This is a week in which there are so many possible songs for the week that it is difficult to pick just one. Monday (the 20th) is my wife’s birthday; Tuesday (the 21st) is my friend Annette’s birthday; Wednesday (the 22nd) is the 45th Earth Day; Thursday (the 23rd) is the anniversary of the release of “We Are the World” (which could be someone’s song of the week); Friday (the 24th) is traditionally recognized was the date of the fall of Troy.
With so many choices, I would like to say, “Happy Birthday, Cathy. Happy Birthday, Annette. Happy Earth Day, everyone” Let us stop there.* Earth Day seems important enough to focus on for a few minutes.
The first Earth Day, back in 1970, was, as much as anything, a demonstration. The Baby Boomers had recently recognized that the thousands of people losing their lives and homelands in Southeast Asia were victims of a greedy military-industrial complex, and they had become good at organizing mass protests as a step toward changing what was perceived as a flawed social and economic system.
It was also apparent that the same social and economic system was causing tremendous ecological damage to the entire planet – poisoning the water and the air and destroying many irreplaceable natural resources. Many of the same people who had been protesting the war in Vietnam extended the civil protest model to bring attention to what was an even more serious threat to the lives and homelands of everyone on the planet.
In many ways, the Earth Day movement and consciousness has been successful. Hundreds of thousands came together across the entire United Stares on that first Earth Day. Forty-five years later, more than a billion people throughout the world will be participating in activities designed to improve the environment.
Less than a year after the first Earth Day, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency was established and two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 The percentage of water in the United States that is safe for drinking and swimming has more than doubled and the level of emissions of many major air pollutants has been reduced to less than half of what it was.
On a personal level, most Americans now know the advantages to recycling, reusable shopping bags, fuel efficiency and the “green” lifestyle.
Yes, there have been very clear movement in positive directions since the first Earth Day. However, it is still necessary to recognize that the darned old greedy military-industrial complex is still there.
Few people do that better than Neil Young, who has been socially conscious throughout his career, with songs such as “Ohio,” about students killed by National Guard troops during an anti-war protest at Kent State University; “After the Gold Rush,” with its dream vision of a future environmental disaster; and “Rockin’ in the Free World,” presenting a harsh look at societal problems. His Living with War album was one of the strongest artistic protests of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Young focuses again on both social and environmental issues in this week’s Song of the Week, “Mother Earth.” The video below is a live performance for an “Honour the Treaties” concert meant to bring attention to the plight of some of Canada’s native population. It includes scenes of land where the devastation of the strip mining by the Canadian tar sands industry is eye-opening and appalling.
I am not sure exactly where the aerial scenes were filmed, but I believe it was near Fort McMurry, Alberta. Here is a quote from Neil Young: “The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuels all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.” Al Gore has called these mining sites “an open sewer.”
On the positive side, though, the major oil companies engaged in this mining – like Shell and Sunco and Imperial Oil – do make written materials available for their shareholders in electronic form so that it will not be necessary to kill quite as many trees.**
Mother Earth
By Neil Young
Oh, mother Earth, with your fields of green
Once more laid down by the hungry hand
How long can you give and not receive
And feed this world ruled by greed?
And feed this world ruled by greed?
Oh, ball of fire in the summer sky
Your healing light, your parade of days
Are they betrayed by the men of power
Who hold this world in their changing hands?
They hold the world in their changing hands
Oh, freedom land, can you let this go
Down to the streets where the numbers grow?
Respect mother Earth and her giving ways
Or trade away our children’s days
Or trade away our children’s days
Respect mother Earth and her healing ways
Or trade away our children’s days
(I cannot find copyright information for this song. The lyrics here are slightly different from those in the video.)
__________
* I am not focusing on birthdays here, but if you ever want to read a good brithday poem, try this one by e. e. cummings:
“your birthday comes to tell me this
– each luckiest of lucky days
i’ve loved,shall love,do love you,was
and will be and my birthday is”
__________
** That was intended as sarcasm, if there was any question. And, by the way, the purpose of the Keystone XL Pipeline that has created such political divisiveness in the United States is to take tar sands from sites like that shown in the video in Canada and across the United States. That would be a good incentive to increase the strip mining and devastation in Canada’s boreal forests.
Tick.
You’re there.
