Journal Entry. May 13, 2015

There is this long wall that runs along my right side. It’s been there for years, probably most of my life. It looms up tall and rock-hard like concrete – the wall of Gaza, the Berlin Wall, soon the Mexican Wall. I can place my right hand on the cold stone and feel dampness on my palm. It is so high it blocks out the sky at times and the sun at other times.

I must have built it for protection – to keep people out – to keep them away from me. This way I can live in my imagination and not have to engage in conversation about myself, about what happened to me, about how I found a way to survive.

The wall becomes solid at my side those times I attempt to climb over. Is there more freedom here than there? Here I can create my own, but over there you have to play by someone else’s rules. I have slowly raised that wall until I am here in nature with my animals. I connect with family and friends then retreat behind cover to create. I think how sad it is that my country is building a wall to keep out people who will only dig under like voles and gophers whose tunnels I fall into when the earth gives way.

Ironically many of the Americans who vote for a wall feed their veins with Mexican heroin and cocaine.

They hire undocumented immigrants to harvest produce coated with toxic pesticides so they can disregard the consequences. Who then will go out into the cancer fields and work for a pittance? Not the entitled Americans crying for a border wall, nor their entitled children living at home in the basement using their highly schooled brain power gaming in cyberspace. Will they work the fields and peddle the drugs once the Wall is built and all the immigrants have gone home?

For me, though this wall of mine plain has to come down, pure and simple, Berlin Wall comes down. It is time to bring the wall down – not slowly – but KABOOM – all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men opened a hole in the wall with cannon fire, and I go through to the other side. I have things I want to say, beauty I want to share and teachings we as humans need to learn.

These walls we create as countries determined to isolate and restrict passage to freedom and liberty have only proven that we share the same story, the same history of migration forever moving across this small spinning planet in a vast and mysterious universe. If we cannot learn to live without walls, then we will build them on Mars and continue to perpetuate the cycle of intolerance, hatred, and misunderstanding.