“Joe Biden has announced new steps to ban oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and limit onshore drilling in Alaska, as his administration reportedly prepares to approve a huge new oilfield in the state.”
The Guardian, Mon 13 Mar 2023.
It started with an intent to share a poem for anyone who writes, but hasn’t lately. Anyone who was also in the orbit of the strange place where events are so profound, so insistent that, as we drop bruisingly from one to the next, it is difficult to know what to say exactly that would offer more meaning and less noise. Conflicts rumble, people watch the skies anxiously as their lands dry out, we talk with friends that seem lost, unable to lend any solace, anything more than an ear really.
Yet at the back of your mind is the constantly nagging thought that everything keeps moving. The climate worsens, we talk of tipping points and managed retreat, yet the most clear headed action - to stop hauling the oil out of the ground and burning it - is the one that is skirted around the most. Largely this seems to be around electoral cycles. The powerful whisper in the ears of the decision-makers and so, dead-eyed, we instead feed investment in our futures into the slot machine that emptily promises short-term economic growth.
As has been pointed out, legislating for protected reserves at the same time as legislating for new extraction is a much worse version of the similar idea that offsetting carbon emissions through the carbon sequestration effects of newly planted trees offers a path to redemption. The timescales of the two are entirely different, the resulting gap pushes us further in entirely the wrong direction.
The main event is not that a spy balloon has been shot down. I mean that’s what is in the news but such sabre-rattling is not new. The twin climate sins of omission and commission never seem to make the front pages - usually they are the white space around what does get reported (I don’t claim that New Zealand is immune from this - it’s not).
So it’s easy to be cynically unsurprised by the headline at the start. The antidote to that is this - look out the window. The kōtare (kingfisher) is back. I know little of where he goes in winter but he is late this year. I don’t blame him. He normally arrives in our garden in late Spring, sometimes with a mate. This year he is as meteorologically confounded as we are. We have no fish here for him but he darts away as quick as the eye and returns to the branch with a cicada in his beak. His arrival reminds me of that poem by David Whyte that finishes “All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”
I’ll share the other poem in case you were stuck, like me, with speaking up. Both because everything is still ahead, waiting, and because it is way past time to start.
An Introduction to Some Poems
By William Stafford
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
I found another quote on writing, from the late novelist E.L.Doctorow: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Which, for better or worse, is pretty much how I ended up writing the above from a state of stasis. Thanks for reading and keep safe!