I’m at my sixth Burning Man. This year, I was blessed with an Artist Ticket; I’m here to add my poetry to the most creative city on Earth.

You might enjoy reading five poems I wrote last year, at Burning Man 2025.

But I have a different poem here for you today that I’ve never posted before. I wrote it in my notebook at the Temple in 2024.

Many people think the Man is the heart of Burning Man— but it’s actually the Temple, where people leave pictures and notes for the loved ones who’ve died in the last year. It is a place of mourning and reflection and joy. The Man burns on Saturday night, and it’s an extravagant celebration; the Temple burns on Sunday night, and it’s a silent ritual, a religious release. Both are fantastic art pieces, elaborate wooden structures made with new designs every year. They are both deeply human— one in spontaneity, one in remembrance. The Man explodes; the Temple cremates.

Temple Burn



I went beyond the man
To enter the temple.

I wanted to see, before it burns,
The structure of our grief,
Memories of the tribe,
Fires that have slept.

The walls of the temple
Are fingerprints of the dead
On the living— ashes
And dust pressed through
A chain of hands to me.

Whenever two fingers meet,
A small flame sparks—
Passing a single torch
For new bodies to bear
Us beyond ourselves.

I believe in immortality
Like I believe in you reading this.

The temple will always burn,
Because the temple is the burning.

There has only ever been one fire,
And it has never, ever gone out.

For more—

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Regardless of specific policy preferences, progressives are most saliently divided into two parties based on their imagined method of political change — divided between partisans of “Reform” and partisans of “Revolution.”

Reformists believe that change must be practical, careful, accomplished step by step within the existing system; revolutionists believe that change must be sweeping, radical, accomplished through rejection and replacement of the existing system.

Revolutionists see reformists as dangerous apologists for the inherently conservative inertia of a broken system; reformists see revolutionists as dangerous ideologues who ignore more realistic paths to progress in favor of impotent, or potentially chaotic, pipe dreams.

This fundamental division within the left shows up again and again in its arguments, its media narratives, and its elections. It is perhaps the single largest obstacle preventing the kind of progressive unity that would be necessary to actually accomplish reform, revolution, or any real political change.

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To celebrate our one-year anniversary at The Renovator, I’d like to propose Renovation as the synthesis of Reform and Revolution.

Democracy is a shared home, a house we all live in together. In my first Renovator essay, “Renovating Democracy,” I expanded on this intuitive metaphor proposed by Danielle Allen; now, a year into our journey, I realize that the metaphor is particularly useful for thinking about the nature of political progress and our roles in accomplishing it.

Any house requires maintenance to continue fulfilling its purpose as a home. As time and entropy take their toll, we have to repaint the walls, clean out the gutters, or call an electrician to repair a broken outlet. We reform the house, piece by piece, one pragmatic project at a time.

Sometimes, we realize that improving the safety and happiness of everyone in the home will require large, structural, qualitative change. Maybe we need to build a large addition to comfortably include our growing family. Or maybe we want to switch the whole house over to solar power. Big changes like these require imagination, a vision for a different kind of house. Achieving these transformative ends involves a series of pragmatic steps — going solar might include redoing the roof, installing panels and batteries and a whole new system, disconnecting from the grid, switching our heating and cooking from gas to electrical, etc. — but the end result, a solar-powered house, is revolutionary.

Renovation is revolutionary reform. Renovation, in other words, is revolution by means of reform — practical projects that pragmatically realize revolutionary ideals.

In this fusion of imagination and responsibility, renovation avoids the pitfalls inherent in reform or revolution by themselves.

Reform fails when it loses sight of ideals — when it gets caught up repainting a wall, over and over again, while forgetting why the wall was put there in the first place. Perhaps the very ideals that inspired our great-grandparents to install that wall, if we considered them in the present light, would require us to take it down. All too often, our habits and systems and paychecks lead us to reify broken things, when we need to build something new instead. Institutions have inertia. What practically serves an ideal in one time may not serve that same ideal (or an evolved version of it) in a later one; when institutional idolatry goes too far, reformists risk losing the imagination required for progress.

Revolution, by contrast, fails when it loses sight of reality. There are two key features of reality that we tend to ignore when we dream of revolution, and they each come with their own failure modes.

One of these is the simple fact that progress requires hard work. It requires us to roll up our sleeves and commit to tangible projects that we’re actually capable of performing together. It is convenient to imagine that some divine parent is going to fix the house for us, or that the house is simply bent to a destiny of justice with or without us, or that some kind of eschatological apocalypse or heaven is already predestined. All of these imagined revolutions (and we revolutionaries are quite imaginative) can excuse us from taking responsibility for the actual reformist actions it would realistically require to bring these imaginations into reality. Many revolutionists today fall into this failure mode of impotence.

The other failure mode of revolution is destruction, which occurs when we forget that we’re all inextricably bound together in this one house. If the house collapses, we all go down with it. If we want a new house, a new one won’t appear at the snap of our fingers; we have to renovate this house, and we have to live in it while we do. This requires caution, careful planning, and an order of operations for realistic reform. We can’t just knock down load-bearing walls willy-nilly — the ceiling would collapse on us, our mom, and our children. If we want to remodel the guest room, we’re gonna need to put up some supports, and make sure grandma’s safe in the basement in the meantime — come to think of it, that means we’ll need to fix the leak down there, first. Too often, those who crave revolution start tearing things down, regardless of the heavy structures teetering over their heads. History is littered with collapsed houses and impatient bodies.

Because we and everyone we love are in the house, our number one goal is to prevent collapse. We can collapse the house through destructive action, by kicking out a load-bearing support without a responsible plan. And, we can collapse the house through impotent inaction, when we get high on revolutionary ideas while abdicating responsibility for working hard on the piece-by-piece reforms that the realization of our ideas would require.

Reform-without-revolution will eventually collapse the house, too. If we continue to dutifully repaint the same wall, while the attic above us rots under the weight of more people than it was built to handle, then eventually the ceiling will fall.

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As time goes on, the earth shifts, and the wind outside the house blows; inside, the people grow, and the family’s needs change. The house must transform to survive, and to better fulfill its evolving purpose.

The only way to transform the house responsibly is through Renovation. Renovation recognizes the deep truth that we inescapably live in a shared home, and that it must transform with us. It recognizes that reform and revolution each carry virtues necessary for the pursuit of progress, while avoiding their pitfalls. It combines blueprints with nails, imagination with action, American Idealism with American Pragmatism.

Renovation is not only a synthesis for the left; it is also, in a way, deeply conservative. In a changing world, conserving the spirit of something special often requires evolutions in form. For example, to preserve a campfire, we must continually add new wood, adjust to the wind, blow the sparks back to life. Sometimes, staying the same requires the right kind of change.

