I’m Mad as Hell!

“I’m mad as hell,” shouts the famous line
from Paddy Chayefsky’s famous film, “Network.”
In the film the follow up line states,
“and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

I go through my moods, as do we all.
I try not to be captured by them,
or identified with them,
but instead to notice, accept,
and understand them.

Today, upon visiting Panther Meadows,
the most sacred site upon the sacred mountain, Shasta;
a place of Native People’s rituals for millennia;
a garden of alpine streams and wildflowers;
straight from a mountain-lover’s Eden;
for the first time in my life I stood in shock
before an arid mountainside and the barest trickle
of one small remaining stream.

I am a scientist and I know the difference
between periodic drought
and a catastrophic climate crisis.
I stood in sorrow mixed with despair,
then a touch of futility,
then anger.

My rage at humankind must pale
before the feelings of the Native Peoples
who had these lovely lands despoiled,
desecrated, and stolen from them.
Nonetheless, it is my rage,
my own to understand.

The intensity of this morning has passed
but the truth of what I feel remains.
I’m mad as hell and …
Here I don’t know what to do.
The hero of the film could cry
“I’m not going to take it any more!”
But what am I to shout as I shake my fist
in what seems a helpless wrath?

What are my options before the juggernaut
of a lost and impervious culture?
I return to myself and befriend my feelings.
I do not talk myself out of them
in the name of being nice and good.
Neither do I let them define my life.

I have some hope.
It is a hope that lies with ancient and shamanic peoples,
whose wisdom infiltrates small pockets of people,
scattered here and there around the world,
and causes them to dream a different dream,
beat a different drum, and sing a different song.
This ancient and authentic dream will not save
the world I know, for that world there is no hope.
But it may weave its melody through the ruins
in compassion and a call for resurrection.
For only in a Phoenix-like arising from the ashes
will a transformed humanity emerge.
This is a hope I hold within my deepest Soul.
I will not live to see it in this life,
but perhaps someday, somehow,
in the never-ending Story …?
In the meantime, it is hard, so hard
to have to watch the conflagration.