After the Jug Was Broken

An Uncanny Magic

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:15:00 +0000

I was exhausted, a sputtering candle, but here in the Quinault Rain Forest the Mother Trees, the great firs and cedars, the moss and ferns rekindle me. This forest is uncannily magical.

To pick a place on a map, choose its likelihood, and drive 800 miles to stand among the trees. And connectivity flourishes as hidden fungal networks feed the plants in exchange for carbon and weave a hundred species into a living fabric. Connectivity & Diversity & Reciprocity, inseparable - what Gaia teaches me.

I have a sudden - sight? An imagining? Could I have dreamed or seen a photo of a woman in a dog hair blanket, single feather in a sleek bun, selling tightly woven baskets? They learned that white people wanted to own…..to keep, to place behind glass.

Dream and myth merge with the deep shadowy silence. Is that the woman picking berries in the photo I discovered so long ago?

I imagine a longboat of fisherfolk, or a single man standing at the edge of the lake. And I remember the masks that we once saw by firelight, and how they became Spirit. Days later, on the Coast, we find Quin-i-ault art and I think of the time 54 years ago when I discovered the art and the peoples of this coast,

and we discover the contemporary Tlingit artist Israel Shotridge, who carries on the tradition with his many-eyed Thunderbird, Salmon & Whale. Ah, Thunderbird, who makes lightning, brings the rainstorms that create this uncanny magic.

But I also feel the same pain as I feel in every formerly indigenous space. They never believed land could be owned till we took it, till we said Mine, a word that only exists in the language of ownership. But Israel Shotridge is a We who holds those who carved and painted before him, maskmakers, polecarvers, paddlepainters, drumstainers.....

How did I come to this blessing, I who could once barely walk to the corner, or make it from the parking lot to the College? Now almost 80 and able to hike a trail. I still remember the first path I fell in love with when I was 8. It was only beaten down grass across an empty lot, but there it was, destination. And here the trails are soft with the layers and leavings of millennia, and a trail's destiny leads to creek-fall.

Outside the door of our cottage is an immense fir tree that will not yield to my camera. When I stand under its 50 foot circumference, it is a shelter like no other. I will take a handful of its deep green moss to add to the basket that Lina Jane Prairie made for us. And a handful for my friend who also talks to trees. If only I could speak the language of the great strands of fungi, the hyphae, who taught the firs and ferns, the pines and maple how to connect without saying a word.

And Then The Cranes Come....

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 00:50:00 +0000

It is Elul a question mark of a month we ask who    and how and what we have harmed. I've said they they have harmed the earth   then I said we we have damaged the earth    and now I say I   I have harmed the earth and each day I chant
                             deforestation
                      degradation
                  extinction
              pollution
and I pray for Her (out on my deck in the fire-sickened air) and name one   fracking   toxic waste
after another but there are more ways we have damaged the earth than there are days of Elul tomorrow is the last day of Elul and there is more to name before the New Year begins

California is on fire are the gods in retreat watching our mourning our grief our worry have they decided there is nothing they can do for us since we are their hands?

A bird lands near me  the simplicity of sweetness the bird flies up to the tree which the fire department says is too close to the chimney

On New Year we will dip an apple in honey But for now?

Two things I had to learn before I found sweetness - 1.The endangered Siberian crane called Omid in Farsi which means hope winters in rice fields on the Caspian sea. 2. When a Muslim leaves on a journey the Koran is held over their head to ensure their return.

In her painting Naeemeh Naeemaei wears the white of cranes she holds the holy book over the head of the bird over the head of Omid over the head of Hope

Wildering Mendocino

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 04:35:00 +0000

The North Coast of California. A place of deep forest, waterfalls, wave crash & whale spout. A place we have felt connected to for decades - and yet Bill & I have just rediscovered it with eyes cleared by post-Covid solitude, when what we saw most days was the sky through the living room windows. It was as though we had never been to Mendocino County before.

We are very connected to family, and we faced a Christmas without them, thanks to the pandemic. We decided on an alternative holiday - isolating for four days in Mendocino; wildering - no social conventions or daily habits, no restaurants, dress-up or visits to town, no must-call-and-should Zoom. Letting go of whatever we don't want, and discovering what we do. We would spend as much time in the wild as possible. Our only rule would be respecting nature. Could we arrange it?

Somehow, just after Thanksgiving, we managed to rent a small house on a ridge above the Pacific, arriving to an unexpected panorama.

When we explored, the pines (the Pines!) seemed to step forward, one by one or in mass. And the ocean (the Pacific!) and seashore, forever captivating, as in capture and captive. Our first sight of this beach was through the pines.

Jug Handle State Reserve

We walk the beach, Bill, with his sharp eyes, finds sea-treasures. A flock swoops and whirls in. Cormorants forage along the rocks. I once wrote a poem about the journey of the godwit, and I always hope to see one - and there it is. We listen to the high call of a long-legged avocet with upturned beak and a sleek body-sweep of black and white stripes. He is is too fast for my camera.

Jug Handle Reserve has the longest beach we've ever seen, and a sweet cove. I imagine the high carved stern of a Spanish ship. I imagine Pomo hunting seal and sea lion, fishing for salmon and gathering mussels. The old ones seem very close to us as we walk toward the water.

Though my beloved & I have hiked together for decades, how different it is to hike through forest now that we know of the Wood Wide Web! Those "Entangled Lives"! The trees connected by miles and millennia of mycelia, fungi fruiting after rain.

On another sparkly day, we hike the magical Ecological Staircase, also in Jug Handle Reserve. We climb wave-cut, glacier-carved terraces, from the beach and riparian zones up to a great community of spruce and fir. We enter the forest and are instantly enclosed in greenness, sheltered in a realm that seems to welcome us. We follow a pine-needle-soft red earth path. A raven’s call accompanies us from beginning to end, a steady rhythmic soundscape.

Then it poured for 24 hours, a time of reading and writing by the fireplace. At night it storms off the coast, and we lie awake listening to a mildly dissonant concerto of rain and wind. Though I often object when human aggression is attributed to nature, at dawn we 'feel' the word angry - wind lashing saplings in the garden, sea slamming rocks, arcs of turbulent spray, the sea a vast tumult of gray waves, a near blackened sky. And then we laugh and lose our fear of the wildness.

I'm grateful for the rain and wind. I feel that I was receiving the knowledge of all the possible weather on this coast, from sparkle to tempest. We left enclosure for nature, and it fulfilled us, as culture has not been able to since Covid shutdowns.

And there is the neutrality of nature, the lack of clamor and rancor, the lack of judgement, and the silent way that plants live their lives. What it gave us was relief from the grief and anxiety of 2020, providing clarity - which is another word for freedom, and the beginning of wildness.

Green is the color of gratitude.

Jug Handle Reserve State Park

The Fires, The Virus & The Day of At-One-Ment

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 18:28:00 +0000

Sunday night. The eve of the Day of At-One-ment. For our online evening services Bill & I are asked to light the candles. “Shekinah, divine feminine, bless our children and the children of our children that they may be sustained and that they sustain the earth and each other”.

After services we receive news of new fires in Napa and Sonoma and evacuations. Plague upon plague! We are supposed to shelter in place if possible, but people are being driven from their homes. Dazed, they arrive in parking lots, unsure of where to go, what to do. I feel such of empathy for them.

It’s grape harvest time. A vintner described “Beautiful bunches…the best ever” - but there has been concern for the workers - how to keep them safe from the virus? Now the vineyards are ablaze. Beautiful old wineries have been destroyed.

We have a Red Flag Fire warning for the Berkeley Hills, and we are prepared to evacuate: the Go Bag with survival items and all our important documents and the cat’s supply bag are next to the door. Bill's art is too large to take with us, but how can we leave it? What irreplaceable books should I pack? The warning will end at 8AM in the morning. But when I wake at 8 there is a message extending the warning till evening. The air is smoky, but a fire in the Oakland Hills has been put out. We are safe - for now.

It's Yom Kippur. The Day of At-One-ment. The doors and windows of our house are closed against the smoke. I am in the living room facing the sky, the redwoods, the smoky clouds hiding Mt. Tamalpais. As I click on Zoom for the morning service, squirrels are cavorting on the deck. The singing begins. “My home is a home of prayer for all people and all nations” and I silently welcome all to my living room, making certain that I include those who we call our adversaries - those on the other side.

Naomi Newman, singer, actress, director, playwright, reads prayers for those who died from Covid, died from Neglect, and prayers for those who survived, because life is a wilderness. Laura Goldman, therapist & spiritual teacher, reminds us that endangered places, high wire spaces, the unknown, are places of transformation. What trapeze of possibility is swinging toward you? Is there any safety net? Must we let go of all that has brought us to this place? Will voters choose the ones who can bring us to the other side?

Yom Kippur and the state of California and our state of being is on fire. Why can’t we summon this fervor, this grief, this fear and deep love on all other days? I look at myself in the small square on the screen and acknowledge my vanity and my self-consciousness, such old patterns, and I laugh, forgive myself, let it go, and scroll to the faces of strangers and silently give my heart to them.

And then Joanna Macy, Root teacher, Buddhist scholar, environmental activist, has us look at our hands. Our hands that were once fins and flippers and all they have accomplished over millions of years. “Fear and courage are at each other’s throats” she says, summarizing our national divide, but with these hands, what we can still accomplish to save this world! Even if we fail, even if we can’t sustain - let us make the attempt in joy and with wonder”- this fearless holy activist!

And then she reads us these lines from a poem of Rilke’s, from the Book of Hours, which she and Anita Barrows translated, and it is exactly what we needed to hear:

Dear darkening ground, You've endured so patiently the walls we've built Perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two. and those that labor - let their work grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness in that hour of inconceivable terror when you take back your name from all things.

Just give me a little more time!

I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them, until they're worthy of you and real.

Making a Poem

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:19:00 +0000

I want to talk about writing poetry, which along with intimacy, is my most joyous activity. When the muse is with me, words and images flow and I happily surrender to her. When she is gone, on vacation, having an affair, I become bereft after a couple months, and feel somewhat empty. Years have taught me that I shouldn’t even try to write without her, it will come to nothing, and I don’t. Fortunately, my life has many riches.

For many years my poems were mostly mythological. I wrote in the voice of many mythic women, from Mary and Mary Magdalene to baudy Baubo and the Japanese crane wife. I wrote about art and music and the experience of visiting sanctuaries in many countries. And then the plight of the earth and migrants and the work of nature took me over, and those are now my themes. And underlying it all, is connection. Among images, among ideas, among trees in the forest, and our common grounding. And beneath that is love.


Connection Photo by Allie Smith

    I worry that my poems are sometimes esoteric. I doubt that I reflect much of the collective, but I join many who have taken on similar themes in response to our times. I have choices in imagery and metaphor and structure, but I have no choice but to choose what has chosen me.

    Psycholinguist Dan Slobin has written about thinking for speaking and thinking for writing, and I have been talking to him about thinking for poetry. When I’m writing a poem the sounds of words are as important as meaning. Alliteration, my love of the repetition of vowel or consonants, takes precedence, and then there is rhythm, and meter and flow. Words come to me as sounds, which doesn’t happen writing prose or speaking. It’s rather magical. My desire is to create rivers in my poems, they flow far and fast, and through and past my meanings. Then they flow out into a sea, which is the spaciousness I hope to create with the poem’s ending.

