It seems to me that humanity is poised at the edge of a great and unforgiving precipice.

I often feel in these times that I am standing at that edge peering over into the void below, wondering what a plunge over would mean and how it would be possible to step back away from that edge, reimagine ourselves as part of this vast universe, redefine our place on this great spinning rock with its thin blanket of air, water, and life, and perhaps find our way back to the forests and grasslands that are our home.

Stimulated by an essay on Medium, I have just re-read, and re-posted on Shunyata’s Apprentice, something I wrote back in September of 2015, an essay on Ta-Nahisi Coates’ wonderful book Between the World and Me. Reading it in the context of the explosion of hatred and virulent, open racism that has characterized our society in the past six months leaves me a bit breathless, anxious, even fearful.

Coates’ brilliant conflation of the social forces that create racism and war with the impulses and social/economic structures that lead to the continuing destruction of the environment, viewed in the light of current events, puts me in fear of our lives.

We are truly clinging to that crumbling precipice by our fingernails.

I will re-post some of my past essays from Shunyata’s Apprentice here, and intend to transfer most of my current-events-related blogging to this site.