Delighted by almonds...

Pages from my journal: 3/05/22

I read... 

How horrible Covid has been.

Not just the virus, but also the restrictions on society.

Lock downs. Stigma. Fear. Entrapment. Terror.

I read...

About current threats of WWIII.
Authoritarian rule. Totalitarianism. The elite.

I read...

About pollution and its repercussions.

Plastics it seems in literally everything, even in our blood and bodily tissues.

Microplastics that cannot dissolve into anything natural, yet.

I keep thinking one day a bacteria will come along and eat plastic.

Wow. Imagine that. 

Cars would cease to function.

Computers. Dishwashers. My cannabis vaporizer.

I have a picture in my mind of a car, just it's steel skeleton with rubber tires.

Driver dumfounded.

Plastic-eating bacteria.

Anyway, when I read an essay about the horror of our times, I most always think of history and wonder...

Is it really that bad? Has it not always been this way? Wars. Diseases. Famines. 

Have our lives of convenience made us so small minded that we tunnel in on what we can't and don't have and do, rather than what we can? 

Am I being judgmental here because of my own privilege? 

How would I feel, think, respond, in a war-torn homeland? 

Which could happen here in the USA.

I've imagined it for decades.

As I sit outside in the woods or in the residential burbs with trees and squirrels and birds and bugs and dogs and homes.

Homes where we have running water, heat, air conditioning, and electricity. 

Humidifiers and dehumidifiers. 

Covid did not really affect our family. 

Son and his now-wife had Covid twice. Once before vaccination and once after. Both of them were able to work through Covid, no job loss.  

Daughter had to go on unemployment for a number of months, but her boyfriend continued to work.

Hubby continued to work, no job loss.

I got my itty-bitty disability check and was able to continue my few-hours-per-week work from home with Art-o-mat.

The only thing that really changed for Hubby and I was that we quit going out to eat. 

I had already dropped out of social life in 2015, for the most part. 

My social life then bloomed with animals including wildlife in the backyard and on the trail.

None of that changed with Covid. None. 

When I read how terrible things are today environmentally, politically, medically, I'm simply not surprised. 

How could things be otherwise? 

It seems greed wins out too often in history.

I don't feel the fear and anxiety that some (many?) folks write of. 

It feels I live outside that bubble.

Am I indifferent? I don't think so. 

But how much of my lack of anxiety comes from my place of privilege?

Or is it just from living decades of life with blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow....

And one finds themselves exhausted, curled on their side...

But not in the fetal position, more in the spoon position... 

Exhausted on the ground, red dirt....

In an open grave that was shoveled out with each blow pushing the velveteen rabbit of a person farther and farther down the hole...

Is it apathy? 

Or plain old exhaustion?

Exhaustion knowing that I can't change all these things.

All I can do is control my choices, and sometimes not even that.

This morning when I opened the kitchen door to the screened-in back porch, a squirrel crawled up on the deck that surrounds the porch. 

He climbed up to eat some millet that I regularly provide on the deck railing.

He looked around for his almonds, which I also regularly provide. 

I picked up the almond jar thinking Squirrel might run as I made my way across the porch to the screen door leading to the deck. 

But he didn't run. 

He backed away a little and waited as I gently threw out a handful of almonds, to his great delight.

Yes, this is my purpose. 

Feed the squirrels and chipmunks and crows and songbirds and raccoons and possums...

It's all I know to do in this moment...

Steward Earth and Life as best I can...