LOVE OF PLACE

2011-04-14T12:20:00.001-07:00

Sharman Apt Russell

The Lighter Side of Global Warming

What is the world’s shortest book? The environmentalist’s book of jokes. –stolen by the author from some internet site she can’t find again

The pigs are funny. They are not really pigs, of course, but pig-sized (200 pounds) or “pig-like” heavily-built herbivores with short legs, big stomachs, small snouts, two tusks, and strong forelimbs for digging in the ground. After the Permian-Triassic extinction event over 250 million years ago—when 96 percent of marine and 70 percent of land species disappeared--these mammal-like reptiles or Lystrosaurus became the most common animal to walk the earth. For millions of years, 95% of land vertebrates were Lystrosaurus.

Yes. Pigs everywhere. Pigs as far as the eye could see. Pigs in the valleys and pigs in the glens and pigs on the mountains and pigs down by the riverside. Pigs mating, birthing, nursing, rearing families, and dying of old age. Pigs going about their business, greeting other pigs, “Hi ya there.” No other life but the pig life.

The Permian-Triassic extinction is abbreviated P-Tr and also called The Great Dying. No one really knows what caused the planet’s biggest loss of existing species but a plausible theory begins with volcanic eruptions that emitted carbon dioxide into the air. The resulting global warming allowed methane hydrate trapped under ice and permafrost to be released, and that methane burp spewed out even more carbon dioxide which increased the earth’s temperature about six degrees. The oceans became anoxic and highly acidic. This was a time when the world’s land masses were one big mass. Africa butted up to South America. Flowers hadn’t been invented yet. Normally I wouldn’t care much about a past in which I can’t recognize the continents. (Like most people, I’ve been conditioned by popular movies to stop short at the Jurassic. It’s a modern miracle how much I know about triceratops.) But climate change scientists are beginning to use the P-Tr as a model for what is happening now. In our case, man-made global warming is also melting permafrost and ice, which might also cause the release of methane, which might also result in a six degree rise in the global temperature.

At six degrees, the rainforests have flamed out, much of the world is a desert, weather is extreme, and humans are confined to a few habitable zones like present-day Michigan. It’s the Era of the Four Horsemen, whose names if you’ve forgotten can easily be Googled: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.

For the pig-like Lystrosaurus, the glass looked half-full. They flourished in a world in which, from their point of view, biodiversity was over-rated. No other animal has dominated the earth in quite this way, and we have to ask why they were so successful. After P-Tr, the atmosphere was low in oxygen and high in carbon dioxide, and many animals died out because they had trouble breathing. The burrow-dwelling Lystrosaurus may have survived in part because of their respiratory efficiency--barrel chests that expanded and contracted easily, large lungs, and short internal nostrils. They were probably generalists who could survive on the surviving plants. Suddenly, too, they had no predators or competition. Moreover, as many scientists have rigorously concluded, they were simply lucky. Good mojo.

For those of you wondering, our ancestors were also mammal-like reptiles who either survived the Great Dying or evolved from the Lystrosaurus as they continued to radiate and diversify. The world of pigs slowly became the world of dinosaurs (small furry mammals underfoot, as annoying as mice in the kitchen today) until the dinosaurs’ own extinction sixty-five million years ago. The descendents of those mammals now rose to prominence, the world of humans, as far as the eye could see.

* * * *

Black humor is for insiders. You have to be one of the victims. It’s your trauma and that gives you the right to be witty about it. In my own life, I’ve been fortunate. Occasions for black humor are mostly confined to the sit-com of raising children--body fluids when they were young; alcohol, drugs, and sex in the teen years. I “own” global warming only in the sense that I worry about these children, whom I love very much and can see too easily in the last half of the twenty-first century, the impoverishment of their lives, the Four Horseman on the highway. Especially in the middle of the night, when resilience is low and worry gathers in the dark of the brain, I think: They are doomed. What will befall them? I think in some archaic language of fear.

For myself, I also feel an intangible loss. Humans are wired for continuity. We believe in culture, tradition, grandkids. We believe we are connected to the future. In the twentieth century, where I spent most of my time, we even believed in progress. We were destined to move forward into something better. Now I feel cut off. Disconnected. The future is no place I want to go.

As Woody Allen wrote, “Mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to extinction. Let us pray we choose correctly.”

My fears are abstract, and I’m grateful for that. Meanwhile, the “insiders” of global warming face literal threats right now, particularly those living on islands and coastal areas. In November of 2009 the president of the archipelago nation Maldives and his Cabinet put on scuba gear and sat around a table sixteen feet underwater. They used hand signals and a really good underwater pen to sign a declaration calling for cuts in global carbon emissions. Bubbles from the masks floated to the ocean surface. Zebra-striped fish, inherently comic, swam nearby. The dreamy scene was a nice example of black humor.

Other probable victims of climate change are south Africans struggling with drought, flooding, desertification, and deforestation. Erratic rainfall and the loss of maize crops in Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and South Africa means increased hunger, while Somalia saw a 30% drop in cereal production in 2009. I am reminded of the Ik, an African tribe in the 1960s who served as the basis for a well-known study on hunger by anthropologist Colin Turnbull. In one story, the anthropologist shook hands with an elderly Ik, weighing about sixty pounds, who tightened his grip as Turnbull moved away. Pulled to the ground from his sitting position, the old man laughed and held out his hand again for Turnbull to help him back up. The Ik apologized for his behavior, saying that he hadn’t eaten for three days and so it was difficult for him to stand up, “Whereupon,” Turnbull noted, “he and his companion dissolved into laughter again."

* * * *

In 1926, H. W. Fowler, author of Modern English Usage, provided a table of the different forms of humor. The gentlest is for a sympathetic audience interested in the oddities of human nature. Wit uses surprise to entertain the intelligent. Sarcasm is about inflicting pain. Irony promotes exclusiveness.

Device	Humor	Wit	Sarcasm	Irony	Sardonic
motive/aim	Discovery	Throwing light	inflicting pain	exclusiveness	self-relief
Province	human nature	words & ideas	faults & foibles	statement of facts	adversity
Method/means	Observation	Surprise	Inversion	mystification	pessimism
Audience	The sympathetic	The intelligent	victim & bystander	an inner circle	the self

As I have learned in writing this essay, climate change brings out the sardonic—humor grounded in pessimism, whose audience is “the self” and whose aim is “self-relief.”

* * * *

I believe that humor is redemptive. Humor takes us outside our selves, outside our agenda and limited view. Remember a moment of laughing with friends? How the ego fell away, the purity of that moment? Remember the last time you saw a baby smile, the way she used her entire body, all two feet, and you had to smile back?

One of my neighbors in the rural West is a biologist saddened by the effects of global warming. Recently he showed me how to make fire with yucca twine and a piece of wood. Like a surprising number of rural people, my friend likes to flirt with the apocalypse-- Peak Oil, the destruction of industrial civilization, the need for certain life skills. We also share a nostalgia for our hunting and gathering past, a simpler Paleoterrific time when humans killed wolves and this was considered a good thing. We are both thinking, “How can I live more harmoniously with the earth?” even as we drive our cars and eat out-of-season fruit. We are concerned and confused to the point at which spending an hour making fire without a match seems not only a useful way to spend an hour but some kind of statement about being human.

My efforts are surprisingly slap-stick. The furrowed brow of the incompetent. The fumbling, the grunting. Then a little flare and flurry to get more grass and tiny sticks. I’m on my knees blowing miniature kindling when I begin to play up the physical comedy, aware of my audience--my friend’s six-year-old son. I exaggerate the urgency, make my gestures big. I’ve got him laughing because I’m such a doofus, a potato bug trying to make fire. I try a Charles Chaplin waddle. The kid hoots and holds his stomach. He is exaggerating, too. We build up the flames, move close against the evening chill, and toast some-mores (if you don’t know what those are, good. You can trust me when I say that ours were organic.)

In the end, I am not sure what this exercise symbolizes: that I can live without industrial civilization or that my pressing need for warmth is inherently destructive. Our nature is the consuming nature of fire. We are the species who makes tools, takes risks, and breeds year-round. A certain logic runs on an electric current from yucca twine to nuclear power plants.

It’s time for a funny aside. Humor is a good distraction—we can’t always bear the weight of our species. The pool of global warming jokes is small but growing. A climatologist walks into a bar…and it’s open season. On our greed. Our pomposity. Our ignorance. The fake talk show host Stephen Colbert interviews the producer of the CNN program Planet in Peril. Colbert asks, “Are you talking about Planet Earth?” and follows up astutely, “Could that eventually affect Planet America?” Mocking Al Gore is Climate Change Comedy 101; even Al Gore can do it. (“Airplane travel,” Gore says, “is nature’s way of making you look like your passport picture.”) George Carlin concludes that the earth invented human beings because it wanted plastic--now we’re expendable. In his blog, a climate change activist quotes an email that moans, “If we do not do something at once, the whole world will be turned into a dessert.” The activist responds, “Although this is an appealing prospect, unfortunately the science does not support it.”

How many of us does it take to screw in a CFL? What did the polar bear say to the climate change denier?

You have to love us. The Buddha said life is suffering. The comedian says life is absurd. Zen Buddhists don’t see much difference. The Big Bang let loose a lot of suffering and eventually humans would see the fun in that. New Age philosophy suggests that we are the universe reflecting on itself. The universe getting another kick out of things.

* * * *

Assume we’re redeemable.

Assume that we in the developed countries, who make most of the jokes and are causing most of the problems, have a responsibility to those people living in the Maldives and southern Africa and elsewhere, a responsibility to our children and grandchildren, as well as a larger responsibility to ecological health, beauty, and biodiversity. Assume we should change our personal patterns of consumption, our national policies, and our international efforts. Assume we must now focus on rewarding everyone and anyone who is trying to slow down climate change. We can do this smiling. We can whistle as we work.

My nature writing friend Jenny Price has an advice online advice column for greenies at the website http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2010/01/green_me_up_jj_2.php. When Jenny was asked for the environmentally-correct response to a child’s desire to play in a baseball league twenty-eight miles from home, she responded empathetically, “This is exactly the sort of argument that families are having more and more these days.”

Fortunately, Jenny had one of those great green formulas.

“First, figure out your family warming coefficient (FWC) by taking the weight in grams of your heart, add the weight of your wife's heart times 2, and multiply by the volume (in cc's) of your child's dreams. Multiply by the number of things that you value half or more as much as doing your part to reduce carbon--e.g. family, friendship, health, travel, chocolate. Then sit your child down and explain that the world as we know it is going to end if we don't stop doing things like driving 8-year-olds 56 miles round-trip to play baseball. Add the weight of the child's guilt to the previous total. Now add together the distance one-way to the game, the weight of the vehicle you plan to drive, and the weight of the people and equipment times 2 inside it. Multiply this sum by the gas mileage, and divide by 2 if it's a hybrid vehicle (or multiply by 2.3 if the hybrid gets ≤6mpg more than your other or last vehicles). Add half the air miles you've flown in the past 15 months (multiply by 1.5 for business class, 2 for first class), and add the number of offsets you purchased and immediately subtract the same number….”

The final scoring? 0-1000: start buying those snacks, Mom. 1000-2000: OK if you convert the car to vegetable oil. 2000+: personally responsible for a .004-inch rise in sea level.

LOL.

The Jaguar's Shadow

2010-11-27T06:49:00.000-08:00

adapted from THE JAGUAR'S SHADOW: SEARCHING FOR A MYTHIC CAT
By Richard Mahler (Yale University Press, 2009)

Soon after I began research for my book, I discovered that the average person, including me, knows nearly nothing about jaguars. And much of what we think we know is wrong. I was surprised that friends and family members had only a vague idea of what I was talking about.
"Which model do you like?" a student, on the verge of receiving a doctorate degree from a prestigious university, inquired.

"They're vicious man-eaters," a cousin declared. "Don't ever turn your back on one because that's when they attack."

"I've seen them at the zoo," a woman at a party enthused. "What beautiful black coats they have!" At the same gathering a retired lawyer insisted that while on safari in East Africa he had watched a jaguar run down a wildebeest.

Several people were convinced the cats were a type of mountain lion: "Cougar? Panther? Jaguar? Aren't they the same thing?"

Patiently, I spelled out some facts. First, a person is much more likely to be killed by a spider, snake, or domestic dog than a jaguar. Second, fewer than 10 percent of jaguars are black. Third, jaguars are New World cats, found outside the Americas only in captivity. And finally, the jaguar is a distinct species, related only distantly to Puma concolor, the felines referred to as cougars and panthers.

When I explained that jaguars occurred historically in the American Southwest and seemed to be drifting back, I was met by skepticism. "Someone is pulling your leg," my next-door neighbor maintained. One of my work colleagues chimed in: "It’s a publicity stunt; a hoax! Tame animals are being turned loose in the mountains." Where I saw a marvel, they saw deception. The notion of a wild United States jaguar struck some folks as outlandish, even suspicious. Yet somewhere in Arizona roamed Macho B: a big, spotted felid that was as focused as a Zen master, as quiet as a fawn, and as eager to avoid cameras as a movie star in rehab.

From the start I was convinced that Panthera onca, one of several endangered among the 38 known species of wild cat, was worth saving, if only because it had as much right to exist as did humans. But how would jaguars find protection if 99 percent of the population did not know what they were? Where they lived? How they survived? What made them special? Beyond their charismatic image, these animals were essentially unseen and unknown.

Having reported for years on conservation issues, I knew people needed to care about a creature before they could be persuaded to help save it. An emotional bond or financial incentive must exist, otherwise the animal may be deemed insignificant, a competitor for resources, an obstacle to progress, a threat to survival, or a source of fresh meat.

Before I spread the word about jaguars, I had to educate myself further. I felt it was necessary to visit places where the animals were seen in order to speak with scientists who studied these cats and rural residents who lived among them. I had no intention of becoming an authority on jaguars, but I wanted to learn what bonafide experts had to say. And I still wanted to observe at least one such cat in the wild.

Accomplishing this would be tricky. Looking for wild jaguars and writing about them posed moral questions. If others followed my example, these animals might become even more endangered. I knew I could not control how my information would be distributed. At worst, my accounts might inspire unscrupulous trophy hunters to track and shoot jaguars. Poachers might use my text as a kind of road map to these strongholds. An increase in nature-based tourism might prompt the cats to withdraw deeper into the wilderness, putting themselves in various kinds of danger.

It was an audacious act to seek out such rare animals merely to satisfy my own curiosity. And wouldn't I be earning money by writing about them? Could that be considered yet another form of exploitation targeting a cat that seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone?
I reflected at length on my underlying motives. My bias was saving jaguars from extinction, an eventuality that already had befallen certain subspecies of tiger. The Cantonese tiger was as good as dead, the Sumatra tiger was critically endangered, and India's tigers were relegated to ever-shrinking islands of habitat. Overall, fewer than 3500 tigers still existed in the wild. By comparison, the jaguar as a species was in decent shape.

Simply wanting to see a big cat is insufficient to make it happen, of course. Felines are famous for their smarts and elusiveness. "Jaguars have the biggest brain-to-body mass of all the big cats," explained Belize researcher Sharon Matola. "They're extremely intelligent, which makes them independent, unpredictable, and dangerous. You'll never see a jaguar tamer in the circus. If you do, buy a ticket, because that'll be a one-time show."

Wild cats in general are challenging subjects. For some of the world's smallest, almost nothing is known. The caracal and serval, notoriously bashful African felids, are studied mostly through indirect evidence rather than direct observation. Field researchers learn about wild jaguars in much the same manner.

"Tracking the stealthy, solitary animals," concedes Eduardo Carrillo, a Costa Rican biologist who has encountered more than a dozen in jungle settings, "remains exceedingly difficult." And while there is plenty of general knowledge and considerable data about the jaguar as a species, significant details are missing. Only a few precious minutes exist on film, for example, of a wild female interacting with her cubs. This fundamental relationship—the foundation upon which the ABCs of "jaguarness" are built—remains something of a mystery. Watching a mother and cub in a zoo can provide clues but not answers, since captive animals act differently than their free-range cousins.

Other key questions hang in the air. It is unclear exactly how jaguars, often alone throughout adulthood, find and court their mates. Also, the cats' carefully regulated social structure and precise communication is not well known. Other lines of inquiry beg investigation: How do such alpha predators influence the biodiversity of a given area? Why are jaguars, as compared to most other large cats, such superb, water-loving swimmers? How do jaguars deal with competing carnivores that overlap with them in time, space, and prey? Why does each jaguar have a singular pattern of spots and rosettes, and why is this hodge-podge different on each flank? How many jaguars move between North and South America and how important is such migration in keeping gene pools healthy? If adult males head out from Mexico to far-flung places like the mountains of Arizona, how do they get across a carefully monitored border without being detected? What are they looking for—or fleeing from?

One reason to protect jaguars is simply to follow these and other intriguing lines of research. Knowledge about such highly evolved and specialized creatures may illuminate and improve our own lives. We might learn from the jaguar's finely tuned senses, for example, what is communicable through odors humans cannot smell and sounds we cannot hear. By studying the cat's remarkable night vision and optic system, perhaps we can better understand our own eyesight and the maladies that affect it. Knowing the role such a top predator plays in maintaining a balanced ecosystem may help us improve management of parks and adjacent agricultural lands. Such investigation is long and arduous, but through perseverance, training, and luck, researchers fit pieces—based on the gathering of a few facts at a time—into the jaguar puzzle, often without actually seeing the animals. Through such obsession, our picture of a wild place comes into focus.

# # #
learn more, and read an excerpt from the first chapter, at www.thejaguarsshadow.com

2010-08-23T08:37:00.001-07:00

The Apocalypse: Not in My Backyard

Sharman Apt Russell

Where I live in the rural Southwest, I am literally surrounded by apocalyptic vision. To my left, a neighbor prepares for the collapse of civilization once the supply of cheap oil disappears and the trucks stop running and the government crashes. To my right, another neighbor waits for the biblical end of days prophesied in Revelations. Both the Peak Oil doomer and fundamentalist Christian seem almost happy about the approaching catastrophe. The human race has sinned, and we deserve to be punished.

I’m not so happy with the human race, either. My apocalypse is spelled six degrees and goes something like this: in the next ten or twenty years, if we fail to reduce the percentage of greenhouse gases in the air, we’ll cause a two to three degree rise in the earth’s temperature, triggering the further release of methane gases in the north, the continued acidification of the oceans, and the flaming out of the Amazon rainforest. Feedback loops will lead to a runaway four or five degree increase in global warming, resulting in even further desertification, famine, war, and poverty on a scale virtually unimaginable. At six degrees, everyone dies from a broken heart.

In my own backward—which now includes a beautiful view of the Gila River winding south from the Gila Wilderness and Gila National Forest--the cottonwoods and willows will be long gone. The river has become a curve of dust. Water is a memory.

If I squint one eye, I can almost see them--those fires burning in the distance. If I try really hard, I can smell the smoke. If I stand on one leg and hop backwards rapidly five times, I am sure to fall down. Just a little effort and I can make myself truly miserable.

I love a good apocalypse as much as the next person. Only lately…I’ve decided to just say no. I still believe in climate change. I still believe that we might actually, foolishly, heat up the earth with catastrophic consequences. But it hasn’t happened yet. I don’t live in that future—yet.

