Apr 18, 2013 Original Poetry, Teaching and Learning
Soldier
©By Vijaya Sundaram
April 18th, 2013
Yes, the world goes on,
The earth swings herself tiredly
Around the sun, sluggishly
Around on her axis
And the tilt of her
And the lilt of her
And the will of her
And the thrill of her
Though she be tired
And old and leaden,
Reminds me that I, too
Must go on, tilting
And lilting, not
Wilting, but willing
To show up for duty,
Across and through a waiting
Universe.
For that is how it is,
Was, and must always
And forever be.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Aging, #NaPoWriMo, Planet Earth, showing up, Soldier on, tiredness
Feb 22, 2013 Original Short Stories
The End and the Beginning – A Narrative of a New Race ©By Vijaya Sundaram January 24, 2012
The planet swung around on its appointed course around the sun, dutifully, tiredly, imperceptibly tilting ever more to the right. Lands grew cold and hot and cold and hot again. Forests died, and mountains grew taller. Tsunamis rose up and islands sank. The desert blazed unmercifully. Birds fell out of the sky. Quietly, entire species died, as the decades drifted by like seaweed on dead oceans. The polar caps melted, and methane clouds rose into the air like ghosts promising a holocaust of fire, ready to ignite, ready to unleash their fierce tendrils of blazing death on the straggling populations of weary humans who eked out their lives in the few safe places on earth.
It was into such a world that the Stranger came drifting through the clouds in her vehicle from a faraway universe.
The Stranger stood, light as air on her feet, straddling continents, and gazing hopelessly around, while the vehicle blended into the very air, so as not to set off any methane into instability. Fire-power was not what propelled her vehicle. What propelled her vehicle was a substance which had no name, and would never be discovered by humans.
Sorrow filled her face as she looked at the tiny dwellings of the people huddled in the mountains, the history of the rise and fall of the human race in their eyes, as they gazed about them at the increasingly hostile world they had inherited from their rapacious forbears. Clad in their animal skins, in shelters of scrub and brush, they gazed around, their scarred visages showing apathy and absolute despair. Scattered around them were the bones of animals, and small straggling fields of corn. There was no evidence of fire.
I should never have seeded this planet, she thought to herself. I should have gone to another star system. This very planet is fighting my descendants. The planet hates them. The planet wants to shake them off like fleas. What shall I do?
And an idea came to her. To make it all happen, she needed a hundred years or two. Time passed, as time does. Eventually, what she wanted, willed, worked for, happened. The planet straightened itself to the exact tilt necessary for life to sustain itself. All the methane released from the melting of snows on polar caps was gathered up into her spacecraft, excess carbon dioxide powered it, and fresh, oxygen-rich air swirled hopefully around the planet. Rains fell, tides rose and ebbed in predictable patterns, and new, green forests sprang up where they hadn’t been for a while.
Humans in the tropics looked around them, and saw fresh green where there hadn’t been any for decades. Polar caps began to freeze again. Others on the far northern ends of continents looked up and felt snowflakes falling. Nobody knew what it was, but it felt good.
And the migrations began. But this time, things were different. This time, the earth purred. Humans weren’t fleas. Humans were benign extensions of earth’s self. They lived with nature, freely, joyously. Then, they discovered the use of fire. This time, something held them back. They looked up. The sun smiled down.
And though it all started all over again, humans had evolved. Their bodies held all the heat and light, air and water they needed. A new race began, straightened its shoulders and rose up into the air.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The Beginning~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Hope, Aliens, Beginnings, Climate Change, Endings, Evolution, Human Life, Planet Earth, Strangeres
Feb 17, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Teaching and Learning
What would I like to post?
I’d like to post a letter to this planet:
Hello, Earth! What have you been up to in the past week?
Ah yes, a meteor hit the upper atmosphere above the Urals in Russia. Tethered to the planet, we see signs of an imminent inescapable route to extinction. Right? Wrong!
Okay, we are seeing the signs of a possible mass extinction. I mean, didn’t millions die? What’s that you say? Oh, about 1,200 people were injured from the shock generated by it?
Regardless, I feel bad that such a thing happened, and guilty because I’m glad it didn’t happen here, or at least it hasn’t happened yet.
