Sunday's Tale... The Dis-embrace

What did you do in the great war mummy?

Ah I worried and worried my love

Feared for what would come if the attack was not stopped

But you were so young

You needed me near and so

…I stayed close

Closed the doors

Locked out the sound of alarm

And ensured that we… came to no harm.

In that time when we were lost

Separated from truth by chosen ignorance

It would knock, shout at the windows, try to come in through the cables and webs

Ah but I was too good at weaving our space my love...wrapping you in a warm embrace of what felt like normal, what seemed like home – what was our only-known way. Beyond the door lurked certain danger, certain harm, certain ugly reality that would ensure an uncertain future – and I was so scared. All I wanted was to keep you safe but the attack was all too soon, on all sides.

It was when your asthma could no longer be managed at home and the hospital visits became all too frequent; when bottled water doubled in price and became invaluable; when George’s farm went bankrupt because his herd were too close to the poisons that were seeping into our air, our water and our soil… that we could no longer hide.

That’s when we rose my love to face truths and see the world for what it had become at the hands of the industries that pillaged it, spilled toxins carelessly into it and cut corners and mountain tops to get every last bit of it - under the sleepy eye of weakened, impotent regulators who whispered only gentle concern or when things went bad… something about ‘lessons learned’. 

Those who claimed ‘authority’ were exposed to be the despicable, callous, inhumane, uncaring swine-at-a-trough that they’d become – none with power in those houses of ‘academics, law and state’ were fit for offices where they’d contemplate the value of economic growth versus the insurance claims on the dead. Pontificating on how to mitigate fallout from increased miscarriages and grief, that would otherwise bleed profit from shareholders; hemorrhaging their precious hopes and dreams of bigger, better, brighter, bolder, more Porsche-infested futures.

I’d see news and even knew some, who’d grabbed truth by the hand and walked with it sooner – the ‘activists’.  I’d feared them almost as much as the industries that were surrounding us and pounding the land night and day till there was no rest in us… those uniformed for ‘law’ had roughly handled many into vans and through court systems, imposing fines and sentences, tarnishing reputations and painting a picture of ‘crimes’. Our minds had been set to perceive the good and the bad, the cowboy black hats or white and the disconnect – was hard to handle. 

If the people with the truth were in courts, prisons and police hands then what measure, what value, what worth was being given to ‘truth’ and how do we define 'criminal behaviour'? The papers too used words to make shapes that seemed black and white and yet there were seepages of footage from industrialised places that were grey. I wondered if any of the black and white history of my life had ever been real anyway… friends, enemies, good, bad, healthy, unhealthy, right, wrong, right, left – did the papers ever tell truth’s side of the story? Truth seemed to have been outcast from this pillar too.

When we came to be with the ‘activists’ it was as if walls literally came crumbling down – divides between us, separators that kept us apart; the marks of our positions, colours of our robes and skins…. prioritised down to nothing as we stood arm in arm with truth and divined – the only way through this was to be kind and if we could not do this one thing - we would fail our children and gift them the uncertainty by which we were now defined.

The great war was no war at all really my love… it was a great re-shuffle, a sorting and a time of great revelations that brought forth the emergence of truth in all its naked, raw, flawed, powerful, unfinished beauty – when we faced that – then we could face each other and the road ahead...