Watching a Documentary about Polar Bears Trying to Survive on the Melting Ice Floes

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That God had a plan, I do not doubt.

But what if His plan was, that we would do better?

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Question from yesterday:  What will you do?

Answer for today:  Better.

This poem’s title is longer than the body, which is unusual in a poem.  This seems fitting given what Mary attempts to do to us.  Perhaps she is asking if we need to spend more time studying or discussing the problem than actually doing something about it.  Having just come from the annual symposium of the Mesoamerican Society of Biology and Conservation, I know how much time we can spend preparing ourselves with all the data and understanding we need to save the world.  It was several days, indoors, of one power point presentation after another.  I’m glad that I took in all that information and I’m glad we have it. Don’t get me wrong. Yet there resides in me a nagging voice saying, All these people didn’t really need to spend all these resources to fly here for this conference  What are we doing indoors looking at a screen or plotting and planning during meals and evening gatherings?    Maybe we don’t’ even need to have careers of studying and saving birds. Maybe all we need to do is love ourselves as we would love all beings.  Do the hard work of growing our social, emotional, and spiritual intelligence.  Consume less and place relationships, within and without, as a priority above all else. In short, to do better.

How might you “do better?”

Showing the Birds

Look, children, here is the shy,

Flightless dodo the many-colored

Pigeon named the passenger, the

Great auk, the Eskimo curlew, the

Woodpecker called the Lord God Bird,

The…

Come, children, hurry-there are so many

More wonderful things to show you in

The museum’s dark drawers.

Every one of the species named here have haunted me in dreams, nightmares, and waking reflection.  It is for them that I pursed avian veterinary medicine and work now in conversation.  I ache that we no longer have the divinity of such a large woodpecker amongst us, or the native Carolina Parakeet nesting in my backyard in Florida.

I was quite aware of the missing parrots in Florida when I first moved here 4 years ago.  For Florida was the last state where they were last reported in the wild. In fact, I read, that the only Carolina Parakeet  eggs anywhere were in my new home of Gainesville. I called up the museum curators to ask if I could see the eggs. For me it was a hajj of sorts – I had to see them, honor them, mourn them, and see with my own eyes what was left of beauty.

The curator granted my request for an audience with extinction. He led me into the museum’s basement and we walked up to a set of drawers where the extinct lay in waiting.  He opened drawer after drawer of preserved Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Passenger Pigeons, and Carolina Parakeets.  It was a ritual of mourning. In the last drawer, in a special box, were 3 eggs.  These eggs came to be here because egg collectors sold eggs for a living, and even though the parakeet was deemed extinct, this one collector knew where nesting birds still flew free.  He did not tell anyone the location – he went for the short term benefit instead of the one where maybe, just maybe collective will may have led to conservation of these birds and their continuance amongst us.

I feel such loss, but do not lay blame at the collector’s feet.  My own life is full of decisions that benefit me and others in the short term.  If I waver from the long view, may I remember those museum drawers and dedicate my life to work that is a prayer that we don’t need to build more museums to hold wonderful things.

How do you balance short term benefit with those more long term?

Ghosts - March 1, 2010

1

Have you noticed?

2

Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts

lay down on the earth and died

it's hard to tell now

what's bone, and what merely

was once...

4

...In the book of the earth it is written:

nothing can die.

In the book of the Sioux it is written:'

they have gone away into the earth to hide.

nothing will coax them out again

but the people dancing...

6

...Have you noticed? how the rain

falls soft as the fall

of moccasins. Have you noticed?..

...the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also

have you noticed? gone now.

7

...in a dream

I watched while, secretly

and with the tenderness of any caring woman,

a cow gave birth

to a red calf...

...in the fragrant grass

in the wild domains

of the prairie spring, and I asked them,

in my dream I knelt down and asked them

to make room for me.

Oh Mary, here you are always with questions and answers. You ask if there is room for yourself. Is there room on this planet for a species such as ours? Will there ever be enough room in the earth, in the grass, and in death? This leads me to another question: How can I make room for death and extinction, now this moment in my heart, for myself, for the buffalo, for the Passenger Pigeon, for the Carolina Parakeet, so that I may make room for life?

Where do you make room to ruminate over the losses of the past, which endure today?