'there will be dying, there will be dying'

i nearly forgot today is the winter solstice.  the shortest day of the year & the official start of winter.  i nearly forgot for the days continue in their turning & i am a hostage to time.  the poet said, 'my life is made of the world; i will do what i can.'  so it goes on.

& but yet, today was a good day.  we did our weekly chores.  i am in the habit of listening to podcasts as i help clean the house, do laundry, tend to the garden & do the other things that are necessary for living in this moment of time.  my most favorite podcast is Startalk hosted by astrophysicist neil de grasse tyson.  i think tyson is a wonderful science educator & funny man.  but i also started listening to the podcast Hardcore History hosted by dan carlin.  carlin does a deep dive into a topic that comes with many twists & turns.  his shows are epic in length too.  many episodes are multi-hours long.  still, carlin is such a good storyteller that if you give yourself over to the narrative soon those hours melt away into a continuous present.

popular hunger & need for storytelling has revived the radio show.  the radio show becomes the podcast & is distributed via the interwebs & the device most commonly used to listen to podcasts is the smart phone.  that piece of technology has literally & figuratively transformed our world.  i am not telling you something you don't already know.  but what amazes me is despite what seems like a dumbing down of our culture there is also a steady stream of programs like TED Talks via youtube & podcasts, which are often non-fiction docu-style narratives, that feed our hunger for knowledge.  for a few hundred years it was the printed book that helped educate us.  today we have digital media to also help educate us.

the world transforms into something else that we can't trace its designs yet.  it scares us.  fear is what fuels our politics today.  the world is changing but people remain the same.  same desires, needs, wants, & so on are so embedded within our human being that no matter the technological, political & socio-economic changes that are changing our civilization into somethings we don't quite understand yet we remain deeply social creatures that love & hate each other sometimes at the same time.

i am no visionary, prophet, political wonk, or even a cassandra.  i am ordinary: a sentient being.  today, anna & were watching a program about orphans thru out the world.  one of the cities in that documentary was rio de janiero.  the wealth gap between the very wealthy & the rest of the population is the size of the grand canyon.  & yet, in the favelas of rio the working poor is plugged in to digital life via smart phones & other devices.  that is not a judgment at all but an observation i made when watching the three girls who were adopted by their working class grandmother.  all three girls had their own phones.  the homeless tent cities on the streets of rio look like the homeless tent cities of sacramento too.  but as we watched the program i said to anna, brazil is the home of some great poets.  what can poets do but observe, she said.  that's right, i said.  & i thought of the cuban poet omar perez who said, when he was interviewed by an american journalist who asked what is the role of the poet in today's cuba.  have fun, said perez.  have fun & observe & comment on what you are observing.

it is arguable that having fun & observation of our society is the sole role of the poet of the early 21st C.  but it ain't so bad a role.  make more of your own role if you like.  but as i see the world that we are creating i think of this poem by northern irish poet derek mahon, 'everything is going to be alright.'  will it?  i don't know but it is a strength i think to have hope.  as mahon, who is among a great generation of northern irish poets who lived thru The Troubles, said, 'there will be dying, there will be dying/but there is no need to go into that' because, i think, to live in these weird times without hope is a despair without end.