After the Jug Was Broken

Heart Broken

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:31:00 +0000

Photo Credit: Corin Royal Drummond

The photo you see is of Strawberry Canyon. I have hiked this canyon in every season, listened to the creek in winter, and the birds in summer . I swear I saw the native Alamed whipsnake once, but, full confession, I've also sworn that I heard the voices of the tribes who once fished here, so you may not believe me on either count. I have never seen a fox or mountain lion, but I'm told that both live in the higher canyon, and I have had a staring contest with more than one doe.
Today I received word that 22, 000 trees are to be cut in Strawberry Canyon by FEMA, in accord with the university - and sixty some thousand more in an Oakland canyon. I am heartbroken. If I tried to describe my sadness, the page would go black, and can't have that happen because 1) I have taken it upon myself since last year to speak for the trees and 2) I really want you to read this article. Please. And act if you are moved to do so.

FEMA Plans Clear-Cutting 85,000 Berkeley and Oakland Trees

Posted on 16 May 2013

By Randy Shaw
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is moving to chop down 22,000 trees in Berkeley's historic Strawberry and Claremont Canyons and over 60,000 more in Oakland. This destructive plan is rapidly moving forward with little publicity, and FEMA cleverly scheduled its three public meetings for mid and late May while UC Berkeley students were in finals or gone for the summer.
UC Berkeley has applied for the grant to destroy the bucolic Strawberry and Claremont Canyon areas, claiming that the trees pose a fire hazard. The school has no plans to replant, and instead will cover 20% of the area in wood chips two feet deep. And it will pour between 700 and 1400 gallons of herbicide to prevent re-sprouting, including the highly toxic herbicide, Roundup. People are mobilizing against this outrageous proposal, which UC Berkeley has done its best to keep secret.
When I heard this week that the federal government would be funding the clear-cutting of 85,000 beautiful Berkeley and Oakland trees, including 22,000 in historic Strawberry and Claremont Canyon, my initial reaction was disbelief. I then wondered how the feds have money for this destructive project while Head Start and public housing programs are being cut due to the sequester.
The trees in Strawberry and Claremont Canyon have been there for decades and hardly constitute a "hazard." But pouring 1400 gallons of herbicide on the currently pristine hills will create a real hazard, and UC Berkeley even plans to use the highly toxic herbicide "Roundup" to squelch the return of non-native vegetation.
This is a true horror story that will happen absent public opposition. I know that many will find it hard to believe that this could occur in the pro-environment San Francisco Bay Area, but UC Berkeley may be counting on this attitude to get all the approvals they need before people find out the truth.
Please read "Death of a Million Trees," which provides all of the facts, figures and background about the Strawberry and Claremont Canyon proposed clear cutting as well as the tree destruction plans for the East Bay. The last public hearing will be held Saturday, May 18, 2013, 10 AM - 12 PM, at Claremont Middle School, 5750 College Avenue in Oakland.
The public has until June 17 to submit written comments on the project. You can do so through the East Bay Hills hazardous fire risk reduction project website, or via email.
There are countless destructive attacks on the environment that Bay Area activists cannot impact. But this is occurring in our own backyard, and activists must make sure that this cannot happen here.

Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:44:00 +0000

Oakland Museum of California March 16 - June 30

September 2001, Oakland Museum of California

"I feel like I'm using my painting as a memorial garden."

         I started to write “The theme of Hung Liu’s work is...” - when I realized that the word “theme” is totally inadequate. It reminds me of essays for English classes, not the lifelong work of a woman whose goal is the resurrection of the dispossessed.
         So many of the peoples of the world experience deprivation and exile. The artist or writer may reinstate them in their old world, describe their suffering, or reshape their identity. It’s one part excavation, one part re-creation.

        Though she left China and came to study and live in California in 1982, most of Hung Liu’s dispossessed are, not surprisingly, Chinese. She researched archives to find photos of those who are not even a footnote to history. Peasant laborers (without the smiles of socialist realism), women soldiers (without the muscles and heroic stance of Maoist art), the poor, the grieving elderly, the 'comfort women' used by Japanese troops during WW II, prostitutes, the exiled, war refugees.

       “In terms of true inspiration you need to discover, to excavate, to peel off the layers and try to find out what was there that got lost, for there is always something missing.”
   Summoning Ghosts: the Art of Hung Liu, University of California Press, 2012, P. 101

         Hung Liu found photos of young prostitutes. Those photos of anonymous teen-age girls were used as advertisements during the end of the last dynasty. She rescues them from obscurity by painting their portraits with great affinity and affection, and lends them a friendly cow, her symbol of humanity, for companionship.

The Cow and the Girls, 2007 Artnet

        Millions of Chinese were displaced by war and government policy during the twentieth century, and Hung Liu's work focuses, as always, on the human element. I found the painting By the Rivers of Babylon, a portrait of an exiled family, particularly moving. I’ve known the psalm that begins with those words since I was a child:
    “If I forget you, O Jerusalem , let my right hand wither; Let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you,
     if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.”

       There are so many Jerusalems! So many who have fled ancestral lands, been forced out of homes.

By the Rivers of Babylon, 2000, Artnet

         Hung Liu’s work, however painful her choice of subjects, is beautiful and lush. The painted surface is as multi-layered as life itself, and the measured, deliberate dripping of paint adds another dimension, another texture. Look closely at By the Rivers of Babylon. Children are eating from colorful Ming dynasty bowls!

       That imaginal juxtaposition appears in so many of her paintings. A young girl, bent over with heavy burdens, is surrounded by doves, fantastic bird wings, and painted Buddhas. Cranes and blossoms and butterflies surround whores and wounded warriors. It is not prettifying, but a loving adornment of the dispossessed. She holds the opposites: the heron in elegant plumage or the inevitable blossoms of Chinese art - juxtaposed with poverty and displacement.

        I was so moved by a series of simple paintings. I wish I had photos for you. Each day the artist painted some object in her mother’s home during the 49 days of mourning after the elderly woman's death. She painted useful objects, like the kitchen tools her mother used every day, each object made eloquent. Hung Liu is a woman who understands the need for ceremony, but she invents rituals for her own soul’s particular journey.

       And then come the paintings of a flame, one after another. The spirit kept alive. The soul guided by light on its journey. An ancient impulse to light a candle to accompany grief. One painting, one candle, after another.

Myanmar: Version 2 - Poetics

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:26:00 +0000

       Morning on the river. Fog-lift and fishing boats. She steers, he hauls the net. Or the solitude of a man alone in a boat all day, every day the same until the sand runs out.
      All native boats speak grace as their mother     tongue.


