Four Poems by Rosemerry

Of Course Sometimes

It isn’t what it seems.
For instance, from below
the apricot looks golden,

orange blush, weighty enough
to droop the branch as if
its sweetness is too much

for stick alone, and so launch,
reach to grasp it,
and with curled fingertips

feel the sticky wound, the gash
where the birds have marred
the fruit, and perhaps choose

to eat it anyway, unless, of course,
the earwigs and ants have found it first.
The disappointment. How it

turns the day, paints gray the apricot skin,
the tree, your hand, the sky
that only moments before

was more blue than you’d
ever seen it. And sometimes,
of course, whatever it is

that seemed so ripe,
so ready to harvest, so
golden, so sweet

really is.


Wishful

After eating the peach
all I wanted was another
and another and another

and a woman could go
wandering from produce aisle
to farm stand to orchard row

and never find another peach
so full of O, so full of sweetened
gravity, a black hole where

peach used to be—the tongue
now more particular, now craving
what was once, now rummaging

trunks of time for the thrill
that riffed beneath the fuzz, the
spilling golden juice, the mmm

of what cannot be labeled,
reproduced or named,
the bliss of knowing that

the Big Bang banged and served up
such a peach that curved
not only space but through

a woman’s sigh. Through pit where sun
has never shone, this peach
has grown, has grown into hunger

that never might be met, but I will
taste relentlessly, peach & peach, until
I find again the sweet-winged trill of

joy-song flesh that makes the lips
say O and O again, and O
for the pleasure of perhaps an O

let us eat another and another
and another, and if we find
another such one

such luck! such chance!
let’s eat it quick and set out again
in search of more summer rapture.


Not that I would go back

but there was that night
on the red sandstone beach
when the air had begun
to lose its swelter

and the sun was low enough
to cast that amber light
in which it seems easier
to fall in love with the world,

with the day, and with each other,
and we had escaped
the dinner hour,
the carrots half-cooked

atop the stove and the table
not yet set. Instead
we walked across the field
and plunged into the cool water.

How I loved you that night,
the broad thrill on your face
as you let the current carry you.
How I loved to be

the woman in the chill water beside you
wanting no life but this one,
faint scent of river breeze,
warm desert air, bright sound of cicada

encircling the beach, the field,
the home with the napkins still in the drawer,
and all around us, inside of us,
so much ripening.



Dominguez Canyon April 4, 2009

I wandered the canyon lined with snow,
through brown apricot blossoms that will not fruit

and startled the starlings, one hundred or more,
into swirls of black flight, oh shiver, oh low angled light,

oh world I am yours, I crumble like cliffs,
I am yours, I am praising your all that is:

these barren trees, this wind, these lips,
the song inside us that rises like starlings

regardless of chill, of petal turned dust.
Praise the soft laughter of purple mustard blooms,

this damp perfume that lingers
the morning after the killing frost.

Speech for "Hunger for Knowledge," a fund-raising dinner for The Volunteer Center in Silver City, New Mexico, at the Bayard Community Center, November 4th, 5:30-7 p.m. This dinner has been organized by Dr. Bailey's Social Inequality class at Western New Mexico University.



I’m going to talk about my relationship to the backpack program Alimento para el Nino. Some of you have heard parts of this story before, and I apologize for that, but most of you have not and it seems the most appropriate thing for me to talk about tonight.

In 2004, when I was writing a book on the science of hunger, I visited the office of the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque and learned about the backpack program they had in northern New Mexico. Every Friday at school they sent backpacks of snacks to thousands of children going hungry over the weekend. In that office, I saw posted a child’s drawing, not much of a drawing really but a series of splotches of brown and black. Someone had asked the little boy what the drawing meant and he replied, “This is a man who is angry because he just wants food.”

Like most of you, I have a very strong connection to food. I wake up thinking, hmmm, what is there good for breakfast, and then at some point I think—that’s what I want for lunch! And then I feel that same anticipatory pleasure about dinner. I love food. You love food. And so we should. Our relationship to food is a kind of miracle. We pick up an apple or a hamburger, a plant or an animal, and then we transform it--like a magician!--into the movement of our lungs, into this gesturing of hands, into feeding a cat, into writing a poem or repairing a broken pipe. We take food and transform it into our lives. If we don’t have food, there is no transformation, and ultimately, there is no life.

Think for a moment how much comfort and pleasure and satisfaction food gives you. Think of the few times when you have also felt that primal voice that rises up in us when we miss a meal for some reason, or miss two meals, and that voice says: I don’t care what your lunch special is today! Just get me something! Our bodies are designed to be very insistent when they are not getting the calories they need. Our stomach sends up hormones to the brain. Our brains sends down hormones to the stomach. The process of digestions starts and then stops and then just waits. Impatiently. A lot of activity is going on and it’s all about one thing. We are chemically designed to be addicted to food, particularly to some foods like sugar and fat, because…food is life. Food is who we are.

Back to that drawing by that little boy in Albuquerque. Here in New Mexico, one in four children and one in six seniors do not always know when or where they will get their next meal. Now, when I saw that drawing, I didn’t really think in terms of the science of what was going on that child’s body. I didn’t think in terms of serious malnutrition or starvation because that’s not really what most hungry people experience in America. My concern was cultural. I thought: what would it be like to be a child in America surrounded by such an abundance of food, by so much food everywhere, and not have enough for myself? To be a child and to know that the adults in my life were not taking care of my most basic needs? At the other end of the narrative, what would it be like to be a senior—to be sick, to be poor, to be forgotten—and to know that the people around you do not care to make sure you have enough food? What would it be like, at the beginning of your life…when you are starting out as child full of hope and expectation…and to know at the end of your life…when things have to finally make sense, when this is your last experience of the world…what would it be like to know that your culture, America, doesn’t really care?

My next thought was more personal. America is not some strange foreign land. I live in America. I am one of the adults in these children’s lives, particularly in the children who live here in Grant County. I am one of the adults who don’t seem to care about them.

I came back from that experience thinking that giving kids a backpack of snacks to take home on the weekend really didn’t sound that difficult. I am a mother of two children. I’ve stuffed plenty of snacks into plenty of backpacks. It sounded doable. I was also on the school board in Silver City at that time, and I felt confident that I could get help from my own school district. And I thought the program would be fairly small. This was my own denial kicking in. I couldn’t imagine that there were that many children going hungry over the weekend in my own sweet little hometown, but for those who were, we needed to do something.

This was the kind of project for which every door opened. It was a joy. The school board, the school superintendent, the principals, the teachers, the social workers—everyone said yes. Come to the schools and give children food for the weekend. These people know that the work of learning can’t take place without food. There has to be that transformation. The transformation of food into math, into reading, into writing. The Volunteer Center said yes. They would be our fiscal agent. They would provide a pantry. They would provide volunteers. Then the community said yes. Businesses gave money. People wrote checks. Even today, people who clearly don’t have much money themselves, send in five or ten or twenty dollars a week. Everyone said the same thing: of course, we want to feed our children. That’s what adults are supposed to do.

The surprise was how many children needed this service. We began in 2005 with two pilot programs at Harrison-Schmitt and Sixth Street and we had enough money for ten or twelve kids. A small program for a handful of kids. Immediately we saw that we needed enough money and food and backpacks for thirty children, and then fifty, and then hundred. We expanded into all the schools in the Silver district and then into the Cobre schools. This all happened very fast in the first year. Today the Volunteer Center is fully in charge of this program and we have almost two hundred children in the Cobre elementary schools and two hundred in the Silver City schools who take home backpacks over the weekend.

