More About Those Poor Trees

Don't be put off by my despair - as I go from place to place, I keep seeing more trees that likely are dead. The optimist in me wants to say that perhaps they will be revived when spring comes.

There is a Japanese poetic form called the haibun. For example, Gary Snyder makes good use of the form.

A haibun consists of a paragraph followed by a haiku. The two relate to each other - but not directly. The form seemed a good way to explore my feelings further. I took a little liberty with the form - writing three paragraphs and using the same haiku three times.

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                     Dry leaves hang on branches. Dead trees masquerading as autumn-arriving-early.

                    The rain has forgotten to come as weeks go by, dry as the leaves that have lost

                    their meaning in life. The Arctic sea ice continues melting while politicians argue

                    about who is to blame for the economy and gas prices. As though they were

                    sealed away from reality.

weep for our lost earth

may your tears water our souls

as we mourn dead trees

                     Once I heard spiritual-dislocation described as being oblivious. The not-noticing

                     of a breeze through pine trees, the hint of changing seasons as the nights turn cool,

                     geese practicing their formations before heading south. Until one day we wake up 

                     and notice. The dead leaves hanging from lifeless trees.

weep for our lost earth

may your tears water our souls

as we mourn dead trees

                      I know there can be no new life without death. I figured that out as a child when

                      I thought about what it would be like if nothing died. And that nothing is not the

                      predecessor of birth. Winter is the first season, not the last - the time when new

                      cubs are born in dark caves, whales migrate to give birth, volcanoes seethe, seeds

                      die in order to be transformed. But these dead trees - perhaps their purpose now

                      is to dramatize the damage we have wrought upon this blue orb moving through

                      darkness. Moving us to pray that we do not create one more dead planet.

weep for our lost earth

may your tears water our souls

as we mourn dead trees

The Cycle of the Seasons - and Dead Trees

Today with temperatures in the low 60's feels like a blustery fall day. Never having lived in a place with less than four seasons, the annual changes are embodied in my bones. At least the old pattern is.

I remember when I kept track when different spring bulbs would pierce the soil in springtime. After about five years, I quit recording the data —  because the dates of their emergence varied so little. I could set my internal clock by the emergence of snowdrops or daffodils.

A mallard pair used to wattle across our backyard every April 23rd. We knew they were the same pair because the drake walked with a limp as he protected his "bride.". One year when spring was a bit late, our pond was still frozen when they arrived. The drake positioned himself in the middle of the pond as if to say "melt baby melt —  because I have arrived." Eventually they stopped coming, probably because they had lived out their life span.

But now all the reliable signs are not happening. I think back to our crossing the North Pacific by boat this past spring and encountering sea ice from the high Arctic, ice floes so dense that we had to turn back to Japan and find another route to North America. Ice that should not have been there, but was the result of too-early melting. I read article after article about the melting ice pack in the Arctic and worry about our future.

Closer to home, garden perennials are confused. Cone flowers bloomed in July —  not August. The sequence of blooms in the spring did not follow their usual pattern. And drought, though not as severe here as further south, has had devastating effects on grass, gardens and crops.

One result has been dying trees. I want to weep as we travel around our metropolitan area. A magnificent maple shorn of its leaves in August. A flowering crab apple at the entry road to our neighborhood that retained its reddish leaves all summer now looks more forlorn as the days go by. A fifty-year-old silver maple a block further that looks like a tree mid-winter — no leaves whatsoever. Evergreens that no longer carry their green coats of needles. The list goes on.

Will this summer's "off-cycle" be an anomaly? And next year see a return to normal patterns of growth, maturation, and preparation for winter? I wish that would be the case — but I am afraid. Afraid that what has been set in motion is the future. More drought. More extreme weather. More fires. And re-calibrating my internal clock as the days grow shorter and cool air from Canada tells us winter is coming.

When Free Speech Is Not Free

Defining where free speech ends and verbal violence begins is not easy.

Possessing pornographic images on your computer has some legal restraints. And when those images are of children, there are stronger legal consequences. Even if you claim those images are for your eyes only, tell that to TSA or to border-crossing personnel if they have a look at your laptop when you are traveling somewhere.

