My October journal brims with sleepless anxiety that mingles with the word “vote” in a myriad of ways. My scrawling handwriting threads, too, with the gifts of melt-in-your-mouth razor clams my friends dug on a beach where sunset clouds reflected in the incoming tide. At home, we gleaned the fields of Rainshadow Organics Farm with families reveling in the freshly dug carrot, the softball-sized onion, and multi-colored corn.
From a coastal journey, I was struck more than ever by autumnal migrations –of Chinook salmon returning up the North Umpqua River and Varied Thrushes flocking over Crater Lake.
Tuesday, November 3rd, is almost here. Let us not be afraid. Let us act for every beautiful species on this planet still left, even as the forces of destruction, power, and greed barrel forward.
Let us take heart from people like my friend Jamie who drove (in an electric car) from the Oregon coast to Helena, Montana, to knock doors with his brother in single-digit temperatures for the good and honorable Governor Steve Bullock, who’s race for the U.S. Senate is critical.
I took heart on Saturday, October 17th, when my friend Sandra and I trekked south on the Oregon Coast, the day when hundreds of people gathered for the Women’s March in Newport and lined the streets of Yachats with signs of Black Lives Matter, of Kindness, of Science, of Love, of Biden-Harris, and RBG.
On that day, I jumped out of the truck in Newport to mail my bundle of handwritten letters to swing voters in Florida and Arizona–each one an offering of why I’m voting, each one a story of the time I wrote that letter, from the choking wildfire smoke of September to the wonder of carbon-storing ancient forests.
Inside the post office, two women in front of me carried bags of their Sierra Club letters, and I knew this was no accident. I’m part of an intricate and immense web–1.25 million of us that day mailed our letters from every state. If not for social distancing, I might have hugged them both. Instead, my eyes brimmed with tears and I could feel smiles beneath our masks.
My acts are small compared to those who are knocking many doors, making hours and days of phone calls, writing letters and texts, and urging people to vote in this most important election of our lives. We are lucky in Oregon with our vote by mail system and ballot drop boxes that are close to home. A few days ago, I slipped my filled out and signed ballot into an official drop box in Bend and felt this rush of relief…done! I’m in awe of the people who are standing in lines for hours to vote early –in rain, wind, storm, and heat. Thank you.
I’ll close with a few anxious and hopeful offerings from my October journal, where I continue the practice of writing the date, a recollection, an aphorism, and a poem attempt (thank you poet Kim Stafford).
Tilting toward Hope
Dipper dance
Salmon spawn
Crane calls at dusk
Varied thrush casting
Molten sunlit feathers
Over Crater Lake
Bouquets of
Gray-crowned Rosy Finches
Snap off seeds
Of currant bush
Rooted and overhanging
This precipice
Of dizzying desire
As October tilts
Toward November 3rd
What Would St. Francis of Assisi Do?
Huddled indoors
Sheltering from
The stinging cold
This Arctic blast
An echo
Of what once was
Before we guzzled oil
Before sea rise
Polar ice cap melt
How long
Can we protect ourselves
From the elements?
Isolate and hide
Ignore and pretend
Keep our comforts
Enough of complicity
Enough of taking
Taking and taking
Open the door
Walk barefoot
On the ice—still here
Feed the morning quail
Be St. Francis
Arms raised, birds landing
Awaken and rise
Time to…
VOTE
Note: This morning as I shared my concept for this Blog with Wes before he headed off to teach school (online), he shared an apropos quote from the book he is reading, Cubed, The Puzzle of us All:
“This persistent and recurring state of anxiety is a fresh opportunity to ask totally new and different questions, broader and more challenging ones.”
Ernö Rubik
Yes. Rubik the master puzzler has a point. Let our anxiety lead us out of conformity and when we win, let us remember, our activism is just beginning.
“Dream only large dreams”–Brock Evans
Thank You for all you do. My sister has been disabled for many years and mostly home bound but she sends out e mail and post cards etc. many featuring some of the birds I have photographed so I go along for the ride 🙂 We voted absentee a while back and checked and the ballots were in and accepted.
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Amen Sister. Thank you. Yes to all of it.
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Thanks for sending the letters to voters. A great idea! I’ve always had a thing for varied thrushes. Love their haunting song.
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So well-said, and SO beautifully written! Thank YOU, Marina, not only for doing these so-important things in these difficult times– but also for describing what it’s all about so perfectly and wonderfully
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Marina, I am heartened by your dedication to getting the vote out and by the sharing of your journal and your dandy poems.
Another thing that bolstered my heart today was Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-31-2020
Hugs and many thanks. xoAnnis
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Thank you! I just read Heather’s post and took heart–and your poems are the winds that hold us up and give us the strength to face the headwinds. Just reading Greta Thunberg quotes and feeling so much in awe–let us answer her in this election! “It is still not too late to act. It will take a far-reaching vision, it will take courage, it will take fierce, fierce determination to act now, to lay the foundations where we may not know all the details about how to shape the ceiling. In other words, it will take cathedral thinking. I ask you to please wake up and make changes required possible.”
Read more at: https://yourstory.com/herstory/2019/09/motivational-quotes-climate-activist-greta-thunberg
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