When We Don’t Walk Alone

The beauty in this is beyond words, and yet words they are. Excerpts of a poem by Eliza Gonzalez:

***

                        Hot mornings. Hot apple tea, honeyed.

                        The mountains a fist knuckled on the horizon.

                        Dust is coming, dust is not yet here.

***

                        — Examples of what, I do not know. It’s just that

                        for a time I took Love out walking

                        with me everywhere and sometimes I thought Child, whose is this child?

                        when it played in the square. A sunshine creature, terrifying,

                        yet still I looked at it like I’ve never looked at a stranger

                        who promises water to the waterless for nothing.

                        And now I lie awake pretending

                        everyone in the world lies still the way the living are still:

                        not entirely, never entirely.

Thoroughly beguiled, I decided to take Love out walking, too:  to the crusted contours of the American West, to the Grecian inlands and islands set aflame, to the Siberian snow forests now crisped and charred; to the dreary deserts departing droplets left behind; to the rivery roads running, swelling and swollen, over homeland and homelessland wrenching lives away. And I took Love out walking in storms now too brutal for either of us to bear.

I walked with Love, not to love the devastation, but to continue to love, furiously and fiercely and ferociously, what had been, what is still, and what can be.

So many of us bemoan our own apathy – in the midst of all the deadly portends of climate change, of pandemic persistence, of inequities and inequalities and division and discord, of – oh, this one example just leaps to mind – the critical need for all genders, races, ethnicities to have the opportunities to lead our huge institutions with new perspectives, with new respect for justice because of justice so long denied.

But apathy, like so many afflictions, does have a cure.

I don’t mean this sentimentally or banally or facilely. I’m not casting forth a convenient cliché; everything we know is too threatened for that. I’m just proposing that our loving the earth and its creatures in all their marvelously varied forms fervently enough will save it and them. Maybe it’s the only grace that will.

So let’s take the walk the poet proposes. Let’s look closely at the “stranger who promises water to the waterless for nothing” and love that Love. And let’s embrace the wonder and promise of us as humans who, as hard as we may try, are never able to lie entirely still – for that just may be our salvation.