Who are these kids? I have met with a number of them over the years, usually in groups arranged by the school social worker and counselor, and I have talked to the school staff. Many of these children live in homes where both parents or a single parent works at a minimum wage job; if you have done the math in terms of the take home pay of a minimum wage job, then you know that there often isn’t enough to pay for rent and food, for propane and food, for medicine and food, for car expenses and food. Real wages are not keeping up with the cost of living. More and more of these kids live with grandparents who don’t work and who survive on minimum Social Security and savings. Some kids come from homes where there is substance abuse or mental illness or where a parent has suddenly died or been imprisoned. Some of these kids are not particularly skinny; all of them probably suffer from a diet high in fat and low in fresh vegetables and fruit. And that’s typical of poverty in America where a Big Mac really is cheaper than a fresh salad with dried cranberries and those fun glazed walnuts. These kids come from diverse backgrounds because there are diverse reasons why both kids and adults are hungry in New Mexico.

It’s time for me to close. I’m going to say briefly why I think there is hunger in America, the land of plenty. I don’t think it’s because we are uncaring as individuals. I think it’s because we have chosen as a society, as a group, not to see food as a basic human right—much as we don’t see health care as a basic human right. And so we haven’t embedded this right into our institutions. We don’t work to make Food Stamps and WIC and Meals on Wheels wonderfully functional because we are still arguing about whether we should even fund these programs. We don’t work for a livable wage because we haven’t agreed that there should be one. Once we make that decision—once we agree that everyone in America has a right to food—then we will get everyone food just like we get them postal service and electricity and other services that we consider basic to being American. We will do this because we are efficient and smart and because we have a lot of resources. And because we are efficient and smart, we’ll know that we have to have a broader vision of health and good nutrition and sustainability. So we will also, as a society, support community gardens and local farmers, and we’ll have neighborhood cooking classes, and we will teach people how to grow vegetables and can and even market their excess produce, and it will be great. These are things, of course, that The Volunteer Center is trying to do right now. Because in the meantime, while we wait for the rest of America to catch up, we want to start here in Grant County.

Now I am really going to close. And I’m going to give you that statistic again: in New Mexico one in four children and one in six seniors do not always know when or where they will get their next meal. If you are like me, statistics don’t stay with you very long. They’re like rain on a rain slicker. I don’t know how many times I have heard how many acres of rainforest are being destroyed this minute, and how many nuclear war heads there are in the world, and I just seem to forget five minutes after I’m told—even though this is important information, even though I care about this information.

More than the statistic, I can remember that child’s drawing, those blobs of brown and black. I am fortunate in that I also have a collection of drawings from children in Grant County thanking Alimento para el Nino for their snacks and I’ll show you this one—I know you can’t see the detail but maybe you can see the color. There’s the child here in a circle of orange and she’s smiling. I think this is an upstairs room, maybe a staircase, a spiral of green, a Tv, a desk that looks like a spider flattened out without perspective, maybe two siblings or her parents. It’s a second-graders drawing and it’s rich and complex and hopeful, and it’s what we want for all our children.

Thank you.

The first half of Chapter Five from Standing in the Light...on Giordano Bruno and my relationship to magic.

A Renaissance Magician

In the last half of the sixteenth century, the Italian scholar Giordano Bruno developed a free-wheeling pantheism that embraced, promoted, and weirdly mixed a dozen different themes, from nascent science to ancient mysticism, social justice to free love. He publicly admired the mathematician Copernicus and the new and seemingly bizarre theory that the earth revolved around the sun. Like other Renaissance scholars, Bruno had also discovered the ancient Greeks, men like Heraclitus, who taught him that life was flux and change, and Democritus and Epicurus, from whom he adopted atomism and the idea of an infinite universe with infinite other earths and suns—possibly, even, other intelligences like our own.. Bruno wrote prodigiously: plays, poems, allegories, lectures. He championed freedom of speech and thought. He praised reason but also insisted on higher truths which could not be understood by the intellect alone.

One of these higher truths was that the universe was a divine Unity, an immanent God who could assume both corporal and incorporeal form. Bruno believed in souls, in their transmigration from the body, and in their eternal life as part of the larger universal soul. He believed in magic and fancied himself a magus or magician, a poet and wordsmith capable of evoking the hidden powers and sympathies in nature. His pantheism was animistic, with an astrobiological twist, for he declared that celestial bodies also had souls and were analogous to living beings. Above all, he admired the ancient Egyptian cults who had worshipped nature, for “Animals and plants are living effects of Nature,” he wrote, which is “nothing else but God in things.”

It sounds like fun. Except that this was the last half of the sixteenth century, Bruno had taken the vows of a Dominican monk, and the Roman Catholic Church considered these ideas to be abhorrent, dangerous, and heretical. At the age of fifty-two, the writer and philosopher found himself tied to a stake as part of a public execution in Rome’s Campo di Fiori, a plaza named after flowers. Giordano Bruno is not the only pantheist to die for his beliefs. But he is one of the best known and certainly the most voluble. Today his statue faces the Vatican in Rome in the same plaza where he was killed, and websites immortalize him as a martyr to science and symbol of defiance against intolerance. He would not be displeased.

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Growing up in a small town near Naples, Italy, Bruno often looked out at a great gloomy mountain in the distance. He would later write, “In my childhood, I thought that nothing existed beyond Vesuvius”—then and now, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. His father was a soldier, his mother from the “lower gentry.” At seventeen, he became a monk in the monastery of S. Domenico, later a priest and doctor of theology. His intellect and talents were soon noticed. In 1571, Pope Pius V brought him to Rome to study ars memoriae, the art of memorization, a subject in which Bruno excelled. In the meantime, he was proving to be a rather troublesome friar, scornful of his superiors, dismissive of outward forms of devotion, critical of established beliefs. Returned to the monastery, at the age of twenty-eight he was discovered reading subversive books in the outhouse. Charged in 1576 with heresy and insubordination by the Neapolitan Inquisition, Bruno fled back to Rome to learn that the Roman Inquisition was also drawing up accusations against him. He fled this time to Switzerland, abandoned his monk’s habit, and began a life of travel.

Hardly a safe haven, Europe was in the middle of thirty years of bloody warfare stemming from the rise of Protestantism, which challenged the dominance of the Catholic Church. In Geneva, the now-excommunicated monk hoped to find some refuge among the Calvinists, a Protestant sect who controlled that city. Instead, after Bruno disagreed with the authorities on a variety of religious matters, he was thrown into jail and forced to publicly apologize. In 1579, he moved on to a troubled France, where only seven years earlier French Catholics had hunted down and killed thousands of French Protestants (perhaps as many as 100,000) in the course of a few months. Despite the social turmoil—and despite the fact that Bruno’s ideas and pugnacious attitude were offensive to both Catholics and Protestants--the scholar managed to make a life for himself in Paris by focusing on one of his first loves, the study and teaching of memorization.

Mnemonic devices had long been used by orators from Roman times through the Middle Ages. Imagine a building, attach images to its parts that correspond to the parts of your speech, and then mentally walk through the building, “seeing” the images and information they signify. A good memory was highly prized in a world without books or with limited access to them. But Bruno was not simply interested in giving a good speech. He believed that increasing the powers of memory simultaneously increased the powers of the mind and enlarged the psyche. Moreover, when a student of the magical arts used certain archetypal images as part of his mnemonic system, then he could tap into the greater mind and psyche of the universe. Such potent and numinous images could open doors. They reflected the divine Oneness of all things.