       That lovely yellow ginger flower! Why is it called The Weeping Goldsmith? It is said that the goldsmiths were reduced to tears since none of their creations could rival its exquisite form. The American botanist who “discovered” the flower on a remote patch of land realized, as I did, that Weeping Goldsmith (Pa deign no) is sold in all the flower stalls near the temples, so ‘exquisite’ can take its place next to the Buddha.

      The tattooed woman with the feathered flicker keeps the crows away from the offerings of fruit.


     At Kyaikmaraw many of the Buddhas are at eye level, and their gaze meets yours. You are their goal, since they have already gained heaven.

Photo by Bill Fulton

      The boat crosses Inle Lake past tomatoes grown on floating islands. Bamboo poles fasten the islands to the lake bottom like straight pins in fabric. You could remove the pins and tow the island anywhere in the lake.

      Egret on an islet of water hyacinth. Traveling like this, on the move, you keep saying goodbye to beauty.

In Pagan, a girl gets the custodian to open the Temple of the 37 Nats (spirits & supernaturals) for us, then she walks me down the line of sculptures explaining each one, laughing at the whiskey-drinking spirit who races horses. And there’s Durga, black garbed, scarved and shawled, riding her tiger, a migrant worker-goddess from Hinduism, who I last encountered in a cave in India.

      Humans circumnavigate the stupa clockwise, but the birds circle to the right, going against the clock. Is that the secret of flight?

      Morning. Climbing the Tower. Temples in all directions as far as you can see. Tearjoy. Temples scattered across the plain like Buddhaseeds flowering into gold stupas.
Who can take in the vastness of the past?

Photo by Bill Fulton

Myanmar: Version One

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:38:00 +0000


Leg-rowing fisherman on Inle Lake (Leah Shelleda)

What strange people we are! Absorbed with the latest technology, then flying off great distances to see folks living traditional lives.

I have yearned for ancient ways and lives that are sustained not by wealth and toys, but a love for the earth. This yearning has been tempered by all the subsistence-based villages I have visited or lived in, where people have barely enough to eat and suffer from ill-health.

Photo by Bill Fulton

But the village in Mon State was different. It was along the Thanlwin (not a typo) river, and we reached it by boat. The wood and bamboo houses had strong roofs to protect against sun and monsoon, and were well-maintained.


(Paste made from the Thanaka tree is used to decorate faces)

The market was filled with the many fruits and vegetables they grow plus several varieties of rice and fish. The children were bright eyed and healthy and the women didn't look look 20 years older than their age.

The reason? A surplus, which provided for a full-time school, medicine and a few trucks. The source? A "sawmill" for cabinet and boat builders who used traditional techniques, and relied on a variety of different tree species to make a beautiful product. The "sawmill" consisted of a belt-driven circular saw we estimated to be 50 years old, and an ingenious system of pulleys. I doubt that they were paid sufficiently for their labor, the people were still relatively poor by Western standards, but the village was self -sufficient and thriving, and impacted lightly on the surrounding environment.

Photo by Bill Fulton

We thought a lot about choice on this trip. What if the children in the village wanted to be doctors or teachers in their kleptocracy of a country? Would any ever have the opportunity to travel, as we do? Surely you couldn't blame any young person in Myanmar for wanting to leave the country and join the the well fed and stylish world they see on TV. All they want is opportunity.

Let me tell you about Poppie, who we met in Kiang Tong. He had studied physics, loved science, but where was there a lab for him to do research, or a teaching position?

Photo by Bill Fulton

He supports his family selling ice cream in summer and working in the tourist industry in the winter. He has wonderful enthusiasm and what we came to call RBS - Remarkable Burmese Sweetness. Poppie took tourists to see the Akha tribeswomen in their extraordinary silver clad bonnets or trekking to the longhouse of the Loi people.Younger women were beginning to dress in tee shirt or blouse and longyi (sarong) like most Burmese, and what would happen to his business if tourists couldn't photograph colorful villagers? And then there was the shivering and sweating of his chronic malaria, the expensive drugs, and a government totally unconcerned with providing cheap mosquito netting, at least for the little ones.

Is choice a developed world luxury we overestimate? Are we lulled into a pleasurable stupor by the innumerable brands available to us, equating freedom with all we can buy?

Thanks to Canal One - "Too Many Logos"

There are different kinds of hunger. In the 1970s emigration was allowed from the Soviet Union, and many came to the Bay Area where I live. We talked about the 'babushka ladies' who came to the supermarkets and slowly walked the aisles just looking - women who had once waited in line outside a store that was rumored to have bread or beets that day.

Thanks to geardiary.com

And here was abundance: bins of fresh vegetables even in winter, whole aisles of every variety of bread, cracker or cookies, steaks and chops and poultry piled in freezers.

Were the women walking those aisles with the wonder that Bill and I experienced in the Shwedagon, the main temple of Yangon? Our hunger for ancient beauty and spirit was fulfilled as we walked through the temple. We realized that families and friends gathered on the vast marble promenade as though it was a park or a public square, or the marketplace. It is not a place of hushed reverence. Laughter was as present as chanting, and as frequent as prayer. The glorious temple was a staple of their lives.

Photo by Bill Fulton

     I've been thinking of all those who have come to the U.S.
        and Europe to feed their families, and of all the Americans
             and Europeans who travel to South East Asia, flying
                     thousands of miles to feed their souls.

Speaking Journese

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 01:25:00 +0000

Bagan, Myanmar photo by David Haberlah

      I am so struck by the different journeys the people I love are on. Some are on the scary path that runs from healer to healer and clinic to hospital. Another is traveling to be with his companion, whose life may be ending soon. A family member has a new and special client. My beloved niece has announced her engagement. A newborn smiled for the first time. All these ages and different stages. It’s such an adventure this life, and Monday Bill & I will have the great good fortune to travel to Burma. But I want to tell you about today.

      Sometimes, remarkably, the personal, spiritual, political and historical roads all come together, as they did this morning. I'll start with the historical, going back to the year 1954. The Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board, declared that the state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.

       In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was already
a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and about to intensify his political activity.

      And the spiritual? This morning a woman completed a journey. In 1954 the Board of the reform Jewish temple her parents belonged to voted against allowing women to read from the Torah (first 5 books of the Hebrew bible). It was the rabbi’s desire to allow girls the same rite of passage that their fathers and brothers celebrated, but he was the only one who voted for it. Today this woman, a professional in her 50s, retiring president of the Board of her synagogue, celebrated her Bat Mitzvah.

      Exactly 100 years ago, the woman’s grandfather had celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, and she was reading the same excerpts from Torah that he had - a portion of the story of Exodus, the flight from Egypt.

      Synchronically, this is also the weekend we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday, so after the Torah reading, the singers and musicians temporarily abandoned the Hebrew liturgy, and played and sang the verses of the gospel hymn Go Down, Moses. We all joined in the chorus "with great gladness."

