Hunker Down

It’s time to hunker down says David Suzuki

Gather with community, learn to grow food, find out what your neighbours need

Do the thing the women have been doing for millennia

While our leaders buy pipelines and weapons and turn a blind eye to genocide

At home and afar

Watching Game of Thrones on our phones

Heads down, shoulders curved, necks aching

The reel reminds us to go outside and smell the flowers

The homestead, the goat farm, the eco-commune is back

But its different this time - a bit less of sharing everything

Those hippies had some good ideas but this time I’d get my own kettle

And toilets that flush

And order takeout once a month

Hunker down

The guy with the legacy of reminding us that the earth matters somehow

That science mattered

That learning about how bees find nectar would be enough for us to think differently about pesticides

To care less about the bottom line

To care more about the earth and each other

Or was that Joanna Macy?

Who taught us that it was important to feel it all

To be grieving the loss of the habitat, the species, the wild spaces

These voices that remind us of who we are

Who we might be

An animal with a brain so big we need a fourth trimester

A quad-mester?

Those 12 weeks when we ask women to lose the baby weight

The fat that feeds the next generation

Tell me about your despair

From that Wild Geese poem that someone finds for the first time on a social media feed

Stay Together, Learn the flowers, Go light

Gary Snyder - the poet laureate of Deep Ecology turned 95 this year

Hunker Down

Why are you there asks a friend? On socials?

I find new poets I’ve never heard of

What algorithm are you tracking?

Don’t worry it’s also filled with people telling me I need to be better, do better, eat better, sleep better and move better.

Another hellscape

It reminds me of the genocide - so there’s that

Will we ever be enough?

Be careful or you’ll be too much says Lena Dunham in her new show that isn’t anything like Girls

I’m watching it hoping it will be her again in her 20’s when she showed us her soft body

As if it was enough

That her dry wit, dark humour and her brain were enough.

And that Marnie was the skinny embarrassing one.

I go to sleep writing a screenplay for my grandchildren

I dream of a deep dark pit of compost

I’m lying on my back in a giant hole I’ve dug in my yard

Trying desperately to make the soil work again

Layer upon layer

Lasagna gardening

These stories that we follow

These tips and tricks and 30 day plans

To grow food and to make peace with this life

These characters in real life and on TV

These days of our lives