Román Leão

Tag: nature

  • Philosophical Musings: On The Garden

    A lot has been made over the past 3,000 or so years about our sudden eviction from the Garden of Eden and all its verdant paradisaical splendor. Sure, you don’t miss your water until your well runs dry and all that, but it always struck me as strange that our concepts of such a state of arboreal grace must be derived from what we know, or have known, here on Earth. I think it would do humankind well to consider the possibility that we never actually left the garden. The sooner that we stop treating our planet like a divorced-dad apartment, the better.

    At the end of that unpleasantness with the Tree of Knowledge, Yahweh is said to have set cherubim with flaming swords in place to guard the way back so we wouldn’t mess with the Tree of Life. At the risk of being pedantic, and/or struck by lightning, according to Genesis, He/She/Them never said not to mess with that one, but it is probably too late to point that out.

    After the first big reset during Noah’s flood, it seems to me that the fences are all down, but unlike the Jurassic Park movie franchise wherein the dangerous raptors always find the weak spots (quite literally, the de-fence) in the defense of the garden, we are the apex predator and we have been on the rampage outside the gates since time immemorial.

    If we put aside the avaricious yearning for yet another paradise, we can likewise drop the handy scapegoating of the fairer sex—and, by extension, our primordial mother Earth—that has allowed for the rise and domination of a patriarchy that has yet to earn a spot in the playoffs, let alone an unbroken string of participation championships reaching back for millennia.

    After the second big reset, the coming of the Christ, his teachings, and most importantly, his sacrifice, we should have been satisfied with the biggest “Get Out of Jail Free” card that has ever been dealt out, instead—especially with the onset of the industrial age—we have subjugated the very garden we were tasked with nurturing, all in the name of progress. Our spiritual health has been separated from the physical, when they must be one and the same. Without the shadow of the Fall of humankind, would we have allowed the shadows that plague our planet to proliferate?

    I believe that we were given the Tree of Knowledge so that we might better tend the garden. If it was on me to write another narrative, I would have the Creator say, “All right, so now you have the manual, you two smartypants. I’ll be back to check your work. Don’t fuck it up, or I shall smite thee!”

  • Out on the Serpentine [poema]

    I walk the serpentine
    Path where dust settles
    Late and yellowjackets prey
    On bones left standing in
    The middle of the road

    I walk the ages
    Past where Gypsies camp
    Back in the pale shadows
    Of summer slowly turning to
    The harvest downwind

    I walk beside you
    Now and do not profess
    To know the mystery of days
    Caught in amber or what happens
    Next; I wonder myself

    Sometimes

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Asylum (Padrão dos Descobrimentos) [poema]

    Even as children, we suspected our world
    was broken—as if our hometown had been lifted
    and dropped from a much higher place.
    Everyday during the long summers we explored
    the edges of the pieces—the spots
    where the pattern no longer matched up.

    Thirty years later, it’s harder to get up
    the motivation to get out and map the world,
    to find the forgotten corners and secret spots.
    The veil of mystery has been lifted,
    and the edge of the continent explored.
    The great unknown now muffled by a sense of place.

    From Yerba Buena to Eureka, I thought I had found the place
    to put down roots—and as many times—I pulled them up.
    A privateer, up and down the coast I wandered,
    only to miss the hidden parts of the world.
    No longer lost, my spirits are still lifted
    when I think about those magic spots.

    Days spent in rapture until our eyes saw spots,
    we rode from place to place.
    As we grew, our dreams were lifted,
    until too soon—we just grew up.
    It’s every man’s destiny to make his way in the world,
    and every boy’s to forget the land he conquered.

    Down in the creeks and ravines we explored,
    searching for those perfect spots
    away from the bustle of the world.
    We were driven to find a mystic place,
    somewhere where the rules were not put up,
    and our pirate banner could be lifted.

    With found bits of lumber are battlements yet lifted
    into treetops no longer noticed or surveyed?
    The old men below don’t bother to look up,
    knowing that gazing into the sun pays nothing but blindness.
    With everything marked and in its proper place,
    wonder fades into the background of the world.

    If only the veil of maturity could be lifted up,
    and we could again see the world as an enchanted place.
    The places we knew as youth could provide asylum
    even for the grown.

    Published in The Hot Air Quarterly, Number Sixteen

    Photo/Ray Larsen