Holy One, cleave our hearts and open them to the prophetic,
earth changing words of Bryce Wiebe.
Treading Lightly
by Bryce Wiebe
“The Earth quakes before them” Joel 2:10
Sixteen hours before technological magic caused these words to
move from my fingers to the tiny specs of light via rafts of “1’s” and “0’s” on
rivers of metalloids cutting through sand-turned-silicon, there was an
earthquake in Langston, Oklahoma. The red dirt of central Oklahoma was
where my grandmother moved after remarrying in her 70s. Our family used
to drive there to visit each New Year, through mesas and wheat fields and
parched pastures specked with oil derricks and gas well. With few trees
dotting that garden of dust and wispy grass God planted there, the whole
landscape seemed heavy and fixed, then pressed down by such a big sky. Or
maybe it was the sky being supported by such a sturdy clay pedestal.
And now it shakes. Everyday. Perhaps 16 hours before
you read these words. Perhaps as you read them.
The experts say that hydraulic fracturing cannot be definitively
blamed. The now poisoned water formed by the process; a resource
destroyed for the sake of a resource extracted, must be shot back down into
Earth as a slicing, high-speed vertical river of techno-industrial
creativity. And this must not be a problem since no one ever bothered to
see if it was a problem. Could it be this river has pried loose the base
of the pedestal and now it wobbles under the pressure of all that sky? The
energy and economic needs of America require that we not look into it.
For the sake of un-flickering electricity, ever-fattening homes, complete with
fixed temperatures and pressed down by as much cheap stuff as can fit in them,
we cannot look. Perhaps we can move fast enough to not notice Earth
shaking. Perhaps bigger homes and more things will finally hold Earth
still again; press her back into control.
Or maybe we, having already pried the pedestal free, must tread
lightly. Shut off our lights and slim down our homes and use those things
we already have. Perhaps Earth can be restored when we move tip-toe
slow. We can, for the first time, float on new visions and dreams down a
Spirit stream, poured out among a people made of the same clay that we now see
steadied and still.
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