_

When the sea is glitter lit,
the sky pied and beauty bent, I pause,
stop to rest on a bench with a bronze plaque
installed:  For Millie full of life and valor for hers and others.

The planks ground down by salt,
rough with chiseled initials, one word
(love) neatly placed. On unfenced grass, a man
throws a Frisbee low and long and grey-blue pallor sifts
across the river of yellow bloom where mothers sit content.

Mid-afternoon, as the sun grew longer and golder, I heard voices. First two distinct voices speaking loudly in harmony, and then the many repeating, responding. Those voices were distant but approaching. By the time, I had laid aside my work, a small but active crowd was passing in front of my house. Two young women were out in front with megaphones, followed by a group of thirty or forty people, including  the Mayor, her husband, the Police Chief and other Oakland city workers, marching solidly up Peralta Street. The women yelled out What do we want? and the crowd yelled back PEACE. And the women yelled back When do we want it? And the voices lifted  NOW. 

End the violence. End the violence. End the violence now.

Join us, join us, yelled the man with the microphone. My heart was with them, but I couldn't get up and walk. I was working. I was barefoot. I would have to put away my work, close up the house, set the alarm. I had a million excuses, and even before I could scratch them all on the back of my skull, the crowd was turning the corner to head down Twelfth Street towards Mandela Parkway and away.

_
What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW.

NOW. . .Now. . . Now.

What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW. . . Now.

The mayor's husband, a doctor, a founder of an over-60 health clinic, reached across my fence and handed me a magnet  for my refrigerator. Create a Safer Cleaner Oakland. Report Problems to the Public Works Agency. I thanked him, and then stood still, listened to the gentleness of feet moving together, the pitch of voices rising. Call and Response. Call out and the world calls back.

I did not want to think about how many years ago, how many decades past, I yelled those same words, passionately, convinced that by working together, we could change the world, bring peace to our cities, peace to our land, peace to our world. Almost 50 years. I stood aside and watched them go  -- the years, the people, the voices -- wondering why I cling, somewhat stupidly, to a hope for peace, but I do. I do.

After they were gone, my neighbor to my right went back to working on his car. My neighbor across the street picked up his hammer again. The man who had stepped out from the Western Service Workers Association put away his camera and stepped back in. I went back to work, and somewhere behind some closed door someone went back to cleaning his gun.

What do we want?       PEACE.

When do we want it? NOW. Stop the Violence, stop it now. NOW. Now.  now. . . please NOW.

But how?  Federal funds are funneled off to wars. Schools are collapsing under the weight of senseless and useless bureaucracies. Our society is gasping and grasping and gagging. There's no money for schools, no money for health care, no money for housing, no money except for those who already have more than they could ever spend in a lifetime. Education, housing, healthcare  have become unaffordable for most of us. Real health care is no longer available except to those who can afford to pay for private  insurance and the hefty deductibles. The rest of us make do with aspirin and tisanes. The social safety net is so shot through with holes that if any who has the misfortune to fall into it instantly falls through its rotted netting and hurdles downward into the abyss.

We want peace, but who's going to sign the Peace Treaty and give up war when war is the money machine, the rusted gas guzzling brutal nasty engine that keeping the economy pumping. . . All money goes to war; all money comes from war. Capitalism is war on the people. Once that war was organized with well-defined rules of engagement; now, it is guerrilla war, fought down in the ghettos and out in the streets, and we, the people,  are being unwittingly transformed into soldiers, destined to die in those trenches unless we cast off the uniforms, lay down the guns, and give up on war. NOW.

Now . . . NOW . . . Now . . .

But how?

If we want peace, we have to stop consuming and start nurturing. We are not the brave soldiers of capitalism, marching off to consume and consume some more. We are mothers and fathers, artists and musicians, farmers and mechanics, dreamers and inventors, scientists and doctors, workers, children, grandchildren, lovers, humans with thin skins and giant hearts.

