The Daily Miracle

Yikes, I’m reposting this (under a slight different title) because the poetry block feature failed on the first go around.

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One thing about the living climate—it’s always in motion. The planet turns before the sun in constant sunrise and sunset. While one side of the planet sleeps and dreams, another wakes and works, turning sunlight into life, transpiring water from ground to sky, assembling clouds, moving heat around and maintaining this place we call home.

It’s a beautiful mystery and often taken for granted. How easy it is to wake up and simply open the laptop, let that other, manufactured light, greet our eyes and the minds behind them. But a danger hides there, one difficult to see.

I’m still working on a mixdown of “The Physical Science Basis,” what mainstream science declares for its assessment of Earth’s climate, and the irony that such a wildly dynamic, living system has been reduced to numbers and computer graphics. It’s a complex matter though, and shouldn’t be rushed. There are distinctions to be made between tool and vision. Black and white dissolve as usual into the many shades of in-between, and I’m still trying to find the right language for it.

In the meantime, here is a morning poem, a reminder of just what a miracle this thing called “morning” really is.

Does life have to wake?
What if the sun came
     and the leaves declined?
What if flowers decided to keep
     their petals closed
     and inspect instead their own minds?
What would happen to the bees?

To grow upon this Earth
     is to be grown by it
     to proceed in the forms
it has made for us, 
     to be what comes through:
 rooted, branching, rivering.

If the wind is tempered by trees
     then what is it's voice?
     What is poetry

but a repetition of what can't be said
    yet speaks unbroken
    deep from the hearts
              of things.

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