I keep waiting for the big shift in collective consciousness.
Year after year I renew my hope for a shift.
You know, sometimes
There is an event that happens on a tectonic scale,
Like the murder of George Floyd,
That shakes us and sends tremors out across the land.
Or it could be the time of year,
Such as Spring Equinox
That sweeps through us
Recharging our signature energy field
Without us even realizing it!
Imagine a year that just skips from February to June,
Then maybe you can appreciate what I'm saying.
I'm talking about some personal and collective game-changer
That moves our collective soul.
I'm talking about watershed moments
That take us by surprise and
Blow us out of our comfort zones!
Or am I? Maybe I need to notch it up.
The pandemic had that potential
To bring us to our knees.
Some of us anyway,
Found ourselves stunned
And down on the ground, on all fours,
And it was for the good,
To find ourselves humbled that way,
Closer to the earth,
Sort of a forced grounding.
A forced awakening,
I'm going for that.
The siege of the Capital!
If you were like me,
You were watching and listening
With incredulity.
As that story developed.
Gobsmacked!
Bucket of cold water in the face.
But over a year later, I'm thinking,
That wasn't it either.
We're just back to the trough,
Happy to eat the same swill.
Move over buddy. That's my swill. Eat your own swill.
But, I'm here to tell you
There have been shifts!
The moon-landing, Kennedy and Martin Luther assinations.
Hiroshima . . . But I've written about that.
Gotta keep moving. Look,
This time of year (in between winter Solstice and the Equinox)
Is incredible.
It isn't winter and it isn't spring.
We can learn a lot from this time of year.
If transitioning from Winter to Spring
Could be expressed as an algorithm
It would be a Nobel prize-winning algorithm,
Because there are so many moving parts,
An infinite number of moving parts!
There is a lot that is happening right on the surface,
And has to happen spontaneously, simultaneously
For Spring to "arrive", that is to say, macro-Spring.
But there are countless micro-Springs unfolding
Right now, under cover of 6 inches of snow,
Deep in the woods,
With waterfalls,
In the forest understory,
In the sky, with the weather.
Just yesterday I heard the most melodious bird song:
Piping, no, ringing, deep in the pine woods,
Like little bells, or windchimes,
That I recognized as
Coming from the Blue Jay.
It is his Spring Love Song, one of them anyway.
It was so sweet and evocative,
It stopped me in my tracks.
My heart switched on
Like a light switch.
It was off, and with that song, it was on.
It was really like that,
And my heart said - Listen!
And because my heart was switched on
I started noticing all the myriad moving parts of
The Great Movement called Spring.
There was nothing to buy or subscribe to,
Nothing to like or join or endorse or bookmark.
It's just something big that is happening
That happens every year around this time
That seems to automatically include me
Even though I hardly deserve it.
And it isn't like, you see one moving part
You see them all.
It's like, you see one moving part
And you begin to see others, and then others and others
But you can never see all of them!
And this kind of shift in Nature
Is exactly what I dream of happening with us,
The human race!
But let me back up.
The James Webb telescope was launched December 25, 2021.
So, there is a human example
Of a macro-synchronous tectonic event.
Count down, ignition and it
Slipped out of Earth's atmosphere
Without much fanfare, considering
That it was something of a miracle of technology.
Basically this telescope is nothing less
Than the idealized eye of the human race.
It isn't scanning for wealth or power
And it isn't spying on anyone.
Once it arrives at a still-spot in space
Known as the Lagrange Point,
Where the gravities of the Sun and Earth
Are not playing tug-of-war,
It will open, and maybe blink a few times,
And then it will gaze so far back in time
That it will see what the universe looked like
Before Earth was created!
I would call that a tectonic event, wouldn't you?
Kind of like a cleaning of the slate.
But, that's not where I am going with this.
The thing is, for the James Webb to fully function
As this golden eye of humanity
As I just described, it has to emerge from its cocoon
And spread its solar shields,
Unfold its golden
Hexagonally segmented mirror . . .
But it's not that simple.
What I have been describing as a metamorphosis
Is really a "high-tension process
Involving some 178 release mechanisms,
Each of which must operate flawlessly
for the telescope to complete
its 40 or so major deployments."*
That's those moving parts.
And those are just the macro-moving parts.
Behind the scenes, well,
Let's just say
The checklist of things that had to happen
That people made happen,
Programmers,
Machinists and technicians,
Designers and yes, visionaries made happen,
Is fractal.
Can I say that?
Because, for something so complex to come out right,
Every small step leading to the outcome
Had to contain
Essential elements of the whole.
So,
Can we see this as a dry run
For what we have to do
If we are going to survive ourselves
And save the planet?
We have to start serving a collective vision
Of what we want to manifest.
On the one hand,
We have the John Webb telescope
To model what this might look like
When we are all on the same page;
Not the launch of another telescope but
Another kind of eye
That we train on ourselves
So we can watch ourselves metamorphose
Into something powerful and beautiful
And worthy of the genius behind all our moving parts!
And, on the other hand,
We have this time of year,
This ineluctable tectonic shift
From winter to spring
Announced by the love song of the Jay
To show us how to shift
Out of the winter of our decline
Into our, if you will allow me,
Miraculous
Tectonic renewal.
And you know what?
We can do this.
.............
This is a prose poem. I could have refrained from breaking up the lines and set it up like this:
I keep waiting for the big shift in collective consciousness. Year after year I renew my hope for a shift. You know, sometimes there is an event that happens on a tectonic scale, like the murder of George Floyd, that shakes us and sends tremors out across the land.
But then the units of the reflection are paragraphs. When we are reading prose, our brains process differently than they do with poetry, any poetry. With prose (most prose), we must prepare to process grammatically, with a subject, object and verb and other predictable elements elucidating a point, exploring a topic that is introduced in the opening paragraph. Prose compresses the narrative as it goes. It follows the author's train of thought. Reading prose, the brain is like the big compactor at the recycling center. With prose the brain takes in whatever the author brings up and synthesizes, that is condenses and absorbs the content in a linear fashion. Good prose will provide everything the reader needs to press forward. In poetry the lines are the units, and, if the lines are organized in stanzas, then lines and stanzas. But stanzas are not like paragraphs. The grammar of poetry is the grammar of metaphor. Metaphors can be simple or complex or subtle, and may just be experienced as a shift in the reader's relationship to the subject. The reader might find themselves identifying with the subject. In other words the poem may become so personal that the whole poem becomes a metaphor for something undefinable that the reader experiences and passes through. Metaphors are not what we learned in school and poetry is the art of communicating through metaphor. So, when I call a piece of writing a prose poem, I am notifying the reader that they best approach the piece prosaically and poetically. I will provide the reader with what they need to be able to condense and press forward but they must also be open to subjectifying the language, letting themselves experience something and be moved obliquely or subtly by conventional or obscure metaphorical devices.
*https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-nail-biting-journey-of-nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-is-about-to-begin/
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