Bruno’s published works on memory were a complex system of graphic word-pictures. Many of these involved the sun and moon. Some were original and startling, “a dark man, of immense stature, with burning eyes, angry face, and clothed in a white garment” and “Saturn: a man with a stag’s head, on a dragon, with an owl which is eating a snake in his right hand,” while others referred back to Egyptian mythology, Greek mythology, the Zodiac, Jewish Cabala and the legends of sorcerers like Merlin and Circe. These magical pictures were placed into various imaginary wheels divided into parts and corresponding to other wheels, which could be memorized and “imprinted on” by the obedient student. Give yourself up to such a system, Bruno wrote, and “you may gain possession of a figurative art which will assist, not only the memory, but all the powers of the soul in a wonderful way.” Possess such a system, and “you will arrive from the confused plurality of things to the underlying unity.”

For Bruno, the relationship of memory, imagination, and godlike power—the relationship of the human mind to the larger universe—was linked to an occult tradition going back thousands of years. This tradition had been preserved in the Hermetic writings, a set of books thought to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical and highly-revered Egyptian sage believed to have lived right after Moses. The lost wisdom of this sage had been “re-discovered” in the fifteenth century. In Bruno’s time, these texts were seen as a sacred entrance into a golden past, when men were better and purer and closer to the mysteries of life. (In fact, historians would later discover that the books were written by Greek authors from 100-300 A.D.) In one of these treatises was the Egyptian Reflection of the Universe in the Mind, something that Bruno took to heart:

Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God; for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thoughts all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.

Combining his mnemonic system with the Hermetic experience of “reflecting the universe in the mind,” Bruno became a kind of Renaissance magician activating images that would help him achieve a knowledge of the divine, as well as a semi-divine personality. He was not alone in his efforts. Magic was still very much part of the Renaissance world—and not, necessarily, a bad or unChristian part. A hundred years earlier, one theologian wrote, “There is no department of knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and cabala.” An important distinction was made between good magicians who used natural magic and bad magicians who relied on demonic magic. A good magician aimed to discover the secret powers of nature, the hidden sympathies and resonances which he could manipulate and control for good ends. Some good magicians were an early form of the scientist--with alchemy the precursor to chemistry and astrology to astronomy. A bad magician, of course, might try instead to call up a demon or use his power for evil, which was a serious concern.

In France, as Bruno’s magical, marvelous system of memory became more popular, the French King himself took interest. Henry III had already studied the history of magic and became one of Bruno’s patrons. In 1583, as the political and religious violence in Paris increased, Bruno left for England with letters of recommendation from Henry III to the French ambassador. (The King himself would be assassinated six years later by Catholics angry at his attempt to work for peace with the Protestants.) In London, as a guest of the French ambassador, Bruno composed some of his most important works or dialogues--a mix of allegorical story and playwriting.

One of these works was dedicated, mischievously, to the doctors of the University of Oxford. Bruno had tried lecturing at Oxford where faculty were fined five shillings for each disagreement with the “laws” of Aristotle. By now, the writings of Aristotle had been reinterpreted by the Church to fit the Christian worldview. They were enshrined as uncontestable dogma, including the belief that the sun revolved around the earth. Bruno immediately disagreed with these laws, particularly the Aristotelian idea that the universe was closed rather than infinite and that the earth was the center of this closed universe. Instead, Bruno lectured on the newest ideas in astronomy and his own scheme of a divine universe that had no boundary and that contained an infinite number of earth-like worlds revolving around sun-like stars.

The Oxford faculty received this, in Bruno’s words, with “a constellation of the most pedantic, obstinate ignorance and presumption, mixed with a kind of rustic incivility which would try the patience of Job.”

Equally, one observer wrote how Bruno, the visiting lecturer, “undertooke among very many other matters to set on foote the opinion of Copernicus, that the earth did goe round, and the heavens stand still; wheras in truth it was his owne head which rather did run round, & his braines did not stand stil.”

It was a fair description. Bruno’s brains did not stand still as he continued to write and publish feverishly, to charm the French ambassador, to chat up Queen Elizabeth whenever possible, and to outrage almost everyone else. He had various love affairs, admitting once that he bedded as many women as possible, with no “desire to become a eunuch.” He was not above plagiarizing the work of other scholars and claiming it as his own. Nor was he humble. He admired Copernicus but also dismissed him as a mere mathematician, describing the astronomer’s work as “the dawn that must precede the rising of the sun” with the sun being Bruno’s own philosophy.

That philosophy was a magical, mystical, animist pantheism that could be called syncretic, eclectic, half-stolen, or half-digested. It is not so much that you love or hate the man, so much as you don’t know what to think. Mounting to the highest height and descending to the lowest depth, Bruno tried his best to understand God by making himself equal to Him, embracing in his thoughts all things at once, growing to a greatness beyond measure, drawing into himself all arts, all sciences, and the nature of every living being, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, fire and water, dry and moist, young and old, living and dead. He tried his best to believe that nothing was impossible.

In 1585, the French ambassador left England and returned to France. Bruno went, too. He stayed in Paris for less than a year, trying but failing to have his ex-communication from the Catholic Church annulled. He had time to fall in love with a new version of the compass, and he published four dialogues that attempted to appropriate the device as his own by labeling its inventor a “triumphant idiot” who could not—unlike Giordano Bruno--grasp the significance of this important work. In another graceless incident, he gave a public lecture describing his concept of an infinite universe with multiple worlds. At the end, he shouted triumphantly for someone to defend Aristotle. When someone did, Bruno tried to leave, was attacked by the students, and escaped only on the promise he would return the next day to continue the debate. Prudently, he left town instead.

He went on to Germany, tangled with the Calvinists again, and escaped to Prague where he did not find employment. Excommunicated now by the Protestants, he continued to write but could not find a way to make a living. In 1590, he traveled to Frankfurt, then Zurich, and back to Frankfort.

His mnemonics retained their striking magical images, “a crowned man of an august presence most gentle of aspect, riding on a camel, dressed in a garment the colour of all flowers, leading with his right hand a naked girl…” or yet another “naked girl rising from the foam of the sea, who on reaching dry land wipes off the humour with her palm.” As one scholar has noted, for this artist, “The fable, the poetic image, and metaphor are no longer vain ornaments but become vehicles of thought.” As Bruno himself wrote, “To think is to speculate with images.”

In the fall of 1591, Bruno moved to Venice, responding to the invitation of a wealthy gentleman who wished to be taught the secrets of memory. In hindsight, we have to wonder why the scholar returned to Italy where he knew he would be exposed to the Inquisition. Probably he was penniless, and certainly he was arrogant, with the inflated belief that his charm and intellectual gifts made him invulnerable. He was also naïve and fostered the hope of reconciliation, that someday he would convince the Church to see him as an important philosopher and thinker--not a threat. He may have had a sense of mission, for the politics of Europe had shifted and Bruno anticipated new reform within the Catholic hierarchy. More simply, he may have been homesick. His father may have still been alive. He may have missed the language, the music, the food. Once in Venice, at least, he did not go immediately to his patron’s house but lived independently until March of 1592.

On his part, the wealthy gentleman named Mocenigo--the villain in this plot-- may have always been a spy for the Venetian Inquisition or, as likely, became alienated from his teacher as the months passed. By May, relations between the two had clearly soured. When Bruno planned a return to Germany to supervise the printing of his latest work, Mocenigo opposed the journey. On the night before Bruno’s departure, the patron locked his tutor in a room and summoned the authorities. That night Bruno was taken to the prison of the Holy Office.

