night songs in the meadow
The Whip-poor-will sings when the whole stage is hers.
At least that’s what I was thinking when she perched right outside my window last night, and again this morning, long before the sun was even near appearing, singing her insistent song. “Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill!” The reason she needs to sing then, at those moments before I fade into or out of sleep, are known to her alone. Maybe she doesn’t even know. She lays her eggs according to lunar cycles so that each two eggs she sits upon will crack open with new life ten days before a full moon. One rarely sees a Whip-poor-will, but what they lack in a gregarious physical presence, they make up for in their songs to the moon.
That little bird got me thinking about things. I was lying in my bed doing nothing anyway, certainly not sleeping, so why not think of a thing or two? I’ve become increasingly deflated over the last few weeks as I’ve watched the direction of our world. The planes are out spraying their climate mitigation experiments, “solar geo-engineering” they call it. Our country’s leaders steer us into every cause I abhor from wars to social and cultural manipulations to sending our money to countries and corporations all over the world in well-orchestrated money laundering schemes. They buy drugs for drug addicts and limit our freedoms when we don’t take the drugs they want us to. We’re taxed to the point where the government now gets more of every dollar than the person earning it. It seems to me we’re being governed by the kids in school that everyone tolerated, but nobody respected. That’s the problem with “government”. The people that really want that type of power are, most frequently, the ones that would never have been able to earn it amongst their peers.
And it all pisses me off. It pisses me off to see what we’re doing to small farmers. It breaks my heart to see beautiful land and wilderness being ripped up to mine lithium and pave it with solar panels. It’s outrageous that our whole world is directed by wall street prospectors and investors. How can it be thought sane that progress involves factories with enormous “digesters” bubbling away the cells of cows in a chemical slurry so that it can all be shaped into something resembling a cutlet or a meatball to satisfy the lowly classes? This is better than cows living in symphony with nature, building ecosystems by eating foods we can’t? How did keeping our rivers clean and our forests standing become so easily manipulated by corporations to make ever more money? Nobody talks about needing more small farms, about the importance of whole foods and more ruminants on pasture as a way to heal the world. There’s no money in that. The only things that have value in the climate conversation are the things that can be monetized. Other than that? Forget it.
That world, the world of simulacra and facsimile, is a world of anonymity. Your participation is optional. What’s needed is your dollars, directed to the stuff that grows profit, however that’s sold. You don’t have to be invested, you just have to invest. This is a world that keeps us stuffed and starving. It can never feed us, never