       Such a moving and joyous occasion, for me personally. During the silent meditation, the words “blessed is the one who brings compassion to all creatures” came to mind. I realized that, of course, the words could speak for both the Jewish Shekinah, the divine feminine, and the Buddha whose temples and monasteries Bill & I were about to visit. And then I saw, as if she were directly in front of me, the Shekinah bring her palms together and raise them in ‘namaste’, the gesture of peace.

Soul-stice

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:48:00 +0000

         So many words have already been written about 12/21/2012, what can I add? The need to bring light into a dark time - both because this is the season of diminishing light, and because, for our country, it is a dark time. We have been celebrating, fearing, mythologizing the shortest day of the year for who knows how long! Before Christ, before Chanukah. Millennia ago humans believed the light would disappear and the world would end, and that view still prevails among many. How do we hold the light? How to keep it with us?

         And how do we hold the opposites? This season we have experienced a joyful time with family, and terrible diagnoses and physical deterioration among friends. There was the nightly beauty of the Chanukah menorah, the holy meditation on the candles, and the magic of rediscovering cherished ornaments as we decorated the tree. The beauty of Renaissance concert music, and the echo of guns and grief. Balance. What an effort to keep a balance!

       There are still a few days before Christmas, so I can still list my wishes: A ban on assault rifles and an end, or at least a lessening, of the alienation and rage in our society.

       I wish us all peace, renewed compassion and empathy - the true and necessary qualities of this season. And I offer this poem, and a candle in memory.

Concert After Sandy Hook
    December 14, 2012

Above the dais
snowflakes fairy lights
illuminated organ pipes
But no digital magic
not even Bach
or grandkids trilling carols
can ease your anguish

You call up angels
to enfold these children
Maybe that wingwhir
only occurs
in your oldlady ears
and maybe it's a seraph
Just keep these
wet-winged
fledgelings
safe!

Sing along:
Ten lords a-leaping
eleven pipers piping
twelve drummers drumming

Twenty mothers mourning

Grand Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 22:48:00 +0000

       I usually find that between the beginning and the end of what I write, I have learned something that I didn’t know when I started - but this time I learned something before I wrote the first word: how protective I am of our family. So - no photos, no names - just the understanding that I, who love learning, and seek it in so many ways, have learned as much from these dear ones as I have anywhere else.

      Take the one we worried about throughout high school, sometimes wondering if he would survive his teens - now in a very creative professional program at the top of his class. As my grandfather would say, “That such a thing can happen!” That someone can fall in love with their own abilities and find their path. Something inside you shifts with that shift, that change. All the sad experience that age must assimilate moves over and makes room for joy.

     But he is not the only one. There is the one who struggled with being in this world, in this body, the one who presented such difficulties, and received such love. And now? Straight A’s, captain of the football team - and so considerate! And the one who had tutors from an early grade, had problems with subjects and strategies, who is now in his first year at university. Each feels like a victory over those who say that it is all there, all given, all wired - that change is a myth we hold on to.

     Oh, and speaking of change. There is the adult so motivated by the desire, the need for change, who emerged as a loving father and husband. The three brothers, all “singularly skilled” (the new phrase I just learned), all successful by any criteria - and all Fathers. One who helps others become successful parents, one who learned to be a father, and one special individual who learned to father - less.

       And oh those mothers! The one who retained humor and pleasure while struggling with and holding her boys. The one whose daughter wants to grow up to be just like her, and the one who raised her child alone while teaching full time - and could open to the man she created a new family with.

        I learn by watching, and the emergence is so powerful. The one who discovered cooking, who spent a month on a farm in Scandinavia, who will major in history - all those dimensions! And the one whose talents and abilities cross the boundaries of arts and ideas, waiting to see what synthesis he will make of it all. And there is the so-very-sweet, lovely-souled and smart boy who excels on land and snow and water, able-bodied on any surface. And next year the girl will begin high-school, and the restrictions of middle-school will disappear, and she will be able to thrive in all the ways I know she can. And the one who plays two instruments, is very bright - and knew how to be his own person at a much earlier age than I did.

   I certainly don't want to imply perfection, or ease, or total compatibility, or humans free from issues and problems. I am so aware of what a difficult world the young ones have been born into, and what they will have to face.

      But how fortunate I am to be a part of this ancient process called family - not through biology or lineage, but through marriage. It has not always been easy. In fact it has often been my biggest challenge.

I wrote the following poem a year ago - it is the last two lines that retain the most truth:

Grandchildren of my husband
a watch   a book   a custom is what I leave you
I used to hide candied creatures so your visits began with treasure
how well I know some of your worlds   how fidgety I became in others

Step   is the word in front of my role
it means one step at a time it means stop after each step
and step to the side

It’s a dance   like the rumba
imagine the men in ruffled shirts   the congos the bembe drum
imagine the dancer in flounced skirt
She steps forward   stops
steps to the side
she is what the music makes
as love makes step
                              into stairway

What Do Goats & Gratitude Have in Common?

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:55:00 +0000

Have I really never written about being at The Ranch?
Its real name is Harms Vineyard and Lavender Fields, and its a biodynamic farm where two of our favorite people, Patricia & Donald, live, and where we get to stay when they go away.
Apart from the healthy abundance of grapes and lavender, plus fruit, olives and vegetables that are grown for their own table, there is also the magic. There is some combination of deep silence and marvelous energy that this land exudes - and the views! The curvaceous hillsides in their evergreen gowns, the far side of the valley with its sunset rose mountains, the steep trail down the hillside with its seasons of mud, weed, dry and leafquilt, the view across the vines, the vines, and the pillows of lavender.

Donald Harms designed the house with its Mediterranean courtyard and Greek columns, built to coincide with the hillsides, size tempered by its soul-satisfying proportions - based on the Golden Mean and ancient ratios.

We feed the goats at night. That is if we can get the herd in the door of the barn and they haven't started a goat rodeo in the corral. It is warm and close and smelly in the small barn as it gets dark. Outside the moon shines, and the llama paces and waits for them to give up their goatly antics so he can be fed without having his feed gulped down by the goat brigade.

Not a Harms ranch machine!

      It is always quiet. The quiet is a presence and an absence. The presence of some magical power that is larger than mere visibility, and the absence of traffic, sirens, air traffic - all the things I usually live with.

