Visit the recent posts of Orca Watcher on Lolita, A Whale of a Purpose on the Beluga Whales and Creative Freedom Photography on the Giant Panda and you will feel touched, as well, by the dedication and enthusiasm.Progress is created one person at a time, and the collective voice of individuals creates a momentum of awareness that is more powerful than the wind and the ocean combined.
I am reading Natalie Goldberg’s book, Wild Mind, Living the Writer’s Life. I’m reading it for several reasons, one of which is to stay connected to what I learned and felt at Rose Mountain. But I also read it to go deep. It settles my mind from the day, from whatever is bothersome and troubling on the surface, and from whatever seems insurmountable. Not that reading solves any of these problems. I’m borrowing another deep thinking mind for a while to encourage my own. These are the mentors and the teachers we find in good literature.In her chapter, “The Dead Year” which is about hard beginnings, Natalie Goldberg writes:
I often say to myself now when writing is hard, “There is no such thing as failure.” The only failure in writing is when you stop doing it. Then you fail yourself. You affirm your resistance. Don’t do that. Let the outside world scream at you. Create an inner world of determination. When someone complained about getting up at five a.m. for sitting meditation, Katagori Roshi said, “Make positive effort for the good.” I repeat that often to myself when pushing the pen across the page feels like I, alone, have the responsibility to make the earth turn around the sun. Well, it’s true. Each of us does create the world. We’d better get to work.
She is writing about her love, writing. I read about writing and I see and hear everything that matters. I hear whales and orcas, and the gentle pandas, and I hear the whooping crane purring to its young. Despite decades of efforts to save the wild migrating population of whooping cranes that winter on the gulf coast of Texas, they are currently being threatened again by the potential development of key marshlands on their wintering grounds and by a new push for cleaner energy that seeks to erect wind turbines in the migration corridor of the most endangered crane in the world without responsibility to confer with wildlife experts on safe co-existence.
There are so many challenges ahead of us. Enough challenges for every single person to make a contribution. Every one of us “better get to work.”
