The news has begun to activate a part of me that was bullied as a young person, who experienced disadvantage just because I was short, and the part of me that found out on going to college that my rural education didn’t match up to the city kids. Memories become rage in my body/mind, a lava dome of upset pushing up against the crust of my conventional self, disturbing a hard-won sense of self-worth and maturity.<!--more-->

How long before this festering boil erupts in me and others? History does not comfort me, considering the implosion of other tyrannical systems. The fumes are filling the room of my awareness. What spark will ignite them, pushing my belief in human kindness into a well of grief and horror?

I don’t want the result to be numbness, or war in me or others. I experience an urge act, to move, to resist paralysis and denial. The kind of acts I trust is reaching out to others, to let you know you are not alone, so, I wrote a poem. Words help me titrate my feelings. I don’t want to take a political bypass, as Charles Eisenstein calls it, by grabbing a balloon of hope and floating off. But the Minnesotans are showing us that when people reach out and touch each other, and work from heart, that contagion can find a flow instead of a wall of flames. If this crisis brings us back into relationships, back into feeling the Earth, back into resisting othering as a way to feel better, then the crises have some value. I do know that the new springs from the composting of the old.  But the breaking down grabs at my heart.

A BROKEN COMPASS

Our compass has lost its bearing,

stopped feeling the living Earth’s magnetism

started spinning and spinning and spinning.

Did it lose its orientation

in the extreme heat of threats

or intentional damage at the pivot point,

bent by lies and murders conducted

right on camera

or was its needle flipped in the

presence of coils of rhetoric wound tightly in direct opposition

to guidance from the Earth?

This damage may be generations

in the making—seeing humans as objects

disconnected from other life,

disconnected from the long arms

of planetary influence, forgetting how

whales, geese and butterflies navigate

over thousands of miles.

Without a compass

we navigate by buoys instead,

listening for the loud horns along the prescribed

channels of thinking set by others.

avoiding known rocks.

lost in the open seas of change.

Is there a physics of morality?

Did we forget

that both inner and outer compasses

work by orientating

to larger fields of coherence

to resonance and compassion

to the living planet as a whole?

We need to move to something new.

It will take a compass that works.

It will take a multitude that is willing.

It will take embracing compost that stinks

until the new roses bloom.

By David Sibbet