Movin' on with Nellie: January, the break-up and put-back month

The white light streams through the blue planet’s

atmosphere on a mission to melt the snow packed and icy

trails around here, and with the help of hardy

house finches and speckled sparrows, my

mind travels back to a walk in the woods outside

the Turpin Road condo in Anchorage. There I

found sleeping bears of snow clinging to the

fir tree limbs then blowing away in one

thought or another. The walk was in January

or February or some wintery month when family

emotions raced rancid. People say January is the

break-up month because feelings mimic the

climate’s growing iciness. It was one evening

like that when parents prowled through consequences

of distances, dips, and duties.



The white light streams through the ailing planet’s

air on its way to breath what will bring the spring

and new life. Already ranchers and part-time sheep

stewards worry about a goat or sheep due to birth.

The thirty-below temperatures would strike a lamb

before gasping and snuff out a wool-less heart beat.

Still the pull to bring water and feed conquers the human

resolve to stay a while longer by the fire. Somewhere

strategies for the New Year plod past one memory and

then another; frost in the tundra melts even more; ice

from a Greenland glacier drops into the ocean—an

unexpected tragedy of carbon gone amuck. Not unlike

the dire detonator of feelings gone by, the once green

and thriving mother earth has Co2 astronomical flu

where waves push deeper into the coasts, where icy

roads catch fossil-fueled machines and drivers in

a blizzard and southern style oxy-morons, where

science and fact are denounced and ignored.



A cataclysm, the type that fished and squirmed until

species of another time died and changed into crude

oil knocks at our Jungian strings, and for sure our culture of

violence and consumption. Our species no longer honors

our ancestors or the prairie schooners and aborigines traversing

the wilderness; we no longer embrace a loving God’s edict

to take care of the world and all within; instead we honor

plastic, pumps and oil pearls. The cataclysm that wakes

now could turn back the time when the earth was

sparce and human less without the forming

community built from one cell to another.

Still there’s time to turn back the astronomical flu

to open up to streaming lights but close the ozone

rift established by too much carbon in the oceans, in the

permafrost, and in the forests. Carbon is muscling

out the oxygen in favor of its own decay. This January

journey begins with us when we choose to recycle,

bicycle and cycle through choices to promote survival

of the planet, plants and people. Walk along the trail

with the dancing wildlife nibbling at the branches. Strike

an arpeggio melody with the land, air, water and life.