Life Force

 By Marilyn Moore

It’s been a week, hasn’t it.  A former president indicted.  Two Tennessee representatives expelled for trying to talk about gun violence.  Relentless book bannings, with a Disney movie about Ruby Bridges and a Dolly Parton song about Rainbowland thrown in for good measure.  A judge in Texas with absolutely no medical or pharmaceutical training orders a drug that has been safely prescribed for more than twenty years taken off the market.  The mayoral campaign in Lincoln that’s likely to get uglier before it’s over, largely funded by two major donors, one of whom doesn't live in Lincoln.  A Nebraska legislature in the midst of restricting the lives of transgender youth and their families, and women of reproductive age, and voters.  So much about which to rant, and I have, and I'll keep doing so…and yet, I’m drawn at this moment to images, and sounds, and metaphors, and experiences, of life forces.  In this week of celebration of major holidays by three religious faiths, Passover, Easter, Ramadan, “life force” resonates.

A truly Nebraska experience is to venture west of Lincoln about a hundred miles to most anyplace along the Platte River at this time of year and settle into the crane migration.  Each year, for millennia, hundreds of thousands of cranes stop along the Platte for a few days or weeks as they migrate from the south to the north.  There are gorgeous photos of the birds, the water, the sky, the grasslands.  To be there is to sense the primordial instinct that guides the birds, and that, somehow, grounds us, too.  For me, it’s the sight, the scent, the feel of the wind on my face, and the sound.  Most especially the sound.  The sound of thousands of birds coming into the river islands at night, or taking off in the morning, is one which mesmerizes me…another writer described it as being caught up in and surrounded by the life force.  That's what it is, it pulses, like a heartbeat, a force that cannot be resisted, and cannot be extinguished…it can only be celebrated, and held in awe.  This week…I need this evidence of the life force.

And so I look for other evidence.  Closer to home, the barrel in which I’ve grown chives for years.  I don’t know if chives are supposed to come back year after year, but these do.  Over time, the barrel has weakened.  Rain, and blasting summer sun, and winter’s snow and ice, have weakened the staves, and now about a third of them have totally fallen away.  Much of the soil has also eroded.  But the chives, they’re growing again, hanging on to the soil that’s there, among the earliest green in the yard, reaching for the sun.  Life force….

Thousands of students rally in Tennessee, joined by others across the country, raising their voices to demand the most basic of assurances, that they be able to go to school without fear of being killed.  There is power in their combined voices, in their insistence that they be heard, in the unassailable truth that their lives are worth protecting.  Life force….

From thousands of voices to a single voice, the relentless voice of Maya Angelou, in "Still, I Rise."

“You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise….

“Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise.

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.”                   

Courage.  Conviction. Persistence.   Life force….

A new sighting from the James Webb Space Telescope, star WR124, in the Sagittarius constellation, 15,000 light years from Earth. (Photo from webbtelescope.org). It’s dying, it’s exploding, it's releasing cosmic dust.  Dust that will swirl with gas and form stars, planets, and the very building blocks of life.  Exploding stars that released heavy elements…that end up inside our own bodies.   Dr. Amber Straughn, astrophysicist, describes it with science, and poetry.  “At the end of a star’s life, they shed their outer layers out into the rest of the universe.  I think this is one of the most beautiful concepts in all of astronomy.  This is Carl Sagan’s stardust concept, the fact that the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones was literally forged inside a star that exploded billions of years ago.”  Or, as my friend and pastor Jane Florence writes, “Isn’t it amazing that science confirms what spirit beings have always known….”  Stardust…. Life force….

And of particular significance to me, this week, this Holy Week celebrated by Christians, are the deaths of three strong and wise and spirit-filled people, who died on Good Friday.  Good Friday, the day that in the Christian tradition Jesus was crucified and died, was the day that Maxine, and Rex, and Charlotte, took their last breaths.  At that moment, as the poet John Magee writes, they “slipped the surly bonds of earth…and touched the face of God.”  Their spirits, freed from their bodies, joined a cosmic force for good, one known by the cranes, and the chives, and exploding stars, one amplified by voices of protesters and by poets, a force for love, for peace, for justice, for life.  Stardust…. Life force….

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