Quail are a good measure of the day’s cold.  Each evening a covey settles in the wild willows west of home near the cattle’s water trough.  During summers height they sometimes don’t make it back from the wonder of a day’s wandering and instead roost in the bramble of a long-abandoned irrigation ditch.  Walking by them on a summers afternoon they hold their ground until you nearly step on them.  However, by late fall, after quail hunting season opens, their demeanor and way of life changes.  No longer holding they’ll take flight while you’re still a good hundred feet away.  They know that should they mistake your human intention, they might not see tomorrow’s light.

There is hope in a day like today.  Racism in the US is not what it was.  There is also concern.  For racism remains and Dr. Kings Beloved Community is something of the future rather than the present.  Though there are many reasons for our inability to create beloved community, I settle for one: a failure of imagination.

Systemic racism in the US blinds our natural imagination in favor of an imagination of technology.  Unlike individual racism, systemic racism is about commodifying the anything and everything of creation.  Creation becomes no more than an item to be bought and sold.  Systemic teaching of the tech-imagination has us accept a commodifying, misogynistic, white supremacist, othering, domineering, profitable economy as normal and correct.  We learn to believe that as long as we get our piece of the pie, life-is-good.   After all, our piece of the pie means we have a reasonable well-paying job, a house, healthcare, education, food on-the-table, retirement, freedom of movement, and children and elders who are safe.  Systemic racism leads us to believe that when everyone (worldwide) has such wealth, we will become the beloved community.  However, wealth hides from us—blinds us—the reality this system providing us jobs, healthcare, education, and food, remains commodified, misogynistic, white supremacist, othering, domineering, identity shifting, power wanting, profitable, and miso-eco.  Due to our learning that having is good, we have lost our instinctual ability to know we are quail in the late fall without enough sense to take flight when the hunter approaches.

Turning toward our interior though, for an opinion and quest for what is natural and intended by nature, our imagination soars beyond having.  The indigenous of natural creation broadens the imagination to an eternal oneness within creation’s wholeness.  Little doubt the natural imagination recognizes and acts against human atrocities of systemic racism.  But when human wellbeing is removed from a pedestal, we come to recognize it for what it is, a small element of the whole.  Identifying that we are not the dominate of creation, our natural imagination allows us to move toward the sacred of more.

When we use the indigenous lenses of natural imagination we begin to hear Dr. King’s words differently.  For his words lead us from humanity alone, to the native of Howard Thurman’s talking to trees and the natural of Jesus’ kinship with the lilies of the field.  Creations ampleness becomes apparent in the nature of our world nature and the natural of the cosmos.  Our want moves from having to the more of kinship with ground and air and stars.  Wholeness centers toward the moment when we hear the Bush speaking in a language we can comprehend, knowing this is neither miracle or  metaphor but the natural and normal of creation. Beloved community is living our natural selves in the radical diverseness of creations kin.

Envisaging in her essay Returning to the Wound, bell hook’s divines, “When we create beloved community, environments that are anti-racist and inclusive, it need not matter whether those spaces are diverse.  What matters is that should difference enter the world of beloved community, it can find a place of welcome, a place to belong.”  Beloved community cannot become until we live with kinships more—our non-human siblings.  To chance wandering and wondering about our interior is to transcend our human wants of having.  In that transcendence we become eternal, we become beloved, we become community.  The moment the birds and rabbits, salmon and salamander, buzzard and snake, gopher and beetle, lizard and dove become sibling we will know oneness with the ancestors of the cosmos.  Therein we’ll know the awe of summer quail in bramble.