      This is the peace that all Americans outside cities lived in before the 20th century, in what was then a farming and ranching country. It is the machine that brought in noise and distraction, and it is the machine that eased a load of labor that could wear out or break a man or woman.
        A vacation means a rest from labor, and when I think of machines and labor, I think of the whole history of humankind gnarled with the problem of labor. The daily work of food and water and shelter, the forced labor when hierarchies formed and created grandiose structures, the forced labor of Great Walls and canals and roads and railroads, the slave labor of Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and Arabs and Mayans, the forced brigades of empire, and the shameful plantations. And there is still the deadly labor of soldiering, where those without a clear future enlist to fight the wars of the Guaranteed.
      I know that Donald spends patient time distilling oil from lavender, and I have accompanied Patricia when she browses the goats, and those are blessed, fortunate tasks, as gardening is for me. These are the labors we choose, they are not foisted on us - not forced. And the labors I choose allow me to once again embrace gratitude, that goatish emotion that gets away from me, and doesn't always appear when I chase it, even when I'm at this beloved place.
     Gratitude, you are not in my control anymore than Lily, Petunia, Boey, and the rest of the Capra clan - you will just keep jumping out of nowhere, startling me with my sweet, relatively easy life.

The Book of Now and The Shy One

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 23:29:00 +0000


Copywrite Bill Fulton & Fisher King Press

      A few days ago I sent the completed manuscript of The Book
of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide, to Mel Mathews, my publisher at Fisher King Press. It will be published in the next month.

The Fisher King - how that title resonates: The wounded king who keeps the Grail, and only one person can succeed him, Parsival, whose first sight of the grail castle leaves him at a loss for the words he must have, the question he must ask. It will be a long journey before he learns what he will need to know to complete his task.

Alright Leah, you may say, but what does the fisher king have to do with editing an anthology? It’s like life - you don’t know what you will have to learn, or overcome, in order to complete a task - even if it is a task you have chosen.

I took a long time, or so it seemed, for the book to become what it is supposed to be. It began by Mel asking if I would like to write an anthology. Yes, I said. I imagined a book full of poems by many authors, and my image was a dance hall - a magician’s dance hall, and dance as a metaphor for life. We discussed a web site where poets could submit poems, and maybe a submission fee, and then Mel thought about permissions, and fees, and we both had doubts. Mel said, “The right approach will come to you.” What he always says when I’m stuck. Or when he thinks there is a better title, or approach. So far he’s been right.

Bill & I went to Yucatan & Chiapas, and the great trees of the rain forest, what remained of them, took over my voice when I came back. I began writing poems about extinction, the harm to the earth, a new Noah, poems of praise to What Remains - and the dance hall became the earth, but I still wanted poems that danced, and poems that unified beauty and terror.

I begin to let what I found, what I read, what I saw take over, let go of having A Theme, A Concept, and what I found! I searched books and websites. My dear friend Naomi Lowinsky’s wonderful poems about the environment fit with my own, but then I saw the video of Crystal Good reading BOOM BOOM in a quantum hip-hop Mountain Mama wild style unlike ours, and thought Yes! Inclusion.

And I found Dunya Mikhail, an award-winning poet, who wrote remarkable poems about war and exile, and I cried with relief that those poems had been written. But could I just write her without knowing her and ask to use her poems? The Shy One emerged and suggested we go watch butterflies. But the Book spoke and said Write to her. Write what you feel. She may say no, but you may get the poems! And I did, and felt such gratitude.

Some poets did not respond. But Anita Endrezze said Yes, she who writes of the wild, and the deep and her people. And I knew that Jane Downs’ The Minotaur, which I had read years ago, had to be in the book. The other poems she sent opened up another perspective.

I asked Frances Hatfield for poems, not knowing how they would fit, but loving her beautifully crafted work. I realized that of course the Underworld, The Soul’s Geometry, had to be in this anthology. The tide is indeed rising!

Each poet would have a portrait, an essay about their work - and I hadn’t written an essay for years. Mel wanted my writing as well as poems, so it would be more than just an anthology. (Just an anthology?!) But I sat with their poems for hours, and their words and worlds told me what to say. I felt the pressure of a deadline, wrote seven essays in two weeks, then fell asleep in my garden, on the grass with the cat mounted on my chest. Meanwhile Bill, always magically in tune with my work, created the beautiful cover, and Mel approved.

Perhaps one of the hardest thing was asking a well-known and highly-respected author, who I at least knew personally, for a cover blurb. It took two months to send the email. Shy One was about to run out the door before I sent the email, taking me with her. The author said Yes. I was so touched and pleased.

The Shy One is still with me. We will probably finish our lives together. A part of her is the humility I was raised in, which I value as an antidote to whatever inflation or arrogance a girl with an almost photographic memory might have had.

      The Book is done, and the last thing I wrote was a back cover description:
       Seven lyrical women poets, each accompanied by a study of their work, navigate our contemporary world. They travel to the depths of the psyche, experience exile, rhapsodize on the beauty
of our planet, lament loss and celebrate renewal. These poets write courageously on what threatens us: climate change, war,
mountain-top removal, loss of species, environmental damage,
the scourge of cancer. They are witnesses, ‘Couriers’, who bring
us their visions. As the tide rises they reach out to us in deeply personal and clear voices, each providing a unique experience in contemporary poetry.

Pt. Reyes: Sky Trail!

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 20:30:00 +0000

          At Pt. Reyes National Seashore we go up Sky Trail into deep fog, oaks, and Bishop pine covered with moss and lichen, boughs like some great shaggy beasts. The path turns terra-cotta and winds through the intense alwaysgreen of a temperate rain forest. Then the march of the magnificent Douglas Firs, trunks upright and straight as Bill's Presbyterian ancestors.

Fog is mystery as sun is clarity? Or so you think. SOMETHING could loom up out of the swirl, couldn’t it? There are so many gray mornings where I live. An iron lid of cloud clamped down and soundless, not mythfog but overcast, and not a word from the faithful dawn chorus of birds. And if fog is more menacing, why have I only seen bear and bobcat in bright light, and that bull charged on a sparkling morning.

      Out here it is always remembrance vs pioneer. Shall we take a new trail or one we know? I remember when we took the Ostero trail at midnight with Wally & Julie, to see the owls, Bill refusing to hoot at bare pines. And the time we crossed a bridge over a pond filled with croaking, mating frogs. And the time we walked out the Pierce Point trail with Stan & Nancy. Where it narrows Ocean is on one side, Bay on the other, both visible at once - one wave-strewn, the other wind-whipped to white cap - but the fog was so deep both were hidden. The visitors had to be told - Bay is there, Ocean there, eyes on trail to keep direction - and it wasn't a dream - though if life were a film this is where the director would have done it - elk emerged, crossed the trail, antlers pierced our recognition. When Stan & Nancy returned to their eastern city, would they tell that tale as if Northern California were the Serengeti? Might the elk become rhinos? Or elegant loping giraffes so close you could see the Sally Rand fans of their eyelashes?

But this is a new trail. Would it ever stop climbing? How high does it go ?Should we take a side path to Mt. Wittenberg? A swath of fogsilk slinks in from deep in the Pacific and where the hell is Mt. Wittenberg? North? South?

