All quiet here this morning — able to think clearly without the thudding din of stun grenades being fired a few roads away. I try not to show any fear so that the dogs don’t pick up my anxiety. ‘Just thunder,’ I say in a soothing voice. The housemate’s battered old car has a problem with its battery, so we are hoping this doesn’t mean financial disaster in February. We will get through, but nail-biting stuff when it comes to unexpected bills and repairs.
Listening to the quiet as if it is something new. And hoping that the wage negotiations reach some satisfactory compromise and the calls for more effective and sensitive policing help the situation. Resilience is the quality I find most often in those who live and work out here, the resilience that helps us come back and start over, try again, not give up, keep going.
Rainforest defender and climate activist Rebecca Tarbotton has died by accidental drowning at the early age of 39 in Mexico, leaving a great legacy of eco-conservation and a healing vision that inspired many:
“We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we’re really talking about, if we’re honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet…. We don’t always know exactly what it is that creates social change. It takes everything from science all the way to faith, and it’s that fertile place right in the middle where really exceptional campaigning happens – and that is where I strive to be.”
At the age of 88, David Ferry has won the National Book Award for poetry in the United States. Eighty-eight years old and still working creatively, able to write such moving and musical lines as these:
When, moments after she died, I looked into her face,
It was as untelling as something natural,
A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,
Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.
Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;
But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.
