The Elephants in Our Living Room, Part 1

Photo Courtesy of the World Wildlife Fund

Part One of a Four-Part Post

They are here, shoving against the sofa, blocking the doorway, rattling the window shades. Keening. Grieving.

From my bedroom, huddled under blankets suddenly gone heavy, I hear them, feel them. Maybe one is sitting on me, like that nauseating commercial with its endless parade of elephant-exploitation. The breath of life in these mammals is fading fast.

My sister called from Northern California. The elephants have also found her; her heart is breaking too. She lives in a lovely senior residence--a labyrinth of small apartments stacked in five connected high-rise buildings, zig-zagged around a leafy commons. These behemoths can weave their way through any jungle, seeking shelter.

But . . . but they left their tusks in San Francisco: a lament that catches in our throats. In certain mazes of the nearby city, ivory is Big Business, ivory is King. Every elephant is Dumbo, a lumbering, floppy-eared source of trinkets and ornaments.

On my back deck, a tiger huddles under our large glass-topped table. Its muzzle is nearly visible, quivering silently beneath the fringe of a winter drape.

This kitty doesn't purr.

There are no lairs safe enough to nest in, on the pampas where the big cats once stalked freely, sinews taut with propulsion. These hunters long ago became the hunted. The haunted. Bred to be killed. Killed to be bled. Tigers are a rare prize now, a trophy that goads rigorous stalking by profit-crazed poachers. Their various parts are bought and sold avidly on the road to extinction. They are nearly at the end of the road.

"This land is your land, This land is my land...from California...to the Gulf Stream waters."

Off our Gulf Coast, some beaches and marshes and wetlands are still leached with a deep, dark fringe, like blackstrap molasses spilt. The odor is nauseating. The seas are noxious, half-or-more dead―and deadly―for endless stretches, permeated with toxic effluvia that erupted from beneath them. A sudden cataclysm.

There are dolphins in my bathtub, circling tightly. They are very quiet. They have nowhere to go.

No "alternate universe" lies conveniently at hand, no pristine waters around the next bend of beach. And now the seismic drumbeat of our search for sub-sea oil is set to become our heartbeat? Their death knell.

The losses there, and yes, off the coast of Alaska and elsewhere, are uncountable. Unaccountable―both in marine life and the once-viable communities dependent upon them. Irresolvable.

Woody Guthrie never lived to see what today's exponential greed-power-indifference would do to "this land." The great trifecta that has infected everything . . . everything.

This land is not our land at all. The exploiters have taken over.

This earth is no longer our earth (although it never really was, of course; we merely  have custody of it, which is the problem we face), and soon it will be no more an elephant/tiger/rhino/great-fish/you-name-it earth. The zoos and laboratories alone will keep them from extinction.

But the earth that bred them is their only habitat: Nothing can replace the irreplaceable.

And my home is haunted by the dwindling ghosts of these stricken animals, and the countless others falling off the chain of life. My heart can hold them all. Our hearts can.

to be continued....

Cleaning Out the Clutter

Image from the public domain

Originally Posted on The Ruminate Magazine Blog 20 September 2014

We’re cleaning out the garage. Not only this day, but the days and weeks ahead. Step by laborious step.

I am a saver, a re-user, a make-do mama―part of the world-war-raised generation that learned as young children to find a new use for anything usable, for whatever might be spruced up, re-purposed or recombined imaginatively, somehow, any how.

It is a secret and semi-legit and often passionate game I have played for much of a lifetime. And, guess what: not infrequently, it really, really works. An old-new thingamajig to live with once again! A transformation! A victory against planned obsolescence, against humanity’s dreadful, casual waste. Reshaping as art—yes, even that!

And sometimes it truly becomes “yes, even that”: a recreated entity, useful and well-used or imaginative―either by its re-purposing or a heightened, expanded “sameness.” It offers testimony to a sort of, umm, resurrection. Sometimes it is the clay pot―mended, ready for holy water, or perhaps a muddle of shards gathered, sorted and shifted, chinked into mosaic that would never have become.

