A Prayer Left on the Beach at Sunrise

I am part of this greater whole. I know that.

I  am all breath, in and out, or a heart beating the march of time as no mechanical clock can record. I am both the feet and footsteps of a people racing headlong into sunset.

Last week, the boys and I joined a team of conservationists (Save A Turtle) that track and protect the nesting of sea turtles in Florida. Twice a week, we will walk Smather's Beach at sunrise when the contour of the sand is most evident. This is the time of day for tracking. The wind is more likely to be still and the asymmetric, inverted commas left behind by passing loggerhead turtles will lie a little longer in cool and silence before jet skis and parasailers arrive.

Green sea turtles nest here, too. The green turtle's path mirrors itself, one side against the other, with a tail drag in the middle which deepens to form something like an exclamation point when the turtle stops to rest. If the path doesn't quite match up in symmetry, it could be due to an old injury -- one flipper sliced half back so that the turtle drags and swishes through the coarse coral sand in a path unique to its species.

If you have trouble identifying a track, and it is not a classic or text book case, our teacher says, "then don't dwell on the oddity of the track. Look for familiar signs instead."

Look for the familiar signs. Is that how its done?

Space travel, navigating stars and planets, moons and comets... just look for the familiar signs that lead to what you best understand. Look for the paths that make known territory out of the infinite mystery in which we live. Look for signs of life.

If I am faced with your anger, I must find in you the traces -- miniscule and vast -- of the love that I know. I will look to your hands and remember them soft. Your cheeks I will recall as they bowed in deep reflection, and into your eyes, I will look beyond the barricades. I will soften the way with my own gaze until I feel the depths I know, familiar and warm.

I will find my way through.

This is a prayer scrolled in the sand at dawn: Don't look for the oddity of the track. Look for the familiar signs, and you will know.

Another* Modest Proposal

Yesterday, while doing our weekly trash pick up at the estuary behind the Winn-Dixie, it occurred to me once more what a national treasure our children are. Watching my nine and eleven-year-old sons snake their slender bodies through the mangroves to reach for empty beer and vodka bottles, I marveled at their tenacious dexterity and the value of its good use in this application.

Still, I am aware that our family is but one small segment of the population discovering a hidden value and economy amongst us. I feel moved to make a proposal at large that includes the use of our youth in ways that they are often naturally drawn to and that may support us all in avoiding our rather unnatural demise as a race -- at least by weeks, months, or years.

Why not employ the children to clean up behind us full time? The empty beer cases, old shirts, shoes, and vodka bottles stacking up behind the Winn-Dixie do not mark an anomaly in human behavior and experience; there are circumstantial dumpsites in many gullies, streams, and empty lots near shopping centers. Why not have our children clean them up?

Children are small. Their bodies are built for shimmying up trees to grab flyaway plastic bags and crawling between bushes in search of wayward styrofoam peanuts. They are naturally compelled to hunt and climb -- I say, let them do it for a purpose! Adults let the wind and weather carry off to nether reaches what we casually toss behind us. The results pose too great a difficulty in the clean up. And despite the fact that we inevitably attempt to teach our children to pick up after themselves, little respect is bestowed upon the janitors of the world. Children generally are not seen as citizens either (how many public restroom sinks are built for people three or four feet tall?). Let them join the ranks!

Children have little else of value to contribute. We withhold them from the workforce lest they provide overmuch competition in our capitalistic hierarchies, and the test scores from public schools are reportedly so poor that our efforts in teaching and administration appear to be a waste. I suggest that we cut our losses and send them all outdoors where they long to be.

Surely, there will be concern for the safety of this venture. Despite the fact that we regularly use our children as laboratory rats in testing the safe consumptive levels of FD&C yellow number six and the like, we do profess a certain level of parental concern for our young as a whole. This is healthy and sound! We harbor this instinct to protect the future of our people.

I propose that we simply realign our strategies to meet our needs for sustainability. In light of the fact that we already subject our children to genetically modified corn syrup, endless electronic games, and artificial colors and flavors of all sorts, their genetic viability across multiple generations is already likely compromised. The greater problem we face at this moment is overpopulation. Forfeiting a few children to toxins received in the process of clean up or in the act of diving for submerged shopping carts would not be so great a loss when one considers how far this "pruning" puts us ahead in terms of saving humanity as a whole.

In light of sustainability and full circles, another significant advantage to employing our youth as litter patrol is that their time spent in clean up frees the adult population to consume and discard their trash helter-skelter as they please, thereby closing the loop so that our children do not ever "finish" the job and risk unemployment. Their work has a component of built-in security in this respect.

Finally, the use of child labor to clean up adult waste (of all sorts! Why stop at just litter?) allows us an unprecedented opportunity -- even a demand -- to show up in integrity. Our children will clean up the polluted world we are leaving them. They will inherit the oil-spills and extinctions that are by-products of our petroleum addiction. They will be left with the countless square miles of shopping bags that float in southern oceans like the unnatural ghosts of jellyfish past. They will take on the consequences of our consumption and our waste as it affects weather patterns and water rising, wars between people, and the collapse of biodiversity and sustainability of whole ecosystems. Why pretend anything different?

This is our chance to really show up for the next generation. So, let's do it! Pitch a wrapper. Drive a car. Employ a child. It may be our only chance.


*With all due respect to "A Modest Proposal" of Jonathan Swift.