dawn chorus - a poem
And known the catastrophising over every day.
Of every tiny thing seeming enormous
Which bin is the right one for this thing
Individual electrical usage
That takeaway coffee cup
Locked doors and whether that fence is on the right side of a made up boundary.
Pointing fingers and financial security
Whether the neighbours are watering on the correct days.
Finding holes in people’s opinions like disdainfully searching a knitted jumper
Without seeing its stories
Or hearing about who knitted it
Or falling in love with the way the wool, grown out on pasture in sunlight
On the back of an animal, birthing and breathing and feeding
Was woven into a story
To keep someone warm.
Raising children and stay home parenting
Falling in love
Dreaming of the future
Your mental health
How your body feels
Cortisol pulsing through your body always
Rushing to find solutions
With no time to feel them out
Or hear from the people who are the most silent
Or consider why they are silent in the first place.
Living everyday as if it’s an argument
And pumping all of that into our blood,
Into our genes
Into our babies.
And the most enormous of things are barely noticed
Like the influence of history
The way colonial genoicide lives on
In our every day lives.
Unfurling in the myth of generational wealth
The lie that privilege holds no sway on the effect of hard work
Or even what hard work is
Or that it is to be glorified
That the earth can be owned
That it can belong to anything as impermanent as a human being
That we can take and take without giving back
From this world, so alive with gifts
Or even,
Giving back only our waste, only our poisons
Without ever asking for consent
Into landscapes that are people’s family
Into places made out of ancestors
Calling colonisation progress
Forgetting that trees are also our kin
That they hold the stories of
A time when human people and plant people
Walked hand in hand
Marvelling at each other’s gifts and sharing this world
That the world is billions of stories in motion
And the land, the water, the cells of all living things
Hold all the stories
Of what has come before
Shaping what the future can be.
Akasha.
Alive, books reading themselves
And writing themselves at the same time.
Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People.
Is about people.
And maybe everything is just people - plant people, animal people, mountain people, ocean people maybe this whole planet, solar system, galaxy is just one person, living out their days.
And maybe it’s all just events or all just ideas. Or everything, all at once, stretched out by the person, event and idea that is time.
And here we are in time's great woven web.
And the body of the earth has been asked to give and give in the name of ownership
So many millions of litres of blood soaking into the soil
All of it made out of ancestors,
Human and not human ancestors
When you have lived as if the world is ending,
When all your days are filled with fear for your children
When you’ve already imagined the worst case scenarios over and over
Trying to take up less and less space
Diminishing into nothing
Telling stories of the apocalypse
Forgetting that for some
The apocalypse already came
That existential dread followed colonisation
Like a magic trick of a magnet pulling something across a table,
Hand hidden underneath.
And your chest holds the enormity of all of it.
Talking about the future as a doomsday.
One day you might rise
And realise you are still alive.
Still breathing
And the world is still giving.
The gifts are still here.
The world is still alive.
And you are still invited
To be part of that aliveness.
And expand, into the world that you belong to
Become part of this great game of reciprocity
What if our days started with glorious songs of our aliveness
Like birds at dawn
A great dawn chorus
Where all voices,
Even the silent ones
Were joining in
Songs of nematodes
And dandelions
And great white sharks
Of mountain streams
And muddy puddles
Of great rolling waves
And baby robins
Cane toads and bakery yeasts
Gut flora and the pull of gravity
All chorusing in one great shout of what it is to be alive
One great moving, cycle of song
Where all stories curl outward and inward
A living world
Expanding in its aliveness.
Celebrating its survival
Knowing its own fragility
When you have survived feeling like the world is going to end
Every morning is a dance.
Death has not claimed me now.
And it cannot claim me
Because I am water
I am the sea
And the mountain
And your smile as I turn to face you
The life cycle of a nematode
And the beauty of a dewdrop
On a quiet morning
Poised to fall
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