Place seems to have little effect on my poems. There I was in Costa Rica recently, in the midst of a tropical forest, writing about the Great Red Cedar Forest on Vancouver Island, because no place in nature has ever created such awe. The subject of the poem was the fungal connection between all the trees in the forest. I had heard of it, was enchanted, and read everything I could find. The muse insisted it become a poem.

The Great Fungal Network

I never know how a poem is going to begin. Though
I intended to open with the connection among trees in that first poem, what came to me was “How she was the leader and told us kids to take one giant step but we had to say mother may I or lose our turn and when I come years later to the Giant Red Cedar Forest I whisper mother may I.” Did I actually whisper that years ago when I went to the forest? No. But this time, when I revisited the forest in my imagination, that’s what I said immediately. The truth in the poem was not literal truth, but the intensity of what I imagined saying. I feel now what I didn’t feel when I hiked through the forest - my deep gratitude to mother earth.

Beginnings and endings. I don’t write in circles, the ending often has nothing to do with the beginning. There is a movement from image to image. One new poem begins with one million ibis buried in an Egyptian tomb, and ends with a melting glacier. That was my stream of thought. And the challenge is to create a link between ideas, so they appear to be a natural sequence. One strategy is to repeat certain phrases, or a single word like star, throughout the poem, or end with the phrases that begin the poem.

It may take days of playing with what initially appeared, shifting stanzas, hunting through a thesaurus for synonyms, adding a new creature, finding out where they land. Other poems have a symmetrical connection. A new one, Homing, talks about the homing in of animals and people and missiles. Easier! Poetry is about intuitive problem solving without having to worry about the consequences, because choice yields choice, till finally there are no more choices that have to be made.

When the poem feels done, I experience the deep pleasure of completion, but it’s the process that I love. What writing a poem gives me is total immersion and involvement, where the world melts away and I am in the absolute presence of my poem, inward, migrating between imagination and feeling and soul without any separation between them. And this is the gift that life has provided, and I call it life’s blessing.

A Cornucopia: Abundance & Forgetfulness

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 06:10:00 +0000

Abundance, Boboli Gardens, Florence

I have realized that to be truly generous you must feel that you have abundance - and that does not mean financial wealth. No, this is an inner sense of abundance; of sufficiency. It’s the feeling that who you are and what you have is Good. I feel a certain sadness when I encounter wealthy people whose inner world is poverty-stricken.

We are 'strivers' and explorers, continually searching the world of self-care to make ourselves feel better. We say it is to find balance, or reduce stress, or improve memory, but underneath it all, for so many, is the insufficiency.

But the whole strategy of American business is to ensure that no one ever feels they have enough. The hidden manifesto of advertising? Create Constant New Needs and make them Irresistible!

Acquiring, repairing and maintaining ourselves and our things becomes a pre-occupation, a cluttering, so there is no inner availability, no spaciousness, no capacity for generosity. And what is generosity? Writing a check or being willing to share what you have - compassion, time, skills?

And what of those who have the same cravings, the same desires and needs, but not the means to satisfy them? And what if they feel their government is helping everyone but them, and not addressing their worst fears? What if they feel they are becoming outnumbered?

Needy folks who are completely dissatisfied ultimately want a Strong Man to Make it Better. They no longer believe their government works for them, and they may be willing to lose some of the openness and freedoms the society has afforded, like an uncensored free press.
This dissatisfaction is a strong component in the rise of fascism - which is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany, as we all know.

But Americans tend to have no sense of any history but their own, and we have a genius, as post-industrial humans, for not learning from the past. Memory, collectively and individually, and the desire and ability to probe and understand history and our own past, is such an important factor in democracies. Germany’s children must study the horrors of the holocaust so it won’t be repeated, and individually there is an inner freedom and relief when we face and acknowledge our demons. We hear this over and over, and we know it on some level, even if it is forgotten during our 24 hour news cycles.

Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali 1954

Each generation, each election cycle, we try, unsuccessfully, to re-invent ourselves, without any agreement on what a new America would look like. It’s a dialectic without conclusion - thesis, antithesis, and no true synthesis - which would be a sustainable, mutually shared vision. And for this improbable vision to be successful, we would have to ensure that what we have inflicted on our own people, and on other nations, must never be repeated.


The violent displacement of Native Americans

It is so easy to lose sight of what is most dear to us, what truly
matters and move us. But the memory and continual awareness of what is most meaningful is what sustains us.

“Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption.”

Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov

The Art of Protest

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 22:21:00 +0000

Gee Vaucher Liberty

     In dark times when people have suffered, when ugly wars have ravaged people and place, when there has been economic depression, attempts at suppression, racism and other injustice, movements have risen that attempt to change the direction of history.

    I’ve been thinking about this for a while: Right now there is a Resistance involved in a daily struggle with the regime in Washington - a cabal that threatens democracy itself. There are movements fighting against all forms of intolerance, and others struggling with the forces that are destroying the planet. But we need the artists, the poets, playwrights the authors who highlight these issues in a form that speaks more creatively than editorial and polemic.

    From the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes' Lysistrata to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, theater has been a force for protest and change. Picasso’s great painting Guernica depicted the destruction of that town by Nazi bombers. The American artist Ben Shahn painted the political outrages of his time. He also used his art as a way to bring people together. Where are the artists of our time who provide the images we need?

    Sometimes satire and caricature perform that function. A mental scan of of history brings us back to Greece, to the fifth century B.C.E., and the comic playwright Aristophanes, whose masterpiece Lysistrata uses the comic stratagem of women refusing sex to their soldier husbands to create a peaceful truce between the Athenians and Spartans. (That this play could be produced during the Pelopennesian war is some tribute to a culture that gave neither power nor place to women, and whose empirium was as dear to Athens as empire is to any modern colonial power.)

We now have the satire of the late night shows, with their nightly piercing of all the hot air balloons floating from the White House.
But we need something beyond monologues - something to hold onto. I think of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, satirizing the worship of nuclear power in 1964. And I remember reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, a brilliant anti-war novel.

I think of John Steinback’s The Grapes of Wrath which drama-tized the plight of the people who were forced to leave family farms during the depression, where drought had turned productive land into a dust bowl. Steinbeck wrote the story of how they became migrant workers living in tents and desperate for work.

Cover by Ben Shahn

And then there is Picasso’s Guernica, which is often considered the greatest work of political art in the twentieth century.
The painting was commissioned by a revolutionary body that understood the power of uniting a great artist with a popular cause: Picasso's Guernica was the response to a delegation from the Spanish Republican government, who asked Picasso to paint a mural for the Spanish Republican Pavilion built for the 1937 World's Fair.
At first Picasso was going to choose a nonpolitical theme, but the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Air Force occurred shortly after the request, and that aerial terror catalyzed his imagination. The painting is neither narrative nor a blasted landscape. It is unreadable accept symbolically, but the images and the terror speak to us in the modern idiom Picasso painted.

And there is Ben Shahn, whose paintings were both calls to action and graphic images of injustice and suffering. From the Sacco & Vanzetti case, where two men with radical political beliefs were tried and executed for a murder they didn’t commit, to the suffering of Japanese fishermen who died from radiation poisoning, Ben Shahn was our graphic conscience.

The poetry of protest has been a powerful force - and it need not be written by « professional » poets. Visions of War, Dreams of Peace is an anthology of poems written by military nurses who served in Vietnam, a book created to raise funds for a Women’s Vietnam Memorial. « Dusty » was the pseudonym of one of the poets, who suffered from PTSD when that acronym did not yet exist.

Like Emily Dickinson
tucking tight little poems
into the corners and crannies
of her father’s home
I tuck their names
into the crevices
of my crenellated heart.

    Rupert Garcia also served in Vietnam. He came home and attended San Francisco State University, receiving the first of three degrees in art, and many awards. He joined with other Chicano and Latino artists, bringing their experiences into the art world. They were also involved in protesting the disproportionate number of minorities who served in Vietnam. Garcia, inspired by German Expressionist art of WW I, created both triptychs and diptychs on the theme of war, especially Fenix , which includes the death symbol of modern wars - the « chopper ».

     Dana Schutz is a contemporary artist whose imagery has been controversial. A large painting of Emmet Till in his coffin was derided by many, who questioned this provocation from a white woman - but in this time of police shootings and Black Lives Matter, she evokes one of the tragedies that inspired a nation's sympathy with the Civil Rights movement.
    Schutz's large bold, brightly colored Cubist/Expressionist canvases attempt to evoke the zeitgeist of the time. The paintings display us in our narcissism and despair, and though they are not narrative, not inherently political, they speak directly to what America has become since the last election. Schutz wrote:
“I want to make a painting about shame. Public shaming has become an element in contemporary life. You can take a picture of someone and post it online, and thousands of people see it. We’re so ashamed, about so many things, and I think for a candidate to be without shame, like Trump, is really powerful. His lack of shame becomes our shame.”

Shame

Finally, there are the remarkable prints created by Pipelines and Borderlines https://www.pipelinesandborderlines.org/ It is a non-profit organization that educates the public about the consequences of consumption and production of unsustainable energy." The group consists of artists from North and South America who create traveling exhibits of fine art - hand pulled prints that are profound visions of what we are facing.

Heart of the Monster, Ed 2017

More art please! More images that inspire and move us, that we can rally around. Let art, in all its many forms, be the partner of Resistance.

Coltan, The Congo and The Bite in the Apple

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 23:17:00 +0000

In my last blog, The Tree of Life and Knowledge, I wrote about the separation of life and knowledge throughout human history -
how we have overreached since the Paleolithic. The excessive use of our technology lead to the end of one culture, one civilization, after another - and now threatens our very planet.

There is another way we separate life from knowledge, and that is the great divide between all the information we receive through our digital devices, and the lives of those who have mined the materials and manufactured those instruments. Though all cell phones use the material I’ll be discussing, I am going to focus on Apple, given that fruit as a symbol of knowledge, going back in our history. Full disclosure: I am neither a technophobe nor techno-refuser, and I own Apple devices, including the one I am typing on.

The need for constant information, constant connection and entertainment, has been implanted in us over the years and to some degree we might equate it with happiness. So let’s begin on the knowledge side of our great divide, and describe a visit to our local « temple » of information:
When you enter an Apple store, it is so white and brightly lit, it practically gleams.

You look at the new iPhones, and the staff tell you all the things the new one can do that your old one cannot.
New features, faster and smarter, plus an updated version of the genie named Siri, who will give you even more information, get you places faster, and play whatever song you ask for, and find your lunch…your Handmaiden? Your new sense of well-being comes in a white box, your phone and cords cradled within as though they were handing you the Holy Babe.

Is there a cost here, beside what you just paid? Some of you may have seen the documentary made in the factories in China where your iPhone is made: The racket, the long hours, the lack of any concern for the well-being of the workers, the exhaustion. We all know that the exploitation of a cheap labor force is responsible for most of the products and clothes we have in our homes, though we may be reluctant to acknowledge that.

But there is another misfortune, and that is the condition of the miners in the Congo who provide us with the Bright and Shiny. We’re going to leave our gleaming white world and enter the dark world we also have created, for isn’t the Congo the stereotypical heart of darkness in the Western mind? And since that post-colonial black jungle of our imagination does not shed light, what could we possibly know of the conditions where an essential ingredient is mined?

