The Genesis of a Sensibility and the Gulf Coast Oil Disaster of 2010

Abstract

Intimate biographical, urgent environmental, and political reflections come together in this aesthetically refined depth psychological excursion beyond self and subjectivity to the transpersonal field of the lumen naturae. From a fateful family car accident through reveries of childhood, school, Boy Scouts, and the influence of a local earth mother and a nature guru sent by Providence, the evolution of a Midwestern child's keen eye and ardent affection for the natural world proceeds tumultuously from art school and a crucial dissociative crisis to a singularly enchanted morning of bird watching on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. There the jarring impact of the explosive British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on the same adult personality 30 hours later and fifty miles off shore is elaborated with no small sense of horror. Colorful observations of birds, insects and plant species, habitats and locales, personal dreams and key excerpts from an old Ecuador travel journal are subtly interwoven, then highlighted by the collectively significant proclamation of fierce political will by a powerful black woman to her countless earthly children in for an era torn with war and ecological outrages. This prose poem seeks throughout to characterize the unique position of our reflective human consciousness poised between the dazzling if troubled extended world and the inwardly receding expanse of psychic space brimming with living images and struck through with myriad scintillae, the rods and cones of the imaginal retina with which we see and derive our capacity for wonder.