Escape into the Future

Hasn't your prison begun to feel smaller and less sustaining?

Has the last week or two been depressing? I read that Americans are discouraged by events, depressed by one news story after another. They tell interviewers that the country is going in the wrong direction.

There is another way to see things.

To know the future we need to escape our imprisonment in the present.  The gates are rusty.  The bars are spread far apart.  The jailor sleeps most of the time.  The key is already in our hands. 

We wandered unthinking onto these grounds.  We followed Facebook to the doors.  We let the 24 hour “news” channels lure us into the enclosure.  We didn’t hear the gates clang shut.

Thus, our present is a cacophony of repeated claims and counterclaims.  Prison gangs, no less, emphasizing the immediate and the momentary.  For safety, they say, you must join our faction, follow our leader.

Simply put, we have been oversold as to the power of the present.  Tomorrow is not threatened by today’s sound bites or talking heads.  This is not a dark age.  Truly, my progressive, and my conservative, friends, the sky is lightening. 

I recommend you seek parole. For then, as long as you resist temptation and practice good behavior, you will stay in the future.  New ideas, not old.  Collaboration with others in the search for justice, global prosperity and a healthy world.

I wrote this poem many years ago, but it has never seemed more true.

Outward the sea.

Outward a blazing sun

and the fixed motion

of the swell.

 

Fresh winds take us

toward shores

that are only now

rising from the ocean.

 

Beyond the horizon,

reefs are forming

and every map is false.

We have sailed

close-hauled

through storms,

and run with the wind,

and we fare well.

We fare forward.

We work in the present, but we live in the future.