Bruno’s trial by the Venetian Inquisition lasted over two months. Mocenigo was a star witness. He accused Bruno of describing the Catholic faith as blasphemous and “against the majesty of God” by confining God to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He testified that Bruno held many erroneous views on the Trinity, on the divinity of Christ, on the holy mass. Bruno did not believe that sins were punished in hell and even denied the virginity of Mary. He practiced magical arts and called Christ a magician. He said that the universe was infinite with infinite worlds. He said that all monks were “asses” and the Church “asinine.”

Mocenigo further stated that Bruno had frequently complained that the original Christians converted through gentleness and good works but now the Church resorted to violence and force. Bruno had asserted a new golden rule: “To not do unto others that which we would not have done unto us.” Bruno had argued that the current state of ignorance, corruption, and hatred could not continue and a new society had to emerge, one that practiced tolerance and encouraged freedom.

For the most part, all these accusations were perfectly true. They repeated what Giordano Bruno had written in his books and presumably spoken out loud to Mocenigo. On trial for his life, however, the scholar now denied almost every charge and either apologized for or recanted what he could not deny.

He justified his ideas about an infinite universe by explaining that he had been speaking philosophically and that such philosophical thoughts had no relation to the tenets of faith. They were the idle products of reason, not “substantial truth.” He tried to realign some of his theories with Christian dogma. His soul of the universe, for example, was really another name for the Holy Ghost. In other instances, he explained, he had been repeating the ideas of heretics like Democritus and Lucretius and Epicurus. They were not his ideas. Bruno did admit doubt concerning the nature of the Trinity, but these were internal dilemmas, not public denials of Church doctrine. He also admitted that at times he had been in error: he should never have condoned the sin of fornication. He admitted that in sixteen years he had only been to a confessor twice but that he intended someday to live as a good Christian. He admitted he was curious about the magical arts, but nothing more. In fact, he held books on necromancy “in contempt.”

Bruno also reversed his most basic belief in pantheism and an immanent God, declaring, “I have believed and maintained without doubt all that which every faithful Christian must believe and maintain concerning the first person [the Father].”
Strategically, at a few crucial points, he simply sputtered and contradicted his accuser. Of course, Mary was a virgin! Of course, the bread and wine of Mass became the body and blood of Christ! Of course, sinners were damned!
At the end of the trial, the former monk humbled himself completely, kneeling before the judges as he begged for mercy. “All the heresies that I have entertained, and the doubts that I have had regarding the Catholic faith and matters determined by the Holy Church, I now detest and abhor; and I am repentant for having done, held, declared, believed, or having meditated upon any matter that was not Catholic…”

Who can blame him? I would have been on my knees from the start, simpering: Don’t mangle my fingers. Don’t use the rack. Don’t burn me alive. I admire Bruno’s gamesmanship, the weeks of talking and cajoling, twisting and turning, which required all his charm and intellectual gifts. As he pleaded for his life, he probably thought it would be spared and perhaps even that he would be set free. He had some cause for hope. The Venetian Inquisition was relatively mild and in the sixteenth century had sentenced to death only five heretics in 1,565 trials.

At this point, unfortunately, Rome stepped in. Bruno had made too many enemies and been too generous with his opinions. The Pope himself demanded the writer’s extradition. Although Venetian authorities did not usually comply with such requests, this time--under political pressure--they did. In February, 1593, the forty-five-year-old Bruno was transferred to the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the prison of the Roman Inquisition.

Eight years passed. Even in jail, Bruno had a hard time keeping quiet, and fellow inmates began to accuse him of making new heretical statements. In further interrogations, the Roman Inquisition went over these offenses, as well as those from the Venetian trial. The fourteenth deposition returned to Bruno’s ideas of an infinite universe with many worlds and the fifteenth to his interest in magical arts. The philosopher continued to deny everything except for the odd minor transgression. In 1594, he wrote an eighty-page response. There were more charges, more interrogations, more long replies. The Roman Inquisition probably felt that its case was weak since the defendant denied his heresy and the new witnesses against him were prisoners. Legally, this opened the door to torture, used when evidence was inconclusive and extreme measures needed to discover the truth.

In January, 1599, officials presented Bruno with a shortened list of eight charges, and he finally submitted. He would agree that these views were heretical and recant them. In return, he would not be executed. In February, at another interrogation, Bruno remained submissive. In April, he produced a written statement of his retraction. In August, that statement was considered satisfactory except for two points, one involving the Trinity and one the analogy of body and soul as being like a ship and pilot.

In September, the Inquisition suddenly reversed its position and decided that the legal case against Bruno was still weak. The Pope ordered a further retraction by Bruno and a reexamination of all previous interrogations.

The next day, Bruno said again that he would do whatever the Church wanted him to do. He also had anther written statement.

In that statement, Bruno recanted his recant. Perhaps he realized that he was never really going to be forgiven or forgotten. Perhaps his renewed insistence that he had done nothing wrong—that he had nothing to repent--was a response to torture or perhaps a way to avoid torture. In any case, the philosopher refused any more acts of submission. He had a forty day period in which to change his mind. He remained firm.

On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno was marched from prison to the Campo di Fiori where he would be burned alive. He was stripped naked. In one report, his tongue was tied in order to stop him from speaking. According to a more detailed account, tying the tongue meant thrusting a metal spike horizontally through the cheeks and another spike vertically through the lips, forming a bloody cross that effectively blocked speech. Once the fire started, Bruno was not offered the mercy of strangulation. He is best remembered today for this moment.

Certainly the astronomer Galileo, who also subscribed to the theories of Democritus and Copernicus, remembered it thirty-three years later when he took his place before the Inquisition and denied his beliefs.

Ah, evil, Marcus Aurelius would have sighed. The same old thing. The same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. Nothing new at all.

[line break]

Growing a New Home Place

Sunday morning, late August, I’m out before 8 working in my garden. My mother and father are particularly present with me this day, though my father is many years dead and my mother is in an Alzheimer’s facility an hour’s drive away. I’ve taken out the pruning saw with the graceful wooden handle inscribed with my father’s initials, E.A., and am sawing some small dry branches into firewood. The branches once belonged to the diseased purple plum that stood in the corner of the lawn-filled wedge of yard when I bought my townhouse three years ago.

Thoughts of family swirl through me as I work on this cool, quiet Oregon morning. When I was growing up we lived in the Bay Area of California, and then just over the border in Nevada, in the Tahoe Sierra. My mother made gardens wherever we moved. Now I’m thinking about how much like her I am, putting roots into this new place by digging in the earth and tending plants.

As a single woman on a freelance income, I chose to leave my overpriced native state of California four years ago to find a place I could afford to call my own. I didn’t know if I would be able to stand being far away from the mountains of California that had imprinted me in my backpacking youth. Oregon offers bountiful beauty and many pleasures, but not for me the pleasure of generations of memories made in one place. This has given my long-desired home ownership a bittersweet flavor.

I’ve been editing a garden memoir by Sydney Eddison, who has lived on the same piece of land in Connecticut for forty-seven years. Forty-seven years! I imagine the change of seasons must occupy a central place in a person’s sense of things when the landscape she looks out upon remains the same year after year after year. Change of place creates a discontinuity that distracts the transplant from the eternal cycles. Although my own migration is probably more the norm nowadays than Sydney’s staying put, I envy her.

