The end, it’s moving 
toward us. His future’s set

in an unreadable script. 

— excerpt Lullaby by John James

Saturday, early spring is overcast.  I am excited.  The photo shoot is “on” at the old Joliet prison.  A collection of photo’s depicting the dissonance between our actions, our practices, ways-of-life all contributing to climate catastrophe and — that of children’s future.  The project moves forward apace.

I do not know what the future holds, of what will play out in detail.  I have no doubt about a warming climate, about what that means.

This passage from The Gay Science captured my attention:

Against remorse.

A thinker sees his own actions
as experiments and questions
— as attempts to find out something.

Success and failure are for him answers above all.

To be annoyed or feel remorse
because something goes wrong
–that he leaves to those who act
because they have received orders and who have to reckon with a beating
when his lordship is not satisfied with the result.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 1, Section 41 by Friedrich Nietzsche

We must insist without remorse upon finding another way-of-life rooted in the foundation value of “enough.”  We cannot continue to extract energy and material from the planet as has been our custom while the climate warms, weather becoming erratic, destructive.  We must press on without fear.  There is no deity to punish or to reward us as his subjects.  There is only survival.

The fragment of the poem at the beginning of the post was written by the poet in the first weeks after the birth of his son.  John James’s “Lullaby” is the first-place winner of the 2023 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize.

To read Lullaby in its entirety:   https://poets.org/poem/lullaby-3?mc_cid=8a6cc2e524&mc_eid=6a290ba17b