Our technologies require minerals and metals. One is coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore.When coltan is refined it can hold a high electric charge, and that’s what capacitors need - and capacitors keep all of our devices charged. 80% of all coltan comes from the Congo, and it is the very definition of a conflict mineral - a substance that is mined in a place where the profits finance militias who enact terror.

There have been wars raging in the eastern Congo since 1994. 5.4 million have died, 3 million have been displaced, a million women raped. It is considered the worst conflict since WWII. (Council on Foreign Relations).

I interviewed Chingwell Mutombu about the conditions in her country. She described an entire generation dislocated or dead, and thousands of children adrift without parents - 8 and 9 year olds now head of families, trying to provide for younger sisters and brothers. It is these children who can be found working for pennies in the rebel-run mines. The maximum wage is about $5 a day. No food is available, nor medical care. The miners have no machinery, no tools beyond their hands and shovels, if they can afford one. They work 12 hours a day. Coltan is mined with sluice boxes, the same method used by gold miners in 1849.

The UN has accused Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda of smuggling coltan over borders to be processed into an essential powder in China - or claiming that their companies own the smelters for the process. Coltan is also processed in other countries, like Brazil and Japan, who claim not to use the ore from conflict mines. But how do they know?

In June 2010, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs admitted the depth of the problem in an email sent to a reporter at Wired magazine: “Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.” (http://www.newsweek.com/2015/02/13/where-apple-gets-tantalum-your-iphone-304351.html_

Apple admits they use coltan mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo to make the smartphones that fuel our 24 hour lifestyle: "Apple remains committed to driving economic development and creating opportunities to source conflict-free minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and adjoining countries,’ Apple told the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2015. Apple says its suppliers must adhere to its code. » (Newsweek) Apple does attempt to check on the coltan supplied from the DRC, but the problem of determining from which mine a processed powder comes from is still very difficult.

There is much more to this story, including SEC attempts at regulation and UN involvement. There are Multilayer Ceramic Capacitors (MLCCs) that do not need coltan. They are used for MRIs and other devices, and could be modified for cell phones - but their cost would be slightly higher and their use would lower profits. No comment necessary, right?

The sleek phones cradled in their white packaging are the end product of terror and tragedy. The mining of coltan is a pernicious activity based on the exploitation of desperate people. It is a very dark example of how we literally enslave people, denying their autonomy, their dignity, and finally, given the dangers of the work, we may deny them their very lives. It is perhaps the ultimate example of the separation of life and knowledge.

The Tree of Life and Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:22:00 +0000

It began with a print I have of a Sumerian seal - priestesses surround a tree and hold out the branches so we can see the fruit. It’s called The Tree of Life and Knowledge. One tree? But I was raised with two: one of life and one of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Even side by side, didn’t life and knowledge long for each other? Has it ever been the same since the two were separated? Is that the human condition, that life and knowledge separate?

I’ve been reading Richard Wright’s A Short History of Progress, which I recommend to anyone interested in How It Has Been, and what I learned began with The People Who Painted the Caves. How fascinated I have been with paleolithic art - attending workshops, lectures, films, and actually entering one - dispensing my own and others' theories on shamanic naturalism - a realism not snatched from the mythic again until the Renaissance.

Chauvet Cave, Ardeche, France

Early modern humans became proficient at hunting. Their stone weapons continually improved - sharper, stronger, lighter. Their population rose. Have you imagined one man, or one troupe tracking a huge animal for hours? I have. But "some of their slaughter sites were almost industrial in size; a thousand mammoths at one; more than 100,000 horses at another. » (P. 38) And then there was nothing to sustain them.

They had overreached. They did not know how, or weren’t willing, to change course, and they disappeared. So 40,000 years ago, we were doing the same thing - separating life and knowledge - that we do now.

The Sumerians also overreached. Their brilliant use of irrigation changed villages into towns, and towns into great cities. But civilizations use massive resources, and when the trees were turned into timber, and the great mats of roots and mosses no longer held in the soil, the flash floods began, and later when more powerful floods broke through the dams, vast quantities of water surged - and we get the story of the Flood. Their gods saw humans as dangerous. They had sinned against the earth itself, and the gods set out to destroy them, which is what it must feel like when your dams break.

Athens? Apparently the Athenians we're worried about deforestation in the sixth century B.C.E! A couple hundred years later Plato, in the Critias, lamented the ecological damage that had been done:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man all the fat and soft earth have washed away…… mountains..had trees not very long ago. The land was enriched by the yearly rains which were not lost to it as is now…… Springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandon shrines remain to show where the Springs once flowed.

That last line really captured me. I wrote this poem:

                                  Delphi, denuded

                                  Now only abandoned shrines remain to
                                     show where the springs once flowed                               Plato Critias
Remnants    rubble   crumbled marble
                           One formerly holy slab at the center
   Imagine Pythia the Oracle her long hair tangled
        in everyone’s fate
           still listening for Gaea
      No Pythia
           someone was blinded looking into the sun
              and named their assailant Apollo
               You are no longer speaking for Her
                       now you incant enchant intone
                            for the light of the world

The spring
      it always says the shrines were centered at a spring
          long dried up   after the trees were felled
             now the site is nearly naked   a few bushes
                  three standing columns   a bit of lintel
         just enough to let you know this was the omphalos the navel

Those blue-black treeless mountains above unembarrassed by
      their bare breasts
          the mountains are just like us they have lost their memory
                we think the mountains were always that way
                   And I can’t even end with Pythia’s voice
                                still present in the wind
              because the wind my friends is as empty as the shrine

The examples of civilizations that have peaked, overreached continues in our own day. The separation of knowledge and life is a feature of our time. It would take the rest of this page to detail the post-industrial processes feeding the smelter of progress that have leached, leaked and released sickening or deadly chemicals into our lives.

We will not admit to any limits. Science depends on and demands the freedom to explore without boundaries. What could we do next? Assemble a robotic human? Clone a woman? Who has ever known a human who said, in advance of experimentation, this could lead to disaster, so I’ll stop?

Not only have life and knowledge been separated, but knowledge itself has been disdained, discredited. David A. Baker writes:
The separation of knowledge from life is one of the tragedies of our time. Immersed in technology, we become addicted to transient knowledge which has little to do with life or the organic structure of our own lives.

Knowledge supports life when an elder teaches a child how to plant; when medications and medical techniques are created for our benefit, not profit; when a composer uses his skills to create a sound world for us, or our leaders stop denying reality and work to create a sustainable world that is sound. Knowledge supports life when the ripe, fragile fruit of life, and the varieties of knowledge, grow together on our family tree.

On Men and Aging

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 23:59:00 +0000

      My aging husband falls off a ladder. Bruised, sore - but ever so fortunately, nothing more. It’s his ego that hurts - no even deeper than that. His physicality is such an important part of who he is.

        This is a man who just a few years ago scampered across scaffolding painting murals and intricate effects on walls. He skipped stone to stone across fast creeks, once carried our wounded 65 lb Samoyed half a mile on a hard trail back to camp. He has always counted on his body.
(And so have I.)

      We have a friend who led treks to the highest mountains, not that old now really, slowly shuffling around the block two strokes later. Don’t suggest books to him, crafts, or afternoons of foreign movies, unless you want the most dismissive look anyone has ever given you. He doesn’t really want to live. « Who the hell am I now» he asks, « and why bother? »
(It really hurts to hear that. )

The artist Pierre Bonnard Self Portrait

       And there's our friend who is no longer supposed to drive, who promised he wouldn’t but had a set of keys hidden, his partner was gone for the day and would never know, and the car was just sitting there and why pay for Uber?



   « Being unable to drive in our culture is a massive blow
to independence. We attach so much attention to self-reliance
and independence as defining characteristics of masculinity, of
maleness and virility that they have deep significance for the lack
of hope and feeling of insignificance in American men as they face
reduced mobility and independence. Dependence upon charitable
programs, friends, neighbors, or relatives further erodes feelings
of self-capability, confidence and usefulness.»   David A. Baker

     At my age I’m surrounded by these men, and I feel for
them. I've seen the depression that sets in, that lurks and lingers, and hinders appreciation let alone joy. I have heard men boasting of old exploits to their grandkids so the little ones will know that grandpa was once Really Strong.
(It doesn’t sound like macho to me - just compensation.)

David A. Baker continues « Intimate relationships between women where shared feelings are discussed and support is offered freely, is simply absent in relationships between men. «

How sad I find that. I have shared feelings about aging with my women friends, acquaintances, even empathic strangers in rest rooms, since the first gray hairs. We grieve that we’re no longer ‹ hot’ and complain of the cold. There are tears, but ribald crone-laughter too, lamenting droops, dryness, double chins. There must be some guys who have such sharing!

Rembrandt van Rijn Self Portrait

      « We lose touch, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro says, and we try to establish touch but often when we reach out our hands and find only emptiness. » from Growing Old on Two Continents

      "Long legs that once carried one with some grace and some speed on the hardwood court or playing field morphed into fragile pipestems ....the body, as Richard Pryor put it, (or was it Ali?) should sue the legs for non-support."
     "Does that shuffling codger not know his spider’s legs, purple-veined, are pathetic in walking shorts? In the midst of one’s arrogance and intolerance, a discomforting inisght floods one’s consciousness: these pensioners are one’s peers! »
      Gordon Weaver, That Face in the Bathroom Mirror

      I read the draft of this blog to my husband. He hopes
that men will read it and share it with each other. I hope so too.

Sources:
David A. Baker, private correspondence
The essays Growing Old on Two Continents and That Face in the Bathroom Mirror can be found in
Duff Brenna & Thomas E. Kennedy, Winter Tales: Men Writing About Aging, Copenhagen and Florham Park, N.J. : Serving House Books, 2011.

In the Goodness of Time: The Poet and "The Great Work"

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:01:00 +0000

W.S. Merwin in his garden on Maui (The Merwin Conservancy)

          Recently, I read an article about Wallace Stevens in the New Yorker. In it Peter Scheldahl declares that for him the best poem of the 20th century is The Idea of Order in Key West.

          I re-read the poem after many years, and yes it is beautifully crafted and mythic, about a She and the Sea and it has the power and repetition of waves - but it is a poem written from a metaphysical sky. There is a line in the poem that tells us « She was the single artificer of the world/In which she sang », and I thought the word ‹ he › could be substituted for ‹ she › and it would describe the poet.

         Perhaps I responded this way because I’m reading W.S. Merwin’s Moon Before Morning and the ease and truth and quietness speak to me so sweetly. When he writes of the earth, he is of the earth, and when he writes of the past it is present for him, and when he writes of the Ark you think you can smell the animals.

Merwin's House www.hilt.org

The Idea of Order in Key West is a peony of a poem, perhaps and entire peony bush - no it has to be larger - the tree of huge red flowers in front of a temple in Laos that I can’t identify by name. A tree that blooms year round and holds its canopy up proud as a god.

Merwin has been planting Pritichardia palm trees, native to Hawaii, on his property in Maui for 40 years. His poems are palms, either quietly climbing toward starlight, or they rustle seductively when the wind blows. Or the poems are the small startling flowers of the tropics like the low growing butterfly pea flower - not the brilliant blue variety, but the candid white. I am enamored of the poems particularly because they present the sense of timelessness and presence that one wants age to enable:

Dew Light
Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age

The Merwin Conservancy

         Those 19 acres, 2740 palms, are the work of reclamation the world so badly needs to do - as Thomas Berry describes it in The Great Work. The palms, along with bananas and mangos and papaya were planted on land that was damaged first by logging, then pineapple rows were planted vertically so most of the soil washed away. What was left of the soil grew grasses so bitter that an experiment in grazing failed when the cows’ lips curled in disgust.