Instead, I am on the board of a local group called the Upper Gila Watershed Alliance, and we’re working hard to reintroduce the otter to the Gila River (way overdue), prevent a foolish diversion on the river, and regulate the use of off-road vehicles in the national forest. I am on my town’s Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Climate Protection, and we have just gotten stimulus money to set up an Office of Sustainability—to weatherize buildings, promote solar energy, and reduce the town’s emission of greenhouse gases. I teach Nature Writing at the nearby university, and my students are producing some awfully nice essays. I am on another board to reduce hunger in Grant County through neighborhood gardens and a Food Security Center with energy-efficient greenhouses, a permaculture system of farming, and a commercial kitchen open to the community. We got federal money for that, too. I’d give up a nonessential body part to keep President Obama in power for another six years. I would even canvas again in Buckhorn, New Mexico (and that was a pretty terrible experience). I am happy doing everything I do because it’s mostly fun and it makes me feel better about over-consuming resources and not living as simply as I could.

I would be the first to admit I’m a flawed human being. I fly in airplanes. I drive a car. I’m part of the problem as much as the solution. At this point, I may be irrelevant. Maybe nothing I do now, good or bad, matters any more.

But I’m not giving up. I’m not ready to consign the human race to ashes. We’re a young species. Maybe we’re too smart for our own good. Maybe we suffer from an addictive personality. I think of my own children and feel a motherly compassion. I think of how much I love my children. I think of how much I love my life, the beauty all around me, the curve of cottonwood trees following the river, shafts of light and flat-bottomed clouds in a sky so gorgeous I almost fall to my knees and sing my own version of Hallelujah. I’m not giving up.

The apocalypse? Not in my backyard.

Radical Renaissance

2010-07-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Radical Renaissance: Writing in the Twenty-first Century

First I am going to talk about my life as a creative writer and then I am going to talk about yours.

I am one of those people who wanted to be a writer when she was eight years old. Well, a number of people of all ages have this compulsion, and at some point in our lives most of us wonder why that is.

It begins with the sheer joy and fun of making up a story. I am going to quote a bit now from the writer C.S. Lewis who, in turn, is talking about J.R. Tolkien and the psychologist Carl Jung. Lewis is speaking specifically of fairy stories or fantasy which is exactly what I wanted to write when I was in the fourth grade. But I think the idea that there are primal and substantive reasons behind the act of writing applies to every kind of creative work—essays, nonfiction, all of it. This quote was written, by the way, in 1963 and you will have to forgive some old-fashioned pronouns:

“According to Tolkien, the appeal of the fairy story lies in the fact that man there most fully exercises his function as a ‘subcreator;’ not, as they love to say now, making a ‘comment upon life,’ but making so far as possible a subordinate world of his own. Since, in Tolkien’s view, this is one of man’s proper functions, delight naturally arises whenever it is successfully performed. For Jung, fairy tale liberates the archetypes which dwell in the collective unconscious and when we read a good fairy tale we are obeying the old precept, “Know thyself.’”

I am reading this quote mainly for that wonderful phrase: delight naturally arises. That’s how I feel about writing. About writing a short story or a novel, or about writing a nonfiction essay or book. Delight naturally arises. The joy of creating a new world. A subcreator. The ability to be everything in that story--a king, a fox, a leaf in the wind. And the almost mystical pleasure of having all those parts integrated into a shaped whole. Everything is one thing. The joy of breaking free of your personal limitations. The joy of getting outside your ego. The joy of creativity. The joy of flight. The joy of play. Delight naturally arises.

This alone is reason enough to write. But there are other compelling benefits. I could also say that for me, as a child, and later as a young woman without much economic or social status, writing was a way to be seen in the world. Writing is about having someone else read your work. Writing depends on that exchange between reader and writer. Writing is about having a voice that is heard. Writing is about the desire to connect to people. Writing is about the desire to be part of a cultural conversation. And so, yes, writing is also about the desire to influence people. Writing can certainly be about ambition or the need for approval.

Finally, and most significantly in the larger arc of my life, writing has become a way of thinking and feeling and being in the world. Writing is a way of becoming my best self. Writing my thoughts helps clarify them. Moreover, writing is a way to actually generate thought. Writing is not transcription. I don’t have some answer which I am then copying onto the page. I write out of a question and the process of writing leads me to an answer, sometimes through the research, sometimes through the very act of writing. Because writing is a dynamic process that takes place on the page. Neurons are firing. Synapses are snapping. There is energy, action, movement. Writing dislodges things in my mind. It sets things adrift. It brings new ideas together. It makes new connections. And as much as writing is about ideas and abstraction and thought, writing is also about feeling. Writing deepens my engagement with the world. Writing might well liberate archetypes and become a path to individuation. Writing, at the very least, is a way to organize and translate. Writing is certainly a process of exploration and discovery.

In my public life as a writer, in my twenties, I published short stories and essays in small literary journals. I began to write articles for commercial magazines and discovered the thrill of getting paid for writing. Meanwhile I had started teaching writing skills here at Western New Mexico University. I was a hired hand on a few books, including Built to Last, an architectural history of Silver City which some of you know and a high school biography of Frederick Douglas. The first book that I would call my own, however, was a collection of personal essays called Songs of the Fluteplayer, published by Addison-Wesley in 1991. I was 37 years old. Not a prodigy. But a steady plodder. That determined little girl. Once I “broke into publishing,” I became something of a hardened criminal. In the next sixteen years, I published nine books: seven creative nonfiction books with New York publishers, one adult novel with the University of New Mexico Press, and one children’s fantasy—that old dream of the eight-year-old—with Knopf Books for Young Readers. As I had been told to do so by the scholar and mythologist Joseph Campbell, I “followed my bliss” and I was somehow given the freedom to write about whatever interested me, in my case, mostly having to do with science, nature, and our relationship to the land.

I have also been told by the people who asked me here today to read a bit from my work during this talk and I’m going to stop and do that briefly—to show you some specific examples of my bliss as a writer. What I will read from is the very first page of my last four books. This will take ten minutes only.

* * * *
I wrote Anatomy of a Rose based on a question, which is the generative source of all my books, questions and not answers. I wanted to know why flowers were so compelling and I also wanted to know what exactly they were doing, their secret life. This was prompted by one of those monsoon seasons here in New Mexico when walking through a meadow or grassland is like walking through a bouquet, all that color, all that scent, all those shapes, and none of it meant for us. Although this book is about pollination ecology, I begin in a chapter called “The Physics of Beauty” with what draws us emotionally to flowers:

READING
“My grandmother in Kansas had a large garden which she used to provide flowers for my father’s grave. We would cut bouquets of snapdragons, zinnias, and cosmos and put them in a coffee can set in the ground near the headstone. My father died when he was thirty-two-years old. Where I live in Silver City, New Mexico, parents decorate the graves of children with holiday ornaments: Easter eggs, Christmas trees, a plastic wreath, a Valentine heart. Some parents do this years and years after a child has died.

My grandmother put flowers on graves until she died at the age of ninety-one: great flowing marigolds for her youngest boy Milburn Grant Apt, weighty white chrysanthemums for her husband Oley Samuel Apt.

Why do we give flowers to the dead? Why do we give flowers to the grieving, the sick, the people we love? Fifty thousand years ago, the Neanderthals, too, buried their relatives with hyacinth and knapweed.

What are we offering? Flowers are not symbols of power. Flowers are too brief, too frail, to elicit much hope of eternity. In truth, flowers are far removed from the human condition and from all human hope. For a moment, in that moment, flowers are simply beautiful.”
END OF READING

I started out knowing that flowers are beautiful. They gladden our hearts. I learned, of course, that flowers run the world. Almost everything we and other mammals eat requires a plant that uses a flower for reproduction. In fact, flowers are powerful. Flowers can be brutal. And without flowers, we would all die.

The next book An Obsession with Butterflies begins:

READING
“In physics, string theory suggests that there are more than four dimensions, perhaps ten in all. These extra dimensions are curled up into a very small space, big enough only for subatomic particles, or tiny loops of vibrating “string.” The theory does not rule out more dimensions, perhaps in the area of time. These dimensions, here but not here, exist outside our range of perception.

Adding butterflies to your life is like adding another dimension. The air trembles with the movement of wings. The approach of a White Admiral. The aerial dance of sulphurs. A painted Lady. A Mourning Cloak. All this existed before, has always existed, but you were unaware. You didn’t see. At various times and places, in winter, or on a busy street, the air is still and butterflies are impossible. Yet their presence remains, like one of those other ten dimensions. You’ve added this to your life.

Butterflies became present in my life one summer afternoon by a river in New Mexico. A Western A Western Tiger Swallowtail dipped by my face. About three inches across, it seemed much larger. Its lemon yellow wings were striped improbably and fluted in black. They filliped into a long forked tail with spots of red and blue. Smelling nothing of interest, the butterfly floated away, leaving me pleased and agitated, as though I had been handed a gift I didn’t deserve. Could this, all along, be a simple truth, beauty without cause or consequence?
The Western Tiger Swallowtail was patrolling for a mate, avoiding birds, and on the lookout for nectar or carrion juices. Like most butterflies, it tasted with its feet and smelled with its antenna. Its genitalia had eyes, light-sensitive cells. It had been alive for a day. It would live another month.

Later I became enamored with the tiniest of butterflies—thumbnail-sized Gray Hairstreaks in my peripheral vision, on a weed or fence, common as a mailbox. But wait until they settle and show their underside. Scallops of mango orange. Patterns of blue and russet. A crescent, a dash, a language in code.

In the second movie of the Jurassic Park series, actor Jeff Goldblum is once again trapped on an island filled with dinosaurs. As the other characters admire a herd of triceratops, Goldblum says drily, “Oooooh. Aaaah. That’s how it always starts. But later there is screaming and running.”
Ooooh. Aaaah. That’s how it starts. Later there are guidebooks and more guidebooks and picnics in meadows and screaming and running. Some of us become obsessed with butterflies, although I would never include myself in that category.

Not like those other people.”
END OF READING

What I learned from writing this book was also a surprise to me. Because butterflies are not especially important pollinators, not like that engine of pollination the bee or even their cousins, the moths. If all the butterflies went extinct, so would a few flowers. But not many. Butterflies are less about ecology and more about grace. Butterflies are a gift.

Finally, Hunger: An Unnatural History was a book I had wanted to write since I was pregnant with my first child, awash in that flood of maternal hormones, wringing my hands over the fact that children were going hungry in the world, that children were dying of hunger. It took me twenty years to convince a publisher to support me in this book and that was mainly because I stopped wringing my hands and approached the subject from a broader perspective. This book begins with the science of hunger in your body, what happens when you skip breakfast, when you fast for three days, when you fast for thirty days. I explore the voluntary-- cultural, spiritual, and social--uses of hunger before I start talking about involuntary hunger, before I get to those starving children.

READING
“Hunger is a country we enter every day, like a commuter across a friendly border. We wake up hungry. We endure that for a matter of minutes before we break our fast. Later we may skip lunch and miss dinner. We may not eat for religious reasons. We may not eat before surgery. We may go on a three-day fast to cleanse ourselves of toxins and boredom. We may go on a longer fast to imitate Christ in the desert—or to lose weight. We may go on a hunger strike. If we are lost at sea, if we have lost our job, if we are at war, we may not be hungry by choice.

Our body is a circle of messages: communication, feedback, updates. Hunger and satiety are the most basic of these. Every day, we learn more about how this system works. We know what hormones run through the blood screaming, “Eat!” We know which ones follow murmuring, “Enough.” We know that it is relatively easy to repress the signal for enough. A gene malfunctions, and a three-year-old girl weighs one hundred pounds: her body does not tell her when to stop eating. That signal is complexly influenced by genetics, chemistry, and culture. For many of us, it has become blurry. Our body doesn’t give us the news or doesn’t give it with enough emphasis.

The signal for hunger is much, much harder to turn off. We are omnivores with an over-sized brain that requires a lot of energy. We are not specialized in how we get our food. Instead, we are always willing, always alert, always ready with a rock or digging stick. We are happy to snack all day long. We are particularly drawn to the high-caloric bit of fat around the deer's kidney and the sweet taste of berries. Our love of fat and sugar has been associated with the same chemical responses that underlie our addictions to alcohol and drugs, and this cycle of addiction may have developed as a way to encourage eating behavior. We hunger easily, we find food, we get a chemical reward. Then we’re hungry again. That’s good because the next time we look for food, we may not find it. Better keep eating while you can.

Human beings evolved for a bad day of hunting, a bad week of hunting, a bad crop, a bad year of crops. We were hungry even in that first Garden of Eden, what some anthropologists call the "Paleoterrific," a world full of large animals and relatively few people. Paleolithic bones and teeth occasionally show an unnatural pause in growth, a sign of food shortage. Our diet didn’t get better as our population grew and the big-game species died out. In the Mesolithic, we foraged more intensively for plants and hunted smaller game with new tools like nets and snares. In the Neolithic, we invented agriculture, which sparked the rise of cities. There is no evidence that any of these changes reduced the odds of starvation or malnutrition. A more common trend seems to be that small-game hunters were shorter and less nourished than their Paleolithic ancestors, farmers less healthy than hunters-and-gatherers, and city-dwellers less robust than farmers. We just kept getting hungrier.

It's no wonder we are programmed to pound the table and demand dinner. The exceptions to this are usually extreme: infection, disease, a terminal illness. For most of us, at regular times, the body shouts, “Feed me, damn it!” Deprived, the body sulks. The body exacts its petty revenge. Finally, with extraordinary cunning, with something that approaches grace, the body turns to the business of the day, beginning what scientists call “the metabolic gymnastics” by which it can survive without food.

If you are a healthy, well-nourished twenty-five-year-old man, you can live this way for sixty days. You can live much longer if you have more fat to break down. The rhythms of your life will change: your heartbeat, your hormones, your thoughts. Your brain will switch to a new energy source, something rare and wonderful, something only humans do and a few lactating ungulates. You will start consuming yourself, but precisely, carefully, with such orchestration.

You are built to be hungry and you are built to withstand hunger. You know exactly what to do.”
END OF READING

Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist was my next book. It’s about everything. And I think I will save that now for my conclusion.

None of these books sold particularly well. You are not looking at a household name or at someone who has made much money from writing. You are looking at someone who has had a lot of cheap thrills. The thrill of doing research, talking to scientists, getting outside your own world, getting all those books from Interlibrary Loan. The thrill of seeing your words translated into Chinese, becoming entirely alien and separate from you, and then imagining those people in China or Korea or Russia reading your work. You are looking at a writer who has felt very lucky. Very happy.

I tell you this not merely to establish my authority today but as the background to my current fall from grace. My world, the world of traditional publishing, is in crisis. My last book came out in 2008 and by now I should be deep in a new contract, a new and exciting book project. I am not. Instead, a year ago, my New York publishers dropped me. My agent, who is now sending out two children’s manuscripts and shopping around a new nonfiction proposal, is not optimistic. I am not optimistic. I don’t see an immediate future for me as a book writer. I don’t know, yet, how to feed my addiction to writing books. I don’t always wake up in the morning with the same excitement of the day. On some days, I don’t know what to do with myself.

I am not alone. Other mid-list writers like myself are also being dropped by their publishers. Other literary agents are not selling work. The staff at most publishing houses is being drastically cut. The remaining editors say no to almost everything that isn’t a slam-dunk commercial success. Small independent bookstores are going out of business, and even the bigger chains like Borders are not something you should invest in. Newspapers are going bankrupt and downsizing, and the traditional venue for book reviews has suddenly disappeared. Print, as we like to say now, is in decline.

I’ll just state quickly some of the obvious reasons. The internet has made it much harder to sell new books. There are over 20,000 book sellers on the net and almost all of these are selling used books. There are websites where hundreds of thousands of readers can swap books through the mail. Then there is Kindle selling an electronic book for ten dollars. Last year, the sale of electronic books was greater than the sale of print books. Essentially a product that can require considerable time and expense can now be acquired at very little expense. In various ways, better technology has undermined the traditional form of writing as commerce.

Traditional publishers themselves are part of the problem. Many of the big corporate-owned publishers came to rely on a model where they paid huge advances for potential best-sellers that didn’t pay off. Publishers also pay enormous costs in operation—particularly for that choice office building and prime real estate in New York. At the same time, publishers weren’t paying attention to new forms of marketing on the internet. When I suggested a blog tour for my last book, my New York publicist said she had no experience with that—now, when someone from Silver City knows more about an industry than the industry does, that’s a sign of something going wrong. In truth, the digital revolution—a world where you can read a book online or order a book printed at an Expresso Book Machine, where the word viral is a good thing—all this has happened so fast and is continuing to happen so fast that tradition-bound publishing just couldn’t and didn’t keep up.

Most of this, by the way, was happening before the economic downturn. The demise of print publishing can not simply be blamed on villainous bankers and stock traders.

And none of this means that people are reading less. A 2008 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts actually says that people are reading 7% more literature since 2002, with the biggest increases in young adults 18-24, and in Hispanic-Americans and African Americans.
People are reading more, and people are writing more. People are writing blogs about their midlife crisis and their parenting and their spirituality and their discovery of native plants or dinosaur tracks. People are writing romance novels and science fiction novels and mystery novels and literary novels and self-publishing them as print-on-demand books. Last year more of these books were produced than by traditional methods of publishing. Maybe the self-published writer does all the work of getting her manuscript ready and then pays nothing for a commercial service to give her book an ISBN number and put it up for sale on the internet. The service then takes a percentage of the sales. Or maybe, and more likely, the author buys from this publishing service editorial help or has them design the cover and page lay-out or contracts for marketing and publicity in the hope of getting more readers than family and friends.

Bottom line: you can write a book now and you can see it in print, spending as much or as little as you like. You can also join a writing community online, a community of beginning writers who will give you support, encouragement, advice, and more readers. You can enter online writing contests. You can do the increasingly well-known NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, which happens every November and which in 2008 had 120,000 participants. More than 20,000 of those finished their goal of writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.
Amazing. The democratization of writing. This is not the traditional and elitist model of East and West Coast publishers deciding who gets to write and who gets to be read. This is you getting to write and you getting read.

Let me give you an example of my daughter’s experience last Christmas.

First I’ll quickly define fan fiction, a genre in which writers take existing literary worlds—from TV shows to ancient Greek myths—and build on those characters and plots. Often these writers are young adults who are most happy subverting these worlds, playing with gender roles and sexual orientation, crashing together realities by having Harry Potter meet up with Captain Kirk, throwing in some Japanese anime for spice, mixing and matching, churning and spinning, playing out new fantasies, new directions, new possibilities. It’s wildly creative and purely fun. It can be erotic, outrageous, and combative. It is outside commerce, not for profit, and it is enormously successful. The best know fanfiction site hosts millions of stories in dozens of languages, stories that are archived and read and reread.

In this brave new world, a group of people run a website called Yuletide where fanfiction authors post a wishlist of stories they would like to read and then agree to write one such story themselves, a minimum of 1000 words, with all the stories posted on December 25. This is a secret Santa exchange. Over Thanksgiving break, my daughter Maria described the story she wanted and got her assignment of what to write—in this case, a continuation of the anime movie Spirited Away. Maria had some intense days of writing, she consulted some editors—me and her best friend. She rewrote the piece, revised a little more. Then she sent the story off. On December 25, it was posted, along with 3500 other stories, got 603 hits, with 13 comments or reviews, and 10 people who thought it was the best story of the week, the best story ever. She got the entire psychological experience of being a writer in a month. The joy of creation. The more subtle pleasure of revision. The fun of being read. A few book reviews. Praise and reward. Then it was time for her to go back to graduate school. I have to say that I watched on with envy.

I have segued now from my life as a writer into your life as a writer—not necessarily fan fiction, but all these other possibilities. Some of you already know about these possibilities. Some of you are already blogging, already writing haiku as twitter, already thinking about the memoirs you want to write for your children and grandchildren, already designing your cover art. Some of you have already discovered that it’s ten times more fun to wake up in the morning and write your own murder mystery than it is to read one.

