by Diane Joy Schmidt

“Upon Waking” Gallup Independent Spiritual Perspectives, 4.13.19 and New Mexico Jewish Link, Summer, 2019 . Winner, First Place, Personal Columns, Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies 2020.

I had a series of dreams. One night I dreamt that a bull calf came to the east door, and I brought him inside because he was lost. I kept him in my bedroom until his owners came along for him. The next night I dreamed I was excavating a stream bed and found drawings of images of fishes, groups of  two and three repeated, then I heard a musical flute that was playing and the musical notes repeated in twos and threes, the music illuminating the meaning of these strange ideograms.

The greater meanings of these dreams elude me. They are mysterious. They left me with a sense of both wondering and wonderment. They awaken a sense of inquiry, of questioning. There is a feeling of watching shadows and lights on moving water. But turn up the contrast too much in that picture, and the life, the air, the atmosphere vanishes.

This makes me think about how I feel when I listen to a certain leader. The problem with this certain leader is that he says he has all the answers. There are no shadings, no gradations of meaning, everything is black and white, everything is in high relief, high contrast, and he outshouts everyone else, he takes the air out of the room. 

He revises history, retelling it to suit only himself without concern for anyone else’s story. To tell a story, a history, only to suit yourself is to ignore the fact that the story is not made by you alone. And the people who put him in power are perfectly happy to keep him there because he is making them rich, richer, and oh, so powerful. But what can you do? The best thing seems to be to stick your head in the sand to stop listening to the noise. 

My cousin, Jerome Lawrence, best known for his play Inherit the Wind about the Scopes Monkey Trial and teaching evolution, wrote a book for children published in 1940 called Oscar the Ostrich. This is when he was still Jerome Lawrence Schwartz. It was just after Hitler had invaded Poland and the U.S. was remaining isolationist. I didn’t know anything about that as a child, but my mother would read the book to me and I learned it practically by heart. I am reminded of that book today.

Oscar was content to bury his head in the sand and ignore the loud-mouthed ostrich who wanted all the sand dunes. But when the loud-mouthed ostrich took Oscar’s sand dune away, he couldn’t bury his head in it anymore. He finally got mad and joined in the fight. He got the other ostriches to out-yell the loud mouthed ostrich. Things are not so clear today. 

Things have not gotten scary for most of us yet. We think we can keep our heads in the sand. It will only be when climate changes reach our own nests, when we can’t ignore them anymore, only then will we act. But this time around, we cannot afford this luxury, because soon it may be too late. 

The climate is changing, but all is not yet lost. The measure of performance of a system requires a larger view the longer the timeframe. In other words, we like to measure the health of the United States this year by its Gross Domestic Product, the value of its economic activity, and say, ‘look how great we’re doing,’ but a model of constant economic growth is unsustainable. If we ignore the increases in pollution and temperature caused by the use of fossil fuels that generate this economic activity, and the cascading effects, one being a massive die-off of the insects that used to pollinate our fields, another being wars and conflicts due to droughts and coastal flooding, we ignore the fact that we are making our home, where we live, planet Earth, uninhabitable.

Dictators believe that the only way to deal with a restless humanity is with an iron hand. They don’t want to give up anything, they don’t want make things more equitable, so they are frightened. They build walls and crack down on dissension. They turn us against one another to divide us. They ultimately fail and take their countries down with them. 

We need to wake up to our humanity and remember that we are in this all together. If we join together as human beings we can still make the changes that will turn the world away from the tipping point of climate change, beyond which there is no return. The only enemy is us. 

“Upon Waking” Gallup Independent Spiritual Perspectives 4.13.19