To find peace, refuse war. All war. All violence. Live simply. Consume less. Do no harm.

_

Last night, there were sirens.
Loud, long, many. Sirens
after midnight went on and on
and I have no idea why. I was
too groggy to rise and see
if there were police cars,
ambulances or something else,
zipping up or down the street.
My body damp and heavy and limp,
my brain absorbed in making sense
of 3000 elephants swimming
in a giant whirlpool near a coast
with a beach layered in numbers
and fragile bits of brightly colored silk
as the sirens matched the waving
of the elephant trunks,  I slipped
beneath the quilts on my bed, screwed
my eyes tight and let the elephants
trumpet amidst the clash of sirens,
waves, and rocks. This morning,
nothing in the morning news.
By afternoon, the moon drained
the waters from the bay.

_
On a grey day, a pink river, no current
We’re in the thick of it, this spring --
Blossoms falling as soon as they open.

No wind sweeps them away, no rain
washes them helter-skelter to the bay.

_

Understanding boundaries


Louder on full moon nights, the street
wakes up. Highway whine sharpens its axis.
Train whistles whip the wind to speed.
Dogs bark longer louder faster. The couple
on the corner argue more with words
and less with fists, finally. Unmuzzled,
a motorcycle wraps up the banging pile driver
breaking concrete beneath the overpass,
and inside all that clamor, the steady tick-tock
of a clock with a spring that needs daily winding
and rings as loud as a firetruck if the alarm is set.
For now, my alarm is the cherry tree, its pink bloom
washed white by the early February moon.
This spring, one spring, come too soon.

When we leave, what stays
what goes, light shrinks
shadow grows

and in the travelled space, stars
and something else,  like god
uncorrected unprotected
in between, without

I have been feeling purple blue  ever since the Occupiers went on their rampage through downtown resulting in the arrest of 400 and the "banishment" of a dozen. I was as disappointed by the arrests as by the violence; both actions resulted in expenditure of tax payer dollars that might have been better spent creating housing for the homeless, subsidies for public education, or any number of public works such as filling potholes, cleaning trash from parks, etc etc etc. In these still hard days of budget cuts, we don't need the expenses incurred by violence and mayhem, and we don't need more people behind bars. The United States is, as the ACLU correctly states, a nation behind bars. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of its prisoners. If we are going to find across the murky swamp of violence that has become commonplace in our cities, we need bridges, ways to communicate that work.

I don't  purport to have any concise precise answers; I know there is no magic wand to wave, but I also know that if we want generous loving lives in a compassionate world,  we need to revise old tired systems, abandon violence and war, long favored and applauded by the hierarchies of power, including most political systems and organized religion.

We're not going to save the world by maiming  and killing one another. I know what you're  thinking -- oh, goodness, how naive! Tell that to the politicians. Tell that to the corporate raiders. Tell that to every sneering mean-spirited pompous self-righteous man or woman who has blamed the poor for their poverty, the sick for their illness, the ignorant for their ignorance, the grieving for their sorrow.

Okay, do that.

Tell them, quietly and firmly, without shouting. Forgive student loans. Regulate financial systems and insurance companies. Adequately fund public education. Reduce the cost of health care and make it available to all. Help our world to bloom.

Elsewhere ice is still holding back the green, but here it is spring. Perhaps it's a spring too early, but it's spring, the season when imaginations run to dreams of peaceful days and visions of verdant summer gardens alive with fruit and flowers. True, this year rainstorms have gone missing, and that's a worry. There are more and more people crowded up against the coast, more and more water consumed daily, and the skies are brilliant blue even in the earliest morning hours.  No rain, but in all that blue, can't we find a rock near a hidden spring perhaps where we might anchor a human bridge that might take us hand over hand from old to new, here to there?

Or are we going to once again leave it up to God and/or Government?