It's actually dripping, dropping, drizzling, hair wet, then it swiftly lifts - and the green, the intense green. Chartreuse and lime and jade and pine, especially fine because the California hills have turned to summer-drought straw, beige and tan. I am not Rapunzel, and I have given up trying to spin straw into gold; those hills are not golden, just beige and tan.

I grew up in the thunderstruck summer-downpour-greenness of the Midwest, and I stand here in sudden sunlight, at home among the ferns, Bishop pines, bay laurel and Douglas fir that once appeared in a child's dreams of an unknown future.

Called! A Women's Congress for Future Generations

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:32:00 +0000

                 A Women’s Congress for Future Generations
            www.wcffg.org    Moab, Utah September 26th-30th

     When I was still teaching college I was usually unwilling to go to conferences or congresses. I’m rather introverted outside of the classroom and poetry readings, and I am a bit anxious about large groups and runaway egos, but the women on the steering committee of this Congress are such competent, committed, developed souls, that my fears are alleviated by the humanistic rules of conduct they have asked us to agree to.

And I am called to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations

      What is the Congress about? “At the Moab Congress, we will map possibilities and pathways toward achieving whole health and justice in this generation to come. Inspired by our environmental foremothers, our hope is to craft a dynamic articulation of the pressing rights future generations have to a livable world and the responsibilities of present generations to uphold those rights. Our labors will yield a living affirmation of these rights and responsibilities in word, art, music and story." (from website)
And I am called to this action, this involvement, these tasks.

      I have written poems, letters, essays to our grandchildren bemoaning the fact that my possibility-filled world may not be theirs - and I have lamented that my generation has failed in providing them a safe, sane, sustainable future.

I am called to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations on behalf of our own lovelies, and the children yet unborn.

       Among other things, I taught environmental ethics for years.
I have been an activist most of my life. My solace and pleasure comes from what Gaia provides me in my garden and in the wild.
I have spoken to trees on four continents. I have cried for the elephants, visited the tigers, and laughed with giraffes. I cannot bear it that future generations may only know these magnificent creatures from books and photos - and I have dreamed that I must name all the animals of the sixth extinction.

And the animals, the trees, the mountains and the seas
call me to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations.

      I am a poet, and I am working on The Book of Now, an anthology of seven women poets who write for the time of rising waters. On her website, the poet Annie Finch writes:
   “The poetess uses poetry to do the work of a witch, calling up
and shaping energies to heal and transform society. The poetess,
in other words, is a witch and a poet in one.”

I am called as a poet and a witch, willing to shape energies and heal and transform society, to A Women’s Congress for Future Generations.

Here is a poem written for The Book of Now, after I was invited to the Congress. Perhaps I will share it there also.

               Praise Song

I want to sing the life of the earth
an egg    a nest   a hive   the herd
uncountable wings in the wet forest
microbes thriving in the heat of a geyser
the unknown swimming the canyons of the sea
what the cat scans as she stalks the savannah
what the hunter sees as he moves through the veldt
the invisible in a bead of water

I want to sing the profusion of peoples
Camel-riding desert Tuareg draped in blue
Balinese balancing edible towers
The last Hadza drilling fire
Inuit curving snow blocks into dome
     the stunning variety of indigenous homes
         the bo-sa a house of bamboo    adobe   hogan   igloo
I want to sing the children on their way to the temple
          mosque    pagoda    kiva   jinja

          I want tribes to sing
              before they’re unspoken
                    I want us to sing for the sake of sound
                          birdsong croak and cricket-creak
                 Praise all I have named
                       this relic
                                                 residue
                                              remnant
                                           remainder

I am called to A Woman’s Congress for Future Generations to speak for the relic, the residue, the remnant, the remainder

Hungry!

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 23:47:00 +0000

I am hungry today. Every few years I have a medical procedure that means clear liquids for a couple of days in preparation, and today is one of those days. I am so aware of how rarely I am truly hungry - the cupboard and the fridge are filled with things I like to eat. Since it is summer there are bowls of plums and cherries and peaches and apricots. A small watermelon sits on the counter, and its rippled rind reminds me of fabrics I’ve seen in Africa. If I leave the house I have a protein bar or two in my purse, and unless we are hiking The Mountain or the paths of Pt. Reyes there is always food nearby - or a couple of backpacks filled with trail faves.

Michelle Obama has rightly focused on child obesity, with its attendant danger of type 2 diabetes, plus heart disease likely in the future. When Bill & I travel through the West we leave the farm-to-kitchen food culture of the Bay Area, and we have to rely on what we bring and whatever restaurants we find - and we are always astonished by the proportions people are served.

But is anyone besides a few large organizations still concerned about hunger in America? The War on Poverty is simply a lost phrase from the Sixties. What summer means in some communities in this country is not bowls of ripe fruit and fresh vegetables from farmer’s markets, but no school lunches. 22 million children are estimated to be in “food insecure” households in the United States.
When climate change results in freakish weather in many parts of the country - abnormally high winds, flooding, hurricanes, wildfire - there is a sudden desperate need for food and shelter, and Food Banks provide it. There is no problem obtaining it - there’s 200 billion pounds of food that go to waste every year in America! We have all the food necessary to feed our hungry, it is just a matter of access, equity, and distribution. Equity? Ha! A House Agricultural Committee just came up with a Farm Bill that would cut 16 billion dollars from Food Stamp allocations over the next decade, which impacts 43 million people.


This is a recent photo though it looks like a Dorothea Lange portrait from the 1930s

Just think. We’ve gone from a War on Poverty to a war on the poor - and I thought it was just women who were being targeted!

"Weave the Tree of Life!"

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:42:00 +0000


Photo by Bill Fulton

In 2009, at the temple of Wat Xieng Thong in Laos, I wrote
Tiered roof
like the sweeping boughs
of a great pine
Inside grace ever green
A voice whispers
"Weave the Tree of Life"

In a Luang Namtha village. my photo

I had been looking for weavers and finding such extraordinary craft woven by women in remote Laotian villages, women weaving sacred symbols & sacred animals and small Buddhist spirits into Rothko-like hangings. The weaving school we visited had handspun hand-dyed silk in colors I didn't know you could get from plants, and the work had patterns that involved the skill of masters.

Living Crafts Weaving Center Luang Prabang Laos - Photo by Bill Fulton

Wait. I forgot to mention that I am a weaver - even when I'm not actually weaving. I have a remarkable Dutch loom that I bought after I retired from teaching, thinking now Now! I will be able to continue what began in 1965, when I studied weaving with Kay Sekimachi, (who would be a National Treasure if we had such a title.) I bought a small loom, and then I became a grad student and later a full-time prof, and I said "When I retire I will return to weaving. And I will write poetry."

