Retirement from community development,
facilitating cooperative economic justice
in this post-millennial time of climate crisis,
feels like being put out to pasture
with the rest of us toothless and feckless horses

Stalking senior centers
and gated communities
to weather the fade-out storm
of physical
and mental,
natural
and spiritual encroaching unease
and disease.

This was not my fade away intent
to graze quietly
with quivering and lame
retired race horses;
although worse company
is readily at hand.

I do like pastures,
meadows,
forest and ocean beach trails,
grains and crunchy carrots
and apples.

But, I also like song and dance
and restorative justice more than retributive injustice,
and skilled multicultural mediation
rather than monopolistic invasion,
and economic cooperative win/win public health investment
and politically empowering regeneration
more than competitively disempowering degeneration,
and polypathic compassionate therapies,
and polyphonic healing designs
and listening with healthy young bicamerally balanced
connected
attached
integral
holistic lives of active hope.

It has taken me so long to get here
in this valley of the shadow of climate death,
and I am so grateful for this vulnerable moment
to share all I can compassionately hear
in multicultural mediation pastures,
including senior health-discernment circles,
of course,
but also echoing off granite bold walls
of win/win ego/eco-historic bicameral mountains,
polycultural peaks
cooperatively grateful
for bilaterally resonant river valleys
of ancient wealthiest memory.

Old nags never die.
We just keep gumming
around Earth’s double-binaries,
longing to speak compassionately
as we have learned to curiously hear,
remember
resonate
reweave
regenerate
seasonal pasture space
of all Earth’s pastoral reasoned time.