A Rant

“Rest!!” cries this sawyer as the sheep process through a terminal to everywhere, and nowhere. 

Many a day I wonder why my heart, and many hearts, yearn for a time and place where trees were but a backdrop to reality, rather than planted in neat rows to adorn the brick and mortar dwellings of businessmen and women who spend their cubicle days searching for life amidst longing and shuttling children from event to event, passing woods and fields in route to soccer games and violin lessons.  Where has the reality gone that we revel in a writer’s fiction on plasma screens from an ocean away while red shafted flickers carry morsels to their roost outside our feverish fiefdoms?  

And how far askew has the human gone that we can cover arms and legs with poison to avoid the sting of a nettle or itch of a sweat bee?  

I am convinced of my inadequacy in this place and time and void of life, and look for the day when I am rid of the stinking smog, or it is rid of me.  

This environment, this life, is all that we have, and the blinders of technology and angst and ambition are effectively helping us to ignore the very sweet rhythm of life’s systole. 

So pardon this ravenous radical when I dare say that the only slap that can awaken our society from wall posts and snap chats to see the pink-orange hue of a sunset over the Narrow Back, Blue Ridge, Appalachians, Rockies, Alps, or any other sleeping ramble of rocks is the quiet after a storm of retreat from a fabled life we all have come to trust too much.  

No beneficial change can come, has come from a diplomatic ending to the story that we have created. We have surpassed the point where meetings and talk about our beleaguered biome will drown out the sound of corporate machines and fear-mongering politicians.  Us last earth lovers must speak loud with one voice and tell the world that these lands and waters and beasts are more important, fundamentally and inextricably linked to real life, than any power and money-rich novel we could ever, never write.