Here

I’m here—in an auditorium, a student listening to some avant-garde John Cage of a man onstage, banging on assorted bits and pieces to produce odd, startling musical sounds we would miss in the rush of a day. Maybe we’d be poorer without them.

And now he’s plucking strings wired up to a living cactus. The resulting sounds are high-pitched, sharp, breaking the silence so we lean in, intrigued by this cactus-noise, wondering what the sounds might mean.

And now I’m here—at the university movie theater, and Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass are at it, the focus now the sharp edge of pending global disaster. Koyaanisqatsi—their movie—draws us in like a flock of birds, as we witness from on high a rushing, ten-lane freeway choked with cars. Someone is chanting the movie title too, in an almost Tibetan polyphonic way: Koyaanisqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi– the Hopi people’s oddly melodic word for life out of balance.

So many years and fears. Animals and forests lost, nations at war, planet warming, yet we go on; and now —I’m over here. Recalling the white trumpet swans today that needed no wiring up or chanting to be heard. Their call was brash, relentless, echoing around the pond and forest, drowning out the Canadian geese. A blue heron glided softly by; the blackbirds added their songs to the uproar, and it all brings me home, hits my tuning-fork body resting on this bench, saves my life again, so I say yes to the mess of it all.