Love Poem: Benighted Enlightenment
Gerald Dillenbeck Avatar
Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Benighted Enlightenment

Potawatomi language,
says Robin Wall Kimmerer,
does not verbally divide us into masculine and feminine.
However, unlike most English verbs,
Potawatomi verbs distinguish between animate and inanimate objects.

For example,
we use sit down
when speaking to an unruly son
and set down
when speaking of what we did with a stone
or a book
which the unruly son would never read.

I wonder if there are other ways
we could evolve this distinction
and if it would change how our relationships feel
over sufficient time
spreading across a multiculturing continent
of organic languages 
and interdependent species.

I notice my own ways of using becoming,
where others might use being.
"Oh, that's just your son
being your son"
sounds to me like
"That's our son still becoming"
whomever he most hopes to become,
or not,
for some mysteriously unmotivated reasons.

I think it was David Bohm
who saw verbs as dynamically emerging and submerging,
diastatically full-bloomed
all the way through to 
as static as a rock
appears upon it's still emerging surface
slowly arriving time's dynamic change trajectories.

The observation that "Climate change just is"
neither good nor bad in and of itself
becomes "Climate change emerges
and submerges within humanizing consciousness."

"The current climate pathology trend just is"
becomes bad, 
assuming climate health might become therapeutically good,
but what are we going to do?
What are we already in process of becoming?

It, pathology, just hopelessly is.
What right does Chicken Little have
to not deny that our sky is fading?
That's what sky is.
It fades, every day.
At least for now.
Until it's gone.
But, like Scarlet,
we'll think about that tomorrow.
Or maybe we can let the grandkids
worry about what's left.
Which is a good reason to not have kids...

So, climate pathology
submerges down deeper,
for awhile,
as climate change
equals Business As Usual;
it simply is
dissonance about outstanding hopeless pathologies,
inducing compassion yawns of exhaustion.

But another comparison between Potawatomi
and English is a reverse proportion
between verbs and nouns.
First Nation languages grow weighted toward dynamic becoming
and un-becoming verbs
as English lists heavily toward more static nouns.

This also reminds me of something David Bohm observed
about verbal functions of nouns
as becoming systems and unraveling systems,
or at least potentially unraveling,
as what becomes
must un-become,
systemically speaking.
For every dynamic
a season.

And, verbing nouns cast this peculiar word "climate"
in a more flowing toward and away from diastatic health
Paradise perspective,
like consciousness inside
climates influence outside
flowing toward healthier days and nights
easier to not do wrong as right
decades and cultures
industries and artifacts
scientific and artistic landscapes,
ebbing toward more dissonant
decaying decadent pathologies
rooted in our denial of what's coming, yes.

But, more significantly,
continuing support for climate pathology
within a noun-oriented 
static reductive LeftBrain frame of mind,
also denies hard empirical evidence of loss accelerating rates 
already incurred,
already dynamically melting away,
multicultural disinvestment
becoming a more monoculturally anthropocentric
played-out,
thrown away 
rabid 
overpopulating "I'll think about your disappearing kids' futures tomorrow"
negative dynamic
sad 
depressing.

What this superfluity of pessimistic denial fails to claim,
and build upon,
grows our ebb and flow dynamic of consciousness
and climates of imagined and historically remembered health
delineating pathological climate trends
in this our time 
as we all struggle to breathe
more cooperatively together.

If we have not become conscious of health
then we cannot define pathological boundaries thereto,
just as we could not have a dynamic verb for benighting
if we had never reached for enlightening.

Theories of relative evolutions
lead developing learners of language and culture
to conclude
"OK, you say benighting climate pathology,
I say enlightened healthy ecopolitical climate,
at least for me and mine."

Yet there are no LeftBrain contrasts of relativity
if not older RightBrain dipolar comparisons of interrelationship
between internally dynamic and dissonant nutritional climates.

Bilaterally interdependent consciousness
of DNA transcribing Earth's regenerativity
ebbs verbal pathology
and flows healthy nurturing phases
of co-arising becoming dynamic consciousness
inviting
co-conscious healthy climates
in-Yin as out-Yang 
mutually symbiotic.

Paraphrasing Bucky Fuller,
DualBlind concave cosmology
as SpecialCase Time-squared, 
enlightening business as usual,
co-operative 4D prime-relational convex,
Left's Theory of Relativity
with Right's older metaphysical eco-inductions 
of/for CoOperative Prime Relationship.

The sky is becoming faded
as Earth becomes inundated with too many aristocratic chickens
telling each other what not to cooperatively do
and what to do to control resulting LeftBrain dominant
Anger Climate-Management issues.