Present Bias

it is devilishly hard to attain the long view,

Yeats in "Fergus and the Druid,"

describes "great webs of sorrow"

when his understanding touches the long cycles,

when his consciousness experiences long time,

there is a wheel on which we find precarious purchase,

and we can think our moment is not just 

one frame in a full-length movie,

but the moment on which we hang is not a constant

that must be what was and what shall be,

but is more ephemeral than we'd like,

we are now in upper New England,

13,000 years ago a great glacier of ice sat on the land,

when climate changed and ice left,

forests returned and over millennia built up a rich soil,

great trees ruled here,

explorers, then colonists, from across the ocean,

wreaked their will, 

the great forest slaughtered,

trees turned into things,

materials for houses, ships, export,

the land viewed as factory  and used for farms,

the topsoil eroded away, farms turned into pasture for Mavil sheep,

the underlying ubiquitous rocks, called glacial till,

increasingly frost-heaved toward the eroding surface,

as if asking to be made into rock walls,

now most of the rock walls are swallowed by returning forest,

we humans are present-biased,

thinking that is, was, and will be,

reality begs to differ.

by Henry H. Walker

October 2, ‘26