My time of promise,
before mistrust of parents
settled into growing fear
and grief into angry disappointment
Began with a visit
from a GreatHorned Owl
dying on our barbed wire fence
Announcing she would go before
but return for my time
to follow heaven’s departed promise.
But, my father responds,
Only straight humans sing in white evangelical Heaven,
And this planted my seed of doubt
A cosmic point
in bitter anticipation
of further adult atrocities to follow
in imaged flight
From this brief encounter
with natural and spiritual wings
I gradually developed internal witness:
If not ecologically necessary,
then not yet theologically sufficient.
Now,
still breathing,
singing and dancing,
beyond all reasonable health risks
of my own environmental history
in a new barbed millennium,
on the cusp of 2020 EarthJustice
left and right winged co-revision,
Heaven’s great-returned owl
revisits in near nightly dreams
Inviting me, and us,
to set aside anger,
to grab hold of more compassion
ego/eco-therapeutic communion
communication
Inclusion in Heaven’s climatic winning
ecologically wise theologies,
long incubating Rapture–
safe flight home.
I go back,
reversing imaged time
to when I felt
and knew untrammeled internal space
responsive within external
eternally immortal times
of Earth’s regenerative history.
For some,
again less fortunate re-imagining
with some conversing,
comparing rights,
contrasting lefts
hear no such winning exterior ecopolitics
with winning internal empowerment
and self-investment
since emerging from EarthMother’s
redundant DNA nurturing womb.
But, for a few,
a time of awareness
recalls a later conscious memory,
a time of courageous and curiously restoring justice
to those few relationships
showing early signs of uncreative anthro-centric tension.
These, unusually blessed
with resilient confluence,
may not recognize each wisdom-visiting other
and yet search for their potential bodhisattva peers,
returning to these childhood experiences
to remember slowly regrowing what went right
and vulnerably wrong
for restoring peace-filled justice
within and without
ego/eco-empowering tipping points,
wealth of healthy co-redemption
For all wombs,
their plantings and yieldings,
now still searching
through past generations
still incarnate in wombs
birthing future health-seeking regenerations.
gdill52 