I Can Wait: An Invitation to the Future

by guest substacker Clark Strand

For those who don’t know, Clark is my husband and collaborator and fellow traveler through deep time. Today he wrote a piece that I thought everyone here might love, but he is not on Substack….so I am sharing it for him. For now you can find him on Facebook and Instagram.

An Invitation to the Future by Clark Strand

In the late 1990s, when Perdita and I were just beginning our study of paleohistory and deep ecology, I discovered an artform that was perfectly suited to capturing the uncanny, sometimes elusive insights that were completely changing the way we thought about the world. The prose equivalent of a haiku, these “microfictions”—though often fantastical—usually had their origins in everyday life.

One spring day, as I sat writing at an outdoor café in upper Manhattan, a window washer arrived with a bucketful of warm, sudsy water. As he used his squeegee to leave broad swaths of perfectly clear, dry glass, I imagined the following conversation:

“Hey, can I borrow that thing?” I ask him. “What for?” he replies. “I want to clean myself with it,” I tell him. But he says it won’t work. He’s tried. You have to be flat, like glass.

I didn’t invent the form. Kafka wrote microfictions. And the Gospel of Thomas would certainly qualify. Yeshua’s short, gnostic logion (from the Greek for “oracles”) subvert existing frames of reference to the point where, after reading a few of them, we sometimes look up from the page feeling that we have woken from a dream.

Here is a story from about twenty years ago called “Tree.” It was the first microfiction I wrote that can legitimately be called an eco-logion—a story embodying an ecological or mythic truth that is not tied to the fate of civilization and, therefore, might be expected to survive it.

“I CAN WAIT”

I went downstairs early on Christmas morning to make sure Santa had come and discovered a small child standing very still beside the tree.

“Are you lost?” I asked, anxious to return her to her people.

“No, she replied. “This is my tree. Wherever the tree is, that is my home.”

I felt ashamed. “Your tree . . . it’s because of me it’s dead. Where will you go now?”

She thought for a moment. “I’ll live here until it comes back.”

“And when will that be?” I wondered.

“When your house is gone,” she said. “I can wait.”

---

Beginning next month, Clark and I will be offering "WHOLE EARTH ANIMISM: A Field Guide for the Future," a nine-month immersion into forgotten ways of knowing that will transform our communal belief-sphere and ready us for the times ahead. Together, we will recover what it means to be kin, not just with human beings but with all beings, and discover how those lost intimacies can bring us profound experiences of belonging and healing, creativity and joy. Week by week, we will create a collection of eco-logia—anecdotes and observations about our journeys that will serve as future guidance through the mysteries of deep time.

To register or for more information, go here

---

Clark Strand is a haiku master who teaches on various platforms and venues, inviting people back into a conversation with what Basho called “the life of things.” He has rewritten many groundbreaking books including: Seeds from A Birch Tree, Meditation without Gurus, and Waking Up to the Dark: The Black Madonna’s Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. With his wife Perdita Finn he is the co-founder of the anarchic ecological fellowship The Way of the Rose and the co-author of the book of the same name.

Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. She and Clark live with their beloved children, their aged incontinent animals, and kin of all kinds in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.