#97, July 24, 2002
Some days I barely wake up and walk downstairs and outside
and pick up the paper and open it and read the headlines and letters and want
so much to go back to sleep. But I don’t.
Some days, when the news is very bad, I’ll remember this
poem by farmer-activist-poet Wendell Berry. It was 1968, a year when his
country was carpet-bombing Southeast Asia, when two men who held a promise to
end the war were gunned down. Berry wrote: In the dark of the moon, / In flying
snow, in the dead of winter / War spreading, families dying, the world in
danger, / I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
There was a towering eucalyptus down the street, home for a
Great Blue Heron. It was chopped to a stub, but the stub is now crowned with
cloud of blue-green foliage. Two months ago, I dug up an old rose bush from my garden.
When I gave it to a friend, it looked dead. Still, she troubled to plant it,
putting faith in roots. Now, she says, the flower buds are beginning to show
color.
Sister Miriam McGillis speaks of planting a certain kind of
desert date that takes more than a lifetime to grow into a fruit-bearing tree.
She says a person who plants and tends such a tree must “live for the love of
what they will never see.”
“Someday someday”, I
often tell my son. Those acorns we planted on the hill behind our house six
years ago have grown to thumb thickness, waist height. Frankly speaking, some
of the weeds are more impressive. The old oak mothers stand nearby, looking
like they sprouted full grown, never having suffered the indignities of growing
up. “Someday someday”, I tell him. There will be a canopy of green above. There
will be water in the streambed below.
I walk with my friend Dusty Resneck from the Bicycle
Committee in the Westridge Open Space along the City’s Urban Growth Boundary.
Dusty and I want connecting trail segments across private and public property
all the way around Petaluma. The Petaluma Rim Trail, I call it. Imagine taking
a 15-mile walk across hills and meadows around your home town. “Someday
someday.”
“Attitude: a mental position with regard to a fact or state;
the position of an aircraft or spacecraft determined by the relationship
between its axes and a reference datum (as the horizon or a particular star)”.
I like to think of attitude as the angle of a wing, like when you hold your
flat hand out the window of a fast moving car. Tilt the leading edge down, the
force of the wind drives it down. Aim it up, and it rises.
My fellow Parks and Recreation Commissioners walk along
McNear Peninsula, the hidden future park in the very heart of town. I point out
where Thompson Creek emerges from under F Street. Hey guys, think of what it’d
be like if it flowed out in the open all the way back up to the hills, lined by
trees and trails, crossed by bridges at every block. “Someday someday.”
I joke with a friend in an email exchange: perhaps
someone will spraypaint yellow circles around the homeless people living under
bridges, rent an airplane with a banner proclaiming “We still have homeless
children”, and pledge to spend some of the $160 million “needed” for streets on
ensuring no little ones in Petaluma go to bed cold or hungry. Someday someday.
When will we ever realize our dreams of a new earthly Eden?
Scholar, author, and whole systems thinker Joanna Macy describes “The Great
Turning”: “People are sick and tired of being pitted against each other when
there’s already so much suffering and the Earth itself is under assault.
They’re ready to reconnect and honor the life we share. That is the great
adventure of our time. And it’s happening.”
Someday someday… perhaps tomorrow, perhaps today.