Galveston Rising – The Light

Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum.  Confronted by any sudden or unexpected absence she rises, turns and looks about, seeking remedy, overcome by her own irrepressible urges to fill, replenish and restore.

Ironically for coastal dwellers, it’s Nature herself who often empties out their lives by means of great, unpredictable weather systems that arrive complete with names and histories. The storms are spoken of so often and with such familiarity they could be members of the family: Carla. Andrew. Gustav. Hugo. Ivan. Gilbert. Opal. Katrina. Rita.  Some are massive, maintaining their destructive momentum for hundreds of miles. Others are smaller, with more localized effects, but all arrive as harbingers of emptiness, desolation and loss.

Galveston’s most recent losses came courtesy of Ike, a storm apparently determined to consume not only a city but an entire coastline.  In some places, he left great piles of debris – homes, boats and businesses splintered and collapsed, heaped up and tumbled down, a beach-comber’s horror.

Musée des Petroleums Arts

 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:

 

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

 

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure;

 

the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water,

 

and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 The suffering of the oil-laden Gulf of Mexico goes on. Like the suffering of Icarus in W.H. Auden’s insightful Musée des Beaux Arts, it is in some ways a strange suffering, partly accidental, partly brought about by hubris and nearly invisible to the world surrounding it.  But it is suffering, nonetheless, and Brueghel’s depiction of its reality is masterful.

A Personal Message to BP from the Wetlands

 You are responsible .

We are watching.

We are angry.

You and those who have enabled you will be held accountable.

 

Special Thanks to JA Lovell for permitting use of  Plato’s image.  The Brown Pelican, of course, is the State Bird of Louisiana.

I met Plato on Judy’s site, Janthina Images, a collection of exquisite and wide-ranging photography.  Confronted by his stare, my first thought was, “I’d like to send him to Congress and the corporate boardrooms to say what needs to be said.” This post is my way of doing that.

 As Varnish John said, “You start where you can start, and do what you can do.”

 

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Transocean’s Titanic Solution

As a child I rarely spent time on the water, but I knew a thing or two about boats. 

Boats were little. Imaginary boats made of paper or leaves were small enough to skim down rain-filled gutters in the streets. Plastic boats fitted nicely into bathtubs or backyard wading pools. Even real boats were small. Fabricated from metal or wood, they plied their way up and down the Raccoon River or across the vast expanse of Red Rock Lake in tiny, buzzing swarms. You could fish from a boat, or go water skiing, but sometimes you just filled it with people and drove it around, like a family taking a Sunday outing in the car.

Voices and Visions

 

Truly good advice rarely comes accompanied by trumpets and tympani. It doesn’t light up the sky with neon colors, or advertise itself like a hot new product with a crack marketing team.  Truly good advice – words of wisdom, if you will – is simply spoken.  It doesn’t need to be remembered because it’s never forgotten.  It applies in circumstances so far removed from its original context you can’t help but be amazed, and its ability to bear time’s testing is absolute.

One of the best bits of advice I ever received was so simple, and so simply put, I’ve never forgotten it, even when I’ve chosen to ignore it or attempted to reject it outright:

Be careful who you listen to, because their voices will influence your own.

The influence of the voices around us is utterly pervasive and often quite surprising.   When I first moved from Iowa to Texas, the Texans with whom I lived and worked asked “Where you from, girl?  You shore do talk funny!”  After three years,  I returned to Iowa from Texas only to have friends and relatives ask, “Why in the world are you talking that way?”   Phrases like “ya’ll”  (and its plural, “all y’all”) and “fixin’ to” had become a part of my speech simply because I heard them on a daily basis.  That’s the power of voice.

To put it another way, what surrounds us, becomes us.  If we listen to hatred, we are more likely to speak in a hateful way.  If we continually hear cynicism and negativity from those around us, we are more like to become cynical and pessimistic ourselves.  If we listen only to Homer Simpson and Spongebob Squarepants, we’ll speak in one sort of voice.  If we listen only to Shakespeare, we’ll speak in another.  The point is not that we should choose one voice over another – Homer Simpson and Shakespeare both have a place in my world – but we need to be attentive to and aware of the quality of the voices around us.  We have the ability to choose which voices we attend to and cherish, and we need to make those choices in order to nurture and protect our own true voice.