Crossposted from Joreth. Politics.

This is crossposted from joreth, who got it from someone else. I don't address politics much here, but I think that this is supremely important and it dosen't take much time. Go to.

***

I know many, many bisexual and/or poly people who care very much about and support the rights of our young people to fact-based sex education. Today we have a very valuable opportunity to express our support for significant funding cuts now under consideration in the US House and Senate for this irresponsible, ill-conceived program.

The less abstinence-only sex ed there is, the fewer young people there are who will be misled and continue to be at risk for lack of adequate information about how to protect their sexual health and prevent pregnancy - and $28 million taxpayer dollars will be saved and not squandered on this decade-old program that has been repeatedly proven not to work.

In just a couple of minutes you can send an e-mail to your senator and representative expressing your support for these funding cuts by going to http://capwiz.com/advofy/issues/alert/?alertid=10474511

More details from Advocates for Youth at
http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/news/blogs/060807_jw.htm

Feel free to cross post as appropriate, and thanks for considering!

Running Dog/Sketches in October

I am driving to work on a cold October morning when a buck steps across the road before me. He is tall and perfect, four-pointed, a dozen shades of subtle grey. His eyes are huge and liquid, intelligent, his muzzle drawn down in an exquisite wedge to the moist darkness of nose and mouth. His neck is swollen and heavy with the rut, musk running down his throat in rivulets, and he steps carefully, delicately, without fear.

I thank him for his grace, wish him many willing does and far away from the roads we have built, but another, deeper part of me just stands in quiet awe, joy: for this complete and perfect blessing, that this is ordinary, that I might live to witness such a thing.

*
We saw Salmon, Lucy tells me with her banked and innocent excitement, at Wohler Bridge. There were so many of them. They didn't look like they were spawning, they were kind of swimming around, back and forth. The river was full of them.

They rest, I think, I say to her. Sometimes, on their way up the river.

*

I am walking, as I do every morning, up the trail through the redwoods to the reservoir. It is dark and green and quiet, smelling of damp and wood and the breath of trees. "Look," Kestrel says, a little before me. "That tree looks like it's glowing."

I look, and it is, a young deciduous tree, probably a maple of some kind, in the midst of all the redwoods. It has caught the sweet morning light in just such a way that its dying leaves flare a perfect pale yellow, backlit and illuminated against the greens and browns which run together behind it. There are no words for its fragile perfection, its singularity.

*

I am in San Francisco, driving through one of the tunnels at dusk on my way home, and through the mouth of the tunnel I see a patch of sunset sky with a cypress set against it. The sky is like gold silk, not in the fanciful figurative sense but almost literally: it looks as if there should be physical weight and texture, like heavy cloth, with folds and ripples in it. All in glowing whites and yellows and oranges, the tree caught in it is perfectly, velvet black. I stare at it a moment, startled, thinking that surely this is a painting. But it can't be. It is almost too splendid to be real.

The experience is brief, only lasting a few moments; once I pass through the tunnel it is just a sunset, albeit a pretty one, and a struggling, grimy city tree. But in those moments it becomes one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

*

A quiet moment, a small death: I am not certain if it is raccoon or opossum, but it died there, by the stream, in the place the snags and deadfalls catch when this creek becomes a torrent and pushes them down with the power only water has. I have not looked too closely, but I know it lies there. Now the bones all show, the skin stretched hard and black over them with the soft green mold furring it again. Maybe later I will take a bone, a skull; perhaps I will not. It comforts me, this small death. I know that I too will die some day, and I am content in that, should it come to me soon, or if I am given many more seasons.

The rains are about to come again. Next October, this snag of dead wood will show differences; the creek will have written new subtleties into its course.

*
Driving home from work, I pass a church, its lawns cut short, its architecture bland and bloodless. I have seen them before and they are here today: a flock of little cattle egrets, their feathers pure and perfect white, save for a few of them whose heads and necks are faintly gilded. They come down with the breathtaking grace of their kind, the fluttering purpose of their wings, their sharp fish-spear mouths, the cool competence of their expressions, stalking the mown grass with which this corner of their wetland was supplanted. I smile at them and something in me eases, thinking, yes, people have done what they can to erase what was important here, what was real: but the sacred arrives nonetheless. I wonder if anyone else notices the irony.

*

Driving to work again. The Laguna may have frosted last night; if so, it was the first time this season. The tall grasses are silver-bearded, the water a still pewter ribbon. Looking into my heart, I gingerly touch at the wounds left in spring and summer. Still there, of course, with the way they shaped my course, their ineradicable marking, but there are layers over them: thin now, still, a tree accretes rings, stone wears, leaves decompose and make new soil. It will be enough.