         The work of reclamation is what there is when the age of conquering the world is over. Or let us say that reclamation and renewal are the new adventure. What if our own or the world’s losses connect us rather than embitter or force us to turn us aside?

        Merwin has been aware of what has been happening to our planet for a long time. His great poem For A Coming Extinction was published in The Lice in 1967, which makes me feel like a Jenny-come-lately to environmental concerns. In 1967 many of us were working and writing against the Vietnam War, and so was he - but he was able to step out of the headlines and into the world to come, which he knew was already there. For A Coming Extinction laments:
“Gray whale/ Now that we are sending you to The End/ That great god/ Tell him/ That we who follow you invented forgiveness/ And forgive nothing.”

The Merwin Conservancy

In an interview with Joel Whitney, Merwin talked about the story of Noah:
« I loved that story so much. And I had this fantasy of building an ark in the back yard, because when the rains came, I said, you know, nobody believed Noah. Nobody will believe us either. We can build this boat, but [smirking] where are we going to get the animals? »

         Merwin has alternated originality, translation and reclamations since his 30s. I was aware of his long poetic narrative on the history of the Hawaiians, The Folding Cliffs, but I did not know that he had once translated the poetry of the Native American Crow people. In an interview with Edward Hirsch in 1986 Merwin said:
« And I had very much the feeling about the Crow, along with American Indian poetry in general, and many other non-literate poetries, too— that even as we talked about it, it was disappearing. And I think of it as of comparable importance to, say, the burning of the library at Alexandria. »

          That comparison. A lessening of scale, a tale of equivalence. Not a diminishing of what we have achieved, but the recognition that others have done as well, and their work is just as significant. This too is the great work.

The Merwin Conservatory

Insurance Man
The Life and Art of Wallace Stevens
The New Yorker
May 2, 2016

Joel Whitney interviews W.S. Merwin
February 15, 2011
Guernica

The Lice, Atheneum, 1967

NAMI: "You Are NOT alone"

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 22:56:00 +0000


from the blog "How to Juggle Glass"

       On Livernois, the old "Avenue of Fashion" in Detroit, she was known as Robbie. A short, vibrant dumpling of a woman who managed Belle Jacobs, an upscale boutique. There she was, narrating a fashion show fundraiser, and there she was, marching before her troop of saleswomen like a general before the invasion, preparing them for the line waiting outside the door on Sale Day. (Where the hell did she find the four star general’s hat smartly cocked on her dark hair?)

        To her husband, she was Pearle, a slightly outrageous woman prone to the unexpected. There he was, exclaiming at the line of Miss America contestants parading across the TV screen, and there she was, slinking into the den in a silk nightgown, exclaiming, « Take me! »

        To friends and relatives suffering from anything from depression to lost charge cards, or the friends of her kids with ‹ parents-who-don’t understand-me ›, she was a warm, available listener.

        For my brother and me, she was Mom.

        And to her psychiatrist she was a woman with a deep inexplicable wound, given to weeping. When she remembered the terrible beating she received as a child our saga began.

by Kevin Caffrey Alexandra College, Dublin, Ireland

    In the 1950s, a Weeping Woman was thrown in the hospital and given insulin and electroconvulsive shock treatments, which terrified her, made little difference, and insured that she would neither forget nor heal. She was stuck fast in trauma like an insect in amber. Later treatments in later hospitals involved massive dosages of Stelazine and Thorazine, still experimental, which resulted in premature dementia.

        I was 16 when it all began, my brother 10.   The psychiatrist gave my father all the information he could. Some members of our extended family tried to give support. My father left a 10 hour work day to visit her every night during the 90 day hospitalizations Blue Cross allowed. Later, I would leave Wayne State University after my classes and take a bus to a hospital, or Lafayette Clinic, or wherever she had been taken, and hear her pleas to come home.

        Her need and her pain were not containable. When she was home the knives were hidden in my sweater drawer, the key to the upstairs back porch next to them so she wouldn’t harm herself. Our Pearle became she-who-lost-herself, and we - we were alone, trying to maintain each other.

from the website "How to Juggle Glass"

Support groups? Unavailable. (Did they even exist?) Education classes for families? Unknown. We were powerless and overwhelmed, and what I find so moving is that now so much is available for families. (And don’t kid yourself - mental illness can happen to anyone.)

My husband & I know people with family members who suffer from mental illness. We empathize and grieve with them. What is it like to live with someone who is suddenly exhibiting incomprehensible and/or frightening behaviors? Imagine all the phone calls, internet sessions, and the trips from one professional to another, trying to find out what’s wrong. Imagine the helplessness and worry, the struggle, and families possibly divided over the right course of action.

Arizona Capitol Times

The fortunate ones find NAMI, the National Alliance for Mental Illness, which has offices everywhere. The support our friends have received is inestimable. Call an office and you will immediately be given resources. There are classes - NAMI Basics, for parents with children or adolescents exhibiting symptoms. NAMI Family-to-Family is a class for families, partners and friends of individuals with mental illness.

        There are courses on growth, healing and recovery for the individual with mental problems, and courses for the families of the psychically stricken veterans of our current wars - and I’ve only mentioned a small part of NAMI’s services. For families, the ability to share stories with others in the same situation, to compare symptoms, treatments, fears - share what is still considered dark and shameful by many in our society.

        NAMI handles national problems as well. The fight for better coverage for mental health, and the disparity between funding for physical and mental health is one that NAMI is actively involved in on the Congressional level.

        If you know someone who has suffered alone with mental health problems, or a struggling family, you only need suggest their local NAMI office. You can find that info at https://www.nami.org/Find-Support/Family-Members-and-Caregivers/Supporting-Recovery.

        And if you are looking for a worthwhile charity, a great place to put your dollars, where money is not eaten up by Administration, I recommend NAMI. Bill & I enjoy the marches and fundraisers for the wholehearted energy of all who participate - and I find it so healing to know that no one today has to go through the isolated misery my family experienced.
Thank you NAMI.

"My art, my mental illness" Johnny Beaver

As Butch Cassidy said, "Who Are Those Guys"?

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 13 May 2015 00:38:00 +0000

University of Leeds, Dept. of Cultural and Media Studies

        Not only am I hopelessly out of date in cultural studies, but I don’t even remember the date. However, this is not one of those dirges by an old-lady-who-once-was-cool-looking-back nostalgically-at-her-radical-past-saying-in-my-day-we-did-it-better. I don’t use the phrase « in my day », because I’m still here. I am often very still, but I am here. And please remember that the linguistic root of radical is root.

       I’m reading Maggie Nelson’s brilliant The Argonaut, and I fell in love with this phrase: »if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness...". I will come back to this later, I promise. But meanwhile I have been absorbed in Nelson’s world of contemporary cultural studies and gender preoccupations.

I taught Women’s Studies beginning in 1974. The door of rediscovered female accomplishment in the arts opened for me at the same time as my students: We learned of Artemisia Gentileschi, first woman admitted to the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. We were outraged that all of the artist Judith Leyster’s work had been attributed to Frans Hals, and it turned out that the unfamiliar artist and sculptor Rosa Bonheur had been famous in the nineteenth century. None of these artists had appeared in the art history books I’d been assigned in college. Our new knowledge was the result of exciting research by J. J. Wilson and Karen Petersen.

Judith Leyster, Self-portrait, c. 1630

If I were still teaching, would it be Cultural Studies? I would need to learn a new language. For example, I would have to admit that my life with a husband and a house and a garden was heteronormative. Could I create a sentence with the word performativity in it? Could I avoid telling my students that performativity is not post-poststructuralist, but the work of J. L. Austin in the 50s, a white male who looked like a woodpecker and told us that words perform acts?

As a teenager I consumed 50's French cool. The flavors of choice were Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, so we said that life was absurde, wore berets, and argued over whether Sartre’s turn toward Communism was a defection from Camus’ early indifference. What was more profound than « Mother died yesterday »? That this period in our lives was a transition between the conformity of high school and the courage of individuation was not even known, let alone expressed.
(photo from Progressive Thinking)

Sartre & de Beauvoir, The Guardian

Full disclosure - I miss my students. But teach now? Cultural Studies? Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Peter Sloterdijk: Who are those guys? I only got as far as Irigeray, Kristova and Deleuze before my attention turned elsewhere.

      So back to »if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness... » Ah, the dangers of maenads and Orphic hymns, and wild sex and the seance of their calling!
      But this is where that phrase led me: When the wild song that wilderness sings ceased to repeat in our brains like the lyrics of pop songs, did we turn to prose? Is the deep green and root-ridden forest the natural home of poetry - along with the riverbank and the wave-struck beach and the red dunes, and, and….all of it? When I heard the trees in the last patch of old forest in Chiapas call on me to speak for them, could I have written essays instead of poems? Published an anthology of prose rather than poetry?

from PBS website

Ficus Andronicus,
The Queen of Trees. Walking Palm. Hoatzin bird. Bowerbird. Desert Paintbrush. Not my only, but my new vocabulary, married to rhythm, and rhyme and alliteration and imagery. I could teach that biopoetic language. But then there would be syllabi to create, and media presentations, and papers to grade, and grades to give, and……..

I wouldn’t be free anymore, and I’d have to remember the date.

Talking to the Leaves of Nasturtium

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 22:33:00 +0000

        I have never written prose about my garden. It seemed to me too slight - too Better Homes and Gardens. How silly, I realized, (with the help of my friend Dan). Time to honor both my garden and the season after spending the morning planting.

      Two things laced me to the cycle of the seasons: The first was the ceremonial calendar of my childhood, that begins with the High Holy days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in the fall. The second cycle belonged to nature, and the intense seasonal changes of the Midwest.

     With the exception of the harvest holiday called Sukkot in autumn, and an egg, lamb bone and greens on the Passover ritual seder plate to commemorate Spring, the two cycles, one of the Earth Mother, the other of the Sky Father, seemed unconnected. It is in the myths of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest that Earth Mother and Sky Father connect and work together, and those myths had a profound effect on me. The two cycles also come together in the rituals I have practiced with women over the years - and now in fact, spirit and nature are inseparable to me, in the wilderness, but especially, in the garden - and in the photo.

Atlanta Botanical Garden

Every year my garden delivers its spring offering: the flowering plum and pear and apple, rhododendron, tall pale yellow iris, and 20 rose bushes, and every year it is one of the best gifts life offers me - the gift of petals.

In Elizabeth Alexander’s heartbreaking memoir, The Light of the World, she describes a peony that her husband planted for her. It bloomed for her birthday every year on May 30th. Never mind that the peony’s season of blooming corresponds to that date. Never mind that the opening of those buds at that time is a normal event. For Alexander, it was a magical, deliberate gift - the gift of petals
.

My garden

My husband fondly remembers the food of his childhood, and recreates the meals for us that his mother made. Those dinners were his first imprint of flavor, as my mother’s and grandmother’s gardens were my first imprint of petals. Peonies, lily of the valley & lilac, zinnias & phlox, the rose they called American Beauty, and tulips.