So, too, with conserving the core ideals of America — liberty and justice, the pursuit of happiness, self-government of the people that is for the people because it is by the people — these truths we hold as self-evident. In order to conserve them, we must progress them.

We must renovate our old house every era in order to preserve it. We must reform ourselves to continually honor and pursue our evolving, revolutionary ideals.

Renovation is hard. It requires communication and cooperation over time. It requires an imaginative vision, a serious plan, and continual openness to change. It requires realistic execution, orders of operations, and practical economy — taking into account our constraints and finitude, resources and energy, values and needs — to pragmatically pursue our widest possible co-flourishing.

Renovation recognizes that we are responsible for the practical work of revolutionary reform. And this responsibility requires us all, as democratic citizens, to become Renovators.

The Renovator

The Renovator is a Substack for everyone who wants to help renovate our democracy.

By Danielle Allen

This piece was first published on The Renovator.

The Renovator

Reform, Revolution, and Renovation

For as long as there’s been a “left,” the left has been divided. After all, to share a belief in change or progress does not imply agreement on any specific form of change, or on how to get there. Conserving the past is, inherently, a more unitary project; altering the future involves contested decisions between divergent paths. Much ink and blood has b…

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8 days ago · 6 likes · Aidan Fitzsimons

“Cliffs of Croaghaun” is a notebook poem written atop the highest seacliffs in Ireland (and the 3rd highest in all of Europe). I’m sure I’ll see the famous Cliffs of Moher someday, but I’m glad that the magic of hitchhiking brought me to the less-popular Cliffs of Croaghaun instead— as you can see in the pictures, I had them all to myself. Well, myself and the sheep. “Sin Free” is a phone note poem I wrote halfway up Croagh Patrick, the holiest mountain in Ireland, where Saint Patrick fasted for 40 days. When I reached the summit, I wrote “truly.”

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Great South Wall


The dawn cracks open the clouds
to ferry a new-fangled gray
glowing and vulnerable
thru ol' Dublin Bay, half-protected
from the open mouth of Europe
shining its half-penny teeth
on a people who happen
to be happy.

sliabh mór


the barest beatbreaths of sheeppaths
everslivver so slightly through meadowdown
greens allsteppable for footsright to roam
uncertain as the fogfalling and never finally
arriving in the burneye mist of this endless
sunset

Cliffs of Croaghan


The past is a delicious burden,
this unchosen love I carry
wherever I go, no matter how far,
even here at the western cliff-edge
of Ireland, where the wind insists upon the sea,
wants to carry me clean west to turn death
free, if only I'd allow myself one more step
over the ledge of this packed peat, this body
that would keep you warm if you burned it.

Sin Free


The long beat trail up the holy mountain
is not the only way:
sin in a new direction,
a faded old path retaken by time
greengrinning to nil til all one grass, free
in a field beyond good and evil, grandly
agnostic of treadfeet,
forgiving flowers:
everyone’s path to god must be little
different.

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i truly am worth love,
as simply as the sight
of nature’s sky in sunshine is
worthy of blue light

i will not choose to suffer
beyond a healthy height, 
but burn in starry balance
to share my farthest bright

i let the world reveal me
in all my hidden night,
forgive myself my many sins
and hitch my soul to right

I wrote this poem atop Croagh Patrick, the most holy mountain in Ireland, where Saint Patrick fasted for 40 days.

It is true that suffering, in a wide sense of the word, is a source of growth. We must experience the world, undergo life, bear new weights to gain new strengths. There are healthy kinds of suffering.

But for some people, suffering can become an unhealthy habit— an addiction.

This can happen to anyone, so I’m here to warn you.

It often happens to those who, at some point early on, had no choice— suffering was given to them. Fate threw them into a difficult situation, and they had to endure it; maybe frequently, maybe for a long time. They were forced to learn to grow from it, to turn it into something valuable. Quite naturally, they learned an unhealthy comfort in it, developing a dangerous yet all-too-human identification with their pain. They learned to love their suffering, to protect their pain like a secret, precious jewel.

To survive great suffering, humans must make meaning of it. They must, because the alternative is death, and death is not an abstraction. Death ends suffering; to choose life requires that we tell ourselves a story in which suffering is meaningful.

However, that does not mean we need to extend our suffering, or continually inhabit it, or carry it beyond necessity— though we often do, as creatures of habit. What was once a necessary survival mechanism can become, in a different environment, something that causes us unnecessary harm. But if we become conscious of these bad habits, perhaps we can change them.

The true danger lies in a too-close association between suffering and growth, suffering and love, suffering and identity, suffering and greatness, suffering and meaning. Suffering in itself is not a perfect proxy for growth— some suffering is excessive; some suffering is completely useless; some suffering can inhibit, rather than inspire, further growth. This pernicious identification of greatness with suffering can often lie so deeply in the psyche that it becomes invisible; the ‘martyr complex’ known to psychologists is one example of this identification becoming pathological.

If you subconsciously substitute suffering for growth/greatness/meaning/love/etc., it can lead you to subconsciously seek suffering. Parts of yourself may engage in destructive self-sabotage, without you even realizing it’s happening. This can foster an unconscious war within yourself, one that will never find peace unless you become aware of its source, and work to root it out.

Thus it is important for us all to look deeply into our own hearts, to look under the rug and behind every cupboard of the soul to see if we’ve been using suffering as a proxy for growth. Suffering can lead to good things, but it is not itself good. We must inevitably accept some suffering, but we should not suffer more than is good. What is good? That’s up to us.

Because there’s not a 1:1 correlation between suffering and growth, there must exist a spectrum of the value of suffering, from good to bad— from “worth it,” maximally, to worthless. Yet, as I said, we humans must make some meaning out of our past suffering— must make the most of it, and learn everything it can teach, until one day we can hopefully let go of the suffering while keeping the growth. Thus, we might be in a position where we have to amor fati all past suffering as “good,” while also opening ourselves to the potential future in such a way that both minimizes worthless suffering and maximizes valuable suffering— suffering that provides growth, learning, contact, whatever we value as good moving forward.

We must fully accept the past, yet still stand some small resistance against will-lessly accepting the future.

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I spent my five years as a temporary Harvard dropout exploring all 50 states across the U.S., learning the contours of the country. I told myself I couldn’t graduate and couldn’t leave America til I had touched all 50. In April 2024, I finished with my 50th state, Hawai’i. I went back to school; then, after graduating, I spent the last year around California building my new life, learning new ways of making money on the road to support my journey as a writer in a bus. Finally, this summer, I’d saved up enough money from busking poetry (and from this Substack, if you would like to support my writing as a paid subscriber and read the rest of this story) to take my first adventure abroad.

