That one cliche’, about ‘surrounded by alligators while trying to drain the swamp’.

First of all, you shouldn’t be frivolously destroying wetlands that way. La Cienega is not only a blessing. It’s the habitat and the ecosystem those gators depend on.

What you blithely think of as swampdraining is, from their perspective, both ecocide and genocide.

No wonder they’re pissed.

But that’s not really why the cliche was on my mind.

There are ghost gators around me in this moment, sure, but less fear than one might think.

In such moments, I remind myself that this is the place I drain into–spill into, and how and why that is important.

It’s both a kind of secular salvation

and The Objective.