No returns

Today I briefly re-visited my past at a business function (impossible to eat if I don't find a way to make work fit somewhere into my week somehow)... it was like when you leave a town for a while, then return to find although your life has been changed - here it remains the same; frozen like that bit in the movie 'Shining' where the bar is always the same people and era. It made me sad and despondent but I don't regret (or maybe just the tiniest bit) the path I ended up on when I realised that the world and government was not as I had allowed myself, to be led to believe.

Truth is surely beautiful even when it is about the ugliest things? This 'movement' made of activists/campaigners/Protectors is full of beauty, full of reasons to believe we can and will eventually all be on the same page of awareness and working together to correct the harms. Until we get there though, this is an exhausting life and although a break/pause is good advice - I don't feel able to heed it.

It's not just the fracking threat that is current, immediate and requiring everything we've got to try to stop it from getting started - but the fact that right now as I sit safely writing and complaining that I'm tired... children are in perilous, terrifying circumstances; trying to escape war, suffering, drought, hunger. THIS is a state of emergency.

Those with the power to do anything to change this – aren't. I find it almost impossible to believe that people like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson could even be considered as potential 'leaders' and because they are being considered – know that this 'system' of government is not a system of government but a facade and behind the facade is blind greed. WE have to act because we're all we seem to have right now.

And more than this - we have to act together against the true problems and not each other - that just does the job for the bad side. The exhaustion in our movement makes us frayed at the edges, raw and sensitive... ruffled feathers could do with soothing of course but we need to remember that as a result of our distractions - more suffering, more harm, more pain is done.

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No Returns

The sacrifices cannot be measured in words

Or heard through brief encounters
Pain this raw, scars this deep, wounds that weep
From truths acknowledged
Are whispered in dialogues and monologues
That go late and are held close
To chests that heave with emotion

No notion on entering through a door once closed
By blissful ignorance and unknowing...
Blown open
Drawn in
Held fast
Thrown about
On waves of revelation
Explanations too unbelievable to believe
We bleed
With the burden of this
Path labelled 'Activist'

Lives forever lost
Goodbyes without choice
Voices too often raised in anger, anguish and grief
Diseasing the joy,
Breaking the imaginings,
Shattering the dreams
That once lullaby-ed life

How to rest in a state of emergency?

How long do we go on
Dissecting the news,
Parading the truths,
Exposing the lies?
Warning! Warning! Warning!
Cries 

Want to hush it away
Make today a better day
Cause it's me
Cause of this
That brings the rain of gloom.
Sadness to the state of play.
There is no time to dance
Barely time to ease away yesterday
Before tomorrow throws it all again.

Glancing over shoulders,
There it is...
That other life from before
Floors filled with light laughter
Bright conversation
Effervescent bubbles of not-knowing
That on the horizon comes a threat

Today there is no bittersweet

Just the sour sting ...and tomorrow brings more.