Benefit for Arc Ecology

They are a great organization. Be there!!

Selah,

the rev

Arc Ecology works toward the cleanup of public lands locally, nationally, and internationally in a variety of ways:

• Arc Ecology provides technical review of closed and closing military base environmental cleanups and negotiates directly with the military and regulators to improve the outcomes of the pollution abatement programs.
• Arc works to ensure adequate funding for cleanup, better cleanup policies, community sensitive strategies, and we provide technical assistance to communities struggling to obtain a voice in the cleanup decision-making process.
• Arc Ecology works with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the Philippines, Okinawa, Japan, and England to ensure they have access to the experience and technical resources needed to negotiate a responsible resolution to the enormous levels of toxic pollution left behind when America closes an overseas military facility.
• At times stronger measures are required to ensure that the federal government complies with the law. In those instances, Arc’s team of pro-bono environmental attorneys swing into action to ensure that the federal government respects the rule of environmental and public health law.

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The Back of the Truck

In this current lifetime, I grew up in a small portion of Brooklyn known as Boro Park. It was primarily a tight knit old school Italian/ Jewish neighborhood that loved and feared the Don, God and the President- all in that order! (After all, the Don had shown us the miracle of life and death every day, where god…let’s say he was a bit more understated).
We all knew the names of each other’s families and all of the families up and down the block, so when something occurred the news spread like a wildfire.
In this fishbowl of culture and familiarity, the language and communications became a unique item unto itself. Our parents, who were either immigrants or first generation Americans, spoke the language of their ancestors. The kids on the block spoke English but were subject to three sometimes four dialects of a few different languages in the same sentence. It was our jobs to decipher this block speak. Sometimes we got it right and sometimes we made it up. Making it up was more fun because something’s just can’t be translated.

In a community where the lowest volume of a conversation was a scream and the no one was concerned with how the rest of the world viewed us, we had a short hand of language. Needless to say Euphemisms were abundant.

“Hey, go count the white lines will ya” – Which meant go into traffic and get hit by a car because your annoying me.
“Zolsvaxen me a tzilbila”- Which translates into you should grow like an onion-Which actually means you should go to hell.

But I had a favorite phrase because it was a wondrous term that morphed and changed upon usage. “It fell off the back of the truck”.
So many wonderful and awful things came off of this truck I wondered how it stayed in business.

My father, who was not a man given to pomp and circumstance, would bring us home items, gifts so to speak. Jewelry for my mom, toys for my brother and I, sometimes even electronics. The massive black and white “portable” TV sets or AM radios, little tschotskes from Radio Shack .He would put the items down unceremoniously on the table or floor and just smile. My mother who would be simultaneously furious and happy with him would look at him and ask where he got it from and how we could afford it. He would casually (and my father was not a casual man) look back and say, “It fell off the back of the truck.”

There was that damn truck again. I never really understood what that meant back then, I had wondered how do people actually find this stuff? Do they just pull over after they see it fall and pick it up? Do the folks who own the truck realize that their goods have actually fallen? How is it possible that so much great stuff falls off of trucks? Is this stuff all broken? Not understanding that in an organized crime neighborhood that phrase was not literal and had other more dire connotations other then theft. You see my father was a bartender and got people drunk for a living, – a popular man in his field-so the truck never failed to stop in front of his bar.

There was another more ominous usage for the same phrase. When someone mysteriously died, without warning or cause they would also say “Oh well, he just fell of the truck.” I thought maybe he got hurt trying to get one of the items that were falling….. Maybe he was!
But I still loved this truck! It came at odd intervals, and never during Christmas. But it came all through my childhood.

A simple thing for a complex time.

My second cousin in this lifetime died this past week; he was just a tad older than me. He was healthy and exercised and in fact he died riding a bike. When I asked my mother what had happened she just waited and said, “He just fell off the truck” and cried.

Selah

In the Silence

In the moments between words, we can learn all there is to know, about all kinds of things. We can learn the difference between the truth and the lie, the weak and the strong or even the poor and the spoiled.
In the moments between heartbeats, we can hear the stillness of the little man. His grumblings seem to be a distant murmur instead of an incessant drumbeat that carries us from conversation to conversation.
In these moments, when we are alone with nothing else but us for company, we can learn all about us.
What we are scared of. What we are drawn to. What we are made of.

I used to be scared of the silence.

In my household growing up there was little of it, mostly because the act of conversation was deemed to be an important one regardless of the inane content. One needed to fill the space so the others would not feel uncomfortable. It got so bad that at one point my father would bring the un-moveable TV console to the dining room table (A thing not heard of theretofore) so he would not have to hear the silence. Although in the end the silence found him!

In my years of the search, for god, for you, I desperately tried to find the silence, but instead I found people screaming at me, telling me that they knew how to find the silence.
They would scream at me all manner of methods to achieve the silence. From chanting to banging drums, from praying and singing to insults and berating
They would say that god lived in the silence, (and I would have to agree), but who could tell over their blaring hippy-trippy-ashram-faux-Indian/Native American-spiritual Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim-bullshit ranting.

Who the fuck could hear a thing?

In my middle years, the silence was covered over by the little man who seemed to be content at reading my faults to me wherever possible, whenever possible. Like a judge damning my actions into confinement, the little man beat me mercilessly until I could no longer know that the silence existed, let alone hear it.

And now here, by the last few curves on this road called life, I have find that the silence is me. It is both a terrifying and magical to behold. It is where god lives and breathes. Where Satan lurks in the shadows. It is where the truth of our lives is revealed in it’s fullest of glories.

I love the silence. I find it soothing. I find it caresses my imagination like nothing else can. The silence tells me stories. The silence sings me songs. What does the silence say to you?

In the silence, I hear the American Spring.

Selah