By Pepper Trail

Be here now.  Be here, in the Rogue Valley at the confluence of Bear Creek and Ashland Creek, on a fine spring day.  You are, let us say, a Zen monk visiting from Kyoto, and your local host has brought you here to sit in meditation at the meeting of these small waters, and simply be.

Your host names the plants for you:  Oregon ash, black cottonwood, white oak, ponderosa pine, Himalayan blackberry, poison hemlock, teasel, honeysuckle.  He names the birds for you:  Acorn Woodpecker, Canada Goose, American Robin, European Starling, Tree Swallow, Golden-crowned Sparrow, Anna’s Hummingbird.  He names the mammals:  beaver, human being, dog.

For you, enlightened monk, all these beings share this moment, this eternal now.  All are here.  All are natural. How could they not be?  This moment, this meeting of moving waters, these budding trees, these early flowers, these singing birds – how beautiful! This is good. This is all we’ve got.

Oh, but time and memory!  Open the door of time, walk through, and look back.  What you see then is a scene of wreckage.  In that reality, the natural and native lie crushed by the alien and invasive.  The trees are right, but the impenetrable blackberry brambles, the sprouting stands of poison hemlock, the blossoming dandelions are all wrong.  The wheeling flocks of starlings – all wrong.  These don’t belong here – they are invaders from the other side of the world.  And what is that sound, that distant, constant sea-sound?  Ah, the freeway, the passing of endless flocks of vehicles, headed both north and south, leaving behind an invisible fog of carbon, filling our valley, our sky, our atmosphere.

Two truths.  We live in the unchanging now. We live in a wounded, ever-changing world.

The essays and poems on the following web pages explore these two truths in the light of the unavoidable reality of climate change.

::  Earth ::  Air ::  Fire ::  Water ::  People  ::