Yes, in the heart and bones and the stars. For is it not written, “Old things are passed away: behold, all things are become new.”? Turns out the Cloud of Unknowing between us and the universe next door is just a curtain of old cobwebs…
And so I send a Happy Birthday to Kathy, Annette, Earth, We Are the World, Hector and Achilles, and you, and us, too. It is good to remember that “Wen” is Now, and today is every thing’s birth day:
“’Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew…. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.”
Cheers!
And happy second stage of your anniversary.
Thank you! It is a happy day. Where does the time go? It seems like yesterday! We are going to spend time and waste time and have a good time here today.
This morning our own in-residence Igor brought us our morning cup of tea and greeted us in his inimitable formal style, observing,” Happy AnnivEarthary, Madam and Sir.”
As you know, the Igor lisp is a bit of optional trade craft and all Igors have excellent enunciation when they care to. The absence of the lisp this morning was an expression of his deepest sincerity, the sweet thing.
Today, here, time will not march on. It will amble lazily, hand in hand, ever new, off into the woods and down to the river…
Absolutely right, forms do indeed have a place on the path back to the Garden. For is it not written, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”? (Yes, it is, I’ve got it right here in my backpack…)
There is a benefit to practicing the forms of things, to trying on the uniform to see how it fits, because underneath the style of the day and the flourishes of local tailors there is a basic purpose and a reason for the uniform.
Some locate that essence. Others preen in front of a mirror for awhile and then go on with the flock of their ilk to the next season’s fashion and the next mirror. Substance found doesn’t require the uniform anymore, the wearer sheds it in a final, transformative moult as they consciously connect with the substance, the essence there, of their nature.
If joining a movement, religion, philosophy or political party leads the joiner to an awareness of the essence of what is already joined with them, and has been eternally, then that’s a good thing. There are many, however, who find themselves joined only to appearances and a group which wears the affectations of a particular look, and the fashions there are temporary, local, and dictated by the changing perspectives of an ever-changing few.
Pratchett’s “auditors” are rigid and narrow, analytical, extremely powerful in the sphere of their existence, uniformly gray and monochromatic, bloodless, dispassionate. They are devoid of an understanding of beings who are, as Joni Mitchell observed, “stardust, billion year old carbon,” and they could not fathom the intricacies of the connections there.
When the auditors took on human form they discovered they had unwittingly exposed themselves to human substance, to passion and connection, and it undid them. They built the bodies – the uniforms – they inhabited. They faked it.
They “made it” when the substance of the form was revealed, when they were overcome by it. The auditor and the uniform ceased to exist. The substance undid them. They couldn’t go back to what they had been and so they made it to the heart of life, the substance of the thing, and died to what they had been.
Where they went and what they became is enough for another book. Perhaps they became a traveling troupe of soulful, mathematical gods performing the Music of the Spheres. Not such a long jump in a universe where Old Man Trouble, the Tooth Fairy, and the (Five) Horsemen of the Apocalypse have become personified by human belief, and so inflicted with the annoying manifestations thereof.
In our world it’s the same. When we die to the forms we have taken on, it is because the substance of our existence has welled up out of the form. We are elaborations of carbon, and the devil’s bargain we are caught in is about how we choose to see that.
If we see the form alone then it’s a mindless, impersonal universe which randomly generates the form of the moment, and the best we can do is keep up with the uniform of the day. To see the substance there is to see how intricately and exquisitely we are joined with it, and it with us. When we see that, we’re on our way back to the garden.
You’re right about music, too. It often speaks to the soul, and the truth of things. Yet in a world where most people everywhere hear the sound of marching, charging feet, and where they still think “Sympathy for the Devil” is praise – or at least a capitulation to – the forms thereof; and where “Let it Be” is heard as an affirmation to do nothing rather than a guiding light showing the way to allow humanity to realize what it can do if it only cooperates with the truth of things, I will continue to regard the “progress” of the human collective to date as sad, and the destination of its present vector the same as Pratchett’s auditors. But that’s no big deal.
It will be fun to be transcended into an itinerant god in a troupe of like-minded musicians, performing the Music of the Spheres. It’s what we really aspire to anyway. It’s also the standing invitation extended to every one of us by the universe at large. And as far as I know, there’s no law that says you have to explode into carbon nano-fuzz before you become that. Heck, as far as I know, I think anybody who wants to play in that band can join up right now, and riff on…
All of which, upon reflection on the porch, is the long way of saying, “For is it not written, ‘It’s a long way to go to get where you are?” Eventually we realize the form is the substance. And once the period has been put to that sentence, it’s time to go knock some moss off the roof, and then go for a walk.
