All too often, whether child or adult most everyone gains something by being thrown into a role that is barely suitable for who they are; it often devolves into a tale of misery, or at least tedium, lasting for a while. In the abstract, it's 'getting out of your comfort zone.' One of my oldest friends down in St. Paul signed me up for a chant leader, even though I had already said I would come to yesterday's Tar Sands Resistance March, since public events, especially ones this relevant to health and well-being here on earth, are best enjoyed when two together can double the pleasure. I came unpracticed, had never used a bull horn, and felt my level of resistance to the task of leading chants mounting since I at any age I've backed down from becoming anything like a cheerleader. Moreover, eighteen years ago a long, severe bronchitis seems to have thinned out what yelling voice I have, the same kind of thing having happened to my mom in midlife, causing a huskiness in her voice forever afterward. I'd argue that chant-leading is a job for someone intensely motivated by a crowd and once and for all endowed with vocal cords suited for an ancient forum.
Demonstrating is a practiced skill like anything else, I see that now. I could, after all, hold and flip around the little scripts bearing the words of call-and-response while holding the speaker of the bull horn and pressing the button, even if I rebelled against using the exact script--let's have no vagueness or unintended meaning like 'Tar sands oil has got to go!'--because that could be read as 'tar sands oil has got to go down the pipelines to the refineries, it can't be avoided,' etc. I kept grousing to my companion that I can't do this, though I didn't like hearing much of that out of my own mouth--what else for heavens sake had I come to these long-familiar streets to do? Frustration gripped me down our course between police barricades with the sense that I was a terrible slacker, a charade or a dummy marcher with my silent megaphone. My companion, also given a bull horn, muttered his qualms about how un-vocal our whole block of marchers was coming across, though he had no inhibition about his own chanting that lacked all sense of tempo much less tonal clarity. To the entertainment and awe of others around us he evinced all possible raw youthfulness deliverable from a geezer (his own term as he approaches 64 years of age, his boyhood volume and zests intact) along with a dreamful imperative to witness the people united, never defeated. There were times I had to chime in with him only because I saw I could and should. When I did we became a pair with bull horns, other voices to the sides and rear joining ours.
'LOVE WATER, NOT OIL! Love water, not oil!' the chanting proceeded till individually and together we chanters could feel the words going stale. Up the line would be strains of something else. 'LOVE BICYCLES!' he began chanting, and then the response 'not oil!' would come back in a murmur. 'Love bicycles!' I chanted along with him, then changed it: 'LOVE HYBRIDS!' which remained our chant alone, no sharers. I still took pride in my little old 2002 hybrid car, the vintage Prius as we'd sometimes called it; he and I had done maintenance on that car. Some of the much younger marchers around us seemed comforted by having a chant leader but wanted to do chants either known to them or of their own making. We listened to them and then, through our bull horns, amplified at least one of their chants, whether someone had conjured it on the spot or not; 'Hey! Obama! It's hot out here! Hey! Obama! You talked the talk, now walk the walk! No Keystone pipeline!'
As I listened to our disharmony at the outset and strained against my own revulsion at our scriptedness, I thought: we need rehearsals and orchestration...this needs to be carried off by people who have a feel for performance, better organized so the effect is maximum and elegant for all to hear and see... But this is for heavens' sake a people's march, I am missing the beat and everything. It's for anyone and right now. Anyone can do better than I'm doing including me.
What if though, in a state like Minnesota, rich in big choirs thanks to the German-Scandinavian heritage which gives rise to such music, there were an endowment for a street procession, costumed and sung in harmonic parts, miked to ultimate glory, danced and be-sloganed with upheld signs and the most evocative of T-shirt art on the torsos of huge opera singers trained to the limberness of dancers as they capered to the capitol or city hall--in towns all over the state, into neighboring states and provinces? What if? This could be done; we don't lack for theatrical people and composers who could collaborate for the cause of a climate that keeps us as beautifully as ever...
We were doing the best that we could, getting better as we went. Demonstrations are normally ad-libbed a lot, the training and preparation led by brave souls like Patti, whoever she was and wherever she had gone, and others of mixed generations, unflappable-seeming people with dedication worthy of as much reward, I felt, as a city engineer's. Demonstrating at its best is an attempt to shout (or sing) out a vision of something that will inevitably develop as it goes, according to the inspiration that hits the different personalities caught up in it.
I inferred that demonstrations can become a habit, or avocation, in which a person's own style gains a value that should not be overlooked in the planning stages: don't let anyone else sign you up for a role best expressed through someone else's unique energy. Know what your own is and go in prepared. Somewhere--I remember where now--I had written myself a note for a sign I could draw up that reads from my own heart and soul--I just didn't prioritize it soon enough to get the durable materials and put them, two-sided, on a flat wooden stake so I could hold it up for everyone far and wide to see.