Defining what is acceptable sexual imagery is not easy to define. Are images of mutually consenting adults designed to arouse a person okay? What happens when the imagery exploits women and continues to maintain a social climate that defines women as secondary sexual objects? And children - do such images increase a person's leaning toward pedophilia - and to acting out on that leaning with children in a family or neighborhood?

When we turn to video games based on violent imagery, another issue of value is raised. Do such violent images glorifying war increase aggression in our gun-loving culture? Or, as some argue, do such games provide an outlet for aggressive feelings - resulting in less violence? Here, there are a different set of legalities regarding the use of such games by young children. And parents trying to enforce their standards, when a neighbor's standards differ from theirs.

After all, we live in a country that values free speech. What may be acceptable for some may be offensive to others.

When we turn to free speech and religious differences, another set of issues is immediately evident. Freedom of speech was political and religious, when a musical group used one of Moscow's churches to appeal to the Virgin Mary to free Russia from Putin. Today, the Prime Minister in Russia suggests the punk singers sentenced to two years in prison should be set free after serving six months. Even though their choice of venue and words was offensive.

The events this week in Muslim countries over a deplorable film clip begs this question:  when is free speech no longer free. Our American Ambassador in Libya and his colleagues paid with their lives because this film was spread around the world using the connectedness via the Internet. As one commentator said: countries used to authoritarian governments may find it hard to believe this film was done without any government permission.

There is so much we do not know about the events unfolding in the Middle East. Are the protesters a very small minority of people in their respective countries, people on the Islamic right and not representative of Islam as a whole? Was the attack in Libya planned and then took advantage of translation of this film into Arabic a few days before 9-11. How much distortion is present among people - both via the Internet and media and from person-to-person in countries with close-knit cultures? These are all questions we will  understand more fully as investigations search for answers to exactly what was/is happening.

But this film clip. . . I will not watch it on YouTube. I do not want to be counted as a viewer. When I read about its content, it is a despicable and unacceptable attempt to misrepresent one of the world's major religions. Think of it this way. Replace Mohammed with Jesus in a parallel "film." Unclear family of origin? A pedophile, a womanizer, a violent man? How would we react if the film had been doctored (as it was) to depict Jesus? Is this free speech?

Do we just cringe and say everyone has a right to say whatever they want, then shrug our shoulders and walk away?

For me, it does not matter how any of us feels or believes about about Islam - or about Christianity or Judaism. Yes, all of us have a right to our opinions and differences - feelings colored by our life experiences.

But when bigotry, fraud, and great distortion are used to inflame people, free speech is no longer free. And all of us bear the cost.

Learning a New Language

Last week, Clem's computer became terminally ill. An old friend, it has been a steady presence in his life - and mine. Perhaps it was all the poetry Clem has been writing - and the poor thing just could not sustain itself any longer.

It was not a particularly well-timed illness - although if it had been a few weeks earlier, while we were still working on our newest manuscript, the results could have been much worse. Any rate, it meant researching, buying, and installing a new computer.

Now, we both have used PC's for a couple of decades. We can cruise around within their software with considerable ease. But the time had come (for various reasons) to shift to an Apple computer.

The Apple people are very helpful. But they speak another language. They would ask, "do you use sjdhtrueyth?" And we would look puzzled. and ask for a translation.  The person would try again. "Khjrhtuc?" And the universal language of talking with our hands - workable in most places around the world - was useless.

It reminded me of traveling in foreign countries where no English was spoken. Where asking basic questions becomes a major event.

One of my favorite memories is traveling in what had beeen East Germany just a year after Reunification. We were traveling around the country by bus, in addition to trains. We quickly learned that bus tickets were sold in different places depending on the town we were in. Sometimes on the bus, sometimes in a kiosk - or elsewhere.

We were in Erfurt and wanted to travel to Wiemar, just a few kilometers away. However the reality of traveling even to the next town under Communist rule had been verboten. Thus, the question of where to buy a bus ticket was a mystery - because it was not a question that occurred to people in Erfurt (who had never been to Wiemar). In German - Whadayamean? You buy tickets where tickets are always sold! Why would you even ask?"  We finally went to a bank where someone had enough broken English to put with our broken German. So here, we learned that the tickets were sold on the bus!

So now we are both struggling to learn Apple-eese. At least the way computers are made these days, it is very hard to break them or screw them up permanently. Mekrjtivuder anyone?