Blood on Our Hands

In the gulf region thousands of gallons of oil are oozing up through the water; bleeding from the crust of the earth where it's been wounded as surely as a woman who has been stabbed. The earth has been injured severely and is in need of urgent care.

Over two hundred sea turtles and more than three hundred brown pelicans already threatened with extinction due to DDT, have been found dead in gulf waters. Untold fish, countless blue crabs, and twenty-two dolphins are among the casualties. As the oil seeps into the coastal and estuary waters of Florida and Louisiana, marsh grasses are smothered. Home to fish and to bustling shrimp colonies, the destruction of the marshes will spell destruction for these creatures.

Nicholai will die of cancer; my sister is one of countless women who face the loss of body parts (along with numerous men and children) due to cancer's malignant spread. The common thread that weaves together my aging wild canine, my single-parent sister, and the gulf coast's turtles, dolphins, birds, fish, and a few human workers is the malignancy of greed.

In Requiem by Kurt Vonnegut, he said:

When the last living thing has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be if Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon (or the Gulf Coast)
"It is done." People did not like it here.

I intend to spend a little time each day, praying and meditating for the soul of humans and the salvation of the world. We have blood on our hands, and we are on the brink.

In the well-worn, but ill heeded words of Chief Seattle:

All things are connected, like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

It's high time we did something heroic, as if we recognized our place in the web.