What are some ways that the quality of the environment directly impacts our lives?
Seeking silence in a noisy world by Adam Ford
Silencing of the heart
The life of nature
is not found in parts
however beautiful,
but in the whole.
Light, air and space,
the meaning is in the being
or life that is
evoked,
ineffable
in itself
howering between things...
Desperation unfolds
like a luminous dream.
How can we imagine
what our lives should be
without natural world
broken in parts
and such,
damaged as a whole.
In Beijing
they want
the skies
to be blue and clear again.
In Fukishima
they want
the cascade
of radioactive failures to end.
In the Torres Straits
they want
the threat of High King tides
breaking down
the old sea walls
to be dealt with
by more
than fresh concrete.
Our careless actions
shattering
the still wholeness
of a harmonious world.
How can we imagine
what our lives should be
without the illumination
of the lives of others?
The quiet,
seemingly unremarkable lives
of our forebearers
reminds us
that with privilege
comes
the untanticipated power
to change our own lives.
How we can think
far more freely
about love and family
and our place in nature
our death in it.
They call us to converse and to act,
for the sake of a better life
and a better world.
Dream encounters
on a brief stroll
through my past
take me back
to my Grandmother's door,
in the Eastern Europe
to her wooden cottage
surrounded by a lovely garden
on a small piece of land
she inherited from her parents,
surrounded by thousands
of tiny pheasants dwellings
in the Carpathian hills.
We walk carefully
through fresh green vineyard
her Grandfather's
property and pride
and she talked
about World War I
trench was
where we stand,
detonations,
carbonised bodies,
sweat and pain.
My Grandomother
was just a child
they lived through it
by taking care
of their land.
Digging nice and round potatoes
on a field nearby
she points at the underground cellar
hidden
under a pile of rocks.
There she spent the years
of World War II
with her children,
my mother was just two...
lonely life,
scarred of guns and soldiers
always in darkness
and hungry too.
"Just few memories remind us
this land is who we are
and why we are still here."
Then communists came
with a new highway
and a big dam.
My Grandmother's willage
with many, many others
disappeared under water,
never to be seen again.
Thousands of people
without home
land all around
empty
dead
left for erosion
to finish the job.
Ecological disaster
followed
floods,
water logging,
downstream riverbanks
silting up,
salinity
and spread of diseases...
"This is progress," the communist official welcomed us,
when we and others cramped into one hastily built flat
in the middle of the mud.
My Grandmother never settled down.
She used to shuffle along the dusty roadside
looking for land she lived for and love,
"It feels wrong,'
she kept repeating,
until she lost her mind.
I sat inside our tiny flat
the day after she died
and said to myself:
"Maybe she has not moved out
of our flat and our lives,
but moved further in,
into the lives of those,
like me,
who benefited so much from her selfless giving
and never ending compassion."
When I left my homeland,
when I lost my home,
when my parents died,
when I left my family behind,
when I got sick,
when I lost my job...
I always said to myself:
"Keep moving,
who knows what lies ahead of you,
live without borders,
try neither to harm,
nor destroy
what keeps you alive,
what brings you joy,
your Grandmother is at your side,
cheering you all the way..."
