If We Are Moral So Too A Tree

If We Are Moral So Too A Tree

february 2020

jp

Takeoff from Toronto Billy Bishop Airport.

I want to be impressed by the endless sea of city lights.

And I am.

Wasted to use words like awesome or spectacular,

Because they confer respect and marvelling.

Can’t use fearsome or shocking,

I’d have to be enthralled by us humans

Or believe that I matter

Which I don’t.

I am too far past the assumption that morality is involved…

Morality…

What is that?

For if we are moral

So too a tree.

My feeling is more indifference to the magnanimity

No, the ubiquity of the species…

Buildings people machines lights…

All too common to any longer impress.

The pleasure remains in knowing

The people I just met in Thunder Bay

Tanner and Rosemary and John and Petyal

Me invited into the details of their lives

Simplefull, meaningfull, eternal without time or measure…

Me understanding that they

Hold no responsibility to

The irrevocable squander of the species

Itself wasted, as all things it touches.

Because my new friends

They were just born here

They did not ask permission from the stars

More likely that the stars themselves put us here.

In this, an odd perception

That the individual and the species are separate creatures

Incomparable

Such that any effort to do so, compare

Is pointless.

And if you, I, me, we are moral…

So too a tree.