For over a week, I’ve been studying the same image every day and seeing the same thing in new ways.

As in life, the more you see the more you see there is to see. And the more you know the more you realize you do not know.

The above image forms a writing prompt that I’ve returned to day and again.

The first days were pleasant postcard stops:

Redwoods

If I touch the tree

that touches sky

that touches god,

does that place

sky & tree & god

in me?

_____

And then I looked closer and saw a forest on fire, a world of rot. The poems got dark and worried:

See America —

In its glory

In its gore

In stars & stripes & rally calls

In parched earth and oven heat

In hurricane wind and drowning cities

See America arrested beaten deported

In orchards and farms in fear

In high prices and homeless living

See America in denial despair

undecided immobile on fire

See fever See futility See me

Stop. See how the redwood stretches

to reach an endless sky. Can we, though small —

stand tall with this conviction?

_____

Because every day is a new crisis, the latest poem came unbidden but not unexpected. Chaos is calculated. But voices are rising. Even our local weather reporter is chiming in:

“We are seriously like the frog in the pot of warming water here. Kinda like we are in this nation — the water just gets hotter and hotter,” writes Temira Amelia Lital.

“First we have masked goons refusing to show identification and picking up people (documented and not) off the streets and at the borders and locking them up. Next we have unarmed military in the streets. Next we have armed military in the streets.”

“You might not be noticing this because it's happening bit by bit and isn’t happening to YOU specifically. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. We do not have military in the streets in this country. You should be concerned, whatever political affiliation you hold.”

_____

As the pot boils, political leaders are speaking out:

“I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country,” said Illinois Governor JB Pritzker this week in response to news that Donald Trump is planning to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago, just as he has in Los Angeles and Washington D.C.

“If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

“This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

_____

Writers (even quiet poets) are urging action:

“Writing is resistance,” says Kate Gray, a novelist/poet.

“Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to write and to resist the silencing, lies, denial, and destruction. We need the voices of love, joy, memory, the voiceless . . . We must write a new world.”

_____

What to do? What to do? I feel the futility.

But awareness is action, and we can read, learn, listen, act.

Start here:

Letters from an American: Heather Cox Richardson
Through daily letters, an historian provides thorough insight of the past that shapes and forms the political present.

Five Things You Can Do: Robert Reich
A professor, writer, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor provides political overviews and practical actions.

The Christian Left: Faith & Social Justice
Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these,
you did not do for me.