Some of you are suspicious. Self-publishing, vanity press—well, look at those words. Self. Vanity. You distrust new forms of creativity that are not vetted by outside sources, that do not have a collective and social stamp of approval. You value the way publishers have served as a filter, protecting you from bad writing. You know that there is a difference between the published writer who has served years of apprenticeship, who has burnt her financial bridges by getting an MFA instead of going to law school, who has suffered through scores of rejection letters, written drawers of drafts, fought her way through angst and self-doubt—that dogged little girl, moi!--to be finally selected for publishing through a competitive process. You know there is a difference between that published writer and the writer who pays Create Space to put it on the net for sale. You also value work in terms of commerce. You see money as a validation. Real writers get paid.

And you are right, on many levels. In most complex situations there is room for being right and wrong at the same time. The democratization of writing, the access to being read as a writer, means there will be more amateur and undisciplined writing in the world. The Google search engine doesn’t distinguish quality. For a long time, perhaps, everything will seem a muddle and a mish mash. The question of how serious writers can make money on their work is still up in the air. The question of who will now decide to commit their lives to writing is still up in the air. The form in which we choose to read is still up in the air.

Eventually, things will sort out. We’ll find ways to value and vet good writing on the internet. We’ll have new filters. We will still have blockbusters, books that we all read together, that touch us collectively. We will still have a range of writers, from serious to celebrity to amateur. We will actually have a broader range. We will have more specialized niches, more curious books on even curiouser subjects. We will have a greater diversity of writing.

If we don’t know exactly what we will lose in this future, we already know what we will gain. You know that already because either you are secretly writing a book or you are going to go home and write a book, inspired by my talk today. We have opened up writing. The floodgates of creativity. There’s no turning back.

As a writer, I may have temporarily lost my job. I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me. I still have a good job, teaching here at Western New Mexico University. The joy of writing is not contingent on publishing. The sky is still a deep New Mexican blue. The birds are still singing. Pollen is in the air.

As a teacher of writing skills, I am in more demand than ever. For twelve years now I have been teaching MFA students at Antioch University in Los Angeles at a low-residency program. I don’t know what is going to happen to those students. They are entering the new world with old world expectations of publishing. More pertinently, in the past four years, I have started teaching online graduate students here at WNMU who are getting their Masters of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. One of these disciplines is writing and the enrollment is steadily increasing. Right now my Writing Fiction class includes students from San Diego, Tallahassee, Deming, and rural areas throughout the country. These people want to join the radical renaissance of the twenty-first century. They want to write their books, their dreams—they want to write themselves into their best selves--and they want to learn as much as they can learn about the art and craft of writing and rewriting. Some of these students dream the old dream of “making it big,” commercial success, the next John Grisham. They equate writing with a career or a bank statement. But more are writing from the heart for the heart. They are writing to clarify their thoughts and to feel more deeply and to live more intensely in the present. They are writing so that that they can feel that joy of waking up and thinking, “Oooh, I get to work on Chapter Fourteen today.” I get to write that scene where Sophie reveals her love for Judy or the cybernetic Polish-speaking goldfish flies to the moon or the evil politician undercuts health care and then dies of blood poisoning. I get to be anything I want, a king or a fox or a leaf in the wind.

I titled this “Writing in the 21rst Century” and of course that was a lie, designed to lure you here and make you think you were going to learn something about the future. In truth, somewhat more knowledgeable than I am might be able to predict writing five years out--but probably not. The CEOs of major publishing houses, the editors, the agents, the writers, the social critics—we are all watching the future happen. New business arrangements, new marketing strategies, new technologies. Imagine yourself standing by the microwave and waiting for that mini-bag of popcorn to finish. Pop, pop, pop, pop. That’s one image of the publishing world. Another might be the sound of a balloon deflating.

In truth—and this is less a parenthetical aside than you think, this is an appropriate if sudden turn of thought--I believe in climate change. I believe we are facing some environmental consequences to our actions such that business as usual is not going to be possible thirty or forty or forty years from now, and so my vision of the mid to late 21rst century is really more about the apocalypse than a new renaissance.

But not even that, not even my greatest fears for us, for our world, for our children and grandchildren, changes my belief in the inherent power and joy and instinct of writing. Because although I may not know much, I do know that we are the story-telling animal. We are the animal for whom imaginative play became an adaptive trait that fostered flexibility and opportunism. In our long developmental time as children, we learn through trial-and-error, through games, through the exercise of creativity. We are the animal who does art and who needs art—from the nearly constant art-making of the Paleolithic hunters and gatherers with their cave paintings and beaded clothes and engraved tools and, quite probably, stories around the campfire—to the nearly constant art of today with our books and our movies and our music, our doodles, our crafts. Through our art, we engage in the world, we order the world, we fall in love with the world. Through our art, through our stories, we reach out to each other. That’s the radical renaissance and, of course, it is not radical at all, and it is not a renaissance in the sense of something new: it is simply who we are being who we are.

Delight naturally arising.

I am going to conclude with the first two pages of Standing in the Light. This is a history of pantheism which is perhaps best defined by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius when he said “Everything is connected and the web is holy” or by Frank Lloyd Wright who said, “I believe in God only I spell it Nature.” This is a history of pantheism in Western thought from the early Greeks, the pre-Socratics to the American transcendentalists, but I began as I usually do with an intimate experience, with where I enter the subject. Ironically, I suppose this passage is also about silence whereas I have been talking for the last forty minutes mostly about speech and words.

READING
“In the summer of 1996, I sat on my porch steps in the small town of Silver City, New Mexico, trying to decide if I should become a Quaker. I had attended my local Meeting off and on for twelve years but had not yet written my official letter asking for membership. Should I write that letter now? I was forty-two years old, a wife and mother. I felt anchored in my life. I felt the sun on my face. I felt the rough concrete against my legs. I watched an ant move across the sidewalk. Was I ready, for the first time, to join an organized religion? Did I have in fact any religious belief, or was I mainly attracted to Quaker culture and history?

The Quakers in my Meeting are also known as unprogrammed Quakers and Universalists. Following the earliest tradition of Friends, we have no scripture, no preacher, no creed. Instead, we practice silence, the act of sitting in a circle, saying nothing, and waiting--waiting for the Light. The Light is a deliberately broad concept. Among Universalist Friends, the Light can take the shape of Christ, the son of a heavenly Father, or the shape of Buddha, a human prince who enlightened himself and preached the Middle Way. Or the Light can take no shape at all and serve only as metaphor, a substitute for the ineffable. In my Meeting, how each Friend defines the Light is a personal choice. We conform to Quakerly ways of opening and closing silence. We share similar ideas about social justice and nonviolence. We wait for the Light. We do not ask much of our members. We do ask this.

In front of me, on my porch step, was a sidewalk, a patch of grass, a broad strip of asphalt, more sidewalk, a stone wall, a pine tree and, higher above, electrical wires. Cars drove by. A raven gurgled, liquid and insistent. In the blue sky, white clouds floated above brown hills. “Well,” I said to myself, “the Light is all this, I suppose, these steps, this concrete, this ant, that raven. The weft and warp. It is,” I gestured, “the street.”

I did not have the perspicuity to shout, “Pantheism.” I would do that a few hours later, looking at a dictionary. Pantheism is the belief that the universe, with all its existing laws and properties, is an interconnected whole which we can rightly consider sacred. At that moment, I had decided to call the wholeness of the universe the Light. I had decided to believe in a holiness that was not confined to any one thing but immanent in everything. God was in the raven and concrete not as a supernatural being but as the miracle of raven-ness and hydrogen molecules and light waves bouncing off a hard surface to enter my soft receptive eye--an image reflected upside down which my brain instantly turned right, my brain humming with insight, adrenaline in the blood, water vapor in the sky, all of it an amazement, all of it numinous. Suddenly, on those porch steps, I was so pleased, so grateful to be part of this existence.

Soon after, I joined my Quaker Meeting, or the Religious Society of Friends, or more simply the Gila Friends since our membership extends across the watershed of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, surrounded by the Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness in a specific landscape of ponderosa pine, juniper, oak, prickly pear, grama grass, and yucca. It is a landscape of transition, between conifer forest, grassland, and high desert, a southern range for elk, a northern for coatimundi. It is a place where not enough rain falls and then too much, flooding the arroyos. Very few people in our Meeting are originally from this area. Most of us have come here just to be here, our home of choice.”
END OF READING

Thank you so much for having me here today.

2010-05-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Susan Krieger’s Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side:

We left Hatch, driving out past the chile fields, the farmland soon giving way to vast expanses of arid, straw-colored desert. Railroad tracks ran beside the road, the sun glaring down as the radio played country and western songs. An occasional Border Patrol car zoomed by. Above distant mountains, a blue sky held high white clouds. I had a sense that we were on our way to new possibilities as the sun lowered, signaling the lateness of the day. Finally, we turned onto a side road that curved, then began to climb up toward gentle mountains, entering the Mimbres Valley. In place of a barren landscape, trees now loomed alongside the road and lined the nearby narrow river, their bare branches reflecting the golden setting sun, the fields behind them the color of winter wheat. The Mimbres River Valley was more picturesque in a conventional sense than the open desert, but of a piece with it. And I was becoming used to the contrasts, to going from a vastness to a sense of close detail, much as with my vision, I move in and out of seeing-sometimes getting a broad view, blurry, with parts unrecognizable, at other times focusing closely in, yet finding comfort in each vision, supplementing the one with the other.

Darkness had settled by the time we arrived at our bed and breakfast in the woods. The innkeepers led us to a mobile home nestled among trees on a hillside on their property. I had requested this mobile home for privacy, and it seemed just what I had wanted-a rustic woodsided trailer set apart from the main house. To enter the front door of the home, however, meant navigating a small flight of steps with no banister. I faltered. I could not see the wooden steps in the darkness and I worried about how I would maintain my balance when carrying our luggage up them. The innkeepers generously offered to bring the bags, and although I was grateful, I felt useless and incompetent, embarrassed because I was afraid of the stairs.

The next morning, I practiced on those steps, going up and down them without looking, counting them, touching the side of the mobile home to keep my balance. Next time I wanted to be able to carry the bags myself.

Later that first night we drove to dinner in a neighboring town. I tried to give Hannah directions but got us lost on the back roads. Much that I did now was more complex than it used to be. The roads were not where I expected them on the dark map in my mind. "There it is," Hannah said finally, finding the turn. I soon saw the fuzzy shape of the restaurant–what looked like a house with a lighted front porch. Hannah parked across the street from it. As I stepped out of the car, I feared the darkness and the cold, unsure how I would reach the restaurant across the way.

"Wait for me," Hannah called.

I stopped beside the car with Teela, wondering, should I take Hannah's arm or go forward without her into the darkness? I listened and heard quiet. "I'll be okay," I told Hannah. "Forward," I instructed Teela and we stepped out into the pitch black night, nothing visible but faint lights on the house across the road. The darkness was imposing but exciting. I felt like an explorer braving the unknown. Once across the street, Teela and I quickly climbed the several stairs to the porch, where white Christmas lights hung above the front door. I felt pleased to have made my way across the dark street and up the steps without tripping. Hannah soon arrived and stood by my side in the glowing white light. "You made it," she said, sharing with me this small moment of conquering my fears.

After dinner, back at the mobile home, I asked Hannah to come with me when I took Teela outside to relieve herself. The ground near the mobile home was sloping and rocky and I was still unfamiliar with the wooden stairs. I knew I could have taken Teela myself, but I wanted Hannah's reassurance, her company.

The next morning when I went out to take a walk with Teela alone, I found myself uncertain of my steps through the brush and dry leaves in nearby fields, even in the brightness of the day, so I came back soon after setting out. Later, Hannah, Teela, and I walked together in the woods on paths covered with dry fallen pine needles that softened our steps and looked like snow, reflecting sunlight from clouds above. That day had a gentle golden feel. Our time in the Mimbres Valley was special–several days of walking in the woods, nights in the mobile home with a piñon fire and a warm bed. "We're very lucky," Hannah said. For me, time had stopped. I could not see, but I felt protected here.

I ate the biscochitos each morning for breakfast, heating them in the oven, filling the home with their cinnamon and anise scent. My blindness made me more limited in my mobility than I wanted to be. I could not drive by myself to find flat places where I could safely walk, and I could no longer navigate on the irregular hilly terrain and in the dry rocky stream beds and arroyos as I used to do. Now the stream beds and arroyos stretched before me as roads untaken. Yet the frustrations did not destroy my sense of well-being. And the comfort I viewed in the landscape was, in part, because my blindness lent a softness to the scenery, blending the trees and fields together. Sometimes I yearned for clarity, for the individual tree shapes to stand out, but I also accepted the softness as a gift of my blindness.

The day before we left the Mimbres Valley, we stopped at the small Mimbres General Store, where I had an experience that stays with me like little else. The store was jam-packed with hunting and picnic supplies and tourist items. As I stood at a glass counter looking at a tray of turquoise and silver earrings, Hannah pointed to a pair she thought I might like. The woman behind the counter reached beneath the glass, searching with her fingers for the pair Hannah indicated, but she could not find them. A younger woman, coming over to help, quickly reached in and lifted out the earrings and handed them to me. I held them up close to my eyes. Then I took out my lighted pocket magnifier. "I don't see very well," I told the women. "So I have to hold things close. She helps me," I gestured toward Hannah.

"I don't see either," the older woman said quietly. She seemed to me to be in her seventies and she was wearing glasses. It had not occurred to me that she couldn't see.

I asked if she had a magnifier. She shook her head. I handed her mine to try. She held it close to a page and seemed pleased with what she saw. Handing it back to me, she soon came out from behind the counter and told me, with a tone of sadness, that she had macular degeneration.

I lifted my arm and pressed the button on my talking watch to cheer her by having it announce the time. She lifted her arm and pressed the button on her talking watch, a smaller version of mine, both from Radio Shack. She smiled broadly.

"Do you have a white cane?" I asked her.

"No," she said. "I pray. I don't give up." She told me that she lived in a house behind the store and could walk to work. She had lived there for seventeen years. Her vision had only deteriorated seriously five years ago. She had an operation, but then it got worse.

"Maybe someday they'll find something for me," she said. "I won't give up praying."

It took me a while to grasp her meaning. I had thought that not giving up meant you still did things, you got the aids you needed. But for her, not giving up meant you still prayed. You did not lose faith.

"I don't drive anymore," she said, in a questioning manner.

"I don't either," I said, as if this were our bond.
I reached into my backpack for one of the black felt pens I always carry. "For you," I handed it to her. "It writes a thick line that's easy to see."

She went back behind the counter while Hannah and I browsed further in the store. I kept wanting to go out to the car and bring in the white cane that I kept there as a backup and give it to her. I was not a believer in religion, in reversals of eye conditions that don't reverse, in waiting for cures that might come someday. I had to restrain myself from going out to get the cane.

"She doesn't need it," Hannah whispered.

I went up to the counter to pay for my items. When the older woman gave them to me in a bag, she also handed me a ballpoint pen with "Mimbres Store" written on the barrel.

As we drove away from the store, I wished to return, to give her my cane and to talk some more. In my mind, I see her to this day making that walk from the house to the store, reaching under the glass counter for things she cannot see. I see her as more helpless than I am, which is not necessarily true. I need rides. I reach for things I can't find. In the Mimbres Store, I bought a hunter's cap and a pair of earrings that I do not wear because out of their environment and in brighter light, they don't look very good on me. In my desk drawer, I keep the pen that the woman in the store gave me. I don't use it because it writes too fine a line for me to see. But it helps me remember. I had wanted my encounter with the woman in the store to seem friendly and my attempts to be helpful to have meaning, for such acts of sharing give a purpose to my blindness.

Driving south, this emotional moment behind me, I thought of a stop by the roadside, a chance meeting, two strangers who hardly knew each other, and yet we did.

2010-04-14T19:30:00.001-07:00

Two poems by Susan Rich

Unexpected Song

Thank-you for sending me back

to the page, the open notebook,

Sarajevo’s unfurled tail

along the table’s edge.

Thank-you for apricot blossoms,

beach rose and blackberry vines;

that allow bright divinations

along the nearly-absent mind.

And hats off to the green

and white ferries over-riding

time-tables, taxes, spring tides;

to the brant’s triumphant choir

casually premiering each April

above the waters of Beach Drive,

above Vashon, Bainbridge, Blake,

like a flyway to the heart.

Outside this raised window

lie early morning charms

traveling the air on blue lilac —

terrestrial and round:

the notes we are meant to sing

the possibility in each slight thing.

Ode to the Question of Blue

As in delphiniums at dusk,

berries, fish, and

calm lagoon;

as in the changing days ~

blue corn, blue ray, blue tooth.

I almost knew you once ~

blue stocking, blue devil,

blue swoon ~ but better to come

to you now through canopied

rooms, to enter the cornflower

sky ~ where I will relinquish

indigo boots and stone-washed jeans

above a river of pine ~

bluebottles, blue miles, blue sighs.

2010-03-26T20:26:00.000-07:00

Three poems by Jim Natal, from Memory and Rain (Red Hen Press, 2009)

BLUR

Out east on the desert freeway,
after the rain blowing in from the coast
had been blocked by the mountains doing their work,
the sky was fearless and the sun, half arisen now,
cast shadows of slow-whirling wind turbine blades
across all eight lanes, passing over each car
like the shadow of a hunting hawk.
A man in front of a prefab church
changed letters on the sidewalk marquee.
“God is waiting…” it began but I went by too fast
to see if He was waiting for me.

ON BROKEN TOP, THREE SISTERS WILDERNESS
—For Jim and Theresa Farrell

I had almost forgotten the wildflowers, how they shelter
in high mountain meadows: crimson Indian Paintbrush,
bushy pink Monkeyflower, purple Lupine haloed
by white airbursts of Queen Anne’s Lace.

Had almost forgotten that every stream has a different voice—
snowmelt, riffle, rocky course, waterfall—
and how river forks slither through marshlands,
and the semi-precious palette of glacial lakes: creamy jade;
rusty garnet; turquoise lit from within.

Had almost forgotten the dry drum thump of boots
treading needle mulch beneath the trunks,
and how a Blue Noble handshake becomes a caress,
pine pollen like cloudbanks you pass through on your way.

Had almost forgotten how life always finds a grip,
how ferns can jimmy themselves into pumice rifts
and Lodgepoles trace their ancestry to a seed-hold in
a crevice, a thrusting out and then upward, and how
growing things at altitude have stature despite clinging
so low to the ground—dwarf architecture
of moss, yellow broomlets of lichen, huddled heather.

I remember now how the weather upslope twists
branches not out of shape but into shape,
and how the word “thistle” lisps like a breeze in the pines,
and that sweeping aside a stone on the trail
can veer the course of the world.

RAIN IN L.A.

Thursday morning

This is a dialogue town,
hard-boiled repartee in a soft-boiled climate.
The mountains wisecrack to the desert,
while the Santa Anas, the red winds,
wring their raspy hands, snivel and sweat
like Peter Lorre waiting for a call on a
black phone from the fat, accented ocean,
the brains behind the operation.
Here, nobody goes out when it rains.
Authors read to the backs of empty chairs.
The movies talk to themselves.
Does the whole city steal
that rare chance to stay home, to listen
to weather spackling the windows,
“So What” softly in the background,
drink and shrink the stack of magazines
beetled beside the bed? Are they all
afraid of hydroplaning on the 405,
upturned SUVs and jack-knifed trailers,
highway patrol cops in yellow slickers
erecting shrines of flares?
Or do people think they’ll melt
like the wicked witch of the coastal west,
leave nothing but a grounded broom
and a puddle on an empty soundstage as if
it’s 1939 in Culver City? Oh, man,
it’s raining munchkins and there are evil
clouds of flying monkeys rumbling in.

