1/7/2024 0 Comments Islide into heaven![]() My dog, Kenzie, a fifty-pound black wolf - more or less - goes loping along the shore as is her custom, energetically invested in the obvious truth that all adventure lies at the tip of one's nose. Simple things, right?Īs we walk the shores and launch our travels, several axes of possibility - evidence, ignorance, indifference, and compassion - will form the north, south, east, and west upon which we'll plot our course. And I believe that - if the word "sacred" means anything at all - the world exists as the one truly sacred place. And that nature and human dignity require each other. So, how to proceed? I've come to see that the geometry of human progress is an expanding circle of compassion. How could they? They're ancient and medieval institutions, out of sync with what we've learned in the last century about how the world really works. Meanwhile, the framework with which we run our lives and our world - our philosophy, ethics, religion, and economics - can't seem to detect the risks we're running. We're borrowing heavily from people not yet born. Many others don't deserve the calamities we're creating. But dinosaurs didn't create their own calamity. The dinosaurs failed to anticipate the meteoroid that extinguished them. But there are also certainties hurtling our way that we fail to notice. We have lost much, and we're risking much more. Yet here's the paradox: In the cycle of seasons and the waves of migrating fishes and birds that come and go along my home coast, I still find sanity, solace, and delight, more than a few fresh meals, and the power and resilience of living things the wider lens of distant horizons, however, reveals people and nature up against trends serious enough to rattle civilization in this century. As watching those terns and fish and the activities of my human neighbors continually reminds me, the world still brims with the living. Maybe not a lot of clams (though I've found a couple of decent pockets in the harbor, and my neighbor Dennis generously clued me to a heavy set over in - well, I probably shouldn't say), but I mean in general, a lot remains. It's true that a lot was gone by the time I got here, and that worms are waning and clams are counting down. The voiceless among us got on for hundreds of millions of years without hearing from me. The whole world has a pretty similar story to tell.īut I don't pretend to speak for the sea-worms or the clams. ![]() Nothing too mysterious a few too many people from elsewhere, having raked over their spots, found our spot. The hour now yields perhaps half a dozen. Just a few years ago we could wade out right here and, using merely our feet to detect buried clams, emerge in an hour lugging four dozen. Even the worms are getting scarcer." He'd earlier commented on the dearth of clams. Squinting against shards of summer light jabbing upward from the water, he says, "S-l-o-w. Bob hopes to slide a few porgies into his frying pan by sundown. My neighbor's cottage is right on the bay, and where I launch my kayak I find him wading waist-deep with a spade, digging sea-worms for bait.
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