It is not cold enough in California for tulips to repeat in my garden. I treat them as annuals, spend an extravagant round number every fall to dig bulbs into the cold, (and now no longer wet), soil of December, assuring bloom as though without my labors Spring would not happen. I'm planting hope as the year darkens.

Pike Street Market, Seattle, April 2015

     And peonies? I once so craved those luxurious blooms that I hauled bags of ice out to the yard in January, and dumped cubes on a faltering plant, knowing they needed winter's freeze. The plant couldn't be fooled, and the treatment didn’t work. Once a year I treat myself to a bouquet of peonies, remembering that my mother never cut her abundance of peonies, or any other flower, to bring into the house. I’ve mentally gone through all the cupboards in my parent’s house and I can’t find a single vase. Why? Self-denial? Another one of her mysteries I will never solve, and a practice I don't follow.

     My roses have begun blooming and there are arrangements of roses in every room. Each morning my first act is to bring all the vases into the kitchen, recut the stems and replace the water - even before my essential mug of coffee. I suppose this action falls between care, habit, and ritual - the obsessions of ceremony:

The Key to the Pay Tree Ark

The high priest was always rushed
The holy ones were due any minute
The altar flowers in alternate rows
of blue
    and white
must be picked immediately
in virginal bud
the bones must be scraped
of flesh before blood dries
table and sun set precisely
Since we could not see the face
of the clock that timed him
we assumed it was God's.
When we think of him now
that we've aged
and our language has changed
we try out words like compulsion
We wonders if the seeds
would have sprouted without him.

The gift of petals on the dining room table

I didn’t begin that garden with confidence. I didn’t know when to expect flowering. I went around to each plant and spoke to it, and I begin my real service to the Muse with this poem:

Speaking To The Leaves of Nasturtium

"Flower" I hear myself say to the plant.
Flower. Sounding each syllable.
Speaking as you would speak to a mute.
Not a demand. Not teaching the flower to speak.
I am not the man in the tale who would teach
a stone to talk. To break its stony silence
with a word, perhaps bird, b-i-r-r-r-d
so the word would emerge from the rock
like a fledgling pecking out its shell.

Nor would I teach a dolphin language,
not to discover why eons ago
it returned to the water,
not to pry into its secret signals,
not even to ask why it loves us.
Could the dolphin accept our word
for how it knows and know
to tell us how it guides?
could it state the impossible
demands of grammar:
Turn right at the next corner,
Don't forget...
Hold me.
The dolphin has its own purpose,
it is our fate to talk to ourselves.

As for the plants
I have no questions that watching could not answer.

At Findhorn they called on spirits
to learn the needs of the green ones.
They said that the spirits were pleased
to answer. More water. More sun.
A little more to the left.

I hear myself speaking to the leaves of nasturtium.
Clearly, sounding each syllable. Flow-er.
As though the green cells could hear
and respond in buds. As though I could cause flowers
by teaching the word. As though I could cause
by teaching. Flower. Flow-er. Repeated to the leaves
whose learning only flows from the roots upward.
I cannot stop speaking but the silence
of leaves is training me to see.

Photo by Bill Fulton

Morning Walk With Bird Cries

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It has been months since I've written a blog, because whatever I’ve had to say the Muse has grabbed for poetry. In fairness to her, she always teases out ideas I haven’t thought of.

If I feed her the Muse will work for attention, but her diet, her cravings, can be mysterious. Generally, she feeds on culture, but sometimes I have to make imaginal trips to specialty stores. For example, the prints of the Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai are her sushi. She can make a main course out of a complex myth like The Crane Wife, or the rain forest. Sometimes it’s hot peppers and, on occasion, bitter herbs to remind me of those who are still enslaved.

The Crane Wife unknown Japanese artist

My curiosity shifts when the Muse is here. I explore images and myth and theater and nature and myself. It's not really research - more like a butterfly collecting nectar, flitting flower to flower. When I find what the Muse wants, she gives me an opening line, or fills me with words.

Where is the Muse when she's not here? On vacation, a religious retreat, maybe having an affair? When she arrives she gives Commandments: I am your Muse, the Nameless One. Thou shalt have no other interests before Me. Honor My Time and keep it Holy.

Greek vase 5th Century B.C. E.

      Today she made an appetizer out of a bird call, had a buffet of animals and gave me rhyme and rhythm. I am grateful, and I’ll put the new poem here because I want it to be read. And now, after hours of work, I’m starved, so it's time for a late lunch.

Morning Walk with Bird Call

‹ Life › ‹ life ›   cry the crows
and when I pause
the long-running performance
that plays in my mind
and listen    I am revived
I ask how to keep species alive
and the Muse speaks -
Tell those who don’t love
the pawed and tailed
finned and horned
that it’s people who need animals
Mention crows and lizards
starfish and ocelots
because profusion startles
the narcissist
Describe lark and lynx and lizard
since feather fur and scale
teach us the genius
of shapeshifting cells
Finally, creatures remind us
that innocence means
not knowing
And we humans know too much
don’t we?

Amazona!

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 05:26:00 +0000

                 A few years ago, when we were in Chiapas, it seemed as though the great trees of the rain forest asked me to speak for them, and eventually I did. The trees were on the edge of the last remnants of old rain forest in the state. I wanted an in - a path, a way to walk through the forest - but I couldn’t find one, and the foliage was so dense. I have longed to walk through the rain forest since that journey.

     We are in Peru, on Lake Sandoval, in the Amazon. We walked two miles from the boat landing to the lake on a wide path through the forest. There are other paths here, leading out from the lodge, and you see the most amazing things.

         Mimicry, mimicry, mimicry - nothing is what it seems. Leaves become butterflies, stones are beetles, snakes are vines and vines are snakes. If it is beautifully colored and patterned it’s poisonous - camouflaged is edible. The amount and variation of pattern and texture is constant. Everything is both everlasting and sudden - the sighting of a toucan, an alligator rising, the river otters cascading like rapids.


Photo by Bill Fulton

The bird that has whooped since wake-up turns out to be a frog. The half minute buzz like a loose high tension wire is the bird with a name out of Dr. Seuss: the blue crowned motmot. The guacamayos are much noisier than starlings, and it is wondrous and strange to see them in groups squawking, rather than singly in a cage, the word macaw written on some brittle plaque. The sudden epidemic of wheezes came from birds with orange plumes a blue streak and the body of a chicken. Now when we are on the lake and hear what sounds like a ward of asthmatics we know its the hoatzins.

Photo by Bill Fulton

It’s magical to put the sounds and patterns and practice together into how a world behaves. Some plants must be explained before we can fathom their magic: The fruits growing straight out of the mottled thin trunk of one tree are cacao beans. The walking palm, with a tepee of thin branches instead of a trunk, moves 30 inches a year. I don’t seem to tire of watching the squirrel monkeys. They cover such great distances between branches. It looks like flight and I can’t believe it's not play as well as transport.

Walking palm

Rain! it pours and pours for an hour leaving puddles and the butterflies come to drink. We are breathless from color and pattern but no one can photograph the fast blue morpho, a silk streak who never seems to land. We are told that when the rainy season comes this quiet waveless lake will rise and rise and bury the roots of the great trees.

The rain forest trees are my people, my tribe. I greet each one with reverence - kapok, rubber, brazil nut (of course there’s a bird that can crack that nut) and ironwood and my soul tree, the fig that I also found in Africa - all buttressed like cathedrals.

       I ask the fig/ask myself what the trees need, and the response is a deep silence and I understand this is not a refusal to answer but what is necessary.

     The trees tell us they are Gaia’s lungs - beings who breathe through their roots. For the Inca and other peoples, Pachamama, we were told, is known as a goddess, but in Incan philosophy she is nature plus time, or how the world works. It was Gregory Bateson who used the word stochastic to describe the union of nature and time and, that, he said, is how evolution works.

Photo by Bill Fulton

A Long Meander - leading to Future First: Women’s Congress for Future Generations

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 01:30:00 +0000

Russian River trip photo by Mark Cohen

I love river trips. Paddling canoes on the swift, sinuous rivers of Michigan, where I grew up. A 3 day raft trip on the Rogue in Oregon - those long smooth glides, then the rush and thrill of white water, and the guide yelling « Hard forward! » The boat trip down the wild part of the Mekong through the forested mountains of Laos, watching boat traffic, stopping at very scattered villages along the way.

Rogue River photo courtesy of RogerRiverVacations.com

        In Myanmar we went from the towns of Mawlamyine to Hpa On on a small river boat on the Thanylin - passing strange river craft, early morning fisher folk, the stupa of gilded temples - and the mountains known as dragon teeth.

      This summer we took a ten mile canoe trip on the Russian river with our friends Judy & Mark. I like learning the ripple pattern on the water, and I like the feeling of the wind on my face - and sometimes I like going fast. OK, full disclosure:

       Once Bill & I went up to Payette Lake in Idaho. We rented jet skis, overcoming our dislike of noise and pollution. Bill tried out all kinds of maneuvers on his, but me? I wanted to see how far and fast I could go in one direction. So here I am trying to figure out if that’s a metaphor for my life or the life of the people in this country.

Early evening on the Mekong, Laos photo by Bill Fulton

For this country straight is the gate (and fast) and narrow is the path that leads to -success. America is about climbing, and once I made it out of the mire I happily leveled off, stayed in the same teaching job and finally figured out how to do it fairly well - about 10 days before I retired. You don’t have to do it that way, especially in community and small colleges, where you can become a dean, or even President. I had no impulse to do that. Some might say I had no ambition, no drive.

Of course in my fantasies, I have great luck and talent. In one I received the award for Best Supporting Actresss. Why only Supporting? I was deliberately raised in humility, so Best Actress was out of the question, even in fantasy. Maybe I thought that all that acting out in my teens and twenties - OK, my thirties too - should pay off.

        I practiced my speech while driving to the college, and when the college actually gave me a teaching award, I gave a speech and thanked the entire support staff, especially Audio/Visual, who in fact, hadn’t shown up on time or delivered the right equipment for years.

       The first fantasy I remember occurred when I was around 4 years old. I got my first bike, a three wheeler, and I rode around pretending to be the sheriff. I never shot anyone, just rode fast (yes, in one direction) and imagined helping people who were in tough situations. (Full Disclosure: Last year for Halloween I bought a tin star and fastened it to my sweater.)

   But helping people in tough situations - that’s the part I am worried about. Who is going to help future generations? If you’ve graduated with hundreds of thousand of dollars in debt, can you afford to take a job teaching? Or join the Peace Corps or Ameri-corps? As we become a corporate state, who will care for the welfare of future generations? And what will the impact of climate change be on our grandkids? Will the result of the great climb upward be a landslide, a great inundation or a wildfire that will not end?


Thanylin River, Myanmar photo by Bill Fulton

There is a group who cares deeply for these questions: Future First: The Women’s Congress for Future Generations, whose concerns includes the Declaration of Rights Held by Future Generations, issues of collective liberation, interconnectedness in the climate justice movement, and examples of women leading direct actions for climate justice. I attended the Congress last year, and the learning and bonding and good work accomplished left me motivated and glowing for months.

This year the Congress will be held in Minneapolis, November 6-9. Below is the poster, and you can check out the Future First website, http://wcffg.org/ I hope you will consider joining us - in the name of the children and grandchildren in our world - and future generations.