2010-03-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

Kathleen Dean Moore
Copyright © Kathleen Dean Moore, 2010
1828 words

Wonder, Bread

A white Buick rolled down the road along the south jetty, trailing gulls. It parked beside us in a gravel pull-out with a view of the channel and the seiners heading out to sea. Gulls swirled over the Buick, squawking. The passenger door opened on the far side of the car. Bedroom slippers on thin legs lowered themselves to the ground. Without warning, slices of bread flew up like toast from a toaster, and gulls swarmed to the open door, screaming and fighting.

On the driver's side, a woman opened the door, grasped the door frame, and pulled herself to standing. Her shoes were purple. Her socks, lavender. Her slacks were purple, and her blouse was purple and gold. Her hair, short and tightly permed, was brick red. The gulls circled her as she made her way to the back of the car. When she opened the trunk, the gulls went wild. Screeching, they swooped in close, colliding in midair. More bread popped up on the far side of the Buick. The gulls glanced over and dove for it, clattering their wings together, crying out.

The woman reached into her trunk for a loaf of bread. She unwound the twisty tie and held it in between her lips. Then she pulled out as much bread as she could hold in one hand. Gulls pressed against her legs, stumbled over her shoes. In spasms of excitement, they tilted back their heads and gulped out the raucous food call. The woman tossed up a handful of bread. Gulls caught the bread on the fly. What fell to the ground disappeared under slapping yellow feet and flapping wings. Gulls swooped in to pull at the bag the woman held in her hand. They swallowed quickly, and who could blame them, tossing back their heads and gulping down the scraps before another gull could snatch them.

How many gulls? A hundred? Two hundred? I sidled closer, not wanted to scare the birds or intrude on the old woman, but wanting to feel the wind of these flapping wings. She saw me coming.

"Want some?" she offered, and in fact, I really did. She beckoned me over to her trunk. Every niche was crammed with bread, one plastic grocery bag after another, each bag stuffed with five full loaves. This was soft, white Wonder Bread. When I was a kid, we used to slather this bread with margarine and coat it with as much sugar as wouldn't shake off.

"Safeway sells it," she said, although I hadn't asked. "Five loaves for a dollar."

"Good price," I said, because it was.

"We've been doing this every day for ten years. It's what we do."

I stood next to her and tossed bread high into the wind. I threw a slice to a pure white gull that had only one eye, firmly fixed in my direction. I threw a slice to a grey-winged gull that had only one leg. But it didn't matter where I aimed; every bird mobbed every piece of bread. Birds hung at our heads, wings flapping and legs dangling. They swarmed at our feet. Experimentally, I side-armed three slices into the crowd. The volume of screaming was directly proportional to the amount of bread in the air.

Another handful of scraps shot up from the far side of the car. A phalanx of gulls peeled off and settled by the bare feet in the bedroom slippers.

“My husband,” the woman said.

"Do the birds follow you home?" I wanted to know.

"No. But they know we'll be back," she said, and turned to pull another loaf from her trunk.

She gave me fully half the loaf. I would have liked to have eaten it, I was that hungry for what the old woman offered. But I tore it to pieces and threw it to the birds. Then I backed out of the melee. There stood the woman in her purple shoes, her face lifted to the birds, her arms wide open -- the gesture of exaltation. Gulls fluttered around her like angels.

She might have been my grandmother, I thought. Her gesture was exactly that of my grandmother in a newspaper photo I keep framed in my hall -- except that when that picture was taken, my grandmother was five years old. In a little shearling coat and buttoned boots, ringlets falling to her waist, she stands in front of an open door. Her face is lifted in wonderment. Her arms are open and her hands upraised. Her expression is a picture of astonishment and delight, that same exultant gesture.

A staff photographer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer had positioned the little girl in front of the tall doors of Macy's department store downtown. He steadied his camera on its tripod and ducked under the drape. On a signal, somebody threw open the doors. There in front of my grandmother shimmered a giant Christmas tree twinkling with electric lights -- the first electric lights Cleveland had ever seen.

The next picture I have of my grandmother shows her waving from a float in a parade -- Miss Liberty, with the same long curls, but this time a young beauty in a flowing toga. Then she was a widow, living alone in a tiny house that used to be a garage. Each year, she talked my Uncle Harry into plowing up the expanse of ground between her house and the road. In rows, as if she were growing corn, she planted five acres of the biggest, brightest flowers she could find. Gladiolas. Sunflowers. Zinnias. Chrysanthemums -- the puffy yellow homecoming kind. Heavenly blue morning glories grew up her trellises, over her roof, and into the trees. She loved these especially, loved the miracle of their opening every morning.

Before dawn, she would fill her car with buckets of flowers. The car was a Metropolitan, a tiny square car so crammed with flowers that she could barely find the gear shift and had no hope of seeing in the rear view mirror. On her way to work, she would drop off buckets of flowers at peoples' doors, especially ours. I would hear a scuffle on the step, open the door to a bucket of red and purple gladiolas as tall as my shoulders, yellow and orange zinnias, day lilies, sunflowers as big as faces. I dragged the flowers into the house, the bucket too heavy to lift, and ran out to thank her before she could get away, wrapping my arms around her ample waist.

She was as thick and hard as a tree trunk, so corseted and girdled -- her amplitude the only thing she held in, as far as I know. She wore purple, always, and dyed her hair mahogany. She gave us lipstick when my sisters and I were kindergartners, and silk stockings when our mother said not until we were twelve, and patent leather tap-dancing shoes with high heels. "There is no waiting with his woman," my mother would despair, which was true.

In these last weeks since I met the woman with purple shoes, I've been thinking about my grandmother, and how one goes about living like that, with that extravagant joy and astonishment, that hard embrace of what is so wonderful that it can take your breath away, which is everything, when you think about it, every single thing in this mysterious, miraculous, morning-drenched world. But we take these things for granted -- really that, we take them as our birthrights -- and we hardly notice them, so focused on ourselves, this bloated self-absorption.

And I've been thinking about a morning in my own life: Waking early, I had opened the front door of the cabin. A forty-foot Douglas-fir filled the door-frame. The tree was made of white light. Light glowed in the water drops at the end of each needle. Light sparkled in the spider webs draped from branch to branch. Beams of light shot from the sun concealed behind the trunk, illuminating even the air inside the tree. The whole thing shimmered in front of me, whistling the sweet clear song of the hermit thrush. I threw back my head and laughed at the wonder of it.

I had opened my door to this tree so many mornings. How could I have never seen it before?

This new seeing, this sense of wonder, must be what Abraham Heschel called "radical astonishment." Astonish, from the Latin word tonus, which means thunder -- to be struck, as by lightning, the sudden flash that startles and, just for a moment, lights the world with uncommon clarity. "Wonder is a state of mind in which . . . nothing is taken for granted," he wrote. "Each thing is a surprise, being is unbelievable. We are amazed at seeing anything at all; amazed . . . at the fact that there is being at all . . . Amazed beyond words. Souls that are focused and do not falter at first sight . . . can behold the mountains as if they were gestures of exaltation."
The mountains, yes, and the gulls, and the gladiolas, and electric lights, and morning light in spider webs, and women in the wind of wings. Everything beautiful and ineffable. Look! Just look! Look as if you have never seen this before -- with that surprise, that wonderment. Or look as if you would never see them again, with that yearning and confusion.

Surely my grandmother lived on a sense of wonder. It fed her, gave her what she hungered for, a life-long enchantment, a connection to great and mysterious gifts. Rachel Carson wished for "a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength." This is what I wish for my children.

So I was glad when my daughter called from Tucson the other day. Hearing a strange noise, she had came out the front door to see what it was, a sort of cracking and scratching noise, "as if somebody was trying to tear a mesquite tree apart with bare hands," she said. As she glanced around, she noticed that feathers were drifting from the sky and alighting on the gravel. She looked up. There, perched on top of a utility pole, was a sharp-shinned hawk, a mourning dove pinned in its talons. With its bony beak, the hawk pulled out the dove's feathers -- that popping noise -- and tossed them away. Each floating feather was soft and grey, with a puff of white down at the end of the vane. My daughter stood in the yard, her arms spread, her face raised into a snowfall of bloody feathers, trying to keep her mouth closed so feathers wouldn’t drift in.

[end]

2010-02-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

Four poems by Laurie Blauner

Episodic Days in the Desert

I tried to unravel the beauty. Walking backwards,
my preoccupied hair under a fat hat. Afternoons,

your laughing mismanaged me. I was resigned
to the scuttling, blinking yellow and red, sand-

colored boredom for miles, the creeping and the crawling.
Yours, not the animals. My happiness was short of breath.

I mistook everything for you, the time between night
and day, a fistful of hair, the scorpion.

I meant to undo my speech. A rock smiled. You
grew empty while light wanted everything.

Your damp fingers scared me;
silent conversations. In the sky I saw

clouds explode as if we were back
in the city confessing to machines.

We exchanged bodies that couldn't save us.
Time boasted and water emptied

our perspectives. We were listening to
a bright blackness I'd call a blue.

I dream of who you used to be,
apologizing for the inconvenience.

Momentary Distractions of the Immense Kind

I get directions for a pretty, little landscape
but I'm so confused that I keep repeating myself,
my movement a migration of possibility.

A glimpse of: what for? A glimpse of:
it once began. The stories between buildings,
the sky whispers about people

who aren't what they used to be. I'm prescribed
night & food. But what does it really matter?
The savory shadows are for the willing.

I sit back in my tiny chair, waiting for my breath
to break. My blood races around to find you
& is thwarted. It's not that I've fallen

& can't get back up, but it's something
like that. Outside I notice the trees' utterances,
which are voices making a decision &

an undertow of wind, the wreckage of desire.
A cloud that couldn't be anything
but a cloud. & I feel knots through my skin

like the anatomy of a leaf. It could happen
to anyone, the earth moving one way, the sky
another and I've forgotten where I was going.

A Prayer & Something to Go with It

Deceive me with dialogue between a bird
& a branch that won't cooperate.

My body wants more, an apparatus it can
call its own. To fly, at least to climb

up the tree trunk that counts the stars overhead
backwards & forwards each night. A clarity.

I don't know if life will let me decide
this or that & I have misplaced

my weightlessness, that is, the state where I grow
smaller until no one notices me.

I make enough mistakes that hardly recognize me.
I avoid the moon with its enormous punctuation

marks. How can I answer when I don't understand
the question? I was outside, counting clouds,

which have fallen onto hard times. When they complain,
I hate the way they sound. All I know is

that I interrupt myself, returning to the same place,
a bird pleading for more sky. I hold onto broken objects,

my landscape filled with enough darkness to fix
anything. And how can I ask for more than that?

In the Distance, How Can I Tell?

I tell the insolent road that we only just met.
Stars reach through the eyebrows of trees, stare,
turn back. It’s the age of the self, they say, laughing,
and we’ve made a mistake. I turn back, make more
leaves, yell things no one needs to know. The
fences, cars, houses don’t want to stop, mumble their
little epilogues. There’s too much radio music and
oncoming archipelagos of light. Moonlight peels it all
away. Underneath, the forlorn and neglected stagger.
I pull into a field, grow quiet, think how roots
run wild, and grass blades can’t stay still. Just
like children. And who isn’t an astronomer of their
own desire? Sky explains how it would go about
changing everything.

2010-01-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

Kate Haake's excerpt from The Origin of Stars and Other Stories

From Kate: "The book is a collection of interstitial eco-fables, and this one tells the story of a dapper square-headed astronomer who finds his true calling in college when, by chance, he discovers a star. Hubert, now convinced that great things are his destiny, accepts a post-graduate fellowship at an important research center in the rugged outback of a distant continent where the only thing he manages to discover is a small aboriginal girl who lurks at the edges of the compound and watches the scientists watching the sky until finally Hubert follows her out into as a rocky world much like another planet as the planet Hubert has been hoping to discover."
"
And this is what happens when he does:

Hubert lay staring upward from a flat mud-colored rock and felt himself oddly pleased by the blue blur of sky above. Of course he hadn’t been so sanguine when he first lost his glasses, some time, he thought—before…— had in fact let out a little cry of hopelessness the very moment they had slipped from his nose and disappeared into a narrow crevasse. Momentarily, their loss had given rise to a tug of something potent out of Hubert’s past, some half-remembered panic or feeling of regret. The sensation had been very strong—for how in the world was he going to see now? Then, like a wave, it had passed, and the girl had reached up to touch his eyes, and Hubert had just barely been able to make out the traces of what might have been tenderness, or maybe relief, in her gaze.

By the time she took to wearing them, Hubert’s own lost glasses, cracked and askew on her face, he would have long since ceased to miss them, for now the sky had grown soft and close as a blanket, and with many of the stars he had loved his whole life simply missing from it—poof—into a blankness or an absence every bit as absolute as the way back to the telescope and his prior life, Hubert would have it no other way. For other stars seemed nearer, almost as if he could grasp them in his hands, and others had turned fat and furry and embarrassingly intimate. Even the moon was rounder and more three-dimensional, not flat in the sky like a math equation.

Now, as he lay beneath the blueness of that sky, Hubert considered the seamlessness with which his square head met the rock’s plane and, serene as destiny itself, determined to stay as long (if that’s what it took) as the rock itself to figure out why he was here.

The girl and her clan lived in a small camp below, mostly rocky overhangs and caves, and though Hubert had never paid any attention before, it suddenly struck him that these people made love, slept, and went about the business of their lives so remote from the business of what had once been his life that the worlds seemed mere shadows of each other. This interested Hubert. And like another light bulb in his head, he now surmised that where he’d ended up had turned out to be every bit as good as another planet, perhaps the very one he’d been hoping to discover.
The next thought Hubert had was one he wished he didn’t, for now he wondered if this new condition might be permanent, if he’d somehow slipped between the two worlds and would remain completely stuck there, as incapable of returning to his as he was of entering the girl’s.
At first, it had just been him and the girl, walking and walking. Then there had been the days of delirium, during which his dead parents hovered and scolded.

“Now you’ve done it,” his father said.

“Oh go away,” his mother said, “you’re not even ours.”

“But Mama,” Hubert said, “I’ll eat my peas—I promise!”

Afterwards, there were more days of walking, with little rest, until at last they stopped.

Within moments, Hubert found himself surrounded by a small group of people—a few men and women, a smaller scattering of children—who, though delicate and furtive, like the girl, seemed otherwise clear-eyed and well fed, and they welcomed Hubert and the girl with a good deal of food and drunkenness, and then, for several days, sleep.

When Hubert finally awoke and took stock of his surroundings, he lay in narrow hollow surrounded by rocks the color of sand and smooth-skinned and curved, like giant eggs. There was water, but he did not know where it came from. The food was mostly dried, mostly meat, but there were also grubs and occasional slender greens. Scarred and gentle, the girl and her people almost never spoke, and though at first Hubert waited patiently for someone to tell him OK, now what? they went about their business of survival utterly oblivious of him, taking stock of his presence only by such considerations as delivering food when it came time to eat or bringing him bundles of grass to sleep on. Hubert did not know quite what to think at first, and even if he did, the way he thought, these days, was more like a dream than a concept.
Not that what was happening to Hubert felt like a dream (or even was a dream), for Hubert was certainly there. Already his skin had turned brown and tough, and the ruined tatters of his shorts and shirt were all that remained of his prior self. If only he had a mirror or a pool of limpid water, anything to show him his reflection. But of course Hubert, by this time, would have recognized nothing of himself except the squareness of his head, and even that was so obscured by wild blooms of hair and beard it was no longer as pronounced, not so severe, as it once had been. And who was he trying to convince anyway?

So, no, Hubert wasn’t dreaming. The dreaming, instead, was going on around him.

The girl was a dreamer all right—and how good she was at it! She could close her eyes and summon up visions at will (just as she had summoned up Hubert himself), and the longer he lived among her and her people, the more he understood they were all like that, waking dreamers, who lived among only stones and the mysterious water, and who were silent, but not, Hubert knew, dumb. If Hubert had been an ordinary hiker, moving quickly through this barren land toward some famous rock or vista, he’d never even have noticed them—no one would. Each member of the girl’s clan lived in a private cave, which Hubert only knew because he watched them disappear into the earth, but he could never find their entrances, their little nooks or crannies, nor could he anticipate when they might reemerge to refresh themselves with bits of food and water, or some small communion with others.

Hubert could never have imagined that human beings could spend so much time alone in dark places, but then neither could he have imagined that the business they were hard at work on in their caves was the fundamental business of dreaming the world into being. It was hard work, and there were not very many of them left to do it. Hubert didn’t know this, but the girl who had fetched him did, for she alone remained awake to keep an eye on him, waiting for the light bulb to pop on in his square head (the only thought that mattered anymore) so that she (and thinking this, the girl let her face go dim with pleasure) could get back to her own cave and her dreams.
Of course this was turning out to be harder than expected, for despite his whole childhood fraught with ideas that rattled around in his square head like—Hubert thought for no apparent reason, acorns!—Hubert’s thinking had gone strangely muddled. Language itself seemed to have detached itself from him, as week after week, he squatted in his overhang and watched the nearby rocks for any sign that might yield an answer to a question he no longer knew. Well, at least the girl was patient, and as long as the thread of dreaming continued unbroken around her, she also was hopeful, convinced that Hubert would come through in the end.

It took him a long time—years, maybe—to realize he was going about this all wrong. Whatever the girl and her clan were doing in their caves, they weren’t going to just hand it over to him, no strings attached; and although Hubert knew he was beginning to resemble them more than the astronomers he’d left behind, he also knew he wasn’t really like them. His own cave was cool, if not exactly homey, but if he didn’t want to end there, he was going to have to come up with a better plan than just sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. What he needed was a system, something controlled, the way back to thinking in words

Also, as a scientist, Hubert needed data.

One night, he awoke with the word in his mouth: data.

“Data,” he said, the word feeling clumsy and unfamiliar on his tongue, like fur.

And though he was asleep again almost at once, the word hung around in the cave, sounding—had there been anyone to listen—more and more like, like something else, like: dada.
Hubert arose the next morning determined to get to the bottom of things.

Hubert’s throat was sore from talking in his sleep.

“Girl,” he bellowed. Then, more softly, more like a lover, he called out, “Oh, girl.”

Hubert looked, for all intents and purposes, like a wild man.

Oh, Hubert.

That very day Hubert went out and began to explore, and the girl, excited, followed. But of course Hubert bumbled even this, becoming agitated by and interested in all the wrong things. First, he wasted time on insects larger and more colorful than any he had ever seen, desperately wishing for his childhood killing jar so he might keep them as proof.

Later, on plants hidden in the cool undersides of stones, which certainly must have been what he was eating, though in their natural environment they looked so delicate and insubstantial: how could they keep a whole, gross body alive?

Behind him, only partially hidden by a ragged outcropping, the girl was thinking: rocks, Hubert, rocks. Think rocks.

But Hubert, so precocious and filled with such alacrity as a child, was going to have to do this, the girl saw now, in his own way.

One day Hubert found a lizard sunning on a rock, its blue tongue flitting in and out of its widely angled mouth. Brown and hard, Hubert looked a little like a lizard himself, and for some time—oh, about a week—he squatted beside it, absorbed in a kind of inter-species communion until finally the lizard climbed to his knee, where it would remain for another week or two, gazing eye to eye with Hubert, flitting tongue to tongue.

Behind them, tears traced dirty trails down the girl’s cheeks—oh, wretched, lost time. Although she did not know what this might mean, she did know that one her uncles was passing in his cave, and that the thread of dreams was weakening all around.

Rocks, Hubert, rocks, she would think.

