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| First daughter rides her newest horse |
Sleeping In The Forest
~ Mary Oliver
~ Mary Oliver
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
Last year I criticized the producers of Mother: Caring for Seven Billion for not making their excellent film available for free viewing - and this morning I received a comment that it is now on youtube. So here it is! Thank you Tiroir A films (there is a button at that link to donate).
Thank you for calling this to our attention.
ReplyDeleteCurious about the backstory when it says "After being pushed into the shadows by converging societal forces"
Found http://postgrowth.org/mother-caring-for-7-billion/ "‘Mother’ rightly calls out the environmental movement for generally shying away from speaking out on population, and for not recognising that it is a driver for many of the issues the environmental/sustainability movement is seeking to address."
One of the interesting aspects of the documentary is that it draws on the social theories of Riane Eisler (author of ‘The Chalice and the Blade’) in positioning overpopulation as a symptom of bigger cultural force – a ‘dominator culture’ that has seen the domination of man over nature and over woman for much of human history.
"If we are to address overpopulation, we must shift this cultural mindset from a dominating, conquering one to a nurturing one. And to effect this change, the status of women worldwide must be raised. Or inversely, raising the status of women is a societal shift that needs to happen anyway for a range of reasons – a chosen decline in population will follow."
rpauli: good point, except it's far too late to change anything for the better now. No matter what we do, we've caused climate change to become out of control by our continued use of fossil fuels.
ReplyDeleteGail:
there's one scene in the film where a small African child is laying with her hands folded on a medical cot and looking at the camera that just grabbed me. It's like she's giving me a glimpse of how it's going to end for all of us - we're just waiting to die, waiting our turn to be ushered off the planet. Thanks for the link.
Tom
As usual, the end is all about hopium and uplifting nonsense that no longer applies. Otherwise a nice documentary regarding population.
ReplyDeleteTom
Always the hopium. It's always 5 minutes to midnight, never midnight. You might check out killing mother down in the blogroll. She's a really good writer but doesn't post anymore. I think I remember her saying she had a book offer but it was withdrawn because it had no hopium at the end - Guy said much the same thing about the anthology McKibben contributed to - "Hope Beneath Our Feet". Every movie, every book, every paper no matter how dire the assessment and warnings, ends with the same fantasy of hope.
ReplyDeleteagreed, it's always false hope, otherwise known as denial.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this, Gail. Jerome
ReplyDelete