Page 18 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

elephants, that melting ice. This cannot continue! But how? How can I contribute to

wholeness with the shape of my life?

And so, and now, how shall we live?

The Wild is sanity. Darkness. Silence. The great knowing of Nature’s rhythmic wisdom.

In the wild is contained the dignity of intactness, authenticity, and the congruence of

original design. Earth’s relentless enfolding of each thing into another keeps life going. It

is a terrifying comfort to remember that nothing, no thing, is outside it. Every thing,

everything, is contained within her eternal cycling. All of the murdered and all of the

murderers. Policemen shooting unarmed black men, and those who, in turn, shoot

policemen. Revelers. Travelers. Suicide bombers and drone-makers. The fracked earth,

pitted and paved, and politicians justifying torture as they parse ‘collateral damage’.

Even the mines with their unspeakable chemicals, and the desperate gouging for gold,

silver, copper, platinum and ‘rare earths’ to put in our smartphones. Each and all of it

deemed by someone’s mad calculus to be a necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of

righteousness, pleasure or profit.

Last night, I saw a huge, black mound lying motionless in the middle of the road. I

realized it was a black bear that had been hit by a car. It was past midnight, and with no

houses nearby, and no other cars on the road, I could neither attend to it nor move it by

myself, and so I guiltily drove on, nauseous and in tears. I remembered the afternoon in

2006 when I saw a pair of courting blue jays. As I slowed my car to watch them, the

male hurtled into my front bumper and dropped from sight. The female alighted on a

patch of curbside grass, wings spread wide as she flitted and paced in alarm. The male

lay motionless by the curb. I grabbed a towel from the back seat, scooped him up and

held him in my lap as I drove the rest of the way home. His body was warm against my

belly. When I opened the towel and bent my head to look at him, my exhale gently lifted

the feathers on his neck.

The dogs slunk over and lay down at my feet. I explained what had happened, telling the

story in every way I could think of: It was an accident. It was Fate. Something spooked

the jays. I was driving too fast, or too slow. We shouldn’t have cars in the first place. It

was an offering that I don’t understand. Up close, the jay was iridescent. Even the gray

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