I am old enough to recall when Americans got our news from a daily newspaper and thirty minutes of televised evening broadcasts. This left more than twenty hours to hear other voices and see three-dimensional, living creatures. My adult life has been bizarre enough to take place mostly in wilderness. There, the voices include loons, coyotes, the blood-curdling mating cry of porcupines, the aroma of elk, or the snow-muffled crack of an ice-fissure racing across a frozen lake. Even the voices of my friends singing in a chapel, on a lakeside beach, or in a starlit, moonlit desert.
These wilderness experiences helped me be open to a Buddhist teacher’s announcement that to the enlightened person, “from beginningless beginning to endless ending, the universe is well-balanced.” That’s big news: all is well. But I’m just Jewish enough to have read the prophets (great news commentators). I have my doubts about the Invisible Hand of the Free Market’s balance. Nefarious barons stick their thumbs on it:
We will … fix our scales for cheating!
We will buy the lowly man for silver,
and the poor man for a pair of sandals;
even the refuse of the wheat we will sell! (Amos 8:5–6)
Then, like poet Wendell Berry, I take refuge in the peace of wild things:
Live, Local, Late-Breaking
On a morning like this, it’s good to turn
To old technology for the news:
Single-syllabled tweets surround the house
From nameless birds on dripping piñon limbs,
While from the southeast come maniac
Coyote cries.
At nearly regular intervals,
Water drips from eaves outside
The narrowly cracked window.
As if that weren’t enough, at 8:30,
As commuters turned on their ignitions
On some other planet,
A bobcat, mottled and silent,
Hunched under the deck,
Reappearing soon after,
To saunter with loose-taut grace
Under the barbed wire,
Into the autumn grass
And beyond the nearby dripping piñons.
This morning’s broadcast is brought to you
By no one and is not underwritten.
After this break,
No one will return to discuss this
Stunning turn of events.
David Denny
October 8, 2018, with new introduction February 9,2024
Very nice! Especially like the “…bought to you/By no one…”
Quite pleasant ‘break’ into my morning of grading essays!! thanks
This creates a longing and satisfies it in a single reading. Thank you.
Oh glorious !
A refreshing retreating from abuse, collusion, investigations, and fracking.
Thank you.
Like the bobcat, in silence
I am there with you.
My prayer melting
into the sand.
This is the type of news I love to hear! So tired of all the stuff we get from radios, TV’s and computers!
Thank you for sharing the beauty in your life. You are so much at one with the Divine in nature. I feel blessed by your words.
Thank you for keeping me grounded – it’s perfect!
Exquisite.
How much this reveals who You are.