My Louët loom

But I haven't been weaving. I set up and threaded the complex loom and began an experiment to weave tapestries using different size yarns without a rough line between colors and shapes - but the Muse stepped in. "Poetry" she whispered while I was reading the manual that came with the loom. "Poetry" she said aloud as I was threading it. "Poetry" she yelled perched on my laptop when I went to check my email. Hadn't I retired to write? she demanded. Portrait of the Inner Voice as a Nag! Finally she used her heaviest weapon - she sent me first lines and last lines in my dreams and during my morning walk.

The Muse accompanied me to Africa & India. She was perfectly willing to lend her voice to the goddesses and spirits I encountered. When I returned I was Writing Writing sending out poems for publication and Writing. I became a mentor at a high school (weave what you know into a new setting) but still Writing Writing. Seeing friends and arranging events. Always an activist. Always connecting to family. But mainly? Poetry.
Write. Join a Writing Group of wonderful talented women. Collaborate with Bill - his art/my words. Present our work. Weave our families together. Write Write. Prepare a manuscript published by Fisher King Press & Read Read in public. Start writing a blog. Read Jung’s Red Book and write poems in response. Write about a friend’s art. Connect with a spiritual community. Join a Facebook community and learn an Amazing Amount.

Now I plan to go to the Congress of Women for Future Generation where a weaving of women will write a Bill of Rights for our descendants. I work on a book of poems by poets who write about Change write about Now about Connection. Write my own poems for this book and the Muse becomes Gaia - Gaia becomes Muse.
Oh I know this may not be enough of an excuse. I know the voice said "Weave the Tree of Life" - but you know? I have been.

The New Land

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Our friend Mark emailed me old photos of Detroit. I could figure out exactly what year it was in one of the photos by recognizing the model year of the cars in the parking lot, which I can do because I'm from Motor City. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that the photo that most resonated with me was the menu of F.W Woolworth's soda fountain. I think I ate everything on that menu that didn't have ham in or on it, at these low prices:
BACON and TOMATO…………… 50c
Toasted Three Decker Sandwich
(I had an agreement with God that bacon was OK outside the home if there was lettuce and tomato and toast with it. Alone it would be traif - unkosher).
That photo of the menu brought back this memory:
Deep winter, my friend Karen & I walk all the way from Greenlawn and Curtis to the State Fair Grounds on Eight Mile and Woodward to ice skate. Coming home at 4:30, it's getting dark, and even our layers of clothes won't protect us, it is so cold. We are a little more than half-way, and there, finally, is the Woolworth's on Seven Mile & Livernois. We come in pulling off gloves, rubbing our hands, galoshes stomping the wooden floor.

Renovated Woolworth Soda Fountain Asheville, N.C.

    We sit down on a red stool and take a little spin - just to make sure we have a good one. ( We will change if we don't.) We look out the window at snowflakes falling through the colored light from the neon sign. We watch the waitress make our order. And there it is in the photo of the menu
HOT NESTLE’S WITH WHIPPED TOPPING & WAFERS 15c

   It is remarkably strange to have grown up in a vital “city of the future”, characterized by dynamism and industry, and know it is now a post-industrial wasteland.

William Livingstone house photo by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

   Have you seen the photos of the ruins of Detroit? Empty high- rises, the ghost of the Beaux Arts Michigan Central Station, decaying mansions, and the population halved since I left. There is a general atmosphere of despair -
but a strange and rather wonderful thing has been happening there.

Let me tell you about it with a poem.
The New Land

You’ve heard of that city
It had an affair
with concrete and steel
the machine was their lovechild
they named it Advance
and how could it not
be the future?
That city was my first home

     Have you heard it’s in ruins?

Next to 40 stories of abandoned smashed-glass skyscraper
and the startled remains of a Beaux-Arts station where
the 20th Century Limited pulled in and men and women
in hats and suits hired porters in perfectly shined shoes
Next to that
                     long blocks of empty lots
I’ve been gone too long to know how the day-to-day goes
But it’s a Black city now   no supermarkets settle in
and nothing fresh comes from a liquor store
So the women go to the vacant spaces   clean up the shards
the bullets    the needles
hoe   plow weed seed and feed the ground that belongs
to no one   put in tomatoes corn   greens   potatoes
And the earth knows they are listening
says “Barter”   says “Seed exchange”     says “Saturday market”

Outside of the churches   among the early sprouts
they say prayers for the crop   grandaddy’s hymn and Gaia hip-hop
arms reaching not skyward
but down
toward the rich reconsecrated land
of Detroit

The Plane Tree & the Woman Born of a Doe

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:29:00 +0000

Plane Tree in Winter Bill Fulton Photos

       Every year the Plane tree across the street re-leafs later. It's May and there is just a bare hint of that new early chartreuse. Every year I ask myself "What if there were no new leaves, if the tree couldn’t do the labor of creating buds any longer?" I love the Plane tree's canopy. It spreads across the street where I have lived for 20 years, and gives such an abundance of green. It reminds me of the street where I grew up in Detroit, the elms forming a long meet-in-the-middle tunnel the length of the block. Here in California lush greenness is spring-brief, then the rains stop and the hills slowly turn brown.

       Yesterday a neighbor said Peter-the-Tree-Man wants to take the tree out, it’s sick, it’s old, it’s dying - and I am close to tears. The neighbor says “So things die, trees die, they’ll plant another one”, and I give him my try-smile, say “See you later” and walk away. I’ve learned that trying to get this neighbor, who loves all art that tribes create, to care deeply for these plane trees, or take in what they mean to me, is a poor use of my time.

     Bill & I have dealt with diseased plants. We were able to save our pear tree. When the blackened leaves that give the disease its name, ‘fire-blight’, appeared, we knew we would not give the tree up easily, and we treated and pruned and special-fed - and yes, talked to it (sang actually) and it lived. It seems to be hard for me to remember that plants, as living things, have life cycles and illness - they are not forever, as art can be, though even art is subject to decay. A few years ago, at the temples of Angkor Wat I wrote:

Tree Growing out of Temple Bill Fulton Photos

The silent struggle of rock and root.
Huge trees growing out of temple stones.
What doesn’t grow cannot free itself.
What cannot die will outlast roots.

And speaking of art, I’ve been working on a poem based on Kiki Smith’s art. Again. I hadn’t looked at the book of her work for a while and felt that it still held another poem. Ah the bronze of those sculptures, the endurance of metal. One sculpture is a woman stepping out of the body of a wolf, the other is a woman born of a doe, her feet still held in the deer's birth passage.