Then I could have marched, even carrying my own megaphone if I wanted to invest in one, and been
whoever it was most natural for me to become in a march. But there will be future marches. As more than one of the spokespeople on the state capitol steps yesterday said: we have a lot of work to do.
The photo above was of a sign I spied at Lambert's Landing beside the Mississippi River, the gathering point for the march before it got moving, where we all felt about as disorganized and miscast as we were probably going to feel. I wished then that I'd had a sign like this lady's, since hers expressed the out-and-out danger facing us if we do not face down, undercut and replace or reorganize the corporate interests whose main interest appears to be doing whatever they deem most profitable, no matter what the most basic science shows will happen to our one and only planet and our offspring.
It would be useless in a way, then or now, to add to the list of further threats that we can't escape as a result of our overpopulation: soil depletion, mineral depletion affecting all industry and urban expansion, water depletion, the increasing strife among the desperate. The idea that nothing grows without limit besides a cancer is too grim for politicians and business modelers to include in their public statements. We are each of us coming from where we're coming from. The focus of the day, of the decade and coming ones, is climate change.
I took up global warming or climate change as a personal threat even at ten years of age or so, on first hearing of it on a TV program, probably a National Geographic special, somewhere at the beginning of the 1970s. Because I have always loved winter and chilly windblown landscapes where snows are abundant and welcome and so are all the wild animals, I was affronted even then that we all, collectively, could inflict fever on this earth, even leading to the death of all life from that fever. Now that I'm past fifty years of age and able to live year-round in what's left of the boreal region with its tamarack swamps, aurora borealis, long winter nights, porcupines, bear, moose and the apex predator the wolf, I'm doing as much art as I can dedicate to this realm,
Freshet from a Ghost-Marsh - original watercolor/mixed media painting about 18 x 32"
even though my watercolor/mixed media landscapes have been slow to sell. They are gloomy I suppose, to a lot of art buyers, barely if at all familiar and symbolic of the cold and unwelcome, the dank and the repressed. But for a lot of art pieces, the right buyer has to come along.
The work above suggests the real landscape's dissolution by melt; an icy lakelet is offset by the river in the rapids of early ice-out, a flock of red-throated loons--which nest on Arctic shorelines--washing their way into the foreground. A sole wolf looks over his shoulder back beyond upheaved root systems, snags and stumps that characteristically trigger, in the imagination, the vision of a beast or carcass, or a defunct cannon or other manufactured throwaway. From the shoreline a waterlogged lean-to exposes its flooded-out interior with an old coat billowing forth on the rivulet that has blasted out two walls.
This semi-forbidding community of plants and fish, birds and bugs all adapted to summers' long light and winters' long dark, undergirded by rock and habituated to watery seepage, is one of many kinds of places that will succumb, at least at the latitudes where we see it now, to a hotter climate worldwide.
Being out on that land normally quickens me, the way a weekend outing does when we feel its brevity before the long work week. What shy thing might I see through there that I've never seen before? But in my soul these familiar ragged horizons will live as long as I do, even if I'm denied a lifelong view of them.
This is not true for many of the native inhabitants, certainly not for the Ojibwe and the Hidatsa, within Minnesota and to the north and west into Alberta, or assorted people whose lives, as they say, are the land that would be crossed by and fouled by the inevitable leaks in multiple oil and gas pipelines. The First Nations' spoken language, their names when uttered, convey a kind of foreign lyricism to my Euro-American ears; their language sings a bit of other ages, a lost adaptiveness and intuition and built-in rhythms that took direction from earthly behaviors, those of animals and wind and water currents, that I know on my terms but probably not in that wholeness that unifies everything that ever mattered since creation.
Somehow, in ways all put together, there will need to be ongoing resistance, changes in profit base, changes in the whole economy, our diets, our modes of transit--everything we do--if we are to keep the generations of humanity alive within the land that bore our ancestors. Yesterday was one of the rare few days when I and a lot of people of so many, many different origins who convened in St. Paul could feel a sense of collective will toward making the best of the coming crisis, whatever it will look like. If you enjoy lessons out of aboriginal legend, one I have been told of says if you see a hawk or an eagle it means you are on the right path. As everyone yesterday sat hearing the speakers on the capitol lawn, a red-tailed hawk dipped over us in spirals, then coasted away, and back. I then thought I saw it tuck itself into one of the slots on the far edge of the capitol dome, making do with the altered natural environment much like so many wild creatures in this new, Anthropocene era. All the creatures cope, sometimes in noticeable ways, much as we'll keep seeing it's time that we do.