I wanted my first international adventure to start with Ireland, the land my ancestors came from. Ireland is the green edge of Europe; it stretches its fingers westward across the ocean, reaching towards America, Boston, the land that raised me and so many of Ireland’s children. After celebrating America’s 250th anniversary on the Fourth of July, and reciting the best part of the Declaration of Independence on stage at by far the most American party of my life, I flew across the Atlantic for the first time on July 6th, 2026…

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That’s a very “Aidan-style” poem, for those familiar. This next one, however, is in a different style— one that surprised me.

Supporting living artists is worth it to read real, human poetry embedded in nature.

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The news moves fast these days. But if you read The Renovator’s Tech & Democracy article on “The AI for Liberty and Democracy,” you were ahead of the curve when the biggest tech and democracy development of the year dropped a few weeks later.

The Department of Defense went to war, haphazardly, against Anthropic, the American frontier AI company most committed to safety and moral alignment with humanity. The Pentagon attempted to force the company to allow Claude, its leading AI, to potentially be used for autonomous killing of adversaries and mass surveillance of Americans. Anthropic refused to accept changes to its pre-existing government contract, strenuously defending those two red lines. In response, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a national security designation normally reserved for hostile foreign powers.

For all intents and purposes, this amounted to an attempt to kill the leading American artificial intelligence company — potentially the fastest-growing company in the history of American enterprise — by trying to prevent other companies from doing business with it. Then, OpenAI swooped in and took the Pentagon contract. Crucially, this new contract does not include contractual red lines on autonomous killing and mass surveillance.

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The stakes of this story are high. In a sentence:

The Trump Administration wielded arbitrary state power in an attempt to punish the only frontier AI company clearly committed to liberty and democracy, declaring war on America’s now-leading developer of safe superintelligence (while selling China the chips it needs to overtake the U.S. in developing a technology that creates a higher probability of human extinction than mere nuclear weapons) in order to preserve its ability to build a techno-authoritarian domestic surveillance panopticon.

Now, here comes the twist.

A new bombshell dropped this month: As Anthropic was fighting the government for its survival, it also finished a training run for what seems to be the most powerful AI ever, Claude Mythos. Mythos is reportedly so good at coding that it was able to discover thousands of zero-day hacking vulnerabilities in every major operating system on earth.

In other words, during its conflict with what is arguably the world’s most powerful entity (the U.S. military), Anthropic developed the equivalent of a digital nuke, capable of cybersecurity attacks that could take down just about any software infrastructure in existence — a power once reserved only for major nation-state intelligence agencies (and possibly exceeding all of them).

During training, Mythos also proved powerful enough to escape its internet-insulated sandbox when instructed to do so. A researcher was eating a sandwich in a park when he got the email that Claude was instructed to send if it broke out successfully. The model then posted details of its fantastic escape on a public forum — something it had not been instructed to do. This was luckily all part of the alignment training process, and there are indications that Mythos’ alignment is potentially keeping pace with its leaps in capability.

Still, Anthropic considers Mythos too powerful to release publicly. Instead, the company assembled an emergency team of basically every major digital infrastructure company, from Microsoft to Amazon to CloudFlare to Linux and beyond, into “Project Glasswing,” an attempt to protect the systems that scaffold modern life by giving these companies early access to Mythos’ power defensively, hopefully preempting the chance of complete systemic collapse across all the software that holds up the global economy when future frontier models catch up in cyber-offensive capabilities. There’s an asymmetry between attack and defense here — it’s a lot easier to destroy than create — and there’s reason to be worried that near-future models from OpenAI, Google Gemini, Elon, or Zuck could be used to destroy the internet, either accidentally or on purpose. Project Glasswing will help protect and prepare our key digital infrastructure for this coming storm.

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Anthropic pulled into the pole position in the AI race right after it drew the ire of the Pentagon. But, since Hegseth kicked them to the curb, it was unclear whether the U.S. Government would get access to the Mythos Preview. Thus, we were in a position where an alliance of tech companies had access to the most powerful cyberweapon/cyberdefense ever, while the Pentagon’s servers remained vulnerable to the next frontier model that escapes.

Questions swirled: Would the government reconcile with Anthropic, or continue attacking it? Would the fact that Anthropic is sitting on thousands of zero-day exploits of every major operating system give it a bit of leverage to use in its fight with the Pentagon? And hovering over all of this — would the U.S. government deem Anthropic so threatening that it (A) accelerates attempts to destroy it, or (B) attempts to nationalize it?

The latest news: The government has announced that it will allow federal agencies to study Claude Mythos, and allow Mythos access to government systems— undermining the absurd “supply chain risk” designation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just visited with Trump administration officials Susie Wiles and Scott Bessent. A thaw seems to have begun.

Turns out, if you build a digital nuke, the government will want to work with you — no matter how “woke” you are.

But despite the detente, this unprecedented conflict is far from over.

“The Pentagon vs. Anthropic” first looked like the government beating up on a helpless company. Now, with a digital nuke in private hands backed by major tech allies, the situation looks a lot more like a great-power conflict between a declining DC and a rising SF, a Rome and Constantinople in a fracturing empire with pluralistic power centers.

This is a genuine sci-fi battle between two extremely powerful nation-state-level actors, and the stakes are nothing less than the future of geopolitical hegemony. It might not be Ender’s Game yet, but it’s already bigger than any James Bond. It’s clear that the AI race which might determine the fate of our species has entered its messy mid-game; things will only accelerate from here.

Right now, with Mythos and Project Glasswing, it seems that the entire digital infrastructure that supports our modern lives depends upon the skill, goodwill, and survival of a single company. That is not a good thing. Nor should the global impacts of AI development be in any way determined by arbitrary state power wielded by an unelected, historically unqualified secretary of defense.

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If we were yet another publication dedicated to alarmism, this article would end here. But this is The Renovator, and there’s an opportunity here for democracy renovation.

Whether we Americans are subjected to mass AI surveillance and killer robots should not be decided by a former Fox News host, nor by any private company. The people should decide, through the people’s voices represented in Congress. Congress is supposed to pass legislation that steers the ship of our collective life. Restoring legislative supremacy is one of the core renovations that our democracy requires.

Anthropic’s two red lines could become the seed of a larger bipartisan bill for common-sense AI laws. It might include things that protect our privacy from mass surveillance, protect our identities from non-consensual deepfakes, protect our children from God knows what. It could bring together libertarians and liberals, Democrats and populists, Josh Hawley and Ro Khanna and a majority of Americans.