Then one day, as gently as humanly possible, Hubert eased the lizard down, stood to shake his stiffness out, and looked about him at the sea of rocks that stretched as far as he could see and above that, only sky. This was not a light bulb and not lightning either—something else. For truly it was as if Hubert had never seen before what he’d been looking at all this time, moving through, living among—the planet itself, his own, a rock, rocks! And as Hubert remembered now, but with a difference, the way the flat back of his head had fit to the plane of the rock where he slept, finally he began to explore in earnest, walking out beyond the place where the girl and her clan lived just a little bit each day in a new direction and never going far enough to get lost or run out of time to get back before dark, but always, each day, closer, ever closer (the girl began to feel hopeful again) to where she had been leading him since they first started out.

So this is how it happens that Hubert discovers the origin of stars in a small stone basin in the outback of a distant continent among a sea of rocks as vast as sky itself, the small girl watching behind him. But of course he doesn’t know this at first. At first Hubert thinks he’s somehow stumbled on a bed of ancient meteorites (his great discovery at last!) that, in a stunning reversal of everything known about the universe itself, somehow have not gone out. And they are beautiful, pooled together in their basin, primeval constellations of lambent luminescence that, even in the bright glare of day, give off so pure a light you could almost touch it, or hold it in your hands, or drink it.

Hubert is suddenly thirsty, but as he runs toward the bed of glowing stones, he is momentarily blinded and falls to his knees, covering his eyes. Then he is very tired—hugely so—and for a long time, he sleeps.

Hubert will return to this site, followed by the girl, many times before he sees again and for the final time that he is wrong, sees that the still glowing meteorites have not fallen there, but instead—and this is something he can never quite get into words but nonetheless knows with an astonishing certitude that will persist his whole life—somehow originate there. This knowledge is the part of his experience that will leave him altered, and it will come to him the day he sees a star being launched by a young man from the girl’s clan who heaves it up into the heavens and then turns back to his cave where the rest of his dreams lie waiting for him. Hubert does not need to link this extravagant discovery to the origin of everything. For Hubert, it is enough, finally, to go out into the small stone basin, to stand there in the light, to reach down and pick up an egg-shaped glowing orb that shimmers almost greenly closer up, and hold it in his hands, knowing that several hundred billion years from now it will be shining down on some small earthly boy (like Hubert once!) from high above and unimaginably far away.

Behind him, the girl is not smiling, but she’s not weeping either, as the anticipation she has had for some time now has been replaced by something like a righteous vindication. But no, the girl keeps both feet planted firmly on the ground, and it’s a good thing too, because Hubert is going to turn around soon, and when he does, he’s going to recognize that look on her face, its meaning every bit as clear to him as if they shared a common language at last: now will you take your telescope and other scientists and big machines, and go away, and leave the stars and the rest of the dreaming to us, to whom they most properly belong and on which you most assuredly depend.

And this is what breaks Hubert’s heart, because after all that she has done for him, he knows he cannot do even this one small thing for her.

2010-01-06T06:00:00.000-08:00

On Walt Whitman, Chapter Eight

Of all the Transcendentalists in the nineteeth century, Walt Whitman stated his pantheism most clearly and is the one I blame the most for who I am. Whitman proposed to write an “indigenous” or uniquely American poetry that reflected the country’s abundance of resources, energy, ambition, and political idealism. He brought together mysticism and scientific theory and fused them in a fiery circle. He would allow for no separation, certainly not the separation of humanity from the natural world. He infected me when I was young and impressionable with his dreams of democracy and his cries of celebration. His “barbaric yawp” proclaimed that this was our job--to celebrate and be joyous.

I read his long poem “Song of Myself” like the Book of Psalms. We were all meant to be Walt Whitman, children of the cosmos, male and female, young and old, plantation owner and slave. Like him, our bodies are made of earth and sidewalk. We spread sideways into nature. We burrow into people. Animals adorn us. Plants grow in our ears. We have lived a trillion summers and will live a trillion more. Unlock the doors, unscrew the door jambs, take down the walls! We experience everything. We are everyone. We go naked and undisguised to the river bank, mad to be in contact with the air which is for our mouth forever. Logic will never convince. Sermons do not convince. The damp of the night drives deeper.

Walt Whitman urged me to connect with the world, and in 1975, a college student at the University of California at Berkeley, I thought I could do it standing on a street corner--behind me a shop that sold falafels in hot pita bread, the taste peppery and exotic, before me a traffic light blinking green and red. Just past the light, I could see the papery trunks of the eucalyptus trees on campus, their sharp medicinal smell, the life of the mind, the life of the senses, people jostling by. I could make contact, naked and undisguised, and I didn’t have to go to parties and talk awkwardly with other college students or go on dates and find a boyfriend. I could do it much more easily through the cadence of Whitman’s poetry. I am the old artillerist. I am the mashed fireman. I am the captain on deck. I am the mother of captains. The language was a little archaic, but still, it seemed that I was all those things. And that the bigger questions about life were answered here or would be answered:

And I call to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God;
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then;
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropt in the street--and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Today, re-reading “Song of Myself,” (which was originally titled “Walt Whitman” in 1855 and which turns out to be the only poem I really read in that famous collection of poems Leaves of Grass) I am still struck by how well Whitman held the enormity of it in his mind and body, in his hand and words. He saw God everyday. He understood God not at all. Does he contradict himself? Very well, he contradicts himself. We are large and contain multitudes. Joy and pain are braided. With broken breast-bone, the mashed fireman lies on the cold earth. The voices of his comrades hush. Elsewhere, the judge also proclaims the death sentence in a hushed voice. Elsewhere, stevedores shout heavy-e-yo and strong men laugh and homely girls croon to babies. Agonies. Good times. The procreant urge.

Elsewhere--everywhere--birds, wheat, whales, cows, and blackberries. A leaf of grass, the egg of a wren. We could live with these cows all day long. We are staggered and triumphant. We are braided into nature. We are reflected there. Celebrate every part, mollusk and hat.

Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

We also ascend, dazzling and tremendous as the sun;
We found our own, my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak.

2009-11-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

Four Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,
a Colorado writer and teacher

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.

2009-10-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-28T15:15:00.001-07:00

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.

[line break]

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]

2009-10-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

Growing a New Home Place by Lorraine Anderson

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.

2009-09-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

Marcus Aurelius, Sacaton Mesa, the meaning of evil, the night sky...

For the first half of this chapter, see the previous post.

I read Marcus Aurelius on Sacaton Mesa, a twenty minute walk from my little yellow house. A dirt road climbs to the top of this plateau and stretches for twelve miles, with a 360 degree view. Once an ancient lake bed, Sacaton Mesa now defines and overlooks the Gila Valley. Directly north are the red striated cliffs and peaks of the Mogollon Mountains, solid, commanding, irregular, with gray rock formations that erupt like giant’s teeth from the lower slopes of juniper and yellow grass. To the east, Bear Mountain and Telephone Mountain stand like sentinels above the Gila River. The rumpled Black Hills run south. Low massive shapes like sleeping animals lie further west.

The mesa itself is desert, a rolling plain covered with prickly-pear and snakeweed, a small bush which typically replaces blue grama grass and dominates ranges overgrazed by cows. Last fall, after the summer rains, the leaves of the snakeweed were a luminous lime-green, a brilliant chartreuse sea lapping at the base of the Mogollon Mountains. Now, in winter, they are olive-green, slowly turning brown. Yucca stalks punctuate the landscape like exclamation points, rising six-feet high from a spiky rosette of leaves.

Ever since I was a child, I have cultivated the ability to walk and read at the same time. It is a simple matter of peripheral vision and the confidence that this is the right thing to do. I walk and read now on Sacaton Mesa’s long dirt road, passed rarely by a rancher’s truck. When I hear the sound of an engine, I put down my reading to save both the rancher and myself the embarrassment of thinking me dangerously eccentric. Every few pages I look up to an enormous space filled with sky, mountains, and desert. This is perfection. I have a good book, and I have a good view.

Meditations is divided into twelve sections, some only a few pages long, with many of the entries a paragraph or single sentence. They are the thoughts of a man who could snatch only minutes between ruling on a judicial case, meeting with diplomats, or attacking the enemy. These things called for public decisiveness. The ruminative Meditations was an antidote to that, supremely private, at times uncertain, melancholic, pessimistic, then rallying. They expressed a vaguely hopeful pantheistic creed: “One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all. One substance and one law—the logos that all rational beings share.” They were also exhortations to the rational self. Be more rational. Work harder. Don’t show-off. Focus on what is important. Be grateful for what you have. Fight for equanimity. Fight your flaws. Stop being afraid of death. Stop being afraid of pain. Stop being afraid of sorrow. Stop whining.

The tone is familiar. Reading Marcus Aurelius is like reading the diary of an earnest seventeen-year-old bent on self-improvement. It is so hard to be good--so hard to be a Stoic! The Emperor scolded himself incessantly, “Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up.”
By now, Marcus Aurelius was in his early fifties, perhaps my age exactly. I also find myself thinking and feeling like a seventeen-year-old, a spiral return to the anxieties of adolescence. No doubt, hormones are involved, a chemical rearrangement both for the teenager and the man or woman nearing menopause. What is this new life ahead of me—old age rather than adulthood—and what does it mean that I am here now surrounded by existence and the beauty of snakeweed and yucca? What does it mean that we all must die and we all must suffer? Nothing I have learned has prepared me for this, and in any case I keep forgetting. What is the point again?

Everyone gets one life. That’s a chilling thought, even more chilling when you have already lived over half yours. Soon my chance at dignity will be gone. It is not simply that I have not accomplished all I wanted to accomplish. It is that I still want to accomplish these things. I want fame and fortune. I want to write a New York Times Notable Book and then be on their best-seller list. I want more friends--invitations to parties, fun times I want to be popular. I want to be admired. I know these things have nothing to do with my inner virtue. They won’t really make me happy. Like Marcus Aurelius, I know how I degrade myself.

Like Marcus Aurelius, I have deeper disappointments. My generation came out of the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam War, promoting civil rights and the rights of women. We would end racism and poverty in America. We would end world hunger. We would make the world a better place, and I would be a part of that.

This didn’t happen.

Like Marcus Aurelius, what I really want is to be wise and serene. Stop whining. Stop being distracted. Accept what I have. Accept who I am.

I read a few more pages of Meditations and look up at the view of mountains and sky, immeasurably pleased. The Roman Emperor has written, “Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as the capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us.” Yes, exactly. This has always been my favorite approach to a problem. How can I analyze myself into wisdom? How can I reach serenity through logic?

Like all Stoics, Marcus Aurelius admired logic and reason as reflections of the larger logos of a rational universe. He believed the most logical and reasonable thing he could do as a Stoic was not to desire what he could not control. The list of things he could not control was long and included his body, other people, his reputation, and his property. What he did control was his inner virtue which could also be described as his will to be in harmony with nature. When he welcomed with affection whatever happened to him in life, he acknowledged a beneficent universe and understood his role in that universe. The fact that this role was fated seemed to negate free will--yet desiring only the logos could be seen as an act of free will, as well as a kind of freedom from pettiness, ambition, lust, and greed.

Reason could be used to examine every troublesome event that arose in daily life. The Emperor agreed with Epicurus that impressions of the world came through the senses and were generally accurate. But emotions could also distort that information with a false value judgment. I might perceive something as bad: an insult, a theft, a death. A closer look using the intellectual power of logos would allow me to analyze the situation with more dispassion.

“What is it,” Marcus Aurelius asked himself rhetorically, “this thing that now forces itself on my notice? What is it made up of? How long was it designed to last? And what qualities do I need to bring to bear on it—tranquility, courage, honesty, trustworthiness, straightforwardness, independence or what?” Was this thing from God or fate? Was it a coincidence? Was it chance? Was it due to the ignorance of another human being? If so, treat that person as nature required—with compassion and justice.

Reason required a cold clear perspective. Marcus Aurelius had to keep reminding himself, just as I do: you are not the center of the universe. This event is not really about you. You have to stay focused. The nature of the world is flux and change. Why would you expect anything else?

Reason often led a Stoic to take action, for that was also the nature of the world. Being human meant participating in human affairs, not withdrawing from them. We were social animals, fundamentally cooperative and unselfish. Sometimes, true, a Stoic had to kill or hurt people in self-defense or for some larger good. Certainly the Roman armies led by Marcus Aurelius caused considerable suffering as the Emperor did what he felt he had to do to protect his empire. Yet in Meditations he warned repeatedly against showing anger or unmanly rage. It was “courtesy and kindness” that defined his real self. He was here to serve others.

Marcus Aurelius would repeat these ideas over and over in his notes from the battlefield. They were difficult ideas to absorb. They seemed to get stuck somewhere. Being a wordy animal as well as a rational one, the Emperor thought: perhaps if I say it differently? If I use a metaphor? If I use a different metaphor? If I say it tomorrow, and the day after? Meditations is a repetitive book, a technique of writing that reinforced and rekindled, variations on a theme: how to be better.

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius. On Sacaton Mesa, I clutch your work to my chest like a seventeen-year-old girl. You examine yourself ruthlessly and chase your own tail. You think you can be perfect but know you can’t. You celebrate the beauty in nature, the ripeness of figs and bending stalks of wheat; yet you are often bleak beyond despair. You want to serve others but you don’t really like people. Sometimes, you have a wit that makes me laugh out loud. “The best revenge is not to be like that.” More often, you sadden yourself. You are saddened by the world.
I understand your contradictions. And the connection is exhilarating. How is it that we that we can be so alike? How can someone like you--ruler of Rome, the most powerful human being in your time--be anything like me, a middle-aged woman, ruler of nothing? How can I possibly feel a kinship across this expanse of time, gender, culture, and status?

Some of this, I know, has to do with language. I happen to be reading an excellent translation by Gregory Hays, a man not afraid to extract from the original Greek colloquialisms like “from the bottom of my heart” and “Don’t gussy up your thoughts.”

But mostly, Marcus Aurelius, I think I can see you so clearly because you have stripped yourself so bare. You choose to talk only of the essentials. You don’t gussy up your thoughts. From reading Meditations, I would not know that you command hundreds of thousands of soldiers or that you lost miserably your first encounter with the barbarians or that the war keeps dragging on and on with too many small but exhausting battles. I would not know that in the year 172 A.D. you were said to have magically summoned a thunderbolt to destroy an enemy’s siege weapon, an event commemorated on the Aurelian column in the Piazza Colonna at Rome. I would not know that your own people slander and mock your wife, that your son and heir Commodus troubles you deeply, that your old friend, the Roman governor of Syria, plots rebellion and has just proclaimed himself the true Emperor of Rome. In response, you have the right and the power to kill his entire family--sister, parents, wife, and child. Of course, you do not.

You are not interested in talking about your personal troubles or your power, even though they are the background to every page. I watch CSI. You stand with the physician Galen and watch the autopsies of your soldiers. You accept the heads of prisoners (also recorded on the Aurelian column) with that same world-weary expression. Writing your spiritual reflections, you can’t help but use the images of gangrene, suppuration, and abscess. A severed hand is what we do to ourselves when we separate from nature by rebelling against fate. Lancets should be kept close by. The word gore comes up often. From you, the Pollyanna chirp of Stoicism—ain’t life grand!—is free of ignorance or hypocrisy. You have seen too much gore to be naive.

This February, as winter slides into a period of cold grey days, I take you with me everywhere. In Silver City, during the middle of the week when Peter and I are not in the Gila Valley, I read you as I walk to the local cemetery. I can start at my house and in fifteen minutes be at the edge of town. To my left, the mostly Protestant graves seem dull in shades of brown and gray. To my right, the Catholic cemetery is alive and shocking with bright color—red and orange plastic flowers, American flags, blue statues of the Virgin. Instead of cement, one grave has green astro turf and lawn ornaments. A bunny, a squirrel, a pink flamingo. Over another patch of dirt sits a bed frame. Rest in peace. On the graves of children, some families put toys under a small tree decorated for Christmas. This month I see Valentine presents, banners spelling MOM, and balloons with hearts. Once I found a letter blowing in the wind: dear grandma, I miss you very, very much….

This all seems natural to me. I was also a child in a cemetery and spent Sunday afternoons sitting on my father’s grave, watching my Methodist grandmother put white chrysanthemums in a Folgers’s can covered with tin foil. The cut-flowers were from her Kansas garden where they were grown as a useful crop for graves, weddings, anniversaries, hospital visits, and church. It is obvious to me now that my grandmother was a Stoic--practical, hard-working, distrustful of emotion. She accepted her son’s death in a way my mother never did. She accepted her life as a good one despite its hardships. She knew her place in the world, a farmer’s wife, with all the narrow prejudices of the Midwest. At the same time, she was part of something larger and beneficent.

It is also natural to read Marcus Aurelius surrounded by the dead, for death was often on his mind. He believed his own would come sooner rather than later, a reflection of his poor health. He worried about what people would think of his imperial legacy, and he devised spiritual exercises to put things in perspective. Remember the ancient courts and rulers--all gone, ashes and dust. Remember that Alexander the Great and his mule-driver both died and the same thing happened to them both, dissolved into the life force or dissolved into atoms. We are all One and we all go back to the One. (More than once, the Emperor contemplated suicide but rejected it as unnecessary.)

In 175 A.D., after seven years in the north fighting the barbarians, the Emperor decided to go home to Rome. First he visited the East, where the Syrian governor had threatened rebellion, to confirm his rule over these territories. His wife and son accompanied him. Enroute, the forty-five-year-old Empress died, possibly in her fifteenth pregnancy. Back in Rome, Marcus Aurelius mourned his wife’s death and prepared a celebration of his return. In a scene of paternal devotion, he did not ride in the triumphal chariot but ran beside it while his teenage son controlled the horses. Soon after, Commodus was elevated to co-ruler, the succession assured. In 178 A.D., father and son went north again to conquer more land for the empire. In the spring of 180, Marcus Aurelius fell ill at the age of fifty-nine and died.

I grieve. He was so young. I am in love with this man. If I could travel back in time, I would go to his tent on the River Danube near present-day Vienna and try to cheer him up. I would tell him he mustn’t be so hard on himself. Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy. I would stroke his cheek, pat his brow. Somehow I think Peter would understand.
[line break]

No one is perfect. Despite his virtues, Marcus Aurelius reflected the prejudices of a brutal age. The life expectancy of a Roman citizen was about twenty-five years, with most people dying of poor nutrition, disease, or violence. Slaves were abused as a matter of course and required a professional—the tortur—to punish them when the master got tired. Unwanted infants, especially girls, were commonly exposed at the local garbage dump. In some areas, the Emperor tried to help, strengthening the rights of orphan children. But he could only do so much, and he only did so much. If we define evil as the extreme and needless suffering that human beings inflict on each other (and on other living creatures) then Marcus Aurelius tolerated a great deal of evil.

He also unleashed evil on the world. For surely he must have known that his son Commodus was unstable and should never be named heir to an empire that included one-fifth of the world’s population. Perhaps the Emperor was blinded by fatherly love, or perhaps he felt he had no choice. In any case, the results were disastrous. Commodus was a cruel and neglectful ruler who became obsessed with killing people and animals in the gladiatorial arena. Within two years of his reign, the eldest daughter of Marcus Aurelius would try to assassinate her twenty-one-year-old brother, a crime for which she was executed. This was the little girl--running about the room in high spirits and good health--of whom the fond father had written to Fronto. This was the new family scene, murderous and vengeful.