Kiki Smith, Rapture, property of the artist/Pace Wildenstein Gallery

Kiki Smith, 2002, Born, Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund

They are preserved for as long as what-cannot-die doesn’t succomb to rust. Perhaps that is a part of my love of art - its endurance. The ability to conserve, to preserve, to restore, to renovate. Unlike the tree, there is no given limit to its time. But then I look again, and I see that the woman stepping out of the wolf is just on the brink, but can never be fully free, and a woman has been born of a doe, but that silent, fleet beauty will hold her feet forever.

The visual arts are caught at the moment, in the metaphor, as a symbol. The beautiful butterfly Smith has created in one sculpture will remain - but the butterfly's power for us includes the stages it went through on the way to becoming. And of course all art is not beautiful. I am reading David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land. It is an anguished tale that gathers you into itself and takes you on a journey that is fraught, and one doubts the possibility of redemption before the journey ends - and should the journey/book even be completed?

I cannot abandon the natural world for art, though I know many have done it, and I taught alongside them. I cannot abandon art, cannot stop reading what I need to know, because it may cause anguish. I must live in both worlds, and suffer the pain I will feel when Peter tears down that tree limb from limb. When I’m walking I will not see that canopy from a distance, not see the winter sunset between its bare branches, when the sky is stained glass and the tree is the black leading.

Just as I must both suffer what is happening to the earth and still enjoy the beauty of the planet. I must hold the opposites. Over and over life gives me more possibilities to learn that. To practice it. Who knows what the next challenge will be.

Metamorph ising

for the artist Kiki Smith

Metamorphosis means more than once
as it is with egg larva pupa butterfly
as it is with some lives when larval stripes
and slow ripple are shed again and again
then comes the mimicry of dead leaf
till finally chrysalis splits and out flutters
wet-winged splendor

I saw a woman born of a doe
I saw a woman step out of the body of a wolf
There is return

Gaia I know you are wounded
it is hard for you to breathe
I dreamed you shed your scarred
strip mined surface
and underneath was skin
the pink of healing

Now you must rest
and all of us   wolf doe
woman man become pupa
In our silk cocoons
we wait
suspended

Lynn & Leah: A Dialogue in Art & Poetry

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:59:00 +0000

I had the pleasure last month of spending an afternoon in the gallery of Lynn Alicia Franco's home, among her multimedia sculptures. I wrote about her art, which had captured the heart of my sometimes finicky muse. We decided that I would do a blog of her art and my poems.
              Lynn Alicia is a Jungian psychoanalyst, and besides her private analytic practice,
              she teaches, supervises and consults for The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley,
              and for candidates and interns at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

                Alchemerical

Bill Fulton Photos

What if you could sculpt whatever you dreamed?
What if your voice spoke in clay
the way some speak in numbers
the way I siphon ink from tears and the sea?
What if all that you dreamed
couldn’t be shaped in clay
couldn’t be fired?
What if it needed grain
needed the density of a growing thing?
What if you could also carve wood
and join wood to clay
as earth is joined to tree
and still keep the fire?

            A Good Catch

     Of course you sculpted the pelican
     with a fish in its mouth
     golden fish   treasurefish
     Of course I must write
     about hunger
     about the skimming flight   the dive
     the misses

     His fishline arcs goes taut
           tight pull of lifestruggle
                golden fish   treasurefish
                     bringing it home

   Cloth-in-Clay

             You travel among tribes
             where weavers star
           in the play of identity
             and O those intricate designs!
             You sculpt a man with a ceramic belt
             patterned in a hieroglyph of clay bits
             Is this a code? Is there a key
             to your language?



Naked not nude

What is the difference?
         A man paints sculpts   gazes
               at nudes
             A woman makes herself
                 naked
     To make a self
                    And here you are
                      a bare Medusa-headed
                         surf rider on a drift of wood
          with seashell pink
                                 ceramic wings
              Or are they fins?
                                         Either way
                                               you fly!


John Lund photo ©2009 JLW Images

A Pair of Ravens
Medievals believed
the pelican
pecked her own breast
to feed her children
Bird as symbol bird as Christ
Here one raven pecks
the chest of another
till the heart is exposed
And we humans know who does that
don't we?


John Lund photo ©2009 JLW Images

                         Death & the BuddhaBabe

                                                           The clay hand
                                                       large enough to hold
                                                      a cracked human skull
                                                         has soiled knuckles
                                                             dirt under nails
                                                            as if it dug   hard
                                                              and gloveless
                                                             into the grave
                                                                  Facing
                                                             hand and skull
                                                              a roselipped
                                                                blue-eyed
                                                               BuddhaBabe
                                                             and on his cheek
                                                                a crystal tear

                                                            Oh I almost forgot
                                                          the BuddhaBabe’s arms
                                                            are raised in surrender

Bill Fulton Photos

          Arcadia

Part goat part man
Lynn’s Pan
relaxes on the mantle
one leg crossed over the other
shaggychested shaggyhoofed
and yes the lower arms the hands
are hairy   but what about the….
I get up and
look between his legs
and he’s all man
Pan pandemonium panic
I call it
wildhearted glee

Edgewalkers* and the Wild Heart

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Many years ago I wrote:
“We walk upright and apart
divorced from our wild heart”
and though it says “we” it was my own wild heart I was lamenting.

     Recently, in the rain forest of Chiapas, I rediscovered my ‘wild heart’. I called it ‘alegria’, and experienced it as a sweetness and joy and freedom and presence in the moment. And fearlessness.

     I will be 70 next year. I want to live the rest of my life open to my wild heart. I ask myself what I have to change, what I have to give up, and what does wildness really mean?
The cultural ecologist David Abram says that
“Wildness is the earthy, untamed undomes-ticated state of things - open-ended, improvisational, moving according to its own boisterous logic. That which is wild is not really out of control, it is simply out of our control. Wildness is not a state of disorder, but a condition whose order is not imposed from the outside. Wild land follows its own order, its own Tao, its own inherent way in the world.”

   That last line strikes me. Couldn’t it be rewritten to apply to ourselves? The wild heart follows its own order, its own Tao, its own inherent way in the world. Isn’t that what Jung meant by individuation?

     And what does it mean to write from a wild heart? Does it mean you are free from the collective, free of influence? I never want to be free of empathy.

'Figure with Black Torso'

   Recently we saw an exhibit of the ceramic sculpture of Stephen de Staebler. When he was young, he was guided by a love of ancient art - Egyptian sarcophagi, Mayan temples, medieval funerary art. He discarded these influences as he began to explore his own personal imagery and history. His work fuses rock and remnants of sculpture with the human body. His art became freer - it soared! He was creating from his own wild heart.

   Must we begin creating from the Outside? I think of our friend Lynn Franco, who, from the beginning of her work in ceramic sculpture, created spontaneously from her dreams and psyche. It isn’t all ‘alegria’. When the wild heart suffers, the inner world opens.