Distant Neighbors: Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:19:00 +0000

My friend Dan calls from the middle of the country. He has a longish layover in (Minneapolis? Milwaukee? It began with an M) on his way to Europe. He’s been reading Charles Wright’s poetry and he has a question. Or is it an answer? We have been doing this for decades, learning from the knowledge each of us has of the realms we share.

      Every other Wednesday for 40 years Naomi & I meet for dinner and critique our poetry. We dive into the deep of each poem and wrestle with grammar on the surface. We have had similar themes throughout the years, and now, once again, our work has centered - on the Earth. Each of us has written about the other’s work, and we’ve read together. « Each other » becomes an I-and-Thou, a We, united by devotion to our work and love for each other.

        Patricia and I share a great love of animals, the wild, the carefully cultivated and we have shared those concerns as they appear in our lives and our work. We are environmentalists, in our own ways and our own words, and we have also read together.

       Which brings us to Distant Neighbors, Selected Letters of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, which focuses on just such a sharing - along with the ideas and insights of two men who will not let their often profound differences damage the love and respect they have for one another. That love and respect was very obvious in their recent reading together.

First reading together, 1977

Wendell Berry is a Christian who refuses the authority of the church, a farmer who admires the tradition of English literature, mentioning Milton and Pope and Blake as his forebears - a man who takes his bible into the forest. Gary Snyder is a Buddhist who admires the Old Ways, hunters and gatherers, and the poetry of China and Japan. For him the authority of Zen comes through a teacher. The way these two men address, resolve and accept their difference is a teaching in itself.

Snyder asked his Sunday school teacher

         " Does my dead heifer go to heaven?
         No, said the teacher.
         Well, I’m not going where my heifer can’t go!"

(Reading, June 27)

Berry speaks always of continuity. « Continuity between

the wonders of the bible and life in the forest. The spiritual

and the material are not bifurcated - they are one fabric.

(Reading, June 27)

Snyder - " My bible is the archaic universal world body of

folklore and folk mythology." (Distant Neighbors, P. 73)

With Snyder in the foothills of the Sierras, and Berry in Port Royal, Kentucky and both men engaged in very public lives as poets and environmentalists, plus family obligations and Berry’s farm work, there are few opportunities to get together. But they take the time to write these letters because their love of the land and their commitment to writing creates a duality. They ask each other questions that others might not respond to:

Berry - What kind of economy would cherish trees?

(Distant Neighbors, P. 134)

In their concern for the environment, and the actions that each took - the books and articles written, the panels they sat on, the conferences they attended, the protests they made, Snyder and Berry are our fore brothers.

Berry and wife Tanya

And they were prescient, raising issues as though they foresaw the crisis in both government and the environment that we are now living through. In one of the letters Berry writes: "I accept the tragedy that one must take sides." (Distant Neighbors, p. 89)

Berry - "Snowden is patriotic. People who make deals

know secrets. if a voter enters the booth uninformed -

what happens to democracy?" (Reading, June 27)

Snyder, 1980 - "….[there were] conversations with

assorted folks after my talk on China, …..where

they tried to play down the seriousness of species

extinction." (Distant Neighbors, p. 69)

They sent letters. By mail. Even after email appeared. Are other writers still writing letters to each other? We email, skype, facebook, tweet, send photos that display what we wish to have known about ourselves and upload the antics of our babies and pets. Shall we have the collected tweets of future artists? The collected FB comments?

Are you familiar with their poetry?
One of my favorite poems - one that I reread over and over - is Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things, first published in 1968. The poem is written in language a nineteenth century reader would recognize, but the universality and depth of feeling and experience remains as fresh as dawn:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                                 (Poemhunter, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171140)

     When did I start reading Gary Snyder? Was the first book Earth House Hold? I loved the juxtaposition of Asian literature with the names of plants and animals and the titles of mountains and rivers, the Old Ways of making and being, his sons. The purely experiential, experimental, the sensory and the eternal.

       Sustained Yield

                     For the treeplanters

Spain, Italy, Albania, Turkey, Greece,
once had hills of
oak and pine

This summer-dry winter-wet
        California
manzanita, valley oak, redwood,
         sugar pine, our folk
sun, air, water,
          our toil,

Topsoil, leafmold, sifted dirt,
hole-in-the-ground

Hold the whip of a tree
steady and roots right
somebody tamp the
           earth, as it’s slipped in,
down.

Keep trees growing in this
             Shasta nation alta California
             Turtle Island
ground.
(Left Out in the Rain, p.134)

This sharing. Of words, of images, of music. How it endows us as humans.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 04:13:00 +0000

Photo from Star Hotel FB page

           Why is it I can find good, healthy food anywhere in the world that we’ve traveled to except my own country? In a restaurant in Nevada, Bill is handed a plate with 21 ozs of steak, and 4 side dishes - french fries, baked beans, cole slaw and spaghetti, plus a half loaf of bread with an ice cream scoop of butter, not to mention cabbage soup before and the possibility of a sundae with churros - fried donuts - after.
         We see obese children, obese adults everywhere. I feel such sorrow for them. But two hamburgers, fries and a soft drink cost $13. An organic, beautifully plated restaurant dinner can be more than double that - for one. There are huge, pornographic signs of juicy burgers along every highway to tempt the hungry, just as in the Bay Area there are billboards of sinfully thin cell phones in suggestive colors.


       We’re crossing the mountains. My turn, and I drive Highway 82 over Independence Pass. The vistas are stunning, and then it is raining, pouring, and I take hairpin turns at 10 MPH and the temperature is dropping - down to 53, 47, 37, and rain turns to sleet. There is nowhere to pull over and wait it out.
       The driver in front of me must fear heights because he is driving down the middle of the yellow line - if another car comes the other way?! I began the morning in sandals and when we can finally stop I jumble through my suitcase for shoes and socks, and we drive through the mountains to our rented house, where we hope for quiet and solitude.
Snow on the side of the road, full moon and the shadow of pines on bright meadows.
Welcome to Colorado.

We stop at the Colorado Wolf Sanctuary in Divide,
(Yes, Divide), where there are also coyotes and a colony of foxes. The rest of our tour group walks on, but one wolf stays by the fence and I remain, staying silent and still. The depth of those eyes! Their faces are so expressive, how could anyone imagine they don't feel? Three thousand wolves have been shot in the last few years, since they have been delisted. Extermination? In sci fi action films humans are always in danger from some alien force that wants to do away with us. We pay to see the unconscious revenge for our own murderousness.

Wolf photo by Bill Fulton

And then there’s the coyote who seems so much wilder than the wolves. It’s stride is undoglike - but it is no less beautiful. These rescued animials are not there to be viewed, but viewing is what pays for their food and veterinary care. Our guide tells us to howl, and we all howl and the wolves howl back - 19 of them! To hear them howl, click on or go to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClilePDz8tc

The view from our rented house is of red boulders massed into mountains, and in contrast to that massive stillness, there are the clusters of quaking aspens that the cottage is nestled into. A trembling ballet - each leaf loose on its petiole, moving in its own arc in the slightest breeze. I watch the leaves. To exist on pure sunlight is the genius of plants.

     Everywhere we go, people are so friendly, chatty, helpful. We have forgotten that Americans have these qualities, since they are rarely experienced in urban California.


         I have traveled from a high tech center where raw materials are converted into wealth, to the place where the materials come from. We visit a restored 19th century gold mine in Cripple Creek, riding the cable-driven cage down 1000 feet. We are there because I wanted to know what it felt like to be a miner, working by candlelight below ground, desperate to not use up the 3 candles he was given.

We learn how it began in the 1850s when a miner only had had a steel mallet and a spike. Along came the drills that deafened the men and sent dust into their lungs. The mine owners knew there would be 1 oz of gold per ton, and the drills got faster, more powerful, and heavier - and heavier. One man had to take the drilled and blasted rock and load it into a metal cart on rails - load a ton in twenty minutes or get fired.

There were actually many jobs in the early West - carters, millworkers, haulers, carpenters, blacksmiths, ranch hands and drovers - but mining paid $3 a day while the going wage was 75 cents. The metal carts were once pulled by burros who never left the mine. They were tethered and fed in packed underground stalls until they were replaced by engines. Feral donkeys, their descendants, now roam the mountains. What seems to drive technology is not human need but the bright and new and shiny and machines of war.

Now gold mining is done by mountain top removal, using mammoth pieces of equipment. I couldn’t bear to visit the new Viktor mine, though I could see where a range of the Kenosha mountains had been leveled. I think of Crystal Good’s poems in The Book of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide, the anthology I edited. Crystal is from West Virginia, where Mountain Mama speaks:

Holding her breath, she let him go in
gentle, like before the other Jaspers came.
He drilled deeper and deeper than the explosion
first above then underground.

Mountain Mama had a history of violations
sirens, sounded, emergency in the dark

(Jasper is an Appalachian dialect word for outsider)

On our way to a wilderness hike, we drive though miles of burnt forest. Could this be the stillblack remains of the 2002 Hayman fire, which destroyed 138, 000 acres? It is. We drive forest roads though unforested rock littered with burnt branches, till we see the sign for Lost Creek Wilderness, then the land is green and treefull again. We walk into the forest, listening to the birds and the creek.

How did the wilderness escape the fire, we wonder, only to find out that if we had taken a different road we would have seen the burn of wilderness as well as national forest. A man-made fire 12 years ago, and there is no sign of renewal. Nothing has grown back. No new post-fire species have appeared.

Hayman post-fire photo by Steve York

   Driving thought Utah and Nevada back to the Bay Area:
Watching the women walk into the restaurant, I imagine myself in high heel boots, rhinestone studded jeans and black leather jacket. Who do I know in San Francisco whose shirts are as perfectly pressed as the men here wear with jeans and a Stetson? And then there are the teens in cap and gown having a proud supper with family- here where underemployment is daily life - and will they have it any better?

       Was it engine-uity blasting through the rocks of Capitol Reef creating a slit large enough for the 26 wheelers to pass through? The trucks look dwarfed and the last sign said Goblin Valley. We are looking at strata laid down before the Permian extinction, 250 million years ago.

We’re following a giant mining truck, hauled around the curves on a tractor trailer. Then another one. There are open pit gold mines all over Nevada.

But oh those spaces - the vast, rolling, peaked and pine-studded West. Can we save them from ourselves so the next generations can experience what we have?

Multiversity

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 23:53:00 +0000

        Where to begin. Every culture has a story about How It All Began, and the stories are all different. A single god creating the world in 6 days, another world evolving over eons, a committee of gods in a joint project of creation, the world hatching from an immense egg, Each story is considered the highest, unimpeachable truth, and parts of the story will permeate the culture.
       As everyone knows, our country is divided over creation stories. Science presents us with the Big Bang and Western religion gives us the 6 day creation. We struggle over the identity each tale provides. I’m going to tell you of a wonderful instance where science and religion tell the same story - but I’ll have to give you background first, and it will take a while.

      Last week we had two experiences that were very engaging.. We saw the film « Particle Fever » about the Large Hadron Collidor and the search for the ‘magical’ Higgs Boson, and we went to see Yoga: The Art of Transformation, an exhibit at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

       I think I’ll start with physics, if you will bear with a poet's attempt at comprehension. The Big Bang. The world born out of a cataclysm, and the background microwave radiation left over from the explosion that is said to prove it.