So, when that meteorite comes blazing out of the sky, that’s it, then. How apocalyptic, how random, how utterly pointless to have that tangent to our circle which goes off-course!
We need a blanket that repels those visitors from our solar system, and not just the atmosphere. Let’s create one now. Right!
What however, if you, Earth are suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as human life? What then? Will we be long gone before any meteoric strikes of the truly apocalyptic variety?
Do you remember what happened in December, those events whose shock waves continued into January, O Earth?
Two terrible events came to occupy our news — on December 14th, six adults and twenty children died in an elementary school because of the unhinging of a man, and on December 16th, a twenty-three year old Indian woman was brutalized in the most horrifying way by six unhinged men.
The first event created sorrow and despair in all of us, but it wasn’t long before the crazies in the organization that aims to “protect” the Second Amendment, all stepped up with bizarre rationalizations for MORE weapons. When that meteor came and struck, some went about, creating false myths about it, turning a blind eye to that which was under their noses. Where did the souls of those people go? Where has conscience fled? Where have empathy and reason gone? Are those people who deny the massacre even human?
After the horror of the young woman’s death, India came together, and has had mass rallies, protests, clashes with the police, men and women speaking out against the blame-the-victim attitude of a male-dominated society. Awareness hit like a shock wave, and shattered many people’s hearts. In many Indian cities, men are becoming more aware and women are standing up for their right to be free in a fettered society, while the male-dominated Indian villages speak about pernicious Western influences and blather on about how women dress, which, they proclaim, invites their fate. What does it take to change the minds of all people? What MORE will it take?
Meanwhile, wars continue around the earth. Women and children get sold into slavery, to be exploited brutally, then killed when things get complicated for the exploiters. Young men, the best and sometimes (but not always) the brightest, push off to fight other young men, eliminating any future for either. Greed is rampant. Fear and hatred rule the foolish and the venal. Everything, but EVERYTHING becomes a mind game, or worse, a game of war and peace.
And we buy, buy, buy, more and more stuff, more and more electronic and digital toys. And somewhere in the Congo and elsewhere close by, women and children are brutalized by mercenary soldiers who wish to control the lands that contain coltan, that combination of minerals which our cell-phones and laptops need. The gentle and the innocent, with all that potential for life, peace, hope and beauty are wiped out by greed-unhinged bestial creatures masquerading as men, while the land around them is mercilessly plundered.
Those meteors strike human lives every day, every single day. I cannot even wrap my mind around that.
Is this the beginning of suicide of the human species? Are we, the individual cells in the complex organism called human life, dealing with a deadly auto-immune disorder? Are we ever going to achieve balance? Will we see reason? I speak not of the few and far-between, but of the whole.
I am a teacher, and I work for the cause of reason and the intellect. I work for the cause of empathy and kindness. I work for the cause of sharing responsibility for the planet, when I head the “Green Team” at my school, and recruit children to deal with “reducing, reusing and recycling” for the Planet. I work to bring some measure of sanity to the insanity that afflicts my life and the lives of those I know. (Of course, I may not always succeed, irrational and irritable that I might seem to my nearest and dearest when I am tired or sleepy, but I try, I try!) I work to bring the beauty of language and literature into the drab vocabulary of the working world, when I teach Shakespeare, or Steinbeck, or Gaiman. I work for the cause of creating a space for children speak their minds, and for their right to weave their emotional and aesthetic lives into their poetry in my Friday afternoon Poetry Club. I work for the cause of right over wrong, for the cause of humanity over inhumanity within my very small milieu, when I teach about the Civil Rights Movement, and we read Melba Pattillo Beals’ book Warriors Don’t Cry, or when we study the Jewish-holocaust period in Europe. At least, it’s something, or so I tell myself.
Today, right now, in the depths of the night, I’m not so sure.
If earth is suffering from an auto-immune disorder known as humanity, a meteoric visitor from outer space wouldn’t be a bad thing.
I’ll be all right tomorrow, I’m sure. But today … today is all about despair. I’m sorry!
Tags: #Peace, auto-immune disorder, delhi gang-rape, gaiman, meteor strike, Planet Earth, sandy hook, Shakespeare, steinbeck, War