Upon Awakening

By Diane Joy Schmidt

I had a series of dreams. One night I dreamt that a bull calf came to the east door, and I brought him inside because he was lost. I kept him in my bedroom until his owners came along for him. The next night I dreamed I was excavating a stream bed and found drawings of images of fishes, groups of  two and three repeated, then I heard a flute playing and the musical notes repeated in twos and threes, the music illuminating these strange ideograms.

The greater meanings of these dreams elude me. They are mysterious. They left me with a sense of both wondering and wonderment. They awaken a sense of inquiry, of questioning. There is a feeling of watching shadows and lights on moving water. But turn up the contrast too much in that picture, and the life, the air, the atmosphere vanishes. 

This makes me think about how I feel when I listen to a certain political candidate. The problem with this certain politician is that he says he has all the answers. There are no shadings, no gradations of meaning, everything is black and white, everything is in high relief, high contrast, and he outshouts everyone else, he takes the air out of the room. 

He revises history, retelling it to suit only himself without concern for anyone else’s story. To tell a story, a history, only to suit yourself is to ignore the fact that the story is not made by you alone. And the people who first put him in power are perfectly happy to return him there because he made them oh so rich, and now will make them so very much richer and powerful. But what can you do? The best thing seems to be to stick your head in the sand to stop listening to the noise. 

My cousin Jerome Lawrence, best known for his play Inherit the Wind about the Scopes Monkey Trial, wrote a book for children published in 1940 called Oscar the Ostrich. It was just after Hitler had invaded Poland and the U.S. was remaining isolationist.

I didn’t know anything about this history as a child, but my mother would read the book to me and I learned it practically by heart. I am reminded of that book again today. Oscar was content to bury his head in the sand and ignore the loud-mouthed ostrich who wanted all the sand dunes. Meanwhile, the other ostriches cried "What shall we do!" and put their heads together...

And gave the loud-voiced ostrich the sand dune to the East! But when the loud-mouthed ostrich took Oscar’s sand dune away, he couldn’t bury his head in it anymore. He finally got mad and joined in the fight. He got the other ostriches to out-yell the loud mouthed ostrich, and the pile of sand-dunes that the loud-mouthed ostrich had stolen all tumbled down.

After that, Oscar determined that "never again would he poke his head in the sand when there was NOISE. Not on your plume tip! He would STOP THE NOISE."

Things are not so clear today, but perhaps only because things have not gotten scary for most of us yet. We think we can keep our heads in the sand. It will only be when climate change fouls our own nests, when floods and fires directly touch our lives, when we can’t ignore it anymore, only then will we act. But this time around, we cannot afford the luxury of waiting, because soon it may be too late.  As of this writing, we are facing not only the real possibility of a regional war in the Middle East, a war that can only lead to disastrous consequences, but a humanitarian crisis at our own border, driven increasingly by climate change as well as inequalities centuries in the making.

Our model of constant economic growth is unsustainable. If we ignore the increases in pollution and temperature caused by the use of fossil fuels, and indiscriminate use of herbicides, and the cascading effects, one being a massive die-off of the bees and other insects that used to pollinate our fields, another being wars and conflicts due to droughts and coastal flooding, we ignore the fact that we are making our home, where we live, planet Earth, uninhabitable.

Dictators believe that the only way to deal with a restless humanity is with an iron hand. They don’t want to give up anything, they don’t want make things more equitable, so they are frightened. They build walls and crack down on dissension. They turn us against one another to divide us. They ultimately fail and take their countries down with them. 

We need to wake up to our humanity and remember that we are in this all together. If we join together as human beings we can still make the changes that will turn the world away from the tipping point of climate change, beyond which there is no return. The only enemy is us. 

"Upon Waking" was first published as a Spiritual Perspectives column in the Gallup Independent in 2019, and earned a 1st place for personal columns from the Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies. In this updated version, "Upon Awakening," the only substantive change needed to be made, sadly, was to indicate that this politician is running again. Also, the situation in Ukraine today distinctly echoes across the years.

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