I’m not sure that what I’ve lost in terms of family ties with place can ever be totally compensated for, but I’ve tried to forge my own connection with this new place by making a garden. The first year I was completely engrossed in learning the native plants, learning to recognize red-twig dogwood and coast silktassel and red currant. Now those plants have come to seem as right to me in my garden as western redbud and flannel bush seemed when I lived in the Central Valley of California.

In the second year I planted my vegetable garden. Now I’ve eaten from the earth of this place—the green beans, the tomatoes, the eggplant and zucchini, the chard and red onions—for a couple of harvest seasons. This year the patches of clover I’ve seeded in the small remaining curve of lawn were big enough for me to lie on. Belly down, I sent my heart and my sorrows deep into the earth and sought to anchor there.

In this third year, right before fall equinox my garden is on the Passport to Healthy Gardens Organic Garden and Sustainable Living Tour that Corvallis Northwest Earth Institute does as an annual fundraiser. The description of my garden in the tour brochure says “this garden provides a calm space featuring recycled art, drought-resistant and edible plants. Built by one person with one shovel, it includes a cut flower bed, a variety of natives for all-season color and texture, and an aspen grove. . . . Stroll along the paths and absorb the serenity this garden emits.”

Do I feel serenely a part of this place at last? Some days I’m simply astonished as I look out my windows that my immediate environment has transformed so completely since the day I moved in. It buoys me with proof that one person with one shovel can change everything, given a guiding vision of a more abundant life, a life more intimate with the gifts of its place. I still wish for more family presence here, but maybe carrying my father and mother with me, through their tools and their love of nature, is enough.

What This Animal Body Knows

Terry Song

Now is a good time to begin—to say what place has meant to me, who I have been in certain places. It is a good time to write out of my love and deep connection to the land, as I sit here in this little house made of earth, loaned to me by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation so that I might be still and rest in a space off the clock, off the calendar. Outside my windows, the wind hurries the season along. If I look to the north, snow falls thick and fast on Taos Mountain. To the south, the sun shines in clear blue sky. Here in this in-between place, the trees are wild and generous, the world a flurry of gold leaves.

I enter into my last week here and soon must leave this casita nestled in cottonwood and elm, this nest where I folded in my wings and took refuge. In this place, I have cleansed myself with tears and sleep, have walked in the mountains, marveling at leaves and sky. I have sat without purpose, lit candles just to gaze at them. On my desk is a picture postcard of a kiva. The ladder in the center, propped against stone, leads up from the dark womb of it into daylight. In giving me the space to reflect on my experience of the midlife passage, this place has allowed me to climb the ladder out of the kiva into the light of new Self.

Each moment of who I have been in Casita #4, in the season of my residency here, is housed in image: the desk I made myself outdoors in the center of the meadowy backyard, tangle of alfalfa gone wild, its purple blossoms in a space ringed by trees that changed with the rhythm of the earth, just as I changed. Bright goldfinch, black iridescence of magpie wing, light on tall grasses, buzz and hum of everything, insects, the silence of butterflies. Each moment a house I can live in for the rest of my life. Even when the outdoor desk is long gone and I am gone from here, in me will still be the whole days I sat at it in the luxury of writing among trees and birds, alfalfa and insects, my books and papers all spread out across the bright blue Mexican oilcloth, the sun warm on my back, in my hair, and every fiber in me fully present and grateful for days of feeling undivided, not fragmented, but a whole person doing the work I love in my natural habitat.

One day when roofers appear to repair my casita, I pack a lunch and set off on an adventure, driving north and west of Taos to the hot springs of Ojo Caliente for an afternoon of soaking and swimming. I drive at my leisure, pulling off the road to soak up the incredible landscape, the play of light and shadow on high desert plateau ringed by mountains, and where it plunges into the Royal Gorge of the Rio Grande, impossible hues and textures. Later, where the plains give way to mountain foothills, I get out of the car and walk, sit on a rock, catching images in my journal: wild sunflowers and purple aster along the roadside; tall grasses that could tickle the belly of a horse; desert scrub oak, rabbitbrush, and juniper mingled with mountain mahogany and piñon—everything purple and yellow and silvery sage. In the distance, cathedrals of clouds drape lavender veils across the mountain. As the Navajo say: Today is a good day to die.

A week later, after another outing, I wake in the night and cannot go back to sleep. Fresh from the nest of my bed and warm glove of covers that hold me cupped in dreams, I rise in the dark, go to my desk, and light a white candle. Images coalesce into lines of a poem:

Luminescent
I walk with women, a high desert
path along the gorge, through
sweetgrass, threadgrass,
peppergrass and blue gramma,
four miles through chamisa and sage.
We sit on the rim in silence,
dangle our legs from a rock ledge
above the winding river.
Silence settles over the land.
The sun slips behind us
like a lover out the back door,
leaves the canyon flushed rose.
Evening tucks its lavender and indigo
secrets into the land, and we hurry along
the desert track. Birds
flutter in the scrub, settling
in for the night. Later,
the moon finds us laughing,
feasting on bread and cheese,
apples, cashews and olives,
chocolate and wine by the flicker of candlelight.
A white half moon, nestled
in the crook of Scorpio’s tail,
scatters its light on the river
where we linger,
hold our cups out for more, captive
in the clear night of a thousand stars.

Many, the luminescent moments where I am held, soothed, lifted by the land: Standing in Taos Pueblo on the feast day of San Geronimo, in the September morning chill, I witness the ceremonial footraces as dawn comes into the mountains and lies itself across the land and red earth walls of the pueblo where the women stand wrapped in bright shawls facing the sun.
~~~
Another: on an afternoon of combing through journals of a painful time in my life, I leave the work to drive up into Taos ski valley. I drive for an hour, late sun in brilliant yellow aspens, the flutter of leaves and light a balm. I stop to kneel beside the rushing mountain stream and splash my face. Something lifts as I stand and stretch, face dripping and cold, taking in the sky, the piney mountain air, a lightness in me as I get back in my car and drive to town.
~~~
Housed in the place of Nambé Pueblo is a day I bask with others in the Indian summer afternoon heat. We stand at the edge of the Corn Dance unfolding—children and elders, men and women, dancing ancient patterns to the rhythm of drums. Later, after the dancers descend into the kiva, we take a back road home through small villages in the mountains, a drive of heart-stopping beauty—bursts of yellow aspen in the evergreen hills. We stop in the village of Truchas to talk with a weaver from an old family of weavers, beautiful rugs on his looms. Last, we stop in Chimayo at the sanctuary renowned for its healing dirt. The impulse toward a poem begins.

My Cristos
At the Sanctuario de Chimayo
I could not find the pilgrim’s
reverence and awe in the small
church of plaster saints
of virginal women with downcast
eyes and covered heads, nor,
forgive me,
in the image of the bleeding
Christ on a cross.
Not even the candles were lit there.

Outside,
yellow-leafed cottonwoods
whispered,“Wake up!”
their alive branches arching
a shady bower sanctuario
underneath a blue sky.
On the sunwarmed banks,
by the little rio, we took off our
shoes and socks, rolled up our pants
and waded into that holy water blessing

flowed down from piney mountains.
In the women, virgins none,
in the milagritos of their
blue and pink and copper painted
toenails, flashing like fish
in the cold October waters—
bare-headed, golden,
afternoon light catching in their hair—
my Cristos.

