Here I am again, in the corner by the wall on a rainy morning at Starbucks.  The return home feels right, the feeling of completion.  What did I accomplish in the last three weeks on the road, a composite of time and places in my memory?  Did I accomplish much, or nothing?  “Nothing” sounds just about right.  I hope that I did not change “the world” one iota.  Like the middle aged stranger, and the senior citizen male, friends seated around a small table on an afternoon in the back of the old country store in Four Oaks N.C….  The store has been open with a few tables and chairs since 1914.  It is salutary to leave the world as we found it, as we were found by it:  as un-damaged as possible. 

I know that is a judgment call.  To ex-ist, to take up space, to require nourishment and shelter as a carbon based life form entails that we must change things…  Yet we have left and are leaving scars that will take millennia to heal.  I think of oceans filling with the effluvia of plastic waste, packaging, toys, containers that become micro pellets with the passage of time.  Ocean life ingests those toxic fragments of human civilization.  Attempts at clean up, while salutary are but ritual formality as all of that waste arising from our demand for convenient, cheap things migrates by rivers into the oceans from every quadrant.

I remember passing yesterday a line of bulldozers, assorted heavy earth moving equipment parked by the highway.  Like so much of what inspires our awe here in the West, the machines were massive in scale, efficient to move great quantities of earth to build roads, to level the terrain for shopping center parking lots…  I shuddered.

We simply must do better.  We cannot do better, as long as we genuflect before the altar of capitalism…

These words are worth contemplation:

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

— Margaret Atwood