Earth Day 2022

Earth Day 2022: A New Tensegrity for the Anthropocene

This Earth Day I find myself losing stability as the war in Ukraine, rising crime rates, little to no shift in carbon emissions and excruciating pandemic losses conspire to strip away my ground. That is why I am choosing to be part of the Now What?! Opening Ceremony on April 22, starting at 12:30 PM PDT, with my friends from Climate Change & Consciousness. I want to share my poems and hear yours; I want to join hands with others around the world reeling from repeated violations and the suffering of the innocent.

The word tensegrity was coined by Buckminster Fuller. It is an elision of tension and integrity. It is a structural principle. It also applies to anatomy and what happens to human structures when they are compressed. Babies being born, for instance, are on a continual quest for tensegrity in a rapidly changing environment. Like birth, all tensegrity has a collaborative component.

I am seeking a new tensegrity right now, on this Easter Sunday Ramadan Passover Day in the Pacific Northwest. Destabilized and aching with grief, I turn to my words and my outreach for survival, and for a new tensegrity that could come from sharing them with you.

The new tensegrity is a collective structure. This is what Climate Change & Consciousness aims to generate. It is possible that from my vulnerable, wobbly, shaken place, dancing so uncontrollably with the mystery, in the free fall that comes from living in a dissolving world with eyes wide open, the tensegrity for the Anthropocene will make itself known It may be forming from these very words I type here as I invite and ask and join.