On my desk is a picture of me in a canoe, rowing the Jackson Fork in Missouri. It is one of three, out of a lifetime of pictures, I recognize as an image of the “real” me, if I don’t count the dancing-as-if-no one-is looking photo. Another is my Sacajawea photo where I stand in round-bellied, full-breasted nakedness on my 29th birthday, eight months pregnant, at the top of McKnight Peak, one hand on my walking stick, the other shading my eyes as I gaze out over mountains. The third is the photo where I am looking into the camera, in my straw sunflower hat, green sunglasses, and tie-dye tank top, smiling the relaxed smile of a woman in her element. Desert hills stretch out behind me.

In this one on my desk, the afternoon light glistens on the water. River willow, large old oak and sycamore trees along the banks are still green, but the first gold and orange leaves floating on the water hint of a season about to change. In the photo, my back is to the camera as though I am rowing away. The image reminds me that when I row away from Missouri, returning to my heartland in New Mexico, I will carry with me golden, lazy days on the river and in the woods with women friends, nights of stars and trading stories by the fire, coffee in a hot tin cup, smell of woodsmoke, and sense of restoration and homecoming, coming into authentic self, canoeing the river, walking in woods—these particular woods of maple, oak, sycamore, and dogwood, with fern and fungus and that loamy, musty smell of leaf mold and rotting bark that I will always associate with Missouri. Embedded in the heart of that image is the palpable sense of who I am—healthy, vital, in relationship to sky and water and land.

In her book Red, Terry Tempest Williams says that “Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that carries our history, our dreams.” Perhaps that intense sense of belonging is what made me weep, when crossing the border from Colorado into northwestern NM the summer my friend Karen rode with me from Missouri, and we stopped at Sugarite State Park for a picnic by the Cimarron River, a lovely small river flowing fast and cold over rocks. As I sat at the picnic table, lifting sandwich to mouth, my eyes taking in the boulders and rocks of the hillside, the piñon, scrub oak and blue sky, my body flooded with recognition. I let the tears flow. Landscape of my bones—it was the embrace of a lost love.
I experienced what Frances Meyers describes in Under the Tuscan Sun, that “pure surge of pleasure, flash flood of joy—to find the electric jolt of the outside place that corresponds with the inside.” Later I found a spot to leap out to a large flat rock in the stream to sit on and dangle my feet in the water. Like a tree drawing nutrients up through its roots, I soaked it up.

This is who I am.

One spring night in the loft of a primitive little cabin deep in Lake of the Ozarks State Park, I lie awake pleasure reading Under the Tuscan Sun by kerosene lamplight, about place and how it enters into us: “The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it,” she says. “Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave“—this fire in the woodstove, path up the hill through moonlit woods to the bath house. If what she says is true, that “where you are is who you are,” I am the woman of the woodland cabin.
I am woman of the sea on the night ferry to the Cycladic island of Paros, the summer I travel to Greece, sea breeze on my face, in my hair, washing everything away. Here and there a sprinkling of lights on a far island, then long stretches of nothing but the sky and night black waters.

Adventuress, woman in the world, rescuing myself from aridity, choosing something deeply craved, I am writer housing images in my red silk journal of this place that enters into me: June 21—On the peninsula of Methana, we hike to the volcano where I find wild mountain thyme and lavender blooming, pick oregáni and something wild and delicate I can’t name; in the shade of olive groves and vineyards, I listen to the sea lap against the shore. Green hills rise out of the Aegean where we swim at sunset. The sun sinks into the sea, shooting golden rays across the water, straight into my open heart. That I have lived to see the sea and the color of the sea at sunset, to be rolled in its embrace, something buoyant and alive!

The air is laden with the sweet scent of jasmine and lemon blossoms as we walk the path up to dinner. We eat outside as night falls, a fingernail moon hanging in the sky, the silky sea shushing, unfolding itself against the shore. A thin Greek tune wafts over the white houses and hills of Methana.

The next morning when I find a garden where the rosemary grows so large that I can break a small branch and brush my hair with it, the words of poet Adrienne Rich ring true— “sensual vitality is essential to the struggle for survival.” Later, I write in a card to my husband: “With my hair scented rosemary and sunlight, my lips all olive oil and Greek wine, my body salty from the sea, I think you would like me.”

Time in the natural world reminds me: I am spirit and creature, vibrantly alive. In the presence of earth’s wild places, I stand in the presence of what is most authentic in me, unmasked, the whole of me fully present.

On a golden autumn day eight years ago, I first got a mind to write a personal essay that speaks to our connection to the land as humans, to explore my love affair with the natural world, one of the deepest relationships, both physically and spiritually, of my life. On a day too glorious to contain ourselves within four white walls, I sent my creative writing students to find a private nook outdoors, to sit and write—out of silent observation and out of their own experience, which is, after all, what gives us the authority to write on a subject convincingly. I found my nook, too, and began to write:

October—and sap in the maple and oak begins its descent. The one thing this blood knows, blood of my farmer father and his father before him, what this animal body knows, as it instinctively picks out a mottled patch of sunwarmed ground to rest on, is that we are meant for this earth to pass between our hands, to be felt by our bare feet. We must not pass over it too quickly or pave over it too solidly.

The leaves flutter down from the trees on campus today. I choose the spot where they rain down the most heavily. They shower in my hair and over the open pages. A tree trunk to lean against—oh, luxury! What other job would allow me to embrace a mid-day hour of autumn—to assign my charges to go where they love and write. I am where I love, the ground slightly damp still from the weekend’s rain. If I could whisk myself back to all those places where I have loved the land . . .

And that day I began to think if I had any hope of convincing a reader or listener that it’s our job to love the land, I must examine what gives me authority to speak. And so—my vita—the facts that lend credibility and, thus, the right to your ear:

1. Daddy was a farmer. Summers found me on the end of a hoehandle, skin nutbrown from sun. I watched the sky for rain, prayed against hailstones, picked peaches in August from my mom’s tree, shelled black-eyed peas from her garden. Other qualifications include: hanging from the willow tree; summer camping trips to mountains, fresh trout, glorious pines and aspens we didn’t have on the Texas panhandle; lazy hot vacations to my grandparents’ farm in Oklahoma—the orchard, the vinerow, the cane patch, and peanut fields. From swinging on sand bags across the creek, making preserves from apricots warm with sun, loving my grandma’s tall gladiolas, and dreaming in the hayloft—I am acquainted with the land.

2. My own garden every year of my adult life, no matter where I find myself living. I replicate for myself the thrill my father felt of putting seeds in the ground, looking across fields of fresh-turned earth, tender green plants springing up where before, there was nothing. Even if my plot must be small.

Every January when the seed catalogues arrive, it’s the same: maybe this year I won’t order, I think, then drool over the catalogues. I mark the possibilities and make my list—a forest of flowers, a few herbs, and such an abundance of vegetables we won’t have to buy groceries. It will be Eden this year and—yes! we will get ourselves back to the garden—until I tally it up: over $100 in one catalogue, $70 in another, and $38 in the third. And that doesn’t even get to the catalogue with all the native plants, or the bulb catalogue—or the one with berries and fruit trees. I release my dreams of being Jeannie Appleseed and scratch from the list the most exotic flowers first, then the veggies least likely to be eaten by my family, and keep scratching till it reaches the threshold of affordability. I used to justify by telling my husband the 29 reasons for such an investment: We’ll save money growing our own food, right? For health then—and for a taste of heaven and the sake of beauty (oh, Keats, marry me!). It is my service work, I claim—bowl of cherry tomatoes for the neighbors across the street and, for friends, a colander full of delectable green beans (whose violet flowers will please the mailman’s eye), a fresh bouquet of flowers brought in every week (and one for your office!), pesto for our pasta and extra for the college girls next door. Calloo! Callay! To squat and dig and sweat in the garden is cheaper than therapy! And dreaming over the seed catalogue, so like reading poetry . . .