'Broken Lady'

Inside. Outside. Some of us are at the center of our fields, our art form, our social and political work, and some bring change in from the edge. I learned a great deal about the role of Outsiders from Linda Schele.

In a taped interview she talked about how her contributions to our knowledge of the Maya came about. When she first visited the temples of Palenque in Mexico, she was an artist who taught studio art. She fell in love with Palenque, with the Mayan world - and changed her life to study and
understand it.

At that time the central figures in Mayan archeology and epigraphy, academics from Yale & Harvard, were unable to move forward. There was no real progress in deciphering Mayan writing, history or mythology, because their Standard Model couldn’t be challenged.

It was Linda Schele, along with a few others, who broke the Mayan code, interpreted the history of the rulers of Palenque, and discovered the astonishing fact that Mayan myth is a mirror of the constellations in the night sky.

     Linda called herself an Edgewalker. Edgewalkers push the box, and change its shape. They may do their work in more than one field, or straddle two cultures. They are the ChangeBringers, who force people to ask different questions, and provide answers that were never considered. Their lack of Traditional Expertise is the very qualification that allows them to break through to new territory.

     Linda Schele had a wild heart. She had a passion for the Maya, and the fearlessness of an outsider unafraid to trespass on the center’s accepted truths.

      I have always been an Edgewalker, and I think of the Edgewalkers I know or know of: David Abrams, Carolyn Raffensperger, an attorney and founder of SEHN, whose Precautionary Principle is influencing the center, Mel Mathews of Fisher King Press, my visionary publisher, Terry Tempest Williams, writer, poet and environmentalist, and so many others in the arts, science, politics……..

     I worry less that Yeats “Center does not hold.” I am counting on the wild-hearted Edgewalkers to take us forward.

Sha Sha Higby Artist/Performer

* The term Edgewalker is the title of a video interview of Linda Schele made in 1998, and released in 2010. A book with that title was published by Judi Neal in 2006.

The Gods' Tale: A Fable

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:46:00 +0000

There are ceremonies still held at the Mayan temples of Palenque in Mexico. Some are secret and some are Officially Sanctioned. The Lacantun people guard the frescoes of Bonampak given to them by the State. The Maya surround the site of Chichen Itza. But to get to Yakchilán you must travel to the end of the country, to the Usumacinta, the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala.
You have to hire a launch and go down the fast brown river and climb the high bank. When you arrive at the center you will feel the handwoven blanket of grief over the temples. The Rain Bringers, the MaizeSeed spirit, the Burden Bearers, the Yum Kaax, spirits of the forest, have been abandoned. There is never smokerise from the painted censors.The palapa-altars that the shamans still build are never constructed here.

But the gods still take the voice of the birds, and Yax-kom mut, the green firefly bird, lands on a branch and begins:
    "All day, and almost every day of ever year, the launches arrive. At first we were hopeful. Sometimes, after war, everyone left, but they always returned. We heard the voices and thought our people were coming back. They arrive in boats without paddles. A new, loud power moves the boats and cripples Silence. They move faster than the river, almost as fast as the birds. Their skin is not brown, their hair is not black, their features lack the elegance of our people.
It took us so long to realize they knew nothing about us, that they were strangers. Strangers because they couldn’t feel our presence - even when we poured rain on them, when we turned our power over to the stones, and their eyes followed us up the stairs of the temples.

     They never stay for long. They return to the boats speaking of where they go next. We have never received a blessing. Not a wisp of smoke.
         O great trees. Holy trees. You who are beyond wanting.”

Traveling the Road Not Taken

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:50:00 +0000


Misol-Ha, Chiapas

In 1963 I traveled and worked in Chiapas, Mexico. There were rumors of waterfalls, blue-green rivers, a Mayan city on the banks of a river that could only be reached by motor launch, and a newly discovered temple with painted frescoes, days away from San Cristóbal.

All of these places were unreachable. The forest was dense and roadless, and two young women traveling alone with machete-wielding chicleros was not a good idea. The road from San Cristóbal into the mountains, which occasionally turned into a track, ended at Tenosique. Or was it Ocosingo? To get from San Cristóbal to the Mayan site of Palenque, we went back to Tuxtla, the capitol of Chiapas, and flew with a bush pilot, who barely rose above the mountains and deposited us in a ditch.

Temple of the Sun, Palenque (all photos are mine)

In Mexico, I became who I am - or who I can be. Adventurous, curious about everything to do with culture, with textiles, reading everything, fairly fearless - and, at that time, with a never-before-free spirit.

Though I longed for adventure and discovery, I did not become a field anthropologist, living in a tropical village and learning a native language. I did not work on digs hoping to find something as exciting as the burial chamber in Palenque, with its jade-masked skeleton of a deified ruler. I became a community college instructor, and remained in the same town, and worked at the same college, and that was my calling, and I called myself fortunate.

       Over the years, I would read over the names on my aging map of Mexico, watch documentaries on the people of Chiapas, and read everything I could find on the cracking of the Mayan code, and the Zapatistas, the revolutionaries among “my” people.

     Several years ago I bought a new map of Mexico. Red lines for major roads went to Palenque and all the way south to the Usamacinta river! I retired, and we began to travel…..

     And then, this January, we were there! Careening vans opened the landscape of Chiapas to us. Here was the rumored and murmuring waterfall, and here was the how-can-it-be-aquamarine river,


Agua Azul

and there were the great trees that hid the ruins of Yaxchilan on the high cliff above the wide brown rush of water.

When we came to the turn-off for Bonampak, we switched vans, and a long-haired Lacandon in traditional white toga drove us through miles of one of the last remaining Preserves of uncut rain forest. We walked up to the temple, and there, finally, were the frescoes!

It was as though all the locked places in myself flew open. My dear husband opened to these magical places as well, and of course I wrote constantly. Here are some of my notes, on the way to becoming poems:

Oh the trees the magnificent magnanimous trees the odd and slightly sinister the bearded tree and the one whose branches are braided and the flowers that flourish in the shade

El Chanpan

Each path is a seduction

Palenque: Traveled the world for 7 years and this is where I most wanted to be elegant temples in the rainforest

a watertumble of creeks that sometimes river

Palenque

How happy I am in the lush greening patterns of light and shade and water running running over rock then rock becomes hillock becomes cliff
Is there no end to higher?

At Bonampak I am so moved as the Maya white stone grey stone world turns colorfresco and lives oh, oh like a Mayan Sistine chapel

Mountains covered in forest and the desire to penetrate

to go inside
Always wanting to go
inside…..

Yaxchilan

It Began with Mother Goose

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:36:00 +0000

I received a question from a woman with a three year old daