not the unintelligble and meaningless Other, not a huge uncomplaining slave existing only to serve the extravagant wants of the post-industrial world. The world is itself. A Thou.

Why would we, how can we dare to harm it? Our nest, our neighborhood. Who wants to live in an ugly filthy house that breeds disease among the inhabitants and is about to fall down on their heads? Who wants to intentionally smash a beautiful priceless work of art? What kind of horror of a human being would strip and mangle a living thing because it was easier than caring for it? I am amazed that so few seem to really consider these questions about the place they are utterly dependent upon, that so few actively work to take care of the earth that is our home.

I love the Easter morning story in the Gospel of John, because Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene as a gardener. In his parables, he describes himself as a shepherd, a gate, the path to truth, the truth itself. But when Mary sees him, she sees a gardener. Someone up early in the morning caring for the plants and the creatures. It's a lovely image. The resurrected Christ tending his creation that longs for the appearing of God's new kingdom. Maybe while we are all awaitng that kingdom we can help hasten it by readying the garden that will be the place of its manifestation, the beautiful earth that is the Lord's.