I've always thought of God as nothing more than the space between, that which both holds us apart from one another and simultaneously provides connection,  a borderless place where we store all our knowledge, all our love.  The only God I know is love. I never could imagine 'a' God, slipped inside a body, perched upon a throne, soberly surveying the troubled paradise below. Thinking of God as that vibrant space between, human life can perhaps be imagined as the Bridge between.  We are the builders of the Bridge. We get to decide which stones we'll use, how much concrete we pour, how high our Bridge will soar, how far its reach. We can choose to eschew those flimsily manufactured pillars of violence and cruelty, choose instead to build the every day with sturdier stock, using only the willowy branches of love and hope lashed together with kindness and generosity.  As for Government.  .  .  well that would be us, wouldn't it? We the people, remaining flexible and fluid, retaining the dream.

Spring is a hopeful dreamy season, a kind Bridge built of earth spirits and sky shadows, one that allows us to slip from darkness into light. Nothing is yet ripe (except the citrus fruits, lemons everywhere) and anything rotten is being greedily consumed by the new growth of old plants. Bursting in bloom, flowering cherries and plums are redrawing horizons, coaxing winter skies to the earth below where those flowers that are the true markers of a Northern California spring -- poppies and oxalis -- are opening to the sun as exuberant and as brilliant as they are short-lived._

Life is short. Live lovingly. Do no harm. Practice random acts of Kindness. Be generous. Make art.

Why not?

Regular readers of this blog -- you know who you are! ;-0 -- may be wondering why I am no longer writing high praise of 'Occupy:Oakland'. Well, the answer to that question is easy enough. I am a pacifist and  do not support  violent wholesale destruction. I never have and never will, and in recent days, rather than focusing their energies on determining positive means of discussion and mediation to address the difficult societal problems  we all face, the Occupy movement in Oakland has been instead a bit too  focused on violence and the destruction of community property, i.e property purchased and maintained by the tax dollars offered by 99%, which includes me and probably you, too, dear readers. Too much bullying going on.

On Saturday night, when several Occupy folk crow-barred open the front doors to City Hall, walls  inside Oakland's City Hall were scrawled with graffiti, glass doors broken, electric wires cut, property removed. The scale model of the building -- the original architect's model over 100 years old -- was overturned and broken.  Several even more fragile yet wildly imaginative sculptures in a children's art exhibit outside the Mayor's office were damaged, some seriously so. This exhibit featured art made of recycled materials and included a small sculpture dedicated to Occupy, yet nonetheless several pieces were over-turned and broken. At least one was destroyed. My personal favorite, the mermaid, her tail a mass of glistening DVD scales, now lists far to the left. Arms akimbo, she's hanging on.

Rather than thrashing about, smashing this, crashing that, the Occupiers might have benefited from stopping at the top of the stairs, standing still if only for a moment. They might have looked quietly at the art made by Oakland's kids, soaked themselves in the imagined worlds and dreams these kids had created from trash and then stood back (or stood near) and allowed themselves to occupy their minds, dream of new ways to solve old problems. Picked up their own trash and moved on.

Of course, capitalism may be correctly described as War on the People. We know that, but we also know that rarely is war ended with more war. Certainly we all see by now that violence does not subside when met with greater violence. Violence begets violence. At the risk of sounding pedantic and overly trite, I will state the obvious again. Creativity builds worlds. Destructive violence only destroys, kills, maims, leaving behind very little with which to build anew. Anyone who has wandered out of a war zone knows that.

I'm not an advocate of war, and I wonder about a group that seeks to wage war on themselves. Why do such harm to themselves and to others? I find it ironic -- and more than little sad -- that a protester charged with committing mayhem carries the name Ahimsa.

Ahimsa -- the awareness that all life is sacred and that we who walk this earth should do no harm to others or to ourselves.  Gandhi showed us that  If we can change ourselves, the tendencies in the world will also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him . . .  So if we live every day in peace and with peace and by peace, perhaps we will have peace. If we do no harm, we can perhaps reconstruct our world as a world without violence.

