I went to the Gratiot Point Beach in Dunkirk, New York for some
peace of mind. I went to experience the naturalness of Lake Erie, with its
expansive mass of teal-brown water. I was befuddled when I saw the amount of
fish carcasses along the shoreline. The naturalness of the lake seems to not be
natural enough for these dead fish, I thought. I wondered how all these
creatures had met their end, as I traversed over bone, fin and sand. Still, the
beauty is preserved in the breeze that carries the lakes sweet odor, and also in
the crashing of its ethereal waves. The wave’s crash taller than usual, it
seems like they're wanting to push those decayed fish out and away from its
waters so that the buzzard and the seagull might make clean work of it. As I
continue walking along the shore, I notice the many shapes of plastics that we
humans leave in the wake of this beautiful place. Ranging anywhere from a cigar
tip to a yogurt cup, you'll find anything here in the category of human
garbage. But the breeze beckons me away from looking at those silly trinkets in
the sand. The wind, gusting around my ears is telling me to pay attention to
the body of water as a whole, and not just to the ripple.
The desecration of
the land won't be stopped through ordinary revolution or protesting, though we
may think it could be accomplished through similar revolutions headed by the
Gandhi's or Martin Luther King Jr.’s of the world, this change will occur very subtly. Those revolutions all ignore an overlying, or
rather ignore an underlying factor that we have long neglected within
ourselves. That, we have the ability to stop the using of lands as if they were
a commodity, just as we have the ability to end political corruption, and end
violence and end all other worldly problems as a whole. The only thing that's
holding us back is ourselves. We are responsible for all of this. I am as well
as you are, and the only way we can change this state of the world is by first
changing ourselves. There needs to be a revolution within you, before any
actual productive change occurs without you. When you see the world as it is
you will see the disorder in it all, and then you will desire order. To know
order, you must first know disorder, and that is the state we are in right now
folks, we are muddling about in the disorder of our society, without at all
realizing we are responsible for it. And so I sit here alone, yet not, gazing
at the dancing feathers that rest on the nearby flock of gulls, being blown by
the breeze not unlike those perpetual ripples that dance under the sun, again
and again casting out, then back in.
