Going to Walden and the Twin Towers

...Going to Walden is not so easy a
thing

As a greet visit.  It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it
where you are.

 Mary Oliver

 

I'm
all about green visits.  I lead Nature
Spirituality trips to our local prairie walk of La Chua trail to see Whooping
Cranes and every spring I head to Central America to work with endangered
parrots.  In these places I fill up, for
they are the Mecca of my heart, the hajj where my self blurs into the masses of
species and experiences.  Indeed it is a
trick to see the glory in urban and devastated areas, for my mind wants to
categorize this vision as not possibly  "right" and not part of the whole. 

 

In
the summer of 2001 I visited Manhattan and one evening I lay on a bench looking
up the lighted trunks of those twin towers. 
In that moment a healing took place, for I saw the world of cities, high
economy, and a dearth and death of species as integral to whole.  I came to a sense of fondness for the art of
humanity that creates blights as well as lights upon the night.  

 

That
urban forest is me, and it became in a few months a scene of destruction.  Does the tragedy negate the beauty?  If the world contradicts itself, very well, it
does, for it is large, as am I.  I am the
world, and I contain multitudes (a la Walt Whitman, acquaintance of Henry David
Thoreau, resident of Walden).

 

As
I am the world, and I am here to gain faith  that I am whole, then I am the ashes of the
Twin Towers, of Treblinka, of sugar cane monoculture killing tropical lands,
and the ashes of quake produced fires in Haiti. 
I am also the phoenix who rises out of the ashes, me, the world, the
universe, here temporarily now as the ashes of old stars.  Would that me, the old, could see the new
that is always there beyond apocalyptic nightmares.

 

What in you or the world or you do
you reject or resist?  Is there anything
you are running from, and in the business, do not see the beauty and the
tragedy of this moment?