Dreams, wishes and wisdom

The sun is shining. The sky is blue with few clouds. The breeze is up and the temperature down. Today's high temperature is forecast to be about 50% of our average high for today. I've started a list of wishes (or prayers) for the immediate future running through the remainder of the year. It's an online alternative to a "God box."

Would you put an oil pipeline crossing here? Where?    © harrington

• May today be the last day this year there is frost on my windows.
• May the ice be gone from the driveway by next Monday.
• May the local rivers have ice off by April 3.
• May the local lakes have ice out by April 10.
• May I get out fly-fishing as often as I want.
• May we find at least six sugar maples to tap.
• May the mice etc. have left the backyard apple trees alone.
• May the weather the first week in October be extraordinarily nice and sunny and warm and dry.
• May my writing and photography improve and My Minnesota's readership grow.
• May Democrats relearn how to be progressive so we once again have a two party system in this country.
• May we learn there is no such place as "away" and financial assurance isn't.

I already know I have a terrible track record of putting some things into a "God box" only to claw them back out again. Most of what goes into the box are things over which I (we) have no control. May I learn to let go of what I can't change and to work smarter on what I can, such as how often I go fly-fishing. Do you suppose our legislature could use some God boxes?

Bald eagle in poplars   © harrington

Carl Sandburg has some important reminders about who we are and where we came from.

Wilderness

By Carl Sandburg 

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.    

There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

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