Found poem: Cook’s Garden Seed Catalogue
Who wouldn’t want your seeds,
your certified organic Tromboncino Cristoforo
or Sundance
and Delicata squash,
perfect for tempura.

I'd take your golden tomatillo, Toma Verde,
serrano, habañero, Corno di Toro,
your Bulldog Paprika with Plum Purple
radishes or Fluo Fluo,
French hybrid breakfast with Red Cloud
Rose Finn from cultured seed stock,
and petit pois
or tendersnap sweet pod heirloom
for nitrogen fixation
or stir fry,
with Southern, curled, Osaka purple tatsoi
mustard green plain cress arugula
Arugula!
selvatica arugula!
Winter Marvel,
Lolla Rosa, perpetual
bestseller Bibb four-season edible salad garden
drizzled with Ellen’s homemade salad dressing
served with wine
and cheese,
by candlelight.

3. It’s true that I am a product of the late 60s and 70s. We believed if we unplugged from the establishment, which included growing our own food instead of paying the gas/oil cartel to spray it and ship it pre-packaged in plastic, that we could make the world a better place. It was a dream some of us had. The only electricity we used was for our fridge, stereo, and one clock. In the evenings, long walks by the river, card games by kerosene lamp-light, homegrown music, stargazing. It wasn’t just us, being eccentric; it was whole communities all over the land.
Ray Bradbury once said, “The only part of the world you can change is the part that passes directly through your hands.” So we traded corn and melons to the honey lady for honey, tomatoes for eggs. We ground wheat for bread and tortillas, milked a goat for yogurt and cheese, canned and dried from the bounty of our garden, and cut our own down-and-dead wood for heat. Much of this was done in community: a salsa canning party with women friends, complete with salsa music and margaritas; a wood-run and picnic in the mountains with another family. We believed in free lunch. If you need one, come walk with me through my garden.

Rock House Poem

There will never be another like it,
the old teacherage on the hillside,
built by the WPA in '39,

a view of Cook's Peak, the velvet
cutout of Black Range Mountains,
splintery wooden floors,

no closets, no hot water at first,
and the well that kept running dry.
The drunk landlord

bursting through the front door,
thinking nobody at home,
shouted,"Viva Mejico!"

But it was only 75 dollars a month,
six rooms with many windows. We built
shelves in kitchen windows, lined them

with plants, and sunshine
filtered through to warm the kitchen,
where we huddled winter mornings

with a cup of tea in the thin light
while the woodstove came to life. As early
as February on the long porch facing south,

we lay nude in sun. At night
constellations would
swing across, friends would crank

ice cream in the White Mountain ice
cream bucket, singing the moon up, a little
wine on the side.

It was a house for newlyweds.
It kept us together. From there I would
walk to Bear Canyon to fish.

In Christmas snow, we wandered
the hills behind the house for our tree, always
a small pine growing

in the shadow of something larger. Our needs
were small: a porch and windows,
a place for our bed. We had our first

child there, in that house with its own large
belly for us to grow in,
forgiving mother with eyes

of memory,
skin and stones and breath—
its voice,

tonight I can almost hear it.


When we moved to the city in the mid-80s, for my husband to go to graduate school, it was, for me, with a sense of loss and a splitting from values held dear. I wept the first night in our suburban rental, the little white box of a bedroom off the dog-run hallway, and houses on all sides. It felt like staying in a motel. Leaving the hills, the river, the big garden, the funky old house was like cutting away a part of my body.

I identified keenly with the character Clemente in Rudolfo Anaya’s Heart of Aztlan, who is reluctant to sell his land and move his family to the promise of a better future for his kids in the city. His heart and soul are in the earth which has nurtured his life. Clemente thinks, “Without the land, the relationship a man created with the earth would be lost . . . they would be like wandering gypsies without a homeland where they might anchor their spirit.” He fears becoming “separated from the rhythm of the heartbeat of the land,” which is the rhythm of sunrise and sunset, of seasons, tuning us to natural human rhythms of daily life and to our own cycles and seasons.

I remember feeling that rhythm, that heartbeat, at various times in my life. After college, when I began teaching high school and opted to rent a farmhouse about 30 miles from my job, it was a sanctuary. Evenings after work, I would walk at dusk across the llano, the breeze on my skin, feet steadily progressing over the land, my breathing becoming deeper and fuller. I would feel my inner gears shifting as I climbed an old windmill in the pasture and watched the sky put the land to sleep and the stars wink out. It was a slowing, a re-tuning to the inner rhythms . . . a coming into the quiet surety of self—the heartbeat of the land my heartbeat, breath of the land my breath.

In the city, I found myself losing touch with a pace conducive to health and wholeness. When we moved to Missouri, city life was fun—going out to hear jazz, going to plays and concerts, dance performances and literary events, art shows, and good restaurants. The going, going, going provided such constant stimulation that little by little and big by big I became cut off from my own rhythms. The self that has always been revivified in nature began to lose her balance. At night I would step out on the porch, walk down the sidewalk into the street away from the house to try to be alone with the sky, to gaze at the stars—but Missouri humidity and the haze of city lights make only the tiniest sprinkle of brightest stars visible.

My sense of loss in the city has been, in part, the feeling of being cut off from the sky, the vast night sky with its awesome company of stars. To be cut off from stars is a severing from our enormity. We lose the sense of mystery of the whole that is larger than us and yet that hints at our own immensity. When earth is paved over and sky blanketed with light, both microcosm and macrocosm are obscured, our biogeneology is lost to us, and we forget who we are: stardust, children hosted by this wet, green planet—dust to dust, mineral and water, substance of the mother’s body. Without the stars, which have always provided a means of orienting, something of perspective and sense of direction are lost; we lose our ability to navigate a path through the darkness.

Our journey away from the land, I am convinced, takes us further and further away from ourselves, in ways that we may not recognize, in ways that are complex, away from what it is to be human on this planet. While our relationship with the earth, in modern city life, may not be completely lost, it does become diminished or sometimes irrelevant. We forget about it. As Clemente says, “A man must work the earth with his hands, he must keep in touch with it, or else he forgets.” And like Clemente, who, on arriving in the city, turns to a corner of yard with enough sunlight to grow tomatoes and pours out the coffee can of soil his wife has filled from her flower garden to bring with them, I too I have tried to overcome the sense of loss by carrying the land with me.

When we left New Mexico I brought a stick of desert willow and a few clumps of herbs from my garden. One of my first acts on arrival, after kitchen boxes were unpacked, groceries bought, and kids registered for school, was to dig a small 4’ x 6’ plot in the clay soil and put lettuce, spinach, and arugula seeds in for a fall salad garden. That little plot helped me make it through the first awful winter of longing. I would tromp out in deep snow, lift the sheet of plastic I had thrown over it, and pick greens to bring in. Like Clemente, I have tried to carry the spirit of the land with me, housed in images of lived experience. Everywhere I go, I am accompanied by NM. In me, I carry the smell of creosote after rain—and sometimes in Missouri, when the dogwood blooms glow white at dusk, I touch down into the place of desert twilight, the ethereal white blossoms of the yucca.