By 192 A.D. Commodus was referring to himself as a god, Hercules Romanus. In one public performance, he dressed a group of crippled men in snake costumes and beat them to death with a club. By now he had already ordered the massacre of numerous Roman officials and their families, and no one knew who would be next. At another spectacle in which a hundred leopards and lions were slaughtered over the course of fourteen days, the senator Cassius Dio recorded how Commodus approached him carrying the head of an ostrich and a bloody sword. The Emperor said nothing but grinned meaningfully. Dio believed that “Many of us would have been killed on the spot for laughing at him—for it was laughter rather than fear that took hold of us—if I had not chewed some laurel leaves that I took from my garland and persuaded those sitting next to me to do likewise.” Moving their jaws steadily, the men concealed their nervous amusement.

Commodus died after he drank poisoned wine--and after an assassin was sent in to strangle him. The next Emperor lasted three months, followed by four years of civil war, more civil unrest, more assassinations, and a collapse of central authority as the military tried to seize control. Between 235-284 A.D., twenty Emperors rose and fell, with another thirty pretenders. Taxes increased. Commerce declined. The poor suffered the most. In the end, the Golden Age of Marcus Aurelius would be admired partly or mainly in contrast to what came next.

One group who had never much appreciated the Stoic Emperor were the Christians. Early in his rule, Marcus Aurelius issued a decree allowing officials to use criminals condemned to death as part of the gladiatorial spectacle. At this time, to declare oneself a Christian--to refuse to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods and obedience to the Roman state--was a capital offense. In an infamous case, when bodies were needed for a public entertainment, officials duly rounded up some Christians, offered them the chance to recant their faith, were conveniently refused, tried, and condemned them. Animals tore apart the old men and boys. The woman Blandina hung on a stake the entire day.

Christianity thrived on such martyrdom. And Christianity offered an eternal life of comfort and bliss that nothing else—certainly not Stoicism—could compete with. For those Romans born to die early of disease or violence; born a slave flogged by the tortur, born a woman married at the age of twelve, born a laborer half-dead from work and little food, Christianity provided an intimate relationship with a loving Father, a community of fellow Christians on earth, and a Heaven and Hell afterward. In that Heaven and Hell, all wrongs would be righted--the tortur punished and the slave freed. Divine justice would prevail, and that justice would not be abstract or impersonal.

By 313 A.D., Emperor Constantine was legalizing Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. An estimated tenth of the population had already converted. Sixty-four years later, Christianity became the official religion, and suddenly the world was full of an evil newly defined and newly dangerous. It existed in people who did not believe what the Church believed. It existed supernaturally in Satan, the fallen angel who had rebelled against God.

For the first Christians, evil must have been puzzling. Why would an all-powerful and omnipresent God allow evil in the world? The early clergy were intellectuals who had no problem turning to Greek philosophy for help. Some of their answers could be found in a revision of Stoicism. What a man might perceive as bad or evil might really be God’s will, and thus a hidden good. Also, bad things didn’t really matter; what mattered was our response to them, our inner virtue—for which, as a Christian, we would be later rewarded. Importantly, the temptation of evil allowed us free will. We were responsible for our actions even in a universe ruled by God. Eventually, the Christian St Augustine would argue that evil was not really included in the Creation but experienced only when a man separated himself from God. Similarly, the Stoics had believed that evil occurred when we failed to follow the logos within us; evil was omission rather than an active presence.

Christianity could borrow so much from Stoicism because the two religions already had so much in common. Both believed in a divine Providence interested in humanity and requiring certain moral behavior. The Stoic version of Providence was an impersonal, pervasive intelligence that was matter interpenetrated with pneuma. The Christian version was a loving, personal, transcendent Creator who existed outside matter. In both viewpoints, man was made in God’s image; the logos in us reflected the logos of the universe. Thus all men were brothers or, as Marcus Aurelius would have it, citizens in a great city.

Rather, for Christians, all men who believed in Christ were brothers, and there was actually a lot more to it than that. The devil was in the details. The Church in Rome had very specific ideas about what Christians or anyone else should believe, and they enforced their religious view as the only one possible. After a fairly decent run, from the sixth century B.C.E. to the fourth century A.D, pantheism in the West was about to disappear, or virtually so, for some twelve hundred years.
[line break]
Because I do not like being cold and am already sleepy by ten o’clock, I have to force myself outside at night. I take blankets. I whine. Then I am on a lawn chair in the Gila Valley looking up at a blaze of stars, the entire sky filled with glittering points of light, nothing here but darkness and light, stars and me.

At first, the Milky Way looks like a long thin cloud. But this milky whiteness is really an extra-density of stars, that cloudiness the edge of an arm in the spiraled disk which is our galaxy. I know that our sun and earth formed in one of these arms and that I am now looking across space at another arm, both of us far from the galaxy’s center which is a turbulent maelstrom with a massive black hole. What I know about the night sky is actually more confusing than helpful. The heart reels. The head spins. The tiny part of the universe I can see is so big and chaotic that I immediately seek order. In so much beauty, I have to admire something small.

My favorite constellation is the Big Dipper because it is easy to find. But in February that would be behind me, on the north side of the house. Too cold to move the lawn chair, I look instead for the belt of Orion or the Pleiades, a star cluster named for the seven daughters of Atlas who was condemned by Zeus to hold up the heavens on his broad shoulders.
Oh, the beauty of stars! I exclaim.

But my thoughts wander to the problem of evil. Like the Stoics, I do not believe in evil as a supernatural force outside nature. I do not believe that any part of nature is evil. I could even say that I do not believe evil exists in a divine universe.
Yet I have no problem using the word evil to describe the pain that humans deliberately and gratuitously cause each other. Let’s take a worst-case scenario. Your child is tortured and killed just like on all those television shows, and all those movies and best-selling thrillers. Someone’s child is tortured and dies screaming.

At this point, any belief I have in serenity or reason is long gone. At the extreme edge of human suffering, Stoicism breaks down. For surely it would be inhuman now to be stoical in your response—to say that this was unimportant or a false value judgment. In some profound way, that would not be virtuous but a betrayal of who we are.

I hope to never personally see the face of evil. If I do, I will not—I am certain—behave like a Stoic. I will not accept my fate with cheerful affection or remotely want to. Instead I expect to wail and protest, curl up and die, or buy a gun. Maybe I will abandon all my pantheistic beliefs and become a Christian just so I can have some divine justice—so someone will go to Hell and someone be saved in Heaven. I expect to behave shamelessly. Regarding evil, shamelessness might be the most reasonable response.

For the moment, I do not believe in the Christian Heaven. I cannot imagine an afterlife designed for just a few people. I cannot imagine where this place would be or what we would do there. Nor do I believe in the Stoic’s intelligent and benign Providence. Looking up at the Milky Way, I do not think the stars care for me or my husband or son or daughter, for any of my family and friends. I do not think humans are at the center of fate or even fated.

Still, we are here. I am here. Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy. Surprisingly, still, that makes sense.

I imagine the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius awake and restless, also leaving his tent on the battlefield and going out to look at the night sky, more brilliant and beautiful in the darker unpolluted world of two thousand years ago. I know he thought about the vastness of space and described Europe and Asia as distant recesses, miniscule and insignificant. He thought of time as a turbulent river. The present was a fleeting split-second. Yet he also believed that the present was all we had--and all we needed: “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”

It is another good spiritual exercise, looking up at the stars. But there are limits to how much vastness a human being can stand. Perhaps the Emperor thought next about his wife. Or the war. Or the governor of Syria. Then he went back inside his tent and took his regular dose of opium, desperate for a good night’s sleep.

Above me, the same stars glitter and one begins to move. Most likely, it is an airplane, a group of people sitting obediently in their seats as they travel through the air in a large heavy object. Perhaps it is something even stranger than that. Aliens. Gods. An interstellar event.

Sometimes you just have to shake your head. You have to stop analyzing. How can the part know the sum? Sometimes you have to let the questions go. Let go of evil. Let go of fear. Let go even of self-improvement. Be kind. Be grateful. Stretch your legs under the warm blanket. For this moment, my family is safe, the night is peaceful, and I am staring up at the Milky Way, another arm of our spiraled galaxy. The present contains everything, all I have, all I need.

2009-07-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

The great pantheist Roman Emporer...from Chapter Four of Standing in the Light...connecting this history to my own place.

Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire for almost twenty years in the second century A.D., a time that would later be called the Golden Age for its relative prosperity. Born into an aristocratic and wealthy Roman family, the boy lost his father when he was three years old. By the age of eleven, this unusually serious and dutiful child was already being groomed for high office. In 136 A.D., the childless Emperor Hadrian adopted Marcus’s maternal uncle as his heir, with the provision that the uncle adopt Marcus as his heir in turn. At this time, too, Marcus met Apollonius the Stoic, with whom he would eventually study and thank for having taught him to “pay attention to nothing, no matter how fleetingly, except the logos.”

According to a biography written many years later, Marcus was unhappy with his new role as the future Emperor. When asked why, the teenager spoke of the corruptible nature of power and burden of responsibility. He dreamed he had shoulders of ivory. How could they support such a weight? A bust of that time shows a beardless boy with firm chin, wide-apart eyes, a solemn expression, and abundant curly hair. He was said to have loved hunting, wrestling, and ball games. But he was also studious and a bit odd, in the habit of reading at the gladiatorial spectacles instead of watching them. He would never be physically strong. Even when young, he complained of chest and stomach pain. As an adult, he took opium, possibly for ulcers.
In 138 A.D., Emperor Hadrian died, the uncle became Emperor Pius, and Marcus (with another adopted younger brother) the heir-apparent. Marcus Aurelius later wrote of his debt to Pius and the lessons his new father taught him about compassion, hard work, and indifference to pomp. It was from Pius that Marcus learned not to be arrogant and to live simply at court, without bodyguards, expensive clothes, or ostentatious furniture—“the whole charade.”

The future Emperor seemed to be growing up in a surprisingly warm and affectionate household. Letters between Marcus Aurelius and his tutor Fronto are intimate and detailed, a lively, literary correspondence. In a typical note to Fronto, Marcus mentions his own mother and the wife of Fronto, Gratia, as well as Fronto’s baby daughter. The heir-apparent is now in his early twenties. He is self-conscious, self-deprecating, eager to please, and smug:

We are well. I slept somewhat late owing to my slight cold, which seems now to have subsided. So from five a.m. till nine I spent the time partly in reading some of Cato’s Agriculture and partly in writing not quite such wretched stuff, by heavens, as yesterday…Then we went to luncheon. What do you think I ate? A little bit of bread, although I saw others devouring beans, onions, and herrings full of roe. We then worked hard at grape-gathering and had a good sweat and were merry and, as the poet says, still left some clusters hanging high as gleanings of the vintage. After six o’clock we came home. I did but little work and that to no purpose. Then I had a long chat with my little mother as she sat on the bed. My talk was this. What do you think my Fronto is now doing? Then she: And what do you think my Gratia is doing? Then I: And what do you think our little sparrow, the wee Gratia, is doing? While we were chattering in this way and disputing which of us two loved the one or other of you two the better, the gong sounded….After coming back here, before I turn over and snore, I get my task done and give my dearest of masters an account of the day’s doings, and if I could miss him more, I would not grudge wasting away a little more. Farewell, my Fronto, wherever you are, most honey-sweet, my love, my delight. How is it between you and me? I love you and you are away.

Such tender exchanges would continue until Fronto’s death twenty-six years later. In almost every aspect of life, Marcus Aurelius seemed to be a man in touch with his feelings--a devoted son to his mother, grateful to his adopted father, an excessively loving and demonstrative friend. At twenty-four, he married and his wife immediately started bearing children, one after another, and on occasion two at a time. In further letters to Fronto, Marcus fussed over them. Concerning his first child, a daughter, “Thank the Gods we seem to have some hope of recovery. The diarrhea is stopped, the feverish attacks got rid of; but the emaciation is extreme and there is still some cough.” Within two years, he had twin sons, who died as infants, and then another daughter, “We are still experiencing summer heat. But since our little girls—we mustn’t boast—are quite well, we think that we are enjoying the healthiest of weather and the balmy temperature of spring.” Too soon the oldest girl would also be dead, and another newborn son. It is easy to imagine the anxious father, listening for a cough, delighting in a laugh, tickling his youngest child, exulting and then weeping.

Yet at some point, despite his emotional nature, Marcus Aurelius became a Stoic. Rome had conquered Greece centuries earlier, adopting much of its culture, including its schools of philosophy. In an ecumenical age, Stoicism was one belief among many. Foreign gods filled the marketplace, even as everyone worshipped the Roman gods--as much to demonstrate their alliance with the state as anything else. Some scholars like the tutor Fronto scorned all religion and philosophy as inferior to literary study. Powerful and well-educated, Marcus Aurelius had a choice, and he chose—like many of the Roman elite—a Stoic pantheism that emphasized virtue combined with duty and service.

As an amateur philosopher, Marcus Aurelius did not pursue much original thought but repeated those of earlier Stoics, as well as men like Democritus, Epicurus, and Heraclitus. His pantheism could be expressed in a single sentence: “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy.” The universe was a unified body, what some Stoics saw as a living organism. All its parts formed a whole; all its parts were divine. Nature was guided by the rational principle, the logos. Our job was to live in harmony with nature, which our inner virtue or logos naturally reflected. Inner virtue was all that mattered. Unruly emotions were to be avoided, although Marcus Aurelius made a nice distinction when he asked “to be free of passion, but not love.” At the same time, our interconnectedness meant that “In a sense, people are our proper occupation.”

In some areas, the Emperor was agnostic. Did the gods exist, too? What happened after death? He didn’t know, and stoically, tried not to worry about it.

He had a lot of other things to worry about. The reputation of Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher-king, a poster-boy for Stoicism--accepting his fate, grateful for his existence--is enhanced by the fact that his fate included so many problems, so many occasions to put philosophy into practice. At age thirty-nine, he became ruler of a kingdom whose borders were dangerously extended to include Britain in the west, Germany in the north, Syria in the east, and North Africa in the south. Both the previous Emperors Hadrian and Pius had neglected their military responsibilities and though the center of Rome held, its edges were crumbling. In 161 A.D, the Parthians invaded in the east and Roman legions had to be sent from as far away as the Danube, weakening the empire’s defense against the Germanic tribes. That same year, in the city of Rome, the River Tiber flooded, setting off a wide-spread famine. It would take five years to subdue the Parthians, and when the troops returned home, they brought with them plague, probably smallpox. At this point, the northern borders erupted, with heavy fighting on the Hungarian Plain. More barbarians attacked the Balkans. The Grecian provinces of Thrace and Macedonia were invaded, with the city of Athens spared only by luck. Finally the enemy entered Italy herself, something that had not happened for hundreds of years. A contemporary account notes, “Among the barbarian dead were found even the bodies of women wearing armor.” This was telling. The barbarians did not want plunder so much as a new home.

Meanwhile in his personal life, the children of Marcus Aurelius kept dying--a four-year-old son, a seven-year-old son, another infant, so that he seemed to illumine the Stoic caution that as you kissed your child at night, you should say in your heart, “Tomorrow, perhaps, you will be taken from me.” Altogether, only five of the Emperor’s fourteen children would survive. His adopted brother and co-ruler also died. His wife was rumored to be unfaithful (when did she find the time?) with a fondness for ballet-dancers and gladiators. His health was bad. Often, he had trouble sleeping and eating.

Yet he could not rest. From 169 to 176 A.D., the Emperor was mostly in the battlefield commanding his troops, fighting the barbarians, defending his borders, and making the administrative decisions of an empire. During this time, he began to write Meditations, a book of spiritual reflection that still sells in bookstores today.

I read Marcus Aurelius on Sacaton Mesa, a twenty minute walk from my little yellow house. A dirt road climbs to the top of this plateau and stretches for twelve miles, with a 360 degree view. Once an ancient lake bed, Sacaton Mesa now defines and overlooks the Gila Valley. Directly north are the red striated cliffs and peaks of the Mogollon Mountains, solid, commanding, irregular, with gray rock formations that erupt like giant’s teeth from the lower slopes of juniper and yellow grass. To the east, Bear Mountain and Telephone Mountain stand like sentinels above the Gila River. The rumpled Black Hills run south. Low massive shapes like sleeping animals lie further west.

The mesa itself is desert, a rolling plain covered with prickly-pear and snakeweed, a small bush which typically replaces blue grama grass and dominates ranges overgrazed by cows. Last fall, after the summer rains, the leaves of the snakeweed were a luminous lime-green, a brilliant chartreuse sea lapping at the base of the Mogollon Mountains. Now, in winter, they are olive-green, slowly turning brown. Yucca stalks punctuate the landscape like exclamation points, rising six-feet high from a spiky rosette of leaves.

Ever since I was a child, I have cultivated the ability to walk and read at the same time. It is a simple matter of peripheral vision and the confidence that this is the right thing to do. I walk and read now on Sacaton Mesa’s long dirt road, passed rarely by a rancher’s truck. When I hear the sound of an engine, I put down my reading to save both the rancher and myself the embarrassment of thinking me dangerously eccentric. Every few pages I look up to an enormous space filled with sky, mountains, and desert. This is perfection. I have a good book, and I have a good view.

Meditations is divided into twelve sections, some only a few pages long, with many of the entries a paragraph or single sentence. They are the thoughts of a man who could snatch only minutes between ruling on a judicial case, meeting with diplomats, or attacking the enemy. These things called for public decisiveness. The ruminative Meditations was an antidote to that, supremely private, at times uncertain, melancholic, pessimistic, then rallying. They expressed a vaguely hopeful pantheistic creed: “One world, made up of all things. One divinity, present in them all. One substance and one law—the logos that all rational beings share.” They were also exhortations to the rational self. Be more rational. Work harder. Don’t show-off. Focus on what is important. Be grateful for what you have. Fight for equanimity. Fight your flaws. Stop being afraid of death. Stop being afraid of pain. Stop being afraid of sorrow. Stop whining.

The tone is familiar. Reading Marcus Aurelius is like reading the diary of an earnest seventeen-year-old bent on self-improvement. It is so hard to be good--so hard to be a Stoic! The Emperor scolded himself incessantly, “Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up.”
By now, Marcus Aurelius was in his early fifties, perhaps my age exactly. I also find myself thinking and feeling like a seventeen-year-old, a spiral return to the anxieties of adolescence. No doubt, hormones are involved, a chemical rearrangement both for the teenager and the man or woman nearing menopause. What is this new life ahead of me—old age rather than adulthood—and what does it mean that I am here now surrounded by existence and the beauty of snakeweed and yucca? What does it mean that we all must die and we all must suffer? Nothing I have learned has prepared me for this, and in any case I keep forgetting. What is the point again?

Everyone gets one life. That’s a chilling thought, even more chilling when you have already lived over half yours. Soon my chance at dignity will be gone. It is not simply that I have not accomplished all I wanted to accomplish. It is that I still want to accomplish these things. I want fame and fortune. I want to write a New York Times Notable Book and then be on their best-seller list. I want more friends--invitations to parties, fun times I want to be popular. I want to be admired. I know these things have nothing to do with my inner virtue. They won’t really make me happy. Like Marcus Aurelius, I know how I degrade myself.

Like Marcus Aurelius, I have deeper disappointments. My generation came out of the 1960s, protesting the Vietnam War, promoting civil rights and the rights of women. We would end racism and poverty in America. We would end world hunger. We would make the world a better place, and I would be a part of that.

This didn’t happen.

Like Marcus Aurelius, what I really want is to be wise and serene. Stop whining. Stop being distracted. Accept what I have. Accept who I am.

I read a few more pages of Meditations and look up at the view of mountains and sky, immeasurably pleased. The Roman Emperor has written, “Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as the capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us.” Yes, exactly. This has always been my favorite approach to a problem. How can I analyze myself into wisdom? How can I reach serenity through logic?

