“In wildness is the preservation of the world” — H.D. Thoreau

      THERE, LOOK! ...…

      Two days before Thanksgiving, marching along the residential sidewalk, a

troop of wild turkeys, their dusky browns and grays merging with Autumn’s smudged palette.  Heads down, one fowl in lead, two following abreast, then three, then three more, with one trailing—moving without pause or hitch down the sidewalk, their purpose known only to guiding Nature. Perhaps some biological imperative version of a promised land.

       Seeing that humble, determined band yanks me from my Slough of Despond—that ever engulfing, oozing swamp of worldly pain, suffering, and death—political, geopolitical, economic, sociological, psychological, climatological—though at end, nearly all anthropological—the humanity authored catalogue of catastrophic present and impending calamities.

       Lines spring to mind from The Congo, Vachel Lindsay’s rhythmic descent into the heart of darkness:  Then I had religion, then I had a vision…  Quickly, I retool the original to what’s welling up in consciousness…

Then I had religion, then I had a vision

I could not turn from that mist-enshrouded mission

Then along that sidewalk, ribboning for  miles

Avatar turkeys danced in files

Gobbling a gospel of earth reclaimed

From industrial plunder and war’s hell flame

While GOBBLE! scream interned birds from their camps of pain

Inhumanely constructed, to humanity’s shame

       Now, the spectral scene shifts to a one-only world, strained and scarred by self-deceiving, self-glorifying,  finger pointing, retributive, centrifugally hurled projections landing ever onto innumerable thems.  Always the thems, carved out for blame. 

       Consider a small, personal datapoint of horror and how bluntly I dodge responsibility. Two days after spotting the turkeys, and under national guise of virtuous thanksgiving, I sit at my wife’s splendid table and eat a domestically raised, tortured and mutilated turkey. Yes, I have seen the enemy, and he is definitively me.   

       Yet now, hear Edenic nature calling out me and most uncivil civilization. Maybe back to simpler, more direct living, with attendant inconveniences accepted as necessary dues. Edenic nature calling us to glad embrace of less, that more may have enough.  And, maybe, into seeing this more as inclusive of all earthly being, from the macro-geologic  to the microbial.

       And not only simpler but wiser, more compassionate living, which belies my own seeing very much.  To truly see is to act truly.  Each entails the other.  As we  move toward a season of returning light, can I see myself into renewed mind and heart?  See into that Mind that channels wisdom from Sophia herself through minds down the ages?  See into the heart of love that transforms as it is transformed? 

       And where love is obscured, hidden beneath bleached-white cloaks of fear, pride, and narrow self-interest, may I  remember—and RE-member into the one-only body of life— all my looked-past kin who right now suffer and die in the name of virtue and pre-emptive security actions?  Still worse, who suffer and die for simple advantage or convenience?   

       May alms be given all remnant forms, the small salvation armies of resurgent nature, who right now humbly move through our ravaged world,  And may kind eyes and ears receive a still small, suffering-soaked, gobbled gospel.