Starter Family
Life on Earth
We used to live in a world where the price of resources came down steadily, and now the world has changed. You have a great mismatch between finite resources and exponential population growth.
–Jeremy Grantham
Starter Family
We wanted a starter family so walked to the bodega to buy ourselves a fern. You set it in a sunlit jar, the world now ordered according to taste. Soon, our fern outgrew its glass; the city dirt is poor, and the bodega does not sell more earth. On the train, you were mourning your parents’ yard. How is it possible to want so little and yet to demand everything everything, of oneself, the world, with all pasts churning underfoot? The worms, I think, are still awake and the eye, the voice, of our love is a vaster thing than my heart can hold on the train out of town. -
There's a lot of nut to crack here. I'm taken by that last stanza.
That’s a powerful meditation on what really matters and perhaps how our modern condition removes us from it.
I especially liked the last stanza:
The worms, I think, are still awake
and the eye, the voice, of our love
is a vaster thing than my heart
can hold on the train out of town.