If Sorrow And Beauty Are All Tied

We Are Moving Into A World Of Unaccountable And Secretive Corporations That Manage All Our Communications And Work Hand In Hand With Governments To Make Us Visible To Them. Our Privacy Is Being Strip-mined And Hoarded.

For Millions Of Years, This World Has Been A Great Gift To Nearly Everything Living On It, A Planet Whose Atmosphere, Temperature, Air, Water, Seasons, And Weather Were Precisely Calibrated To Allow Us - The Big Us, Including Forests And Oceans, Species Large And Small - To Flourish.

They Are All Beasts Of Burden In A Sense, ' Thoreau Once Remarked Of Animals, 'made To Carry Some Portion Of Our Thoughts.' Animals Are The Old Language Of The Imagination; One Of The Ten Thousand Tragedies Of Their Disappearance Would Be A Silencing Of This Speech.

When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

Having The Right To Show Up And Speak Are Basic To Survival, To Dignity, And To Liberty.