Makes sense really because we’re only a few weeks away from the Green Solstice. My personal days are long because I am playing catch up and get-ahead before I leave for Pagan Spirit Gathering in about a week.  I am mostly ready to go–only a few outlines to type up and print out and then the joy of packing.

The Women’s Garden at Herland got renamed in honor of the poet and is now the Maya Angelou Peace Garden. The upstairs garden is called the Rachel Carson Roof Garden.  We weeded the one and planted another bed of the other on Wednesday night and we have a work morning tomorrow.  Weeding, watering, maybe more bed prep.  My sights are set on clearing out the Gathering area so we can start our classes and workshops there.  And the planned water catchment is funded now and the work should begin soon.

But here in NC, we are facing a governor and general assembly who are set on fracking in the state. As a person who cares about and for and in fact has a spiritual connection to the natural world, this whole idea fills me with dread. I was stricken by the Elk River disaster in West Virginia earlier this year and similarly stricken by the coal ash disaster into the Dan River and our own close encounter out at Hominy Creek.  And now fracking–water contamination and waste as well as potential earthquakes, poor people robbed of their mineral rights, rich outlanders profiting from Appalachian destruction–is here. My friend Sheila Kay Adams says the fracking companies are already sniffing around her native county (Madison).

I feel gutted by the relentless speed of this and the feeling that I am powerless to stop it.  And tonight the local tv news reported that families have been evacuated from the area around the Superfund CTS site because the air itself is toxic–vapours rising from the site that no one is responsible for fixing.  All too slow, too little–in spite of all that those families have done to achieve some measure of justice. Too many people dodging responsibility for these environmental horrors–no one to blame, no one to sue, no one to put in jail for criminal negligence.

So I’m focusing on my garden and the other gardens I tend.  I am grounding myself deeply in the Earth I love, knowing that I have no trust (or faith, if you will) that any elected officials have the guts to do a damned thing about any of it.

Gormless. Concerned only with the next time they can be elected, as powerless as I but with more resources to escape. To sell out, in so many ways.  What can we do but write letters and make phone calls and protest and “hope” for the best? Which is actually too late because the worst is on its way and–for the families around the CTS site–the worst has been here for a long, long time.

our new water barrels for the new catchment system

And you know what Derrick Jensen has to say about “hope,” don’t you?  It’s here–

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/

I concur.