We see you. And we’re not messin’ around.
Today is the official federal holy day honoring the late, murdered Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior. I’m in Seattle with my Sweetie Sweetchickens. Both of us are FV & Boostered, we don’t feel well, and she feels worse than me. We’re waiting for the results of her test for COVID-19. Got tested Saturday. So with all due respect to MLK we avoided marches, rallies, and social gatherings indoors. We chose to go for a meandering ramble up in Shoreline at Richmond Beach Saltwater Park. We need wide open spaces with healing views of big sky, open water, and a breeze. Temperatures were in the low to mid 40s. Fahrenheit.
Contemplation of stillness amidst vast spaces…and those waves of energy rippling out thru air and water.
We contemplated the winter sun, the sea, and overcast skies. To our surprise one lone boat was way out there crossing the Sound. Then it dawned upon me the Salish Sea appeared so bereft of boats because of the threat of tsunamis from earlier in the morning. Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai, a submarine volcanic mountain in the South Pacific, had exploded in spectacular and deadly fashion. Tsunamis shot across the Pacific in all directions, battering other islands including Hawaii, Fiji, and New Zealand. These walls of water reached from Japan and Australia to the entire western coasts of the Americas all the way from Alaska to Chile. I wondered if any waves crashed up on Kamchatka in the Russian Far East.
In the Vast
Ahhh, yet another dreadful yet mesmerizing apocalypse. Fell into a funk as I considered the current state of voting rights in my country, the creeping and creepy push towards an American dictatorship, the clamor over civil war, multiple pandemics and not just COVID, the economy, asteroids, comets, Earth slowing down and cooling off, the paralytic crises in governments, the weather, the climate, murders and robberies…aye, twas a deep funk. So I opened wide into the mystery, the majesty, and the terror of it all.
We smiled at a gathering of maybe a dozen or so friends gathered around a picnic table. A mix of genders and ethnic groups all sharing the youthfulness of being young adults. We remarked on the number of solo walkers & couples out in the park being either middle-aged or elderly. We both used to have lots of friends in our youth, too, and now the ones still alive are scattered around the world. One lays dying in hospice in another state. Cancer. Damn cancer.
Soaking in the calm just beyond the storms at Richmond Beach Saltwater Park, City of Shoreline north of Seattle, MLK Day January 2022.
I stop and tell Faithlyn directly how gratitude I feel being together with her. Her choosing me. Her letting me choose her. Yes, I value solitude, yes, I do, and I am also glad to have one to share my life with on a daily basis. Not just the friendship, not merely the sex or only the love or the power of shared finances, but companionship itself.
And damn cancer. Such clustermucks of cellular terror took her mother, both of my parents, affected three of my grandparents, and killed one of them. It’s also scourged other family members, friends, coworkers, and even my own skin. Took my sweetie’s Mama, too, back when Faithlyn was but a teenager.
Sure, am able to distinguish between moods, the pessimism expressed by so many people, the desperate happyfaking to make it, the doom and gloom in the media, the distraction of binge watching movies and shows streaming across the Internet only to learn passively watching more than 3.5 hours of TV a day greatly increases the possibility of dementia. And I’m terrified of dementia.
Faithlyn, however, warns me against going around “borrowing trouble,” as she calls worrying over things one has little or no power to change. Borrowing trouble is in my nature, however, and so is causing trouble. I don’t feel depressed, tho. Not lost in rumination, no, but I am contemplating and analyzing current events from my background in world history and geopolitics. The skies, the water, the movement of the sun, the way people move along the paths of the park, well, I can feel the patterns. Listening to the roll of memories of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his growing recognition of the relationship of war and empire to racism and civil rights and of all of those things to democracy, the economy, and the finances of buying a hamburger where even the storefront’s a racist, capitalist racket.
Rise up! Take a stand!
Aye, even so can’t help but borrow trouble.
Because I feel a dread coming on. Beyond the Tonga volcano and tsunamis, beyond the five asteroids whizzing by Earth this month, beyond worldwide climate change, beyond the threats of civil war and dictatorship. I sense extinction.
I have felt the looming apocalypse since I was a child. What a terrible thing to gift a child with, too, the ability to simply know and comprehend those truly big pictures trembling across the universe.
The ultimate disaster was one we humans would or may do to ourselves. A final world war. With nuclear weapons. And possibly chemical and biological weapons. With the global collapse of commerce and infrastructure including power grids. The survivors will face anarchistic civil wars for survival. Global climate disruption will worsen. Famine. Pandemics. Economic dissipation. Martin Luther King, Jr., would remind us to keep moving forward even if all we can do is crawl. MLK would remind us it’s not about ourselves but to serve others and help each other out.
The clocks, however, are all ticking. Tickety tock and tockety tick. Right up under midnight, a midnight of high noons. See, I’ve felt this dread coming on since I was a child, Mama.
In the Vast of Earth
William Dudley Bass
Monday 17 January 2022
Wednesday 19 January 2022
Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Notes on fotos & videos: Images of MLK, Jr., are free from various public commons. The images from the city park were taken by me and are copyrighted.
Copyright © 2022 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.