Courtesy of Particle Data Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Physics has a Standard Model that has tried to unite Einstein's Theory of Relativity with Quantum Field Theory, which is a description of the tiniest of our worlds. The result is a mysterious prediction - anti-matter. Enter Supersymmetry to account for this strange phenomenon. That theory proposes that for every particle (proton, neutron, etc), there is a 'superpartner'.

Another problem that physics hadn’t solved was what makes stuff - what makes mass, what gives substance to particles? Scientists thought it was another particle, called the Higgs Boson, and they might find it if a huge SuperCollidor was created. Beams of protons would collide, at almost the speed of light. Particles would explode as they did after the Big Bang, replicating the conditions immediately after the event.

So, to continue our story: the Large Hadron Collider was built, and the Higgs Boson was found, and that was the big story that appeared in all the newspapers and hundreds of Internet sites. But it was only part of the story. In fact the Standard Model was now in question.

        More background: The Standard Model is based on the universe we live in, and governed by equations - the elegant, beautiful, pristine model that Einstein believed we would find. Some said our universe was actually set up for life to occur, others that it was not only set up for life to occur, but « It knew we were coming ». (Freeman Dyson).

        Not only a world perfectly tuned to life - but consciousness, said the metaphysicians among the physicists, may be as natural a feature of our world as time and space.

But that seemed to raise the need for a Creator, an argument for Intelligent Design, and that is not an option for science, so the only other option was - worlds upon worlds! Andrei Linde and others proposed a multiverse - an infinite number of universes. If there were infinite numbers of universes at least one, if not more, would support life, they reasoned, so there is no need for a creator.

       There would be no possible connection between these worlds. Each one would have it’s own mathematical constants, its own laws perhaps, or maybe there were different constants within the same universe.

       No universal law, no Theory of Everything. But how can we imagine this multiverse? How to describe it? Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, announced that « Our Universe could be just one bubble floating in an ocean of other bubbles ».


Computer simulation. Each ray is another expanding universe

   Now, back to the SuperCollidor. If those magic superparticles predicted by Supersymmetry didn’t show up during the Collidor’s collisions, they probably did not exist. If they didn’t exist, it might be the end for Supersymmetry (still with me?) The multiverse would be the model to go forward. There were no superparticles found. Maybe at higher energy levels, maybe in the future, but that was only a very small maybe.

       In the film physicists watch the Standard Model begin to disintegrate like particles colliding in the cosmos. One researcher speaks of 40 years of work - disproved. For others it was a revelation, an understanding that there would (hopefully) be more revelations ahead, and it was time to move on. And I will also - to India.

    It was a revelation to enter the exhibit of Indian art, and the world of Brahma and Krishna, Shiva and the devas, yogi and Sufi. In the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of God, Krishna responds to Arjuna’s desire to see Entirety: "My dear Arjuna, O son of Prtha, behold now My opulences, hundreds of thousands of varied divine forms, multicolored like the sea." Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 11, Verse 5.

Vishnuvishvarupa, "Yoga: The Art of Transformation

There are several creation stories in Hinduism, but creation is always vast and the time scale is endless. The world is cyclic - creation and destruction, creation, preservation, destruction. It has happened a million million times, and time has no end.

And there are multiple universes. Seven dimension below and seven above - a multiverse of intention, operated by platoons of gods in a state of transcendence. The practice of yoga would allow humans that transcendence, that ultimate bliss - the answer to the problem of suffering, which is the ancient and ongoing ordeal of India.

The subtle philosophies of India have been elaborated by a forest of sages, rising above the undergrowth of ignorance and mystery. One who stands particularly tall is Abhinavagupta, who lived in the 10th century. In his Paramarthasara, he describes the workings of the universe, which correspond to the fields and forces within us. This leads him to a conclusion - that there are « numerous universes floating…..like bubbles in an ocean ». There it is - the same words the theoretical physicist used. A convergence.

But what is my point? Ha ha, you physicists, India had the answer a millennium ago and they didn’t need a ten billion dollar Large Hadron Collidor to do it? The ancients possessed greater wisdom then we do?

        No. Not my point. I do believe that traditional cultures have much we must learn from in order to survive the calamities that are predicted for the future.
I do feel that industrial civilization may well be the downfall of the planet, and I do believe that applied science has created products and processes that are harmful to us.

       But I am awed and made (irrationally?) hopeful by the idea that ancient understanding and modern theory can converge. I think that a coming together of the ancient and the scientific might be our only hope, if only that convergence was someone or some government’s priority.

      What if climate and biological science and traditional knowledge of the earth and its life forms came together in a project as huge and well-funded as the SuperCollider. The vision is not impossible:
I think of our friend Nathaniel’s 18 months in Africa learning local cultivation practices, and the knowledge he is gaining from advanced study in health, social and biological science. He hopes to return to Africa in order to apply this new knowledge to what communities already know, in order to create sustainable solutions for their future. A true convergence. Multiversity.

Indian rendition of a bubble universe

Dimastalgia: On The Loss of Traditional Skills

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 19:14:00 +0000

Photo collages by Bill Fulton

Last year in Myanmar I watched an elderly woman snap the stem of a lotus, pluck the minuscule fibers and spin the sheerest silk. I watched a man paint tiny stylized elephants on a vase that would receive 14 layers of lacquer. (He was carrying on a tradition that goes back to the Shang Dynasty - 1400 years B.C.E. ) Travelers stopped at the workshop of a family who make graceful wooden umbrellas with hand-painted canopies. We watched them carve the handle, ribs and finial, and paint the colorful designs.

Photo collages by Bill Fulton

We saw the fishermens' "ballet" on Inle lake - one leg wrapped around a paddle, steering, hands free to hold the conical net. Later there was the gifted flutter of a dancer’s hand miming flight. We saw the old ways of building ships and making cabinets, aware of the co-operation required. One European shook his head and muttered how it was worth all the money to come this far just to see what his countrymen no longer did.

      The arts and crafts of the world, painted, carved, sung and enacted, unfold for the traveler. We stand rapt watching deft hands, snap photos with digital devices intended to replace the wonder we no longer create.

      There is a profound sense of loss that I believe we experience as traditional arts and everyday skills disappear. I call it Dimastalgia, from the Greek diadikasía, meaning process, simasía, significant, and algia - pain. It is the loss of skills and techniques that provided utility and beauty and the feelings that generates, and I believe that this loss is a feature of our times. It may not be conscious until we suddenly have an experience that makes us aware of what has disappeared.

      In the Netherlands, I had such an experience. Along the waterway in Groningen are the restored sailing barges that allowed the Dutch to trade along the Baltic as far as Russia. You are instantly aware of their grace and clever construction. In the marine museum I saw an exhibit of the myriad devices that made sailing possible, and, a sailor myself, I was suddenly filled with the knowledge, the nomenclature, the skills that building and sailing a ship required. It was a culture, a rich world, experienced now only as sport or pleasure. Our awareness of the lost beauty of this ancient form of transport is apparent when hundreds show up at a harbor to see the Tall Ships arrive under full sail.

Bernardus Bueninck Loading quay for Hunze boats ,Groningen

Of course you may respond that homo sapiens have always replaced one technology with another, presumably a better one. But the rate of change has accelerated dramatically since the industrial revolution, and now each generation may rely on new, different devices. The fact that we are quick learners does not mean there is no sense of loss.
          You may also wonder if this is merely nostalgia I am describing. No, I would answer. Nostalgia is usually partial and one-sided. For example, there are those who miss the 1950s - Elvis, sock-hops, car-hops, be-bop. But what of the Cold War, the nuclear threat, McCarthyism, sexual repression? No one misses that darkness. To acknowledge dimastalgia does not mean that one ignores the disease, infant mortality rate, lack of social mobility, physical dangers, etc of the past - nor does it represent a desire to live at a different time.

        Dimastalgia is the recognition that skills that sustained us for milennia are disappearing, and that loss is one of the vacuities of the present age, and a possible threat, as we shall see.

       What is especially poignant is the attempt to maintain the arts. The situation in China is an example. The government, in order to create more consumers, is moving millions from the countryside to cities. The headline in the New York Times reads:

In China, ‘Once the Villages Are Gone, the Culture Is Gone’

Screen shot does not play video

BEIJING - Once or twice a week, a dozen amateur
musicians meet under a highway overpass on the
outskirts of Beijing, carting with them drums,
      cymbals and the collective memory of their destroyed
village. They set up quickly, then play music that
is almost never heard anymore, not even here, where
the steady drone of cars muffles the lyrics of love
and betrayal, deeds and kingdoms lost.

The musicians used to live in Lei Family Bridge,
     a village of about 300 households near the overpass.
     In 2009, the village was torn down to build a golf
     course and residents were scattered among several
   housing projects, some a dozen miles away.
     Now, the musicians meet once a week under the
     bridge. But the distances mean the number of
     participants is dwindling. Young people, especially,
     do not have the time.

   I want to keep this going,” said Lei Peng, 27, who
      inherited leadership of the group from his grandfather.
      “When we play our music, I think of my grandfather.
      When we play, he lives.”

      Across China, cultural traditions like the Lei family’s
      music are under threat. Rapid urbanization means village
      life, the bedrock of Chinese culture, is disappearing, and
with it, traditions and history.


    And we might add, a loss of meaning, significance and pleasure for the individuals who lived within those cultures. To learn a skill, an instrument, a dance is to experience mastery, and a powerful feeling of satisfaction. But what if there is no one to teach you, or the materials and tools are not available? Think of all the Native Americans on our own continent who have struggled to maintain their culture, and what happens to people whose place and heritage have been destroyed.

     The loss of culture is the loss of diversity and adaptability. Human adaptability has been the key to the survival of our species. One marvels at the variety of shelter we have built, from igloo and tipi to the tongkonan of the Toraja in Sulawesi.

Tools have been carved from bone and bamboo. Clothes fashioned from hide, bark and wool. Non-specificity in diet meant food could be sourced from whatever plants and animals were available.

The hand shaping the brain, the brain shaping direction. Each culture, each adaptation represented a solution to the conditions in a specific locale, and in some cases there were variations within the same region. For example, the cultural variants of the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma and Diné (Navaho) peoples in the Southwestern deserts. All of these models represented sustainable life styles that did not permanently harm the environment.

Vintage postcard Hopi village of Oraibi Founded in 1120 C.E.

One of the major problems of globalization and industrialization may be the loss of this diversity - what if we have only one set of solutions available, and if/when that fails - if climate change or another disaster ends our current civilization, and survivors must restart - we will have lost the skills and knowledge our species depended on prior to machinery. The loss of farming and food gathering techniques may be especially crucial.
Alternatives become difficult to imagine when there are so many basic skills we no longer have - and believe we no longer need. What would be left for inscription if electronics failed, and handwriting is no longer practiced?

       Our daughter-in-law Natalie Grant, a fourth grade teacher, informs us that under the new Common Core guidelines her students will do all their work on ipads. There doesn’t seem to be a need to teach handwriting any more, when we rely on keyboards. But it takes a special mental and physical conjoined process to symbolize thought in letters, and connect those letters smoothly - a neuroscientist would call it an « intrahemispheric specialization ». We know a child’s brain is actually changed while acquiring this new skill. What will it mean for the development of the brain if we give up handwriting for keyboards and clicks? How does the act of writing effect the brain?
     « Writing no longer means only using pencil and
          paper, but using computer word processing programs.
          Writing using paper and pencil does not require the
          same cognitive, motor, and spatial tasks as those
          required when using a computer keyboard. Although
          the conceptual knowledge of written language can be
          the same, the motor activity and the spatial abilities
          that are used are rather different. » Which implies that
          our brains are going to develop differently.
                 Alfredo Ardila, "There is not any specific brain area for writing: From
cave‐paintings to computers." International Journal of Psychology,
                               Vol. 39, Issue 1 - Can Literacy Change Brain Anatomy?