Is it not written:
pity this busy monster,manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
–electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born–pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if–listen:there’s a hell
of a good universe next door;let’s go
-e. e. cummings
?
Lenore and I were married on April 22, 1984. That year, Easter and Earth Day fell on the same day. It couldn’t have turned out any other way. It’s who we are.
The classics are good, no matter how deep the needle has worn the groove in the wax. “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell and “Where Do the Children Play” by Cat Stevens haven’t lost a thing after all these years. Neither has “After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young. These are songs from my generation, and every generation has their own. The principle’s the thing, as they say, at least to begin with. Once you’ve got that, the real tale is told when you either go ahead and live where the radial meets the asphalt, or you find your own way.
Joni Mitchell nailed it in “Woodstock.” The attrition rates have been high, because that’s what happens as folks get tired, or comfortable, or resigned. They give in, capitulate, compromise, isolate, sell out and submit to the juggernaut that informs them of the securities and rewards of compliance with the status quo, and the risks of moving outside the lines.
The 60’s movement seeking a higher consciousness of connection to one another and the earth was, in a sense, a return to 1st century Christianity, and within that movement there was even a small contingent of Jesus Freaks who heard the resonances there. But the message wasn’t religious, and the movement wasn’t social.
For a few of us it was personal, and it was spiritual, and it pointed the child of God to the true way. The camp followers and the players and party animals fell away, and all the regimented children wearing the strictly defined garb of “individualists” and “revolutionaries” eventually cast off their costumes and returned to their studies on the way to their assigned cubicle.
It’s always about choice. You either remember you’re a child of God and nature, or you don’t. Karma does the rest. The universe doesn’t care whether humanity works or not. That’s up to us. I personally think the planet is doing it right, and people aren’t, and earth will continue to exist, and people won’t – depending on the sum of our collective choices, which to date hasn’t added up to much.
Woodstock (Joni Mitchell)
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who l am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Is it not written, “There’s a lot goes on we don’t know about, in my opinion”? Back in the ’60s and ’70s there were many outward trappings for the flower children and the revolutionaries. Some of us took on those outward signs because we truly wanted to be rugged individualists, just like all our friends and neighbors. Some of us did it simply because we liked the music. Others had deeper and more profound reasons, perhaps. It was a different uniform, though, that set us apart from the industrialists and politicians and bankers, all of whom wore ties at all times.
Nowadays you see Silicon Valley CEOs wearing shorts and tee shirts, and lawyers almost never wear ties if they are just going to the office. There are still the individualists who wear tattoos and backward baseball caps and legging outfits, just like everyone else. Sometimes you are hard pressed to tell those individualists from the CEOs.
Those are all external things, of course. They don’t really define what a person is like inside. Still, there may be some benefit coming from the fact that the greedy military-industrial complex seems to be loosening up a little bit. I started this comment alluding to Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time. As you know, the auditors in that book suffered defeat because by taking on human form they became partly human (and subject to the effects of chocolate). Maybe, then, outward appearances in our world can be more important than we might think.
Loosening up and taking on human form also make it possible for things like music to influence the internal, as well as the external, being. The songs you mentioned are all good ones and are known by a whole lot of people from several different generations. And there are more. I thought of those and a number of others for an Earth Day Song of the Week. I almost chose the Kinks doing “Village Green Preservation Society,” but decided it was not quite what I wanted. Anyway, I think the fact that there are so many such songs and things to which the general population has been exposed by the media and the artistic folks among us has nudged humanity toward a better world and better state of mind. We all have quite a long ways to go, but with any luck . . . . .
okay, another song that I was unfamiliar with. At first I thought that you were going to choose Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth singing “Mother Earth(provides for me)” or Memphis Slim’s “Mother Earth” by T.N. and Mother Earth. I like Neil’s Mother Earth a lot. Then I was stuck trying to name the tune that Neil was using. Finally I figured it out as “The Water is Wide”.
Happy Earth Day to you and Cathy.
You are right. The song first came out in 1990 on an album by Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I hadn’t heard it for a long time until I came across the video I put in the post. I just finished reading John Grisham’s latest novel, Gray Mountain, which focuses on strip mining and black lung in Appalachia; so Neil’s video seemed to fit right in. The tune to “Mother Earth” sounded familiar – as it did 25 years ago – but I didn’t think beyond, “That sounds familiar.” It is the “Water Is Wide,” as you point out. Happy Earth Day!