Satyagraha. Nonviolence. Ahimsa. Do no harm. Walk in beauty. Walk in light.

Behind the fog, inside the smoke, is the light of peace, the grace of life.

Just the other day, I was out trimming my all impetuous passion flower vine and came upon a butterfly, a butterfly in January. A real butterfly -- a California Painted Lady, sitting quietly on the redwood post beneath the green waterfall of leaves. It didn't fly away.

Then, today, cleaning my refrigerator, I came upon a head of Romaine lettuce that I bought perhaps a week before Thanksgiving, in mid-November. Now before you scold about my housekeeping, imagine this. That head of lettuce, still in its original bag, was as fresh as green as the day I bought it -- no greying outer leaves to peel away, no browning stalks -- just Romaine looking for all the world like Romaine. Why have I keep it for so long? Now you can tut-tut-tut about my housekeeping.

But my housekeeping is not the story here. I held that lettuce in my hand, looked closely at its still perfect leaves, and then carefully laid it back in the crisper. I have no intention of eating it, but I'll keep it. I'll just watch it -- see how many more months it stays fresh and crisp and green. It startles me to see  lettuce so old and so green. Makes me wonder . . . what are we eating these days? Why -- how -- does lettuce stay fresh for two and a half months?? Is that even possible? The bag reads 'organic' 'no preservatives.' Say wha? No preservatives and this ancient head of lettuce looks like it was just cut from the field? Why? Was it watered with liquid plastic?

Cabbages can last that long naturally -- just peel off the limp outer leaves and the center is still sweet, but lettuce? Lettuce was the treat of the spring, fresh greens, new greens, tender greens that might soon wilt. Romaine  lasted just a little linger. Pick it in the morning; it might still be fresh for the evening meal, but who ever heard of 2 1/2 month old Romaine still fresh. . .

Our world has gone strange. Butterflies birthing in January. Eternal lettuce that will never wilt.

I'm not much interested in eating ever-crisp-always-green lettuce grown sometime in 2010. My liver might be suddenly as crisp and green. I rather prefer the real and the ephemeral -- baby lettuce that settles flat onto the plate (eat it quickly!), fog that disappears by noon, sun that skips gold on water, children's chalk drawings on sidewalks that will wash away with the rain. 

The imagined and the dreamed -- as real as real can be.

Boats and flowers: what a child sees
and butterflies, what a child dreams
. . . or sees, could be, beneath
a waterfall of green January leaves.

On those days when the morning talk show on NPR is host to blithering idiots, I walk, looking for another sort of order, wondering if I am going crazy or is the world. Today's Forum show featured two of the most soggy self-important "thinkers" I have had the misfortune of hearing lately; both wanted to "prove" to the rest of us dunderheads that gossip can be a force for good,  a useful means of keeping society orderly and well-organized. Nothing either said made any sort of sense. It was all so much twinkie-twaddle trash, dressed up to look like sober new directions in social thought. Ha. I know I would not want to live in a world precisely and maliciously ordered by gossip or hearsay.

Today, I found myself loving the  lacy order of the natural world, random perhaps but  resonant . .  sometimes tattered and torn, sometimes soothingly geometric, lines of geese, triangles of sky, trees in parallel, stacks of stones, and sweeping curves of sea pushed against the sand.

The sea never gossips. It just pushes its waters through deep channels, sucks away sands with currents strong enough to create graceful curves as perfect as prayer is not.

When the moon pulls the tide away from the shore,  great lines of red seaweed  trace a delicate firm beauty on the sands that stay behind.  . . .  When tides of gossip pull away, what remains are gaping holes, crashed trust, ruined lives, misery.

_What brings order to my chaotic world is never gossip. It is instead the sympathy of distance, mountains made light by a floating line of ducks and a settled row of rocks. Gossip is just flotsam and jetsam, so much plastic trash to be raked, sorted, and bagged.