       The author of The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture expresses his personal opinion:
        "There really is something quite new about bonding
        very early in life with keyboard, mouse, and 3-D
        graphics, and it will be very interesting to see what it
        produces by way of new heuristics (problem-solving
        behaviors) in adult life. I am not surprised that we are
        so eager as a society to welcome the Internet into our
        public schools. I am a little surprised that we are so
        ready to say goodbye…….to the books in the school
   library. And I am actually stunned that we imagine that
       commercial sponsors of in-school computer networks
       will not take their lesson from the tobacco companies
       as they eagerly underwrite the development of more
   appealing ways to help children learn how to be happy
       and successful adults."
   Wilson, Frank R. (2010-10-27). The Hand: How Its Use Shapes
                      the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (Vintage) (Kindle Locations
                      5635-5640). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

       Ah humans! We move into brave new worlds brought about by technology without even considering the implications until its use is established. Will we one day experience dimastalgia for beautiful penmanship & calligraphy as we do for the arts and skills we lose every day?

Poem by Du Mu Tang Dynasty 9th Century C.E.

Finally, what might Darwin say about Dimastalgia?

                    What Darwin Never Dreamed

                 Hold on!    Hold on Old Ways!
      Hold fast as if you were deeprooted in Time’s cliff
      What if we only knew this one way to live   this one
      click here of a world   and what if it founders floods
            turns dark    sudden as a Florida sinkhole
     I watched 3 men in Burma lift their steel mallets in turn
     and pound fireforged metal to the shape of need
     and I watched the very old woman pull
     the secret fiber at the center of a lotus stem
     spin it into weaver's yarn
     and I say we need to know what the Buddha knew:
            There is treasure in the lotus
     and we need to play the music of the blacksmith’s dance
     and someone must know how to   how to   Do
     what the milennia taught us at all the separate sites we
     settled…...
       ...Is it to late to say if     this flash of an era ends
          or is it already when    the sun and fire and wind
          and what remains of sweetwaterflow
          are all that is left

Soul-stice

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:42:00 +0000

         We are those who feared the encroaching darkness.
Was there a time I have wondered, imagined, that we did not know/were not sure/did not assume that light would return, that days would grow longer? At least not return by itself, without our intercession. What would it take to bring back the light? Sacrifice? Of an animal, a human? Would prayers and chanting and ceremony bring back the light?
Did you know that Stonehenge is aligned on a sight-line toward sunrise and sunset on the day of Winter Solstice?

        What did winter mean during the Neolithic?
During early periods of farming and herding in the Northern Hemisphere? It meant that communities might not survive winter. Starvation might occur. Cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed when snow covered fodder.

          Yet, we humans in the North celebrated Solstice. Though some meat was preserved, fresh meat was available. The fermenting of beer and wine that began in late summer was now complete. The deciduous trees were bare, but the great firs stood green and alive. The Sun God, they realized, was about to be reborn, and so it was the time of the last great feast of the year.

        And so we still celebrate, though the myth has shifted for some and been forgotten by others, and the event has been monetized. We bring light into the world at the darkest time, and we rediscover giving and charity and some of our best human impulses. And we hope - keep hoping - that those impulses will remain with us.

So I wish you light and love and a generosity of spirit!

A Feeling of Well-Being

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 01:30:00 +0000

All photos by Bill Fulton

      I want to tell you about Groningen, in the Netherlands, but this is not a travelogue. Bill and I didn’t come here as tourists, but to be with our friends. I want to write about how a place can hold you, in both senses of that word. But first I’ll describe this small city.

      The old town is surrounded by a canal, and it is self- contained and self-providing - no need to drive elsewhere for what you need. You can walk everywhere, and though cars are allowed in the city, the only traffic to worry about are streams of bicyclists.There is a central marketplace for Tuesday & Friday Market, shops, cafes, restaurants, a university, movie theater, concert hall and three museums.

   Groningen gifts you with a lovingly cared for aesthetic. It is charming and accessible - we circumnavigated in 45 minutes - and there are beautiful old sailing barges docked along the canal. Nights are softly lit, and light sparkles the dark water of the canal.

     But I have been in charming places that did not create the sense of well-being that we experienced. I think that comfort comes from an integration of mind/ heart/ body that I usually only experience in nature, not in cities, and I think there are several reasons for this.

     The first involves the proportions of this small city, and the harmony of the architecture. The buildings are on a human scale - most are no more than 5 stories, and most are in the style of Dutch architecture of the 17th century.The harmony of the buildings comes from their related styles.

         Another source of well-being is the relative quiet. No rush of traffic, trucks honking, jackhammers yammering - an absence of noise pollution. The sound of church bells is as natural to this town as birdsong in a forest, and the Dutch do not walk down the street yelling into their cellphones.

      And there is what happens to your body, to your psyche when there is no possible threat. Our first night we left our friend’s house at 11. At first I was anxious, as I am here at home, walking on dark streets at night - then I realized we were perfectly safe. We walked slowly back to our apartment through narrow streets and unlighted alleyways, free to enjoy the moon, the shadows dancing on the water, and the holiday lights. The lighted church towers become landmarks, so you always know where you are.

No gun-waving or knife-brandishing mugger would appear as they have twice in my own city.

        When you can relax, without having to be vigilant or on guard, you can be open, and of course when you are open you can be more loving and caring and creative, as we discover again and again.

Groningen is a soulful city. It's as though the river spirits and the spirits of all the shipbuilders, the captains and sailors who navigated the canals and rivers to the sea watch over it.

     Now I know who you are, dear readers. You do not need a long lecture on the contrasts between what I have described and life in American cities, or the statistics on what stress and a lack of a feeling of well-being do to us - and how much we spend on things and therapies to make it go away.

       I will simply end by saying that Groningen reminded me of how cities once held us, and it taught me how adaptable we humans try to be and what we are willing to put up with
when we are not being held,

The Beauty Addict

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 20:51:00 +0000

       Imagine this is a recovery program. I stand up and say
“My name is Leah and I’m addicted to beauty.” You say “Hi Leah”, and then I tell you my story and and make my confession.

         Beauty has been a revelation, a source of awe, a compulsion, an escape, a fortification. It is my drug of choice and necessity. So let me tell the worst first, and get it over with: I have loved people for their beauty, convinced that underneath the sweetfeatures of the poet was a pure soul.

         And don’t get me started about the art I’ve had to buy because I couldn’t walk away from it.

'Florissima' (Oaxaca)

(Fortunately I’m not a diamonds & fur kind of person, unless the fur is on a living animal.) For years I relied on a waterfall, meadows, weeping willows, cherry blossoms, big white dogs with big ruffs, etc ad infinitum, to fill voids, gloss the past, and not have to think about the future.

So what caused this addiction? The swirl and pattern of colored glass in a kaleidoscope when I was a little girl? The roses and peonies in my mother’s garden? A handsome and charming uncle I adored?

Dr. Sam Singal

Books of stunned and stunning wild animals? Perhaps it was moonlight on first heavy snowfall, the gleam and awe of nightquiet, when I couldn’t leave the sight of it, standing at my bedroom window way past bedtime. All of this masked, for the duration of each, the pain and struggle in my family.

Of course perfect beauty is even better than plain old beauty. And that’s another danger - a dismissal, a turning away, a continuously critical eye that sees imperfections, flaws. And the search for perfection in form, or transcendence in spirit. After seeing the Taj Mahal I wrote:
    Was it snowfall   unspoiled white fields
            where I first felt the word ‘perfection’
                 finally fulfilled in this building
                      that I must leave    and never see again

But one thing does lead to another with addictions - eventually it will lead you to the hard stuff. That sweet infatuation with a kaleidoscope’s colored glass led me to 12th century stained glass. I was hypnotized by Mary’s-robe blue and spent years studying the 12th century in France - which also included the return of Greek idealism, illuminated manuscripts, Arthurian tales & courtly love. Ah heaven! Escape!

Chartres

(It took much longer before I could study the terrible in history, the catastrophic - and write about it.)

Beauty, like all addictions, is a Road you must follow, but at least it probably won’t kill you. Fortunately, this addiction can also provide an income. A legal one. I discovered literature, philosophy, music and art in my senior year of high school and eventually became a Humanities prof - a decent source of money to support the Road.

    My mother’s roses wound up in my garden, though try growing peonies in Northern California! Landscape, wild places, redwood groves, mountain passes, all of it is now near and dear.   Because of my love for nature, and the desire that my grandkids and future generations be able to enjoy it,   I have to fight to try and preserve what we have. The churches have this part right -the call must be followed by a response.

   But still, I am always conscious of my dependency. Then, last week, in Anna Halprin’s movement-ritual class, a shift:
After warm-ups, prep and focus, Anna put on a CD of Sibelius and asked us to conjure an image. I began to move to that sublime music. And then I realized: Beauty may be an addiction but, unlike other drugs, it is also a gift.

Okay, I admit it........

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:22:00 +0000

           I am an unabashed, unrepentant devotee of Spring, however cliched that may be. Me, Leah-Persephone, returning from the mudsliding, sunless, windlashed underworld of Winter, to the yellow spread of forsythia, daffodils that nod yes as you walk by, hyacinth, tulips, and the incandescent cherry blossoms that seem lit from within.

      Then summers long light, transparent patterns of leaf-light, days in the garden, hikes to the ocean, barefoot and jacket-free
(on those days that don’t begin and end with fog.
     And then there’s is Fall:
           the crunch
                of dead leaves
                 the earth ceases to speak
                  darkness takes over
                      is your ancient brain really certain
                               that light will return?
the drift of autumn leaves
        but orange
            is not my color

Photo by Bill Fulton

The Great Dying, I call it. The endless browns and beige and
straw, and the spent stalks. Autumn in Michigan where I grew up means fields of color. It took me a long time to see true seasonal change in California. There are fewer maples, elms are rare, and the oaks that like a wild display also prefer a different climate.

         Finally, I began to really see color: the remarkable gingkoes, living fossils, 250 million years old, in their fall gold.

The persimmon trees, with elegant, elongated leaves that blush red. And for someone addicted to the beauty of words, there is liquid amber, with an autumn array of golds and flame, and the bright berry clusters of - listen to this - scarlet fire thorn.

Persimmon leaves John Barger

I become a forager
in autumn, cutting bunches of leaves and berries, and gathering apple oak galls in my neighborhood and from
the ranch we are privileged to stay at.      I let go of my usual minimalism and fill the house with glossy teal pumpkins, baskets of oak apple galls, sprays of colored leaves.

                  Why must we turn white with age
                          while trees bedazzle themselves to death?

        I mix beauty with ceremony, as the ancients did, and the spirit requires. We have a Mexican-Tarascan Day of the Dead cart, with a skeleton driver, and a winged demon riding shotgun. I fill it with gourds, miniature pumpkins, and multicolored baby corn, and I wander around my home admiring autumn and avoid thinking about the future - the mudsliding, sunless, windlashed underworld of winter.