Confession: More often, I admire and set this gizmo-wonder aside for when I might need it, or someone else might need it . . . and it dies, unseen, forgotten, shelved perhaps for years, a space-robber for the essential―for the freshness of the new new. At what point do these re-creations or salvagings become simply debris? The answer, which I’ve long suspected and often avoided, may be that anything that doesn’t have a viable application is suspect.

But wait; there’s a deeper layer to all this clutter-mutter. My garage is a visible metaphor for the crowded chasm of my mind. The head-cargo is of another sort, but no less wedged and dredged.

Do I really want to rummage my thought-life, unravel my theses for remnants patched together over a lifework of processing the whole of it? Do I even know if I habitually do this―feed upon leftovers gone stale with their keeping? Do they, my patterns of response, become too comfortable/comforting, from years of shoeing them into tight assumptions and new juxtapositions and “Aha!”ing the way I patch my old disparities together? Do my alterations and altercations look suspiciously like rationalizations? Place-holders? Are they that?

Life must be more than a convoluted word game, a scrabble of shifting shapes―runes that might fit somewhere, deciphered somehow. It is self-deception, even arrogance, to assume that our cupboardful of suppositions, profess-ings, rationales, can be lifted from their dusty contexts and cross-stitched into a covering that serves the need.

Consider, oh my soul: Have I played God with all my toying and tinkering in response to life? Is this neuronal closet atop my shoulders likely my storehouse, the Ark I’ve toted place to place to place―my Holy of Holies? ? A crammed repository of symbolism and syllogism that I “need”. . .

. . .to shape the need I need to shape, to shape the house that Judith built?

My real need? To sift through the dust and find out what anchors me, what lies at bedrock. What have I shelved in there― behind, beneath the swift or stuttering articulation that is real life? That absolutely begs to be recycled, refurbished . . . rethought. Reshaped without losing some core identity. Redeemed. Perception that becomes bread, that bestows breath.

The Kingdom of God is surety―a clearinghouse for every cluttered mind or closet. It is time to unload. Time to stand before that disheveled mountain of the unknown, unremembered, unusable, and whittle it down to rock. There, and then, I need only stand. Stand and wait.

A Prayer for Artists

Photo by Judith Deem Dupree

Originally posted on the Ruminate Magazine Blog on 20 December 2013

Dear Father Creator, you have created within us a yearning that is never fully satisfied, a longing that leaves us ever hungry. A spaciousness that is often cramped by life. Sorrow unhealed and joy beyond describing. It is You, oh Holy One, author and crafter of Life, Whom we seek—Whom we forever hide from and always search for beyond our heart’s own rubble and the world’s afflictions.

Find us, where we hide. Coax our wizened souls out of the half-dark of our own thoughts. Grant us that inner Sabbath which was wrapped in the flesh and timeless consciousness of Your beloved Son.

Teach us, oh Holy One, with the fine probe of Your Thought, that our very neurons will hum with the inner Life that Your Spirit solely bestows. In Him Who came in Your Name, solely for Your purpose, we see the fluidity, the audacity, the precocity of that hidden Life! Truly, we are meant to stand in the flow of such a steady and illimitable understanding. This is Your promise . . . genesis and fulfillment.

This, this is our Genesis—to live in that endless Creation which flows from your heart. To be wrapped in the warp and weave, the seamless robe of Your Son. To lay our smallness against His brokenness, and grow large with His humility, great with His passion and compassion, timeless with His understanding. When we see more wholly, the gifts of Your imagining will become—will engender and struggle up within our own soul’s soil. We will not be afraid of life, nor death. Our pulse will hum with Your artistry and purpose.

Here, Father—hear my own plea for my own completion: Oh, grasp my reluctant hand, and draw me into Rest! I pledge to forfeit all my heap of sin and sorrow, and to become a part of the Word spoken, an image of the Image of the Living Christ. Draw my portrait as You see it. Out of this great bestowal I choose to live and move and have my being. Cloaked in this comprehension, I will to walk into the world again, readied for life. Readied for giving more than is mine, purposed to evolve and evoke and to recreate Life in His Image, and yearning with your Father-heart over the broken earth.

Amen.