We each carry the story of our birthplace in pieces of earth, water, sky and spirit. Though nothing appears to have changed here in this Indian town along the Arkansas River, it is always changing.

Joy Harjo from her book Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings

Joy Harjo, Poet Laureate of the United States (2019) and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, lives and writes from a sense of shared humanity. She illuminates through language with a jeweler’s precision, shared elements of the commonweal in the great diversity.   The purpose of this posting is to remind us more of what we share and not so much how we are different, better, exceptional, or even all around ‘great’ as is the current theme of times. Truly good decisions come from the common ground of humanity and certainly not exclusively from the high cliffs of intellect.

How odd that we need to be reminded of the permanence of change because change always was, is, and will always be. To be reminded of change is like reminding fish about water or birds about air.  But when a government has the audacity to try to back up time at severe human cost, we apparently must be reminded that we are living, not in ‘interesting times’, but in a man-made warp that could be called an ‘aberration of time’.  The violence of trying to back up time eventually burns everything in its path, because time relentlessly insists on its own rules.

A modest proposal for good

Live in the time you live.  Spiritualities spring out of origin stories. Our individual lives do as well.  Our current government is on a fools errand trying to back up the powerful process of life evolving forward from those origin stories. The so called ‘Greatness’ of the past cannot not be the greatness of the future because the context of history is always on the move. Too much has changed.  Good is using memory only to facilitate the run of time into the future. Anything else feels to this writer like sacrilege.  Make good decisions out of the present moment in the time span for which we are responsible and time will forgive us past transgressions. We will come to no harm remembering  we, sometimes foolish beings, depend on mercy from a source far beyond our preening, meager, overeager, lowercase ‘greatness’.