Like all Stoics, Marcus Aurelius admired logic and reason as reflections of the larger logos of a rational universe. He believed the most logical and reasonable thing he could do as a Stoic was not to desire what he could not control. The list of things he could not control was long and included his body, other people, his reputation, and his property. What he did control was his inner virtue which could also be described as his will to be in harmony with nature. When he welcomed with affection whatever happened to him in life, he acknowledged a beneficent universe and understood his role in that universe. The fact that this role was fated seemed to negate free will--yet desiring only the logos could be seen as an act of free will, as well as a kind of freedom from pettiness, ambition, lust, and greed.

Reason could be used to examine every troublesome event that arose in daily life. The Emperor agreed with Epicurus that impressions of the world came through the senses and were generally accurate. But emotions could also distort that information with a false value judgment. I might perceive something as bad: an insult, a theft, a death. A closer look using the intellectual power of logos would allow me to analyze the situation with more dispassion.

“What is it,” Marcus Aurelius asked himself rhetorically, “this thing that now forces itself on my notice? What is it made up of? How long was it designed to last? And what qualities do I need to bring to bear on it—tranquility, courage, honesty, trustworthiness, straightforwardness, independence or what?” Was this thing from God or fate? Was it a coincidence? Was it chance? Was it due to the ignorance of another human being? If so, treat that person as nature required—with compassion and justice.

Reason required a cold clear perspective. Marcus Aurelius had to keep reminding himself, just as I do: you are not the center of the universe. This event is not really about you. You have to stay focused. The nature of the world is flux and change. Why would you expect anything else?

Reason often led a Stoic to take action, for that was also the nature of the world. Being human meant participating in human affairs, not withdrawing from them. We were social animals, fundamentally cooperative and unselfish. Sometimes, true, a Stoic had to kill or hurt people in self-defense or for some larger good. Certainly the Roman armies led by Marcus Aurelius caused considerable suffering as the Emperor did what he felt he had to do to protect his empire. Yet in Meditations he warned repeatedly against showing anger or unmanly rage. It was “courtesy and kindness” that defined his real self. He was here to serve others.

Marcus Aurelius would repeat these ideas over and over in his notes from the battlefield. They were difficult ideas to absorb. They seemed to get stuck somewhere. Being a wordy animal as well as a rational one, the Emperor thought: perhaps if I say it differently? If I use a metaphor? If I use a different metaphor? If I say it tomorrow, and the day after? Meditations is a repetitive book, a technique of writing that reinforced and rekindled, variations on a theme: how to be better.

Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius. On Sacaton Mesa, I clutch your work to my chest like a seventeen-year-old girl. You examine yourself ruthlessly and chase your own tail. You think you can be perfect but know you can’t. You celebrate the beauty in nature, the ripeness of figs and bending stalks of wheat; yet you are often bleak beyond despair. You want to serve others but you don’t really like people. Sometimes, you have a wit that makes me laugh out loud. “The best revenge is not to be like that.” More often, you sadden yourself. You are saddened by the world.
I understand your contradictions. And the connection is exhilarating. How is it that we that we can be so alike? How can someone like you--ruler of Rome, the most powerful human being in your time--be anything like me, a middle-aged woman, ruler of nothing? How can I possibly feel a kinship across this expanse of time, gender, culture, and status?
Some of this, I know, has to do with language. I happen to be reading an excellent translation by Gregory Hays, a man not afraid to extract from the original Greek colloquialisms like “from the bottom of my heart” and “Don’t gussy up your thoughts.”

But mostly, Marcus Aurelius, I think I can see you so clearly because you have stripped yourself so bare. You choose to talk only of the essentials. You don’t gussy up your thoughts. From reading Meditations, I would not know that you command hundreds of thousands of soldiers or that you lost miserably your first encounter with the barbarians or that the war keeps dragging on and on with too many small but exhausting battles. I would not know that in the year 172 A.D. you were said to have magically summoned a thunderbolt to destroy an enemy’s siege weapon, an event commemorated on the Aurelian column in the Piazza Colonna at Rome. I would not know that your own people slander and mock your wife, that your son and heir Commodus troubles you deeply, that your old friend, the Roman governor of Syria, plots rebellion and has just proclaimed himself the true Emperor of Rome. In response, you have the right and the power to kill his entire family--sister, parents, wife, and child. Of course, you do not.

You are not interested in talking about your personal troubles or your power, even though they are the background to every page. I watch CSI. You stand with the physician Galen and watch the autopsies of your soldiers. You accept the heads of prisoners (also recorded on the Aurelian column) with that same world-weary expression. Writing your spiritual reflections, you can’t help but use the images of gangrene, suppuration, and abscess. A severed hand is what we do to ourselves when we separate from nature by rebelling against fate. Lancets should be kept close by. The word gore comes up often. From you, the Pollyanna chirp of Stoicism—ain’t life grand!—is free of ignorance or hypocrisy. You have seen too much gore to be naive.

This February, as winter slides into a period of cold grey days, I take you with me everywhere. In Silver City, during the middle of the week when Peter and I are not in the Gila Valley, I read you as I walk to the local cemetery. I can start at my house and in fifteen minutes be at the edge of town. To my left, the mostly Protestant graves seem dull in shades of brown and gray. To my right, the Catholic cemetery is alive and shocking with bright color—red and orange plastic flowers, American flags, blue statues of the Virgin. Instead of cement, one grave has green astro turf and lawn ornaments. A bunny, a squirrel, a pink flamingo. Over another patch of dirt sits a bed frame. Rest in peace. On the graves of children, some families put toys under a small tree decorated for Christmas. This month I see Valentine presents, banners spelling MOM, and balloons with hearts. Once I found a letter blowing in the wind: dear grandma, I miss you very, very much….

This all seems natural to me. I was also a child in a cemetery and spent Sunday afternoons sitting on my father’s grave, watching my Methodist grandmother put white chrysanthemums in a Folgers’s can covered with tin foil. The cut-flowers were from her Kansas garden where they were grown as a useful crop for graves, weddings, anniversaries, hospital visits, and church. It is obvious to me now that my grandmother was a Stoic--practical, hard-working, distrustful of emotion. She accepted her son’s death in a way my mother never did. She accepted her life as a good one despite its hardships. She knew her place in the world, a farmer’s wife, with all the narrow prejudices of the Midwest. At the same time, she was part of something larger and beneficent.

It is also natural to read Marcus Aurelius surrounded by the dead, for death was often on his mind. He believed his own would come sooner rather than later, a reflection of his poor health. He worried about what people would think of his imperial legacy, and he devised spiritual exercises to put things in perspective. Remember the ancient courts and rulers--all gone, ashes and dust. Remember that Alexander the Great and his mule-driver both died and the same thing happened to them both, dissolved into the life force or dissolved into atoms. We are all One and we all go back to the One. (More than once, the Emperor contemplated suicide but rejected it as unnecessary.)

In 175 A.D., after seven years in the north fighting the barbarians, the Emperor decided to go home to Rome. First he visited the East, where the Syrian governor had threatened rebellion, to confirm his rule over these territories. His wife and son accompanied him. Enroute, the forty-five-year-old Empress died, possibly in her fifteenth pregnancy. Back in Rome, Marcus Aurelius mourned his wife’s death and prepared a celebration of his return. In a scene of paternal devotion, he did not ride in the triumphal chariot but ran beside it while his teenage son controlled the horses. Soon after, Commodus was elevated to co-ruler, the succession assured. In 178 A.D., father and son went north again to conquer more land for the empire. In the spring of 180, Marcus Aurelius fell ill at the age of fifty-nine and died.

I grieve. He was so young. I am in love with this man. If I could travel back in time, I would go to his tent on the River Danube near present-day Vienna and try to cheer him up. I would tell him he mustn’t be so hard on himself. Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy. I would stroke his cheek, pat his brow. Somehow I think my husband Peter would understand.

(To be continued...)

2009-06-17T07:04:00.000-07:00

RIEHL’S SIGHTLINES CONVERGE ON LOVE, PLACE, AND MEANING

A short interview with Janet Riehl

Sharman: Your poems in your audio book “Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music” are about family and your family’s home place. Tell us how that place came to be so strongly connected to family.

Janet: I traveled and lived all over the United States and the world. There are places I passed through or stayed for a time…even years…that didn’t feel like home. Then, there were places of the heart. My heart homes are Botswana and Ghana in Africa, New Mexico, Northern California (specifically Lake County), and our family place in SW Illinois where most of the “Sightlines” poems center.

Our place there is inextricable from our family. My great-grandfather E. A. Riehl founded Evergreen Heights in the 1860s. My grandmother Anna was one of the Riehl sisters. My father was raised there. He raised his children there. He nursed his wife there before her death. He continues to live there in the Big Brown House by himself, with the help of a family support team. His granddaughter and two of his great-grandchildren live next door in the White Cottage. This continuity of six generations nurtured by one place is rare in contemporary society.

Following my father’s death, his heirs are dedicated to continuing to keep the place…and to keep it in the family. We have been schooled in this value and some long-term ways of looking at the problems and practical matters of how to accomplish that.

Our land—now down to 100 acres—has gone through several transformations. Originally, E.A. Riehl used the land as a base for his horticultural operations. He was in his time considered one of the eight foremost horticulturalist in the world. His specialty was grafting nuts, particularly chestnuts. He had found a way to make a living commercially by shipping his nuts and flowers regionally to Chicago and back East…while, at the same time, doing ground-breaking research field work.

After E. A. Riehl’s death, his daughter Amelia continued his work at a time when women didn’t do that sort of thing. After my father came back from World War Two, he wanted with all his heart to stay on the land to make his living. But, that time had passed. To support his wife and young family he went to work in town: first as a powder monkey (i.e. dynamite) for a quarry and later working for the gas department in the utility company.

When we (my brother, sister, and myself) were growing up, we still lived like farmers…haying, keeping a horse or two, hogs, milking our cows, growing and putting up all our food. Gradually, that existence of the land decreased as each of his three children migrated to college and out into the world. Now Pop, 93, says that his rental property is his best crop.

My father has a deep feeling for this land he’s known since boyhood. He’s written beautiful poetry of great foresight about this land and ecology issues. He instilled this feeling in all of us.

In my girlhood I roamed this land…its woods and our pine rows on the ridge. It was my best companion and where I went to for solace. Coming back to the place—its presence and its memories—form one of the leitmotif’s in “Sightlines.”

Sharman: You speak of life as being rich with meaning, and you find your meaning in big things like love and family and home. You also find meaning in some odd places like in the poem "Butt Wipes." Should we perhaps be on the alert for meaning everywhere—in the daily affair of being human?

Janet: Yes, and the more human the better. What could be more human than going to the toilet?

During 2005, the year following my sister’s death in a car wreck (the period in which these 90 poems are set) I made one of the most important decisions of my life. A friend in Lake County in Northern California knew I was struggling with how deeply to be involved in the situation back in Illinois where most of my family is centered. He told me “Everyone deserves to know the truth about their lives.” Out of the truth I found, I wrote “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” which later became the audio book.

One of the wings of our family situations was taking care of my mother at home; this was a decision and effort we were united in as a family. She suffered from dementia as a result of a stroke in 2001. She’d been a passenger in the car when my sister was killed and had been severely injured. She nearly died in the hospital after that, but finally, she lived and we brought her back home.

Caring for my mother and groping for meaning both alone and with my family during this period taught me so much through all the grief and pain we faced. My mother needed care moment by moment. I cared for her during the day and my father was her night nurse.

My mother’s constant need for care and her altered state of mind demanded living moment by moment and locating my meaning in that moment. What I had was what was in front of me: my mother, a mother totally unlike any I’d ever know before. She said profound things and funny things. We sang to each other and made jokes. When she was on the move in her walker, I was on the move, too. When she went to the toilet, I was there to help her.

That’s the context for the cycle of poems that surrounds “Butt Wipes.” I considered whether to include these in the book, but it seemed important. There is both pathos and humor shown in this cycle that could only come out there, in that particular way. People who have become caretakers appreciate this cycle especially.

Sharman: What particular clarity and healing comes out of the act of writing?

Janet: Every art form has its gifts and demands. I’ve been blessed to be a visual artist, musician, and storyteller in my life as well as a writer. The gift of writing is, indeed, clarity as we put our thoughts, experiences, and feelings into words. Visual art can be more inchoate, for instance.

In writing we may not know the full extent we’ve done until we’ve done it, true. And, we may be surprised in the act of writing, true. But whatever it is, it demands to be named. It is in the naming and finding the images and detail to support that naming that clarity comes.

In this way writing can become your practice…as in the Quaker practice of sitting in silence waiting for guidance. I have known several Buddhist practitioners who were advised by their teachers to take their writing as their main practice.

For me, writing “Sightlines” was like that. I started the writing following a small retreat in which I received guidance of “Clearing/during this quiet time.” I wrote every morning in bed before I went down to take care of Mother. I took notes during the day to have a place to start the next morning. The slow pace of our lives alive with boredom, intensity, and sudden surprise were ideal seedbeds for clarity.

Sharman: Why do you write about the things you love?

Janet: To honor them and know them more deeply…just as a lover comes to know and honor her beloved.

2009-05-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

Below are the first pages of the first chapter to Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist.

Standing in the Light

In the summer of 1996, I sat on my porch steps in the small town of Silver City, New Mexico, trying to decide if I should become a Quaker. I had attended my local Meeting off and on for twelve years but had not yet written my official letter asking for membership. Should I write that letter now? I was forty-two years old, a wife and mother. I felt anchored in my life. I felt the sun on my face. I felt the rough concrete against my legs. I watched an ant move across the sidewalk. Was I ready, for the first time, to join an organized religion? Did I have in fact any religious belief, or was I mainly attracted to Quaker culture and history?

The Quakers in my Meeting are also known as unprogrammed Quakers and Universalists. Following the earliest tradition of Friends, we have no scripture, no preacher, no creed. Instead, we practice silence, the act of sitting in a circle, saying nothing, and waiting--waiting for the Light. The Light is a deliberately broad concept. Among Universalist Friends, the Light can take the shape of Christ, the son of a heavenly Father, or the shape of Buddha, a human prince who enlightened himself and preached the Middle Way. Or the Light can take no shape at all and serve only as metaphor, a substitute for the ineffable. In my Meeting, how each Friend defines the Light is a personal choice. We conform to Quakerly ways of opening and closing silence. We share similar ideas about social justice and nonviolence. We wait for the Light. We do not ask much of our members. We do ask this.

In front of me, on my porch step, was a sidewalk, a patch of grass, a broad strip of asphalt, more sidewalk, a stone wall, a pine tree and, higher above, electrical wires. Cars drove by. A raven gurgled, liquid and insistent. In the blue sky, white clouds floated above brown hills. “Well,” I said to myself, “the Light is all this, I suppose, these steps, this concrete, this ant, that raven. The weft and warp. It is,” I gestured, “the street.”

I did not have the perspicuity to shout, “Pantheism.” I would do that a few hours later, looking at a dictionary. Pantheism is the belief that the universe, with all its existing laws and properties, is an interconnected whole which we can rightly consider sacred. At that moment, I had decided to call the wholeness of the universe the Light. I had decided to believe in a holiness that was not confined to any one thing but immanent in everything. God was in the raven and concrete not as a supernatural being but as the miracle of raven-ness and hydrogen molecules and light waves bouncing off a hard surface to enter my soft receptive eye--an image reflected upside down which my brain instantly turned right, my brain humming with insight, adrenaline in the blood, water vapor in the sky, all of it an amazement, all of it numinous. Suddenly, on those porch steps, I was so pleased, so grateful to be part of this existence.

Soon after, I joined my Quaker Meeting, or the Religious Society of Friends, or more simply the Gila Friends since our membership extends across the watershed of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico, surrounded by the Gila National Forest and Gila Wilderness in a specific landscape of ponderosa pine, juniper, oak, prickly pear, grama grass, and yucca. It is a landscape of transition, between conifer forest, grassland, and high desert, a southern range for elk, a northern for coatimundi. It is a place where not enough rain falls and then too much, flooding the arroyos. Very few people in our Meeting are originally from this area. Most of us have come here just to be here, our home of choice.

[line break]

Pantheism is a word easily confused with other words. Pantheon, for example, refers to a collection of many gods. Polytheism is the belief in many gods. When I tell an acquaintance that I am a pantheist, she looks at me scant-eyed. Do I believe in tree spirits? No, that is animism, I explain—the belief that individual souls inhabit natural objects and phenomena. Am I a pagan? she wonders. Yes, I say. Paganism is the religion of anyone not specifically a Christian, Muslim, or Jew. But, I add, she is probably thinking of Neo-pagans, people from a modern, technological society who are trying to revive the ancient worship of nature. My pantheism does revere nature. But I don’t practice any ancient rituals.

Importantly, what pantheism is not is theism--the acceptance of a single, personal god. Pantheism is not atheism, either, a disbelief in a sacred or numinous universe. There is some argument here. The well-known atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins calls pantheism “sexed-up atheism.” Well, nothing wrong with being sexy. But the pantheist acknowledges a strong religious impulse. The pantheist walks literally, every day, in the Mind and Body of God. Panentheism sounds the most like pantheism but also is not, being the doctrine that God is both immanent in the world and transcendent or outside it, too.

I was born in 1954. Growing up in America in the last half of the twentieth century meant being exposed to almost every belief system listed above. My mother was an agnostic, a widow and professional bridge player who raised her two girls in apartment buildings in Phoenix, Arizona. We didn’t go to church. In the summers, I was sent to Kansas to live with my father’s parents where being a Methodist was like eating breakfast or buying sneakers, part of the rhythm of life. I recited the Nicene creed and ate potato salad at the church picnic. Back in Phoenix, I went to temple with Jewish friends and Mass with Catholic friends, fancying myself an anthropologist--but also hungry for something. These were secret worlds. I listened by the door. In college, one of my roommates had an alter to the Hindu god Ganesh. The Hare Krishnas filled the airports then. My older sister practiced Transcendental Meditation. Meanwhile, some Westerners were looking to their druidic past. They wanted to believe in magic, and New Age mythology was a wide net: crystals, covens, tree spirits.

Today I have to wonder why pantheism—a word I only learned in 1996, at the age of forty-two—was the one belief not to winnow out, the wheat separated from the chaff, the gold panned.

There is a time in a reader’s life when books are inhaled and absorbed into the body. They become the body of who you are. Between the ages of 17-22, I gulped down writers. I read them fast and whole, something like a snake swallowing its prey, and I read everything they wrote, one book after another, trying to steal their souls or, more nicely, become who they were. Starting with nineteenth-century literature, I read Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Particularly, I read Whitman, in love with the physical world and finding divinity everywhere, for whom “a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion infidels” and a gnat sufficient explanation. I could as easily have read Wordsworth or Tennyson.

I read avowed pantheists like D.H Lawrence and the poet Robinson Jeffers, who wrote, “I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy…The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine.” I could as easily have read Frank Lloyd Wright, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature” or Albert Einstein, “I am a deeply religious unbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”

After college, I traveled through India and Southeast Asia, the de rigueur copies of the Bhagavad-Gita and Upanishads in my backpack. I was still the anthropologist, still listening by the door. It never occurred to me to become a Hindu or Buddhist. But the ideas echoed nicely. The Hindu god Brahma becomes all things. All the world is Brahmin. Buddha has Reality for his body. The Buddha’s body is the world.

Eventually, I went to a graduate writing program in Missoula, Montana. Everything, always, had been about writing. I composed my first story in the fourth grade and never looked back. In my understanding of how I was to live, in my nascent and fumbling sense of how I could live, everything had to be transformed into language. Everything had to be transformed. It hardly seems now I had a choice. It seems now that writing was something that happened to me--which is what, I have learned since, many writers think. Of course, it is not true. Of course, we chose.

