I like how my mind wanders while I am doing tasks that don’t require full engagement. Yesterday, while picking up the sticks from the pear trees I had pruned a couple of days before, my mental path went from children’s poems--”Five, six, pick up sticks; seven, eight lay them straight”-- to thinking about the Lone Ranger. I thought about how destructive the notion of standing alone, of riding off to the horizon abandoning connection with people and place; off to be heroic again and again in new situations where the only common theme was the Lone Ranger rescuing; never upon building strong, stable, interconnected community capable of solving its own problems.
I thought further about how pervasive this theme is in our culture. From Horatio Alger to Ayn Rand and many manifestations in between: The self made man pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, persistently shedding the grasp of the many who seemed to him intent on pulling him down.
While picking up the bundles of sticks and carrying them a step closer to the transfer station where they will be transformed to compost, I wondered about what it would take to transform our stories to ones in which heroic, valued acts are ones of people caring for one another Stories about creating just systems where all voices are heard, where seeking truth carries more weight than sophistry; where compassion trumps possession; and where the commonwealth is paramount.
Maybe it’s beyond laying them straight and big fat hen: eleven, twelve, beyond ourselves; thirteen, fourteen, the future green; fifteen, sixteen, an end to mean; seventeen, eighteen, justice queen; nineteen, twenty, enough is plenty...
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