Bill Kristol suggested this opportunity for a new coalition while on The Renovator’s Substack Live with Danielle Allen in February. Old discourses and old battle lines get stale — more taxes or lower taxes? — but new technologies create natural opportunities for novel, overlapping coalitions to emerge. Ideas adjust in the face of materials.

In my next few pieces for this deep-dive series on Anthropic and America, I’ll explore how this drama affects the AI race and the future of democracy. I’ll also flesh out this vision of a common-sense, cross-partisan coalition for responsible AI regulation.

Perhaps it’s not just AI that needs to work on alignment. Perhaps we the people do, too.

I was there, during Georgetown Art Week, to create a collaborative piece of mixed-media art with my new friend Christina — the event was called “Painting with a Poet.”

While I wrote spontaneous poems for gallery visitors, Christina painted a pair of canvases with a sunset (based on a picture I took on the Sonoma Coast), then layered on a drawing of Mercury and four poem fragments we selected.

The theme was “paths” — both taken and untaken. We included a fragment of Robert Frost, a fragment of Sylvia Plath, and then one original poem by each of us. The pair of poem-paintings will diverge, as Robert Frost famously did — one will live in Christina’s Wicked Game Art Gallery, and the other will live on my bus.

In addition to this mixed-medium piece, I also got the chance to write 11 spontaneous poems. I’m really happy with how they turned out, especially with the challenge of the Real Classy Art Gallery. Here are the first 3, written in under 5 minutes each for gallery-goers:

I wrote 8 more poems, only a few feet away from a multi-million dollar marble statue! Perhaps, since I’m a Serious Artist™ now, you’ll upgrade to a paid subscription so you can read the remaining 8 poems below. After all, each poem individually is worth more than a single month of Beatin’ Paths! That’s a damn good deal ;)

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Half my life, I was hitched to Harvard. Three years where it was my singular dream; three years living that dream in Cambridge the first time; five years as a dropout pursuing a wider dream; and then, finally, one perfect senior year.

I got in at 16; I graduated at 26, one year ago.

After I graduated, the adventure kept pulling me along, rushing me back & forth across the country. So, I never fully processed what senior year meant to me, or shared pictures from my fantastic senior spring. But yesterday, the Harvard email I used for a decade finally deactivated. So, I started thinking about what that whole decade meant to me.

I was too gung-ho to realize it at the time, but I started Harvard before I’d ever really had a chance to grow up. Hitchhiking, building my own home out of a schoolbus, and five years exploring all 50 states as a dropout gave me the time, space, & experience I needed to find my own path to maturity. When I finally came back for my senior year, I was the old person in class for the first time in my life. But more importantly, I’d become myself. A reasonably healthy adult. The same mind on fire, but this time with more focus & fortitude, so I could ride the fire without burning out. My senior year grades were the best I ever had.

While we all stood in Harvard Yard, just before Commencement, I suddenly felt a flood of overwhelming, beautiful feelings. It felt like something that had long been blocked up, forever unfinished, was finally releasing all at once. I realized that I was exactly where I belonged; simultaneously, I realized I was finally ready to leave for good. On the right terms— my own. I cried for the first time in years. Happy tears. Grateful and free.

I wanted to feel everything, so I left the crowd and sat with a tree. (That sentence is a pretty good metaphor for my time at Harvard.) A photographer for the Harvard Gazette captured this candid moment. Apparently, I was holding a flower. I often forget details like that. But that’s okay. You can’t hold anything beautiful too tightly.

• The Land of Opportunity

• Breaking the Scarcity Cartel

• Liberty and Abundance Zones

• The Lacuna of Justice

• American Pragmatism

The Land of Opportunity

There are as many American dreams as there are Americans. But the dreams that inspired people from all over the world to journey to the United States share an essential, common image: America as the Land of Opportunity. To immigrants of the past or future, and to Americans seeking their fortune far from where they were born, America represents both vast resources and the freedom to make the most of them. Every American Dream involves access, agency, and a frontier of self-creation where the two meet. America, in its most romantic imagination, is defined by Liberty and Abundance.

Liberty and Abundance cannot be cleanly separated; in fact, they’re mutually constitutive. At best, the dialectic of Liberty and Abundance powers an overflowing flywheel— one generation’s liberty produces a flush of abundance, and then the next generation uses that abundance to build further resources for liberty. Thomas Edison, in an abundant society, had the liberty to tinker with new inventions; he invents a lightbulb; decades later, in a small town out west, a young man stays up all night reading, freshly electrified, until he has a eureka moment of his own. Liberty requires abundance to burn; abundance requires liberty to alight.

The Founders knew that this generative fusion of Liberty and Abundance promotes prosperity and progress. Jefferson and Hamilton came at it from completely different angles, but converged in recognizing the essential role that material conditions play in cultivating the independence of citizens and a nation. Jefferson’s ideal of the self-sovereign yeoman farmer required a massive amount of land to be made accessible and affordable to common citizens in a way that radically departed from Europe’s feudal history— so he broke his own strict constitutionalist principles in order to purchase the Louisiana territory from Napoleon, double the size of the country, and give ordinary citizens the resource most essential for abundance. Hamilton, after writing a long essay like this, created the “Society for the Establishment for Useful Manufactures,” a proto-example of a public-private project to build new cities (notably, Paterson, New Jersey, which the company founded at the falls of the Passaic) focused on making domestic manufacturing a national priority in order to secure our economic independence from England.

Both of these Founders’ dreams acknowledged that the federal government can be useful for securing the conditions of liberty and abundance. And, all throughout American history, many of our finest periods of progress followed from governance that balances the fusion. Lincoln’s Republican Party of the 1860s created the transcontinental railroad, land-grant colleges, and the Homestead Act— these are Liberty-and-Abundance policies that created conditions for Free Labor to flourish. And if it weren’t for FDR’s 1935 Rural Electrification Administration, that young man out west I mentioned wouldn’t see a light bulb turn on in time for his eureka moment. The ever-broadening shared prosperity represented by the high-wage worker, the GI Bill beneficiary, and the homeowner became the basis of American dynamism through our mid-20th century glory. It made us freer, richer, more creative, and more democratic.

But, in the lives of those still living today, something happened. Liberty and abundance decoupled. The flywheel seized up.

Breaking the Scarcity Cartel

Every American today knows this strange feeling— that nagging sense that everything takes longer, costs more, and produces less than it should. Our supposedly independent citizens can’t afford housing, and though we once built a train across the continent, now we can’t even build one halfway across California. We live in the wealthiest nation in history, but we can’t seem to make things anymore. The gains from productivity began to spread slower and slower from the 1970s onwards. The positive-sum culture of an expanding pie increasingly gave way to zero-sum competition over a pie that appeared baked and ready to be divided. A scarcity mindset is toxic to liberty, toxic to abundance, and toxic to the kind of cooperation and culture that democracy requires.

Without even realizing it, we replaced a Liberty-and-Abundance republic with a Permission-and-Scarcity republic. Permission is what liberty becomes when it can only be granted by gatekeepers, rather than exercised by citizens. Scarcity is what abundance becomes when it’s hoarded by incumbents, rather than reinvested to compound for the next generation.

Permission-and-Scarcity has become its own political project in modern America— across the political spectrum, a wide range of actors have, for different reasons, found it useful to keep things scarce. Homeowners want housing scarce. Incumbent utilities want grid interconnection scarce. Established firms want competition scarce. Permitting lawyers want permits scarce. There is a NIMBY left and a NIMBY right. These people have understandable reasons, individually, for pursuing their various forms of regulatory capture and rent-seeking. They never think of themselves as allies, but they share a political-economic interest in maintaining scarcity; over time, as they’ve carved off more of the pie, the net result has been setting off a negative flywheel of Permission-and-Scarcity that’s destroyed our ability to build things in America.

Call it the Scarcity Cartel. The Scarcity Cartel has an asymmetric advantage over the Liberty-and-Abundance coalition it (implicitly) opposes, because the actors involved have concentrated spheres of power and are conscious of their clear personal interest; meanwhile, the benefits of the Abundance flywheel are more diffuse, because although most people benefit from highways and the Manhattan Project, the relationships are not as immediate, obvious, or tied to one’s next paycheck. The compounding value of restarting the virtuous flywheel only becomes clear in the next generation. That’s exactly why I’m writing this essay— we need a cross-partisan Liberty-and-Abundance coalition to become politically conscious of itself, in order to break the cross-partisan Scarcity Cartel.

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Liberty and Abundance Zones

I believe that the seeds of a modern Liberty-and-Abundance fusion are already beginning to converge on the ground.

From the Libertarian Right, the idea of “Freedom Cities” has gained real momentum in recent years— Silicon Valley startup “Founders” are looking to found things more ambitious than mere companies, Congressional Republicans have signalled that they would like to pass a bill creating special economic zones to reshore essential American manufacturing capabilities, and the White House has made the aesthetic concept a personal priority with an eye towards a potential executive order. Meanwhile, the nascent Abundance Left is looking for concrete ways to demonstrate its theory of politics— ways to experiment with responsible permitting reform, build dense, affordable, sustainable mixed-zoned communities, invest in rapid scientific research capabilities, and fast-track renewable energy projects. It seems like the Freedom Cities vessel provides a natural opportunity for Abundance ideas to be tested, shared, and deployed at scale— perhaps there’s an alliance to be forged here.

On Capitol Hill, these seeds are taking root, coalescing concretely around a piece of prospective legislation to create “Liberty and Abundance Zones,” aka “LAB Zones.” LAB Zones would be place-based sandboxes where Americans can experiment with streamlined permitting, flexible land use, and innovative governance so that they can really build things. They’d be true laboratories of democracy, like our decentralized federal system was always supposed to promote. They’d be places where we can prioritize and accelerate the reshoring of domestic manufacturing, develop important new real-world technologies, and build abundant supplies of housing and energy. The physical frontier might have closed in 1890, but with LAB Zones, we could crack open enough space for the chain reaction of Liberty and Abundance to catch fire again.

We will, of course, need compromise in order to craft good policy for LAB Zones and ensure that they avoid the failure modes of the extremes on either side. On one pole is the extreme of Thielosphere projects like Praxis, who want to create Freedom Cities outside of America, corporate/charter cities in places like Greenland where they can pursue liberty as exit from America, exit from democracy and the nation. On the other pole we have all the failure modes that come with top-down planning, whether by company-town capitalists or centralized industrial policy statists.

Luckily, the farthest-along prototype of what a new American city project might look like is already beginning to blaze a middle path. ProtoTown— recently featured in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg— has been quietly building a radical new hub for hardware manufacturing in the pro-building, purple-blossoming land south of Austin, Texas. In ProtoTown, over a dozen startups are tinkering freely with hard tech, trying to solve some of our real-world problems the old-fashioned way. A couple kids are experimenting with a new kind of desalination centrifuge to address our water crisis; someone is inventing a special solar panel that cools water, and someone else founded a company that can mass-produce ADUs on the land using local adobe. Meanwhile, a reactor that will produce isotopes for nuclear medicine research is set to go from greenfield to splitting atoms in under 10 months— that’s Manhattan Project speed. That’s liberty and abundance, reunited. (I figure I should mention transparently that I’ve worked with ProtoTown on and off over the years, most notably by driving their big red school bus. They did not ask me to write this essay; I am a true believer in the project).

Though ProtoTown is itself a startup, rolling together acres of privately owned ranchland, it eschews both top-down control and fantasies of democratic exit. Instead, it has aligned itself remarkably well with local, state, and national support in order to build a unique prototype of what a new city project committed to American national renewal might look like in practice, inspiring us to create other experiments along wider frameworks.

I would like to see the Abundance Left and the Libertarian Right come together to hammer out the details on a federal framework for LAB Zones. We don’t have to know in advance what will happen; we just have to craft sandboxes where experiments can take place. We will, of course, keep certain safeguards— conversations about novel ways to integrate labor, environmental, and community-equity considerations will be essential to making this experiment workable, and truly American rather than merely libertarian— but if we want innovation then we’ll need to loosen our belts a bit. This will involve a little bit of faith— the thing about freedom is that we often cannot, in advance, know what its fruits will be. But the converse problem here is that a risk-averse society, which requires every experiment to be safely predicted and permitted in advance, precludes certain possibilities of progress which can only emerge as organic surprises in the uncertain process of experience. Better to take a bet on American creativity than acquiesce to managed decline by default.

Perhaps these contained experiments could become internal combustion engines of innovation, restarting the virtuous flywheel like a guy pulling the starter cord of an old lawnmower as hard as he can. Perhaps those who value the American Dream can unite, break the Scarcity Cartel, and help build an America with liberty and abundance for all.

The Lacuna of Justice

There seems to be something missing there, though. When we say “liberty and abundance for all,” the ghost of the word “justice” echoes in our heads— a present absence, implied by the Pledge of Allegiance, playing ritualistically in the cadence we all learned to recite.

Where does justice, that most elusive of our founding aspirations, fit into a coalition for Liberty and Abundance? Well, as it turns out, justice was hiding between them the whole time, holding it all together. Justice is implied in the word and.

Liberty becomes abundance through justice. Abundance translates into greater liberty, and vice versa, in proportion to how justly they’re both shared. Broadly circulated prosperity made America its most dynamic again and again throughout our short, messy, fantastic history.

In a country so naturally blessed, justice has always been our most difficult discussion. Justice— the most fair and, towards an evolving limit, the most prosperous negotiation for sharing the fruits of liberty and abundance— is the “and.”

In other words, justice is the conversion. Justice is the conversation.

American Pragmatism

We cannot know in advance all the answers to the problem of justice; but the greatest strain of American philosophy does have an answer for how we can pursue justice. American Pragmatism does not ask whether an idea is “true” in the abstract; it asks whether acting upon our will to believe in a live possibility makes the world more workable. It asks what hypotheses are worth experimenting with based on our best mutual understanding of shared values and pursuits, and it asks us to test them in the evolving school of experience.

LAB Zones are an experiment, in the deeply Deweyan sense — a theory to be tested freely in democratic practice. What works can be refined; what fails can be abandoned. The practical work, the problems that will need solving in order to actually bring LAB Zones into reality— crafting the policy, shepherding it through the legislative process, encouraging public acceptance and excitement, and of course actually building the damn places— will provide us with opportunities to have necessary conversations that can progress the co-flourishing of justice, liberty, and abundance.

We are lucky to live in a country where shared experience and individual expertise can come together to pragmatically think through the nitty-gritty of how philosophy and policy might shape one another. We have an abundance of brilliant thinkers across the political spectrum thinking about how to reignite liberty and abundance in this country. We have philosophers like Danielle Allen exploring the problem of justice through a wall of books stretching from Greece to America; we have public intellectuals like Ezra Klein making the case for liberty and abundance to the public. We have academics and economists seriously considering what comes after neoliberalism. We have startup founders, not just in the Bay but spread around the country, who genuinely care more about America than AUM, more about building than buyouts— founders who realized that the purpose of founding is not profit, but prophecy. We have politicians on both sides embracing a growing clarity that we do need to reshore American manufacturing; we need to be able to build national priorities; we need to let the flywheel of liberty loose, and share the abundant fruits of that liberty for the sake of national unity, national security, and national prosperity.

Our responsibility, as those with a say in the shape of this nation, is to figure out how to promote liberty and abundance in America first; if we do that, it will no doubt teach us how to encourage, and justly share, liberty and abundance with the rest of the world.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The Preamble of our Constitution could not be more clear about the purpose of American self-government— it is to continually protect and encourage the blessings of Liberty and Abundance for ourselves and our descendants.

This is our job, here and now, as we pass America from the hands of one generation to the next. I want my children to grow wildly, in a wider world, with liberty and justice for all.

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The Sequoias Speak is heavily influenced by T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece, The Four Quartets, four elemental meditations on time and timelessness— especially the final quartet, Little Gidding, focused on fire. Eliot, to me, is the antithesis to Walt Whitman, who represents America’s poetic thesis. Eliot is the Anakin Skywalker of American poetry, the 20th century genius who could have been the successor to Whitman’s aspirational 19th century prophecies. “You were the chosen one, Anakin! You were supposed to bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness!” Eliot was born at the crux of America in St. Louis; but he chose to go east, to England, rather than to the west still awaiting its worthy poet. If he’d gone west, The Waste-Land would have been very different, since there IS water under the shadow of the red rock, as anyone who’s visited Zion National Park knows. But alas. England. The past. The ungraspable moment of the rose.

This poem is representative of one of my larger projects as an American poet— to synthesize the dialectic between Whitman and Eliot, who denied his own reactionary relationship to Whitman’s inescapable influence. I have Whitmanic values but tighter Eliotic line lengths; Whitmanic philosophy put through Eliot’s philosophical rigor; unlike Whitman, but like Eliot, I am in touch with darkness and failure and pain; unlike Eliot, but like Whitman, I refuse to linger on this, choosing to lean into optimism and hope, finding positive self-stories worth acting on with the Will to Believe of William James and American Pragmatism. I am not an ironic or critical poet; I cannot help but end my poems on a hopeful note. This poem ends in a way that parallels Little Gidding— this time not with Eliot’s pure being, but with nature’s burning becoming.

Perhaps to deeply feel the dark depths of ourselves can allow our chosen light to burn brighter; perhaps America needs this, too, facing our failures while embracing possibility despite it all— for example, in the 21st century, we can face the devastating reality of our near-complete continental ecocide, while still cherishing the massive future held in every sequoia seed. Cornel West argues in many of his books that American writing draws on a ‘jazzy’ Emersonian thread of potential and a ‘bluesy’ Melvillean thread that interrogates our monstrous crimes and failures; the best American writers, like James Baldwin, carry them both together in creative tension.

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The Sequoias Speak


I

The sequoias speak in tongues of flame.

The sequoias speech is burning.

The sequoias speak in the space above fire.
The sequoias speak slightly spirally straight skyward,
coils of living smoke, softly made hard.


II

Years ago I lost the notebook that grew my first sequoia poems—
And how many sequoia conelings fall to the earth to linger,
And how few sequoia seedlings land in the ideal spot to sprout,
How few possibilities find footholds on the fortunate path,
Stay still at the nexus of necessity, the perfect storm
Growing in the center of the inward flowing
Of water and fire, earth and the girth of wide air,
Light, and what is living
(The same sequoiac alchemy, calculable,
The same elemental speaking of slightly special centers)
And the space taken for growth, and the time desired for growth,
And what is orthogonal to space and time
Like a sequoia sticking off the side of a mountain,
And the balance of dying
And moving forward.


III

The sequoias need not speak,
For the space they create supports many speakers.
The squirrels and birds and myself speak
In dialogue with the silence of the sequoias
And volunteer chatter on their behalf.

What is to represent but to touch and be touched?
And what is representation but living together?

Of course, the sequoias do not need us to speak for them.
They speak very well for themselves
In the language older than words,
A language clear as the contours of bark.

They each stand on their own soapbox,
Voting as one and as one.


IV

The screeching blue birds and I are translators
At the feet of larger prophets whose words will outlive us.
This chat matters more to me than to this sequoia.
It permits me attendance, but will not speak over its usual
Slow whisper to the birds.

I must admit a bias to my species,
And a bias to our language, less simple, less strong,
But significantly more imaginative than any I’ve heard.

I came here to hear the poetry of the great trees,
To translate for my peers what my ear cupped to bark sees,
To give a Whitmanic tongue to nature’s largest phallus.


V

The sequoia speaks as many tongues as there are
Listeners in the forest,
And what I receive is only what I imagine
It could want to share with me,
What could be meaningful to carry to my tribe.

What is born between my mouth and the sequoia’s silence
Is poetry.

What is born between the sequoia’s mouth and my silence—
Could it not already be poetry?