As it turned out, graduate school was less about writing and more about mountains and cold weather and falling in love. Peter was also in the writing program, a young intellectual from a military family who had spent most of his childhood in Europe and the East Coast. We were different enough to attract each other but alike enough to stay together. We had mutual dreams. It was in the air. Earth Day. Ecology. Back to the land. We talked about our desire for roots and community. We wanted to connect more directly to life. We were hungry for something.

In the 1980s, Peter and I married, moved to southwestern New Mexico, bought twelve acres in a small valley near the Gila National Forest, and built an adobe house—a house made of mud. Born in city and suburb, we were reading eagerly now about composting toilets and killing gophers and pruning fruit trees. We had a wonderful view of a distant mountain. We had an oppressively-large garden which we irrigated from a nearby acequia and a small herd of goats. We had two homebirths—a girl and a boy--and too much home-made cheese in the refrigerator. Our naivety that we could live simply and sustain ourselves on this land lasted about two weeks, or perhaps a little longer. Peter took on a succession of jobs: high school teacher, Nature Conservancy field director, and town planner for Silver City, thirty miles away. I became a teacher of writing skills at the small university in Silver City, a job I still have twenty-five years later.

Living in the country, our social life revolved around potlucks, and these gatherings were often Quakerly since a number of “weighty” Quakers happened to live in our valley, too. Some were involved in the Sanctuary Movement, a network of churches committed to helping refugees flee the political violence in Guatemala and El Salvador. Almost all the Quakers I know are deeply political, believing that the Peaceable Kingdom or Kingdom of God exists here and now and not anywhere else. They want to “stand in the Light” when that kingdom is threatened. Between raising my children, commuting into town, teaching, and writing, I was learning about Quaker ideals from people who were trying to live out those ideals. I was learning about silence and the small inner voice that can be heard in silence.

Then we moved to town. Our children were growing up. Peter and I had not quite foreseen that this would happen—that our children would grow up and want to play Little League, join band, or be in a drama club. The local middle and high school required an hour and half bus ride there and back, and now the days were never long enough for all the things we had to do and all the time spent in a car. In 1996, the same year I finally joined my Quaker Meeting, my husband and I left our small rural valley for Silver City, population 10,000, with a trade area of 30,000. We did this so our daughter Maria and son David could have a better education and more conventional social life. So we wouldn’t have to cross a river to drive thirty miles to work. So I could walk to the university and Peter could walk to his office at city hall. In town, we would be closer to shops and the library. We could go to cultural events, the occasional concert or play. We could have central heating instead of a wood stove. Life would be easier.

[line break]

2009-05-16T10:07:00.001-07:00

Below is included the final sections of the first chapter to Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist. Included here is a discussion of Baruch Spinoza and a definition of scientific pantheism.

My experience on a porch step in a small American town is a version of pantheism first expressed in the seventeenth century. In 1656, the Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated the twenty-three-year-old Baruch Spinoza for his “evil opinions” and “abominable heresies.” The cherem or banishment of the young man was unusually harsh:

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smote against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.

Although the Jewish elders did not record the nature of these heresies, they likely referred to the pantheism that Spinoza would develop fully in his mature work Ethics, which on publication in 1670 was immediately banned and suppressed throughout Europe. Spinoza’s ideas were not new. Greek philosophers in the sixth century B.C.E. had also rejected the idea of supernatural gods in favor of a universe made up of a single divine substance. Centuries later, the pantheistic Roman Stoics believed in a divine Unity which they called God or Fate or Providence or the logos. As recently as 1600, the scholar Bruno Giordano had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition for his notion of an immanent God who could assume many forms. But Spinoza was the first to describe pantheism in a way that would appeal to a more modern and scientific sensibility, offering what he saw as a logical “geometric proof” that God was and could only be an infinite substance identical with Nature. Ethics remain Western philosophy’s most coherent and complete defense of this idea.

Spinoza concluded that nothing can exist outside God. There can be no Creation outside the Creator. At one point in Ethics, he lightly scolded, “There are those who imagine God to be like a man, composed of body and soul and subject to passions; but it is clear enough from what has already been demonstrated how far off men who believe this are from the true knowledge of God.” He later conceded that if a triangle could think, it would also imagine God to be like a triangle. But both triangle and man were wrong.

Spinoza’s logic led him to deny personal or individual immortality. Something eternal lived on when a human being died but it was not that human’s personality or soul. There was no after-life in the sense of a heaven or hell. There was no relationship with a loving, engaged, personal Father. The Bible said these things because the Bible was written by people who wanted to believe them. God did not write the Bible. God didn’t really care about human beings. God was existence itself.

These ideas were a harsh rejection of both Jewish and Christian tradition--and for that time and place, very dangerous. People were being imprisoned, tortured, and executed for less. Spinoza knew this and wrote discreetly, sometimes just to friends, sometimes anonymously. His major work Ethics was kept in a desk drawer and only published after his death by lung disease at the age of forty-four.

The philosopher himself never used the word pantheism. That would be left to one of his disciples, an Irish writer named John Toland who first coined the term in the early 1700s. In honor of his mentor, Toland also called pantheists “Spinozists.” Toland had his own problems with Church authorities and lived in fear of religious persecution for most of his life. He waited until he had nothing to lose—until he was sick, dying, alcoholic, and penniless--to write and distribute his personal manifesto, which he titled Pantheisticon.

Toland’s description of pantheism relied more on poetry than logic. Grandly, he proclaimed, “The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country, and all men are my family.” He defined a pantheist as someone who believed that the only eternal and divine being was the material universe, which was infinite with an infinite number of stars and other earths circling their suns. Thought was a property of the brain. Soul was another. Thought and soul were forms of matter, and death was the endless transformation of matter. The death of one thing brought about the birth of something else, contributing “to the preservation and welfare of the Whole by a continual change of forms and a marvelous variation which forms an eternal cycle.” Virtue was its own reward.

At odds with the religion and culture of his day, Toland was a lonely man. In Pantheisticon, he indulged himself and imagined a secret society in which his ideas were celebrated and applauded--a network of private, underground clubs with pantheistic creeds and rituals. In such a refuge, educated gentlemen could eat, drink, joke, and debate philosophy. Toland wrote as if such clubs existed, and one British Druid Order claims it descended from such a gathering in 1717. A few believers think that Toland started the Masons.

Whatever the case, the meetings described in the Pantheisticon would make for a pleasant evening. The president begins by ejecting any unworthy or dangerous outsiders, “Make sure that vulgar laymen are far away.” The community responds in unison, “The doors are locked, we are in safety.” The president exults, “All things in the world are One, and One in All in all things.” The community praises, “What is all in all things is God, and God is eternal, has not been created, and will never die.”

Toland died hoping for a future of religious tolerance. He would be delighted today with the World Pantheist Movement, a lively Internet-based organization founded in 1998 with over a thousand members in fifty countries. The WPM’s earnest goal is to promote pantheism and support the values of environmental activism and human rights. Their advisors include scientists like James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory, and cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, a prominent figure in another organization called the Institute of Religion in an Age of Science. Secrecy in such clubs is no longer necessary, and the small membership of these groups may be misleading. Paul Harrison, founder of the World Pantheist Movement, believes that up to 10% of people in the religions of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as many others outside organized religion, have quietly abandoned their belief in a personal god or after-life even as they retain a strong sense of religiosity. These 200-350 million have shifted their focus of reverence from the supernatural to the natural. After parsing out the history and meaning of pantheism, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy agrees, “There are probably more grass-root pantheists than Protestants or theists in general.”
[line break]
Like any religion, pantheism disagrees with itself. There is confusion and contradiction. We can define pantheism as the belief that the universe is an inter-related whole which deserves human reverence. Everything is God. But the definition of everything varies.

What Paul Harrison calls scientific pantheism imagines the universe to be made of one substance--matter/energy. The dance of matter/energy is beautiful and holy but also impersonal and non-sentient. As Spinoza first outlined, human consciousness is a product of matter and dies when the body dies.

For a few pantheists, including some Hindus and Buddhists, the reverse is true. The universe is also made of one substance, but that substance is mind, not matter. Matter is an illusion, a product of mind. Everything is God, and God is consciousness.

Other pantheists (also known as dualists) separate the universe into two substances, matter and spirit. Since spirit can exist without matter, the human soul can exist outside the human body--beyond death. There may be a collective World-Soul which manifests in different forms, such as gods. A form of soul or spirit may be present in plants, animals, and rocks. This kind of pantheist might also be a polytheist or an animist. He or she might have a magical worldview—supposing, for example, that simply thinking about an object can affect that object and that nothing is bound by merely physical laws. Non-flying things can sometimes fly. Non-thinking things can sometimes think.

I don’t believe that. I am a scientific pantheist, credulous in my own way. The culture of science is a distinct one and certainly mine. I believe that the latest discoveries in biology, chemistry, and physics are true, or at least true for the moment, for science is a method, not a destination. I believe we live in the body of the world and that we are compelled to know the world. We are compelled to witness. Thoreau set the bar, “The woman who sits in the house and sees is a match for a stirring captain. Those still, piercing eyes, as faithfully exercised on their talent, will keep her even with Alexander or Shakespeare.” I believe in that woman. I believe that what we see is real and important and we have a natural urge to see ever more clearly.

I believe that I live inside larger laws. In the culture of science, the religious impulse can be explained by evolutionary biology. Religion either had some genetically inheritable advantage or was a byproduct of something that did. That’s fine with me. The fact that a sense of the numinous may be hardwired does not make the numinous less of a true feeling. Similarly, if I know anything as a parent, I know I would give my life for my child. The fact that maternal love is hardwired does not change that love. Moreover, I would not want to feel differently. I would not want not to love.

I believe that science is about connection and complexity, harmony and surprise. Science is about beauty. The more I see--the more I know--the more beautiful the world seems. Importantly, the way I experience beauty has always been physical. The yellow sunflower hits me with a friendly punch. A mountain view causes a flutter in my chest, a subtle movement, something like an ache. We say that the heart soars, a common description for what we feel before a beautiful natural scene (or a painting or a piece of music). There is a sense of hollowness, a hormonal cascade. There are sensations.

Neurologically, however, I am not built for mysticism. My heart soars at the sight of beauty. Something in my chest flutters. But I never faint or have aural hallucinations. My spiritual responses are not dramatic. Because of this, I have to work hard for my religious view. I have to have faith.

My sense of beauty is also limited, almost always evoked by the natural world. Once I did feel an enormous connection, the heightened pleasure of existence, standing in line at a pharmacy in WalMart. All that color! All those things! And the smiling, complicated faces of people. I recognize that humans are not outside nature and our accomplishments are often extraordinary. But for the most part, I am moved to an understanding of the divine by the non-human, the Beloved-that-is-not-me. In this, I am fairly conventional. A lot of my friends feel the same way.

[line break/conclusion of chapter]

For a long time after we moved into town, I felt content--even smug. It seemed to me that I could be content almost anywhere, with my family and my writing. I was adaptable. I was self-sufficient. I didn’t know myself very well. I didn’t know that in moving to the country and choosing to stay there for fifteen years, I had followed an instinct. I had heard a voice. Someone had been yelling in my ear: this is who you are. This is what you need. Pay attention.

After we lived in Silver City for about five years, I stopped attending Quaker Meeting. I didn’t discuss this with any of my Quaker friends. I kept paying my yearly dues and receiving my monthly newsletter. I just slowly drifted away. I missed one Meeting and then another and then another. I stopped waiting for the Light. Of course, I was very busy, a working mother of two teenagers. That seemed a good enough excuse.

Today, I am crazy with desire—anxious, grouchy, determined--to move back to the country and reclaim myself. By now, Peter and I have sold our first homestead and bought new property in another rural area also thirty miles from town. These six acres in the Gila Valley adjoin eighty acres of a Nature Conservancy wildlife refuge on the Gila River. Our land, once again, is near the Gila National Forest which extends for another three million acres and includes the Gila Wilderness and Aldo Leopold Wilderness. The scattered communities of Gila and Cliff number about five hundred, a settlement dominated by Mormons and the descendents of ranchers, supplemented by retirees and old and new hippies. The Nature Conservancy sponsors the study of the Gila River, and visiting scientists are part of the mix. Our view includes irrigated farmland, the rugged folds of Bear Mountain, and a more distant view of the Black Hills. We have paid more than we can afford for this and understand better that every country house is a satellite to the city. This time we won’t pretend to grow our own food or sustain ourselves on the land. We go to the country for reflection and redemption. We go despite the fact that living in town is more ecological. We go with a new set of illusions. We will live here until we die or die trying.

This past summer, my father-in-law gave us money to build on our new property a large single room with a bathroom and kitchen, a place where we can live part-time until we manage the move from our jobs in town. The little house was finished in October. An extended porch wraps around walls filled with windows and French doors, as many as I could get for a 360 degree view. We visit the house every weekend and sometimes stay longer, commuting again to work. Every time I look out a window, I hope for the lift of a sandhill crane, a quail or fox, a herd of javelina. Every time, every single time, I am hungry for something.

I can not say now that I am content. Both my children are in college this fall, and I suffer, I grieve, the loss of my life as a mother. You do something for twenty years, and it feels good, it feels important, and then you are out of the game—fast, like a football player with bad knees. The glory years are over. Goodbye to baby smells, doctor appointments, homework assignments, PTA, deep concerns, daily concerns. Every morning you had a reason to get up. You were always needed. You were never lonely. Goodbye to all that. As parents, we are not supposed to admit this selfish sorrow. Certainly we are not supposed to wallow in it.

I am 51 years old, sliding toward death, and I don’t much like myself. I have failed at so many things—not the very best writer, not the very best wife or friend, not even the very best parent. I don’t much like the world either, which is too full of suffering and disease and war, as the world has always been. I am acutely aware of how my country has betrayed itself, refusing once again to fulfill its potential. I am acutely aware of how humanity has betrayed itself, poisoning the earth, heedless of the future we create for our children. As a Quaker, I have lost my sense of the Light. I dislike town. I don’t feel special. I am surrounded by miracles—the porch step, the blue sky, black ravens croaking and gurgling—only I don’t see the connection. What do they have to do with me?

Still, I feel hopeful. My husband and I have a house in the Gila Valley and a new view of mountains. Living in nature will restore me. This time, I will pay more attention. This time I will take along some friends, books I haven’t read for many years, some things I have forgotten. I will take along my science, my neglected pantheism, my neglected Quakerism. If I know anything, I know that I do not want to live in a universe devoid of community, mystery, and awe. I do not want to be alone in my brain, my timid and lazy personality, unconnected to the rest of the world. I cast my lot with Spinoza, Thoreau, and Einstein. I want to live every minute in a holy universe, so pleased and grateful to be part of this existence.

Of pantheism, I will ask the questions we must ask any religion. How can I lead a better and more joyful life? How can I come to terms with my death and suffering? How can I come to terms with all death and suffering? How should we live as humans on the earth? How can we be at home here?

This time, during my days and nights in the Gila Valley, rooting my life back into the natural world, this time I will go deeper.

2009-05-11T11:51:00.001-07:00

Introduction to Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist

In the second century A.D. the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius may have best defined pantheism when he wrote, “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy.” My account uses many more words and covers a year in my life, roughly November, 2005 to November, 2006. It barrels through the history of pantheistic thought in the West, from the Greek philosophers of the sixth century B.C.E. to the internet sites 2500 years later. This overview is personal, not definitive. I am in love with Marcus Aurelius. I ignore Plotinus. I admire Virginia Woolf, whom many would not consider a pantheist at all. As for Eastern philosophies, they come late in my story, in the 1960s and 70s after their texts had entered American mainstream and my local bookstore.

In this account, science is a good friend--although not perfect; friends are not perfect. Quakerism is central to my experience, and I am grateful to belong to a Quaker Meeting which allows for pantheism as one of its beliefs. My title Standing in the Light comes from the Quaker phrase “to stand in the Light,” a concept with many meanings, encompassing political beliefs as well as spiritual. In my case, it is very much related to the bright New Mexican sky. In my case, pantheism is a word whose back I ride like a man on a horse trying to get somewhere. Or maybe a word more like a house, a place of shelter when it is cold and rainy, a house with big windows and a gorgeous view.

2009-03-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

Home and Homesickness

By SUSAN TWEIT

How do you define "home?" Is it a specific place, a building, a town, a region? Is it the way the light filters through tall shade trees? The sound of waves on a beach? The smell of bread baking in the oven, or the sound of sandhill cranes flying past? The feel of snow underfoot? For me it's the fragrance of big sagebrush.

Those are the questions I posed earlier this month here on Love of Place. Knowing home and recognizing how important one particular landscape is to life and health is a theme in my memoir, Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey (http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/twewal.html), just published by University of Texas Press.

Homesickness is not something our restless, rootless culture heeds or lends any credence to. We admire or even revere those who pull up stakes and move across the country or around the world for more status, economic opportunity, or even a relationship; those who stay home or return home, we scorn as "stuck in a rut" or "dull" or "stay-at-homes."

Yet, as Barry Lopez writes in his book Arctic Dreams, some of us are firmly attached to place in a way that makes "home" an essential and integral part of who we are:

For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land. ... Such people are connected to the land as if by luminous fibers, and they live in a kind of time that is not of the moment, but in concert with memory, is extensive, measured by a lifetime. To cut these fibers causes not only pain, but a sense of dislocation.

I first read those words more than two decades ago in a bookstore one gray and rainy winter day in Western Washington. I remember clearly the shiver that went down my spine, and how I closed the book and rushed to the counter to buy it so I could get out of the store before bursting into tears.

Sometimes words hit you that way, arrowing straight to your heart. In that case of that passage from Arctic Dreams, it was the first time anyone had described what I felt as if it was real, something worth noting. Until I read Lopez' words, I didn't realize my feelings of dislocation mattered. I figured homesickness was a weakness. I could get over it.

I tried for decades and five more moves, from Washington to the Front Range of Colorado to Iowa to New Mexico. Only when I recognized that being away from home hurt not just my heart but my health and my ability to do what I'm best at in life, that spurred me to speak up, and resulted in my husband and I leaving our settled, comfortable, and financially stable lives behind to move home to the the small town where we live in the Southern Rockies.

Here's what I realized, as I wrote in Walking Nature Home:

I belong to the arid spaces where sagebrush grows, mountains define at least one horizon, and stars fill clear night skies.

Homesickness may not be a diagnosable illness, but it is more than mere sentiment. The word itself, writes Carolyn Servid in Of Landscape and Longing, allows the truth that when we are away from the places that nurture heart and spirit we feel "unhealthy, ill at ease." Americans are a restless culture, moving constantly in search of new opportunities, which we define in terms of money, possessions, and power, not the richness of connection. If we valued roots—attachment to place and the community of species that live there, over material success, we might be happier, less driven to accumulate things and more able to be nourished by what we have and who we love.

The subtle malaise that captures us when we live in a place or culture that nurtures neither heart or spirit may be telling us that we, like ET, need to honor the call to go home.

When I wrote those words, America and the world were in boom economic times. The stock market was going up and infinite growth seemed possible (at least to some). Now we're on the downhill slope of this particular roller-coaster ride, and all of us are feeling the pain in one way or another. It seems to me that tough times are like any challenge: they are hard and dangerous, but they also offer the opportunity to walk new paths. Tough times shake up our habits and routines, forcing us to re-evaluate what we're doing and make sure it's what's best for us. Focusing on what's really most important in life and taking steps toward our dreams could be what sustains us through the hard times.

Homesickness may not be a diagnosable illness, but the symptoms could be an important call to honor ourselves and cut to the heart of what we really need to live our best possible life.