Dingle, Dingle, Dangle

Dingle dingle dangle, the moss its grasp entangles. Dingle dingle dangle, its age our life and spangle. The lapping shores were our lapis, the wind-swept sea our limit. Dingle dingle dangle, the rhythm its woodlands solicit.

But conquering our limit we conquered our place and the ground and her dells followed. Hunters became husbandmen, friends became foresters, and her great womb separated into the living and the unliving: the dirt and the soil, the raucous rot of sapwood and the milling man’s prize of heartwood. The singular river that is also the singularity of life transformed into this and that and oxbows and their meanders followed. We and our separate movements harshened her processes into profits and reduced her deep dells into shallow stands and forests of flowers became woodlots primed and planted for churning like butter that which was not ours to begin with but us in the beginning and the dusk and the dawn followed.

I think the real question is why humankind steadily endures the worshiping of progress. Progress is eternal as time is eternal but even time is matched against our waning star’s energy.

But progress requires some bit of doing that is also some spend of energy outside of Her time and it thereby requires some bit of separation, I think. Progress is a fine word when it takes a long while to say it, to speak it and then to see what is spoken. The dawn-darkness of our smoldering campfires, progress exists in time and not for time.

But conquering our limit we conquered our place and the ground and her dells followed.

Dingle dingle dangle, she says. And I think the answer falls somewhere in between our intrinsic worthlessness and the cleverness intrinsic in our miserably lonely and modern lives. In between that place which we are not but perhaps could be if we stopped trying so hard to be there. If we stopped being so worthlessly creative.

But dingle dingle dangle echoes against our plastic clothed and air-tight abodes alongside city walls and dusk covered concrete aisles that usher the working dead home where already-plated microwave dinners alone provide the fuel for the fire to burn just one more day. Just one more day. We burn.

That humans create is true. That humans create well is the eternal question. Dingle dingle dangle, she says, we are waiting.

And our smiles return.