No matter what efforts we make to counter loss and try to be whole, at some point we must return to what we love, to what is in our bones, or we lose ourselves. And if we cannot return in a big permanent way, we must make every effort to return as often as possible to the wild places on the earth, to create and preserve sanctuaries, refuges, parks, greenbelts, and gardens in the city so we do not forget, so we have places to commune, renew our connection, and restore ourselves.

The gift of this time, sitting at my little makeshift desk in the borrowed backyard in the mountains, leaves raining down on the page as I write, magpie chattering in the tree, will carry me through the busy winter and spring ahead. Even if the essay I dance toward in these lines doesn’t ever find audience, just to be here in the rhythm of season changing, contemplating my own connection to land, its impact on me, saying it definite, is enough. To look up at the incredible blue October sky, that no matter how many times I see it still makes my mouth hang open, is a way of embracing my values.

We are tied to the land, and when we maintain our connection, in whatever small and large ways available to us, when we attune ourselves to its seasons and cycles, we grow more mindful of our own cycles and learn to ferry more gracefully between inner and outer life, spirit and flesh, bringing each important messages from the other that allow us our balance in daily life. In the presence of the land, in the company of mountain and desert, woods and river, we can descend into the valley of ourselves and learn what we need to be whole.

THREE POEMS BY SUSAN RICH

Searching Out Teepee Circles

~ Ucross, Wyoming

It’s the second night we’ve come searching

and this time brought a map; found

psilocybin mushrooms, white tailed deer

and one jack rabbit. The alfalfa is all in bloom

and sagebrush deepens the air. The sky

a pink and gold fabric ~ when the stones

finally appear. Yep, the size of your average

teepee, Phillip brightly declares. But it’s Jason

who leads the way home; and one by one

we head to the depot ~ singing our souls off to bed.

Almost There, 5 AM

We wake early to watch the sunrise.

Walk route 195, with cups of coffee in hand.

Our bodies still tumbled by sleep.

In polka dots, pink plaids, and solids,

we are pajama beauty queens, delighted

by Erin’s delightful x-rated dream.

Golnar demands a picture, her smile

assures this babe anything. Whatthefuck?

she says; as Laura captures the cloudscape

with her consummate word: Amazing. What must

the cowboy see as he stumbles along

the highway ~ as a constellation of women

climb into the sky ~

each alive in her own vision ~

each a prophet ready to die ~

Ucross, Wyoming

After Watching A Sky of Trumpeter Swans and Snow Geese

Today there’s nothing but this embrace

of world ~ winsome

and warm as a blank page,

a story’s sun-dried sheets.

Today I’m thrown into

a sky of snow, in narrative

circles, white psalms;

under fields emptied of crops

and knowing; what holds us

here, enraptured ~

klow wow, klow wow, klow wow?

May our desire rise like

notes from the crusts

of homemade pies.

May the tempo

hold like trumpeter swans

or snow geese ~ a forward

March formation, aural sash

of silk and grace.

In other words,

let my pleadings be

a pleasure to hear; a

Morse code of small requests.

Attentive lover, cash to spare, another Northwest year.

Page Lambert's Guest Blog

Guest Blog, by Page Lambert

Kathleen Cain begins her review of Standing in the Light (Bloomsbury Review, May/June/July 2009; http://www.bloomsburyreview.com/) this way: “I’ve been waiting for this book all my life…I am urged to awe that equals spiritual fervor in the presence of Nature.”

What is it about Nature—Nature with a capitol N as depicted in Sharman’s new book—that moves us so? How can the physical world cause our spirits to have such passionate responses?

On May 4, 2009, Time Magazine chose The Wind in the Willows as its “Book Pick for the Week.” This classic children’s novel, a compilation of stories told by the author Kenneth Grahame to his four-year-old son, was first published in America in 1909. One hundred years ago! Yet here we are today, still falling in love with Mole and Rat and Badger and Otter and yes, even arrogant Toad—creatures great and small who live charmed lives full of missteps and dangerous escapades at, or near, the River. Not just any river, but THE River. As in NATURE. All caps. It is the River that forms the landscape of their lives and serves as metaphor for ours. It teaches them, and us, about the hospitality of community.

A couple of years ago, I attended the annual conference of the Quivira Coalition (http://www.quiviracoalition.org/) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was there to do a book-signing for Home Land: Ranching and a West that Works (Rocky Mountain Land Library (http://www.landlibrary.org/). Renowned writer Wendell Barry was the keynote speaker. The Quivira Coalition was formed in 2003, when “twenty ranchers, environmentalists, and scientists met for forty-eight hours to figure out a way to take back the American West…”

A community of people seeking to “find a way to make ourselves worthy of the land we all love” evolved from this initial gathering. And though these individuals were as different from one another as were Mole and Rat and Badger and Otter and Toad, their love of place, of the landscape where they lived their lives, was greater than the divisive issues that had, in the past, kept them apart.

While in Albuquerque at the Quivira Conference, I also had a chance to visit with Peter Forbes, founder of the Center for Whole Communities (http://www.wholecommunities.org/). “How is it that those of us who care about people and those of us who care about the land, have ended up divided from one another?” the Center asks. “What might we achieve if movements for environmental and social change worked together for healthy, whole communities?” The Center poses this question on their website, where you can view an 8-minute presentation on reweaving people, land, and communities. “Story is the way we carry the land inside of us,” writes Peter Forbes in his book, What Is A Whole Community. “We tell stories to cross the borders that separate us from one another.”

In this same spirit of reweaving, Sharman’s blog, “Love of Place,” celebrates and promotes a “greater relationship and intimacy with the natural world.” She does not advocate a natural world without human beings, though she often writes passionately and with firm opinions about how we interact with the land. (Her perspective and mine on public land grazing probably differ greatly, in great part because she writes about the arid southwest, while my experience is with the forests and grasslands of the Black Hills of Wyoming—much different ecosystems.)

In Standing in the Light, when writing about the environmentally threatened Gila River, Sharman asks who cares about a dead river, what does it mean to care? She tells us of sitting in a meeting packed with men and women who had come to watch a slide show about saving the river. “Outside, the soft August night still smells of rain,” she writes. “The clay in the soil has released compounds like those found in urine, a distinct acrid odor. Walking back to my house, I hear an owl hoot, and I click off the flashlight, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.”

I cherish these points of intersection, where Sharman’s world and mine come together—where I hear the owl hoot as if I were there walking with her, because, on the ranch in the Black Hills where I reared my children, I, too, listened to the hooting of owls and smelled the acrid odor of clay soil.

When Wendell Barry gave the keynote talk at the Quivira Coalition’s annual conference, more than 500 people attended. I could not help but smile when I scanned the room. The audience was filled with men, women, and children, as different looking from one another as the critters in The Wind in the Willows. Some wore cowboy hats. Some wore Birkenstocks. Some wore Forest Service uniforms. Some wore Park Service uniforms. Some wore Wranglers and denim jackets. Some wore microfleece and Sahara pants. Here was a true gathering of people from all walks of life. But they shared one thing in common—their Love of Place—with a capital L and a capitol P.

I hope Sharman and I can sit down soon and talk about the issues we hold close to our hearts—those that lead us closer to the Divine and about which Sharman speaks so eloquently in Standing in the Light. “How should I live in the world,” she asks. “How can I face my death?” “How can I be more joyous?” These are intimate questions, soul-piercing questions to ponder while walking on a favorite trail at dusk, as the evening light draws near, or perhaps while floating down a sunlit river with someone who was, only moments ago, a stranger.