You Reckon?

"Take death for a walk in your minds, folks." This is the sage advice of Peter Schjeldahl, in an extraordinary piece in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine. Facing lung cancer, Schjeldahl means for his advice to be taken personally, but, as we both enter and emerge from the darkness of the year - and, perhaps, of the future, now might be a good time to go for a stroll with death on a planetary scale. If, in fact, we are headed for extinction in our lifetimes, how would it unfold? Will the moment of extinction come when there simply isn't enough food or water or oxygen? Will we look at the once-living ocean as we gasp for breath? Though I frequently worry about climate collapse and extinction, I've only lately begun trying to actually imagine it (and worrying that the very act of imagination will add momentum to its reality).

Gazing out over the ocean full of plastic, I remember that this past summer and fall there were no whales to be seen when normally they are plentiful. Are they elsewhere, or are they gone? Whales' enormous poops, deep dives and long migrations stir the nutrients that make the phytoplankton that contribute 50% of the oxygen on earth. According to a study reported in Bloomberg news, "Increasing phytoplankton productivity by just 1% would have the same effect as the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees." We'd better get busy planting whales, I guess.

Or will it be the Amazon, at a tipping point, as Bolsonaro rants about homosexuals and Trump fires up the coal plants? And what of us, in this most polluting country of ours? I wait for one of our presidential candidates to offer a narrative of a viable future, even as this election, too, is already being stolen. And I stare at my blue plastic recycling bin, dutifully adding another wrapper or bottle, even though only 9% actually gets recycled.

I wonder again, and every day, What will turn the tide? Beyond that overflowing blue bin, and talking to the Wild, beyond planting trees and leaving an egg for the fox, what is it, exactly, that might conjure a global awakening of the human heart that will shift us from Me to WE, on the scale required?

It's been exactly one week since I dreamed that I'm in a play and the performance is about to begin. But I haven't learned my lines, haven't even seen the script. At the last moment, someone hands me a tattered copy of the play - pages missing, words crowded together, hand-written notes scribbled everywhere, obscuring the text. It's almost illegible, but in a moment, I've got to walk out onto the stage and, since I don't know my lines, I will have to read my part. A woman in the audience shouts, "And where are you from?" In the dream, I think, "If I wake up now, I won't have to face this."

"Take death for a walk," is a line that, once heard in the mind, cannot and perhaps should not be unheard. And I wonder, if I befriend Death, will he leave us alone long enough for us to turn things around? I take Death's arm. He's tall, wearing a top hat and tails. Dignified. Reserved. Together we walk onstage. This is it, folks. Showtime.