Who Dad?!

Present Day

As I wake

the familiar body next to mine

breathing rhythmically still

instinctively inches closer

even asleep

sensing a change in me

something in her responds

As I wake

sometimes her touch

will lead me back

to a kind of sleep

I would not find on my own

As I wake

more alert unmoving in darkness

than in the fullness of day

I wonder what source

these random images

already streaming for attention

As I wake

in this body complaining

even before asked a task

As I wake

with what creative slumber has restored

and with what ills still ignored

As I wake

a world in peril

a country no longer recognizable

the urge to drift away,

not awake, sizable

As I wake

a whisper to resist

a voice insists to persist

another day

this day

kissed

awake

As Napoleon was reported to have said: "Never awake me when you have good news to announce, because with good news nothing presses but when you have bad news, arouse me immediately for then there is not an instant to be lost."

Seems like we should all be awake these days, huh?

It's late July, 2023. We've been in extreme heat for weeks. Every day, it seems, is a new record high for global temperatures. Smoke from massive fires in Canada have affected air quality across most of the continent. And now, Greece. Tens of thousands have been evacuated ahead of fires. Dream vacations abruptly ended. Tourists sleeping on floors in airports, desperate to return home.

I think the age of travel (for me, at least) is over.

Wander in desert

Wonder where the Promised Land

Any oasis

Meanwhile, besides Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there are 32 other ongoing conflicts, insurgencies, and civil wars going on as the world burns. I read this week "Critical Ocean Current System is Heading for Collapse" and I wonder what it will take for humans to cooperate to solve our very pressing problems.

I have so little to offer besides words. Just this past week, I started writing on the electronic platform, Wattpad, to engage in real time with others in shaping a narrative. We need stories to guide us in a different direction.

Ever read a book or watch a film, figure out too quickly where it was headed, and then wish for a different kind of plot, a better outcome? Think of how little our story telling has changed. Of course, we are more technically proficient, but what are our stories today telling us?

Humanity is in need of a new story. Our old stories of how the world came to be and how we fit into it have sustained us for a long period of time, shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with purpose, energized action, consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, and guided education. Some hold on vigorously to such models. Others have long rejected them as outdated, or grounded in superstition rather than science.

A good story doesn't necessarily make people good, nor take away the pains and missteps of living, but it can create a context in which life functions and proceeds in a meaningful manner.

Taming and populating a vast and wild sphere spurred tales of valor, led to mighty nations fixated on power and growth, but now what? What kind of leadership or government can transcend borders and allow global cooperation for sustaining, not conquering, an interconnected ecosystem?

And, what does that all mean for individual choices of health and diet, career and marriage, recreation and procreation? If you had children, or grandchildren, today, what stories would you read them tonight? And, with what else on earth would you feed them?

We are almost an entirely new species, globally and instantly connected. We disparage those who dare to think they are somehow superior and should lead. And yet most of us know, we, ourselves, would do no better.

My hunch is it's because the next step is to become something truly interconnected, where we collectively wield the scepter, on behalf of the the whole, on behalf of every living thing, and of the planet itself.

We're not there yet. Old and emerging forms are colliding and struggling, fueled by all kinds of reasons and fears. Maybe the mythological key to this puzzle is in all of our inner inventors, observers, philosophers, artists, dancers, comics, musicians, programmers, gardeners, crafters, and storytellers discovering, expressing, and joining in imagining and manifesting a new reality.