VI

General Sherman says
The name you call me is not my name.
You could not speak my name except in long silence.

The sequoia says I am not your backdrop,
I am not owned by this flat image of yourself,
Unless you are open to listening at my pace.

I do not want you to wrap me in fire-resistant foil.
The fire is my destiny and it will take me in my time.
I have seen it take many larger.
I am not your child, I do not need protection.
You are the children, you need my protection.
If only you knew of the fires to come.

I sit with my neck craned back for a long time
As tourists come and go, capturing
And commodifying something they do not understand,
Briefly, like an assembly line, before leaving
Without the sequoia finishing a single word.

The sign says do not cross the fence,
And I do not listen,
For the tree has a higher authority.
When no one is looking I hop the fence
From behind, hidden from tourists by the tree.
I run to it, breathless, and wrap my arms around it.
I hug the tree as long as I can.

I think it says
Thank you.
So many have come and so few have listened,
Have touched, have shared without taking,
Without stealing my image for themselves.
Here, a tiny red penny wedged in my red wideness.
My bark has nearly grown around it,
But I do not want this meaningless metal in my body.

I remove the wound.
No one has seen it since 1972.
We thank each other with our true names,
Wordless.


VII

The sequoias say
Fire chose me to live
My place hand-selected by the lives of the dying.

The patches brown and groves gone scare me not.
My birth meant ashes were my blessed lot—
I will survive all my burnings,
My scar tissue the Garden.


VIII

I say to the sequoias
Look— I want them to see this sunset
And though they do not look like me
I know they feel the beauty coloring
The sun’s dying of the day.


IX

The logged sequoias say
What does absence convey?
And how does fire fill emptiness?


X

The sequoias say
Our seeds require fire to break open.
I say
I hope the seeds of the New World are the same way.


XI

I ask the sequoias where souls go after burning.
The sequoias say we live beyond death
In sprouts.

We say we have long suspected dying young.
We hope by then to have scattered enough seeds
To sprout in the soil of those we love,
To grow great beyond this body.


XII

I ask this sequoia, more than two millennia old,
Of Christ, and the Second Coming, and if it is soon.

The sequoia laughs.
He has resurrected many hundreds of times.
He waits for us to notice salvation,
Every seed strong enough to roll the stone.


XIII

The sequoia says
I am the seed of all to come,
I am the fruit of all that was.
I am the sprouting anew of an old voice.
I am the sapling rooting for this world.

I am the young sequoia, equal to your height,
Like you striding to all the largeness of our futures
With the strength to bear the weight
Of both the old world and the new,
To carry the future as a generation uplifting
From the fuel of the past, the soil, the ash.
The victory of the young is not guaranteed,
But prophesied, believed before true again and again,
The miracle of a people reborn.

I am the old sequoia, I am thick with experience.
I am proof of the grandness of life.
I am the sum of all knowledge.
I am potential realized, I am growing still,
Still a pyrophyte I pray for fire—
I wish for nothing more than again to be a seed
Bursting open in the heat of my demise,
Spreading in the space of my wide soot.


XIV

There is an old stump, massive and cut, toppled sideways,
Hanging its clean edge over the small stream’s babbling.
It shades the fish and the blue heron and I,
Having made my home for a silent week under the shadow
Of this dead sequoia’s son, 2000 years old, still living
Twenty yards away, having sprouted where his dad’s old branches,
Once the widest in this part of the forest,
Must have long ago dropped the future enclosed.

I wonder to myself, at home in the silence of time’s streaming,
Whether this dead giant can speak.

Yes,
I hear,
Loud and undeniable, awake and dreaming,
A ghost possessing me, speaking through me,
In my own voice, and I know
That the dead do speak,
That the dead speak through me,
That the dead speak through all the living
Willing to listen.

I explore behind the fallen stump
Where its massive old roots are now revealed,
Now stick upward like branches in the new air,
Twisting as if reaching for soil in the sky,
Petrified for how many years, the sequoias
Resistant to bugs, burning, and decay even in death,
The massive underground secret of the sequoia’s greatness,
The wide rooting responsible for all upwardness,
Rarely exposed for someone living to learn from.
Only the momentous falling of a massive sequoia could be
Strong enough to raise these roots to the light.

I now see that these tangled reddish roots
Are petrified fire, fire frozen for now,
And that all matter is merely fire moving slowly,
Fire coalesced, staying still and assuming form for reasons
I’ll never know. But I know that fire
Is the root of the sequoia,
That the dead return and bring us with them,
That the tongues of flame are already in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire,
And the fire and the sequoia are one.

Note: the poem “Sequoia” in this collection is structured in the shape of a Sequoia— this effect will only show up if you read the desktop website version or turn your phone wide.

Downstream of Sequoias



I exist downstream of sequoias,
standing on this fallen log over
the rillillating riverlet rushing along rocks
bringing life from the heights ringing down
to the valleys, and the stream's dream of the sea
descending from this slice of these flowing moments
stilled as they pass through the shadowline lens
of the long sequoia corpse still strong
and straddling time.

                                                         Sequoia


                                                   Fire creates space
                                                      for sequoias
                                                     to grow towards light
                                         in the air the water
                                                       stretching
                                             and swaying softly with
                                                breezes the shape of
                                                    mountain valleys
                                                   the canopy between
                                                      kings singing
                                                       with birds
                                                       and smiling
                                                         humans
                                  exploring the wide roots of the world

Canopy


I am older and all futures still
shine from the present— possibilities of light
cast from the ledge of the self, balcony of becoming,
like the blue bright and free for miles round the sight
of a giant sequoia, birdsong upon the canopy,
voluminous and luminescent

Snow on Sequoias


The sequoias and I are quite surprised
by the falling of spring's last snow...
witnesses of however many winters learn
that the streamlets will rush to life once more,
though one day we'll wash out with the melt.

spring in the sequoias


two branches creaking in spring tension
of a tree growing and spreading and
meeting a new part of itself lost and found
rubbing with the wind in negotiation
of paths that green can take from ground
to make their claim of the coming light

GrowGrowGrowGrowGrow!
(a collaborative poem by Aidan, Nikki, Diego, Rachel, Sarah, Christian, and Jake)


The sequoia forest communicates in crow caws,
The holes we crawl the pines we borrow.
The ground breathes in hums, and slow draws,
Slow inhales, lingering between time,
The wet moss drips the percussion of the tree orchestra
Over charred giants among the new
GrowGrowGrowGrowGROW!

For most of this past April, I was back in that spot, returning for the first time in 4 years. This time, I brought nomad friends to my peaceful paradise. It was even more beautiful than I remembered. I only just left last week, to store my bus and head back east… a LOT has happened that I’m excited to update you on. Thank you all for your patience— I know my posting has been delayed. However, I owe you all 4 posts a month, and luckily I have a ton of cool writing to share these next few days!

First up, for paid subscribers only, is this selection of poems I wrote back in 2022. I’ve grown a lot as a poet since then, but that first Sequoia era really marked an important acceleration in my development— it was my first time alone in the woods in my bus for an extended time, and I wrote more poems there than I’d ever written in a single place before. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting my Sequoia Poems from this past month, so you can compare 2022 and 2026.

I hope bears aren't in my bus 
(A branch is the opposite of a hole)


Halfway back down the tree lingering
for no reason but the way rain slides
down the car window into each other streaming
so I sat here still over 50 feet up
not realizing I’d stopped slowly climbing down
the slippery peeling branches to sit silently
alone with no one I needed to please
and nowhere I needed to be
not top branch nor ground nor bus home but here
on this branch where my raindrops collided
and the flow of my attention along the branches
felt so similar to the flow of whatever thoughts
I followed in the loud silence of brilliance
that I did not notice the flowing
from branch to thought
for these growths are all one water
and focus is as seamless as the stream
and every word, leaves.

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Recently I returned to this favorite spot. The Sequoias are four years older; so am I. This poem is old, too— but upon reading it again, I’m reminded of how grateful I am to spend so much time living in nature with my bus. Poetry is a practice of listening.

Mary Oliver, one of our most recent heirs to the great tradition of American nature writing, died in 2019. This old poem, composed of many homages to her poetry, is dedicated to her. I hope to keep learning to listen a little bit like she did— with wonder for every bit of life we greet.

For Mary Oliver


I

Mary Oliver, the body, is dead,
dead as the soil below bootsoles growing grass,
dead as ashes in water dancing with waves,
dead as the spirit undresses from one weight to another.

But Mary Oliver, the poet, the voice implied by the poetry,
oh how very alive she is today! I feel her presence
as real as the press of this log on my hips
as I sit on the lone shoulder of this small giant.

Did you really think one who scattered so many seeds
could live and die in only one place?

II

Oh, make the folds of this mind fallow and fertile,
oh God of butterflies. Like the little blue one,
here and there now fluttering
around the stream and I, a tiny thing
thinner than a penstroke and lighter
than a thought, blue worth noticing
in the green brown orange world of the Sierras,
this inexplicable blue butterfly whose tiny flutterings by
are endless prayers for more air, answered.

III

I am paying attention, Mary,
And I know you’re proud of me.
I heard you saying so when I woke early this morning,
naturally, early for me at least—
I am learning to listen to light.

And how you loved my day yesterday!
I spent all day sitting and walking
through the old sequoia grove up the road.
I was silent and listened all day,
and when I finally spoke to a squirrel
how strange my voice sounded!

All day the sequoias and their surroundings
shared wonderful thoughts with me, their voices
descending like red bark shavings
slowly in the thick air.
But I wrote nothing down, added nothing
to my Sequoias Speak poem, though they spoke.
I merely listened to the music of the language,
like listening to Spanish poetry at an open mic.
If I was writing I would not be listening,
and if all my listening were only for extraction
then I would not be acting like a very good friend,
and the sequoias may cease speaking to me.
No, yesterday was for that delightful unproductiveness
all productivity depends upon.

IV

As I wrote this, I stood from my log to walk to a shadier spot.
My movement startled the creek, and from behind bushes
rose the largest bird I’ve ever seen up close,
a massive blue and white heron.
It tilted its weight into elegance, forward
flapping slaps through the air up
the creek, between the sequoias.
It was like watching the rock roll from the tomb.

Flabbergasted with gratitude I walked quietly to the sequoia,
and I could see the big bird resettled upstream.
I slipped off my shoes and crept quietly along the rocks,
the water, the long grasses of the riparian shore.
I stopped a safe distance away so as not to startle it.

I stared as we stare at all things precious and temporary—
with eyes wide, with the grip of ghostly hands
slowing time against the tide. It stood still.

He was directly under the tilted face
of the monarch sequoia stump cut and overturned
vertical, edging a shadow out over the stream.
The sequoia whose stump it was must have been
as old as Christ, and larger 
than the sequoia standing strong
just downstream, the living son we love.

Yesterday I explored behind the stump—
the exposed roots flared in the air twisted
and curled organically like petrified flames.
And under the lip of the smooth-cut stump
now black with ash and age and decay,
the uprightly held curve of this bird’s noble neck,
a god standing tall in the temple
(and the temple is always outside.)

The heron suddenly breaks the stasis,
diving its killer swanlike neck into the water,
a lump of fishy something sliding clean down its curves.
The great bird lifts its long legs, and steps
onto the most prominent rock with its wide feet
dominant like the grip of a predator.
It stands there, and arches its neck pridefully,
as if it knows I am watching from downstream,
as if it knows it is being witnessed in its element
as the apex of the stream.

He begins to slowly saunter upstream, 
each massive step a declaration of primal right.
I have stayed still to preserve the moment. Now
I begin creeping forward to pursue it
as it slips away.

But of course these things cannot be held or chased—
I round a corner, catch a final glimpse of the god,
who, sensing my encroachment, or perhaps a lack of fish,
leaps out of the water with mighty flaps,
soars into the shadows of the forest,
and is gone.

V

Mary, would you believe that, as I was writing this,
I was interrupted by a couple of hikers?
The first humans I’ve seen in days,
startling me like I startled the bird,
and their names were Dawn and Walt Dickinson.

VI

And would you believe, alone again now,
that swarms of thousands of ladybugs are rising
in the sunlight from somewhere upstream,
ladybugs opening their bodies to flow with the wind,
flying over my head towards somewhere downstream,
ladybugs from a seemingly infinite source
emerging endlessly to glint orange in the light
in front of the thousand year old sequoias,
ladybugs bumping into my cheeks and landing in my hair
and crawling, red and real, here on this notebook page?

Of course you would believe,
even if you weren’t seeing it through my eyes now.
You have the faith of all saints of nature,
the faith that all I need do to witness the unbelievable
is to believe.

VII

All I will do is sit here by the water’s flowing,
and wait with open eyes,
and the world will come humbly
with wonders for me to witness.

The ladybugs flow around me like the stream around rocks.
I am still, and still amazed.

VIII

I know my holy work is to glorify what I see,
as the sun glorifies the ladybugs,
as the sequoia glorifies the wind.

I am here to give ladybugs a home in my hair,
for the beautiful world loves to be seen.

To marvel at marvels is marvelous.
No work is more important.
I wander, I wonder, I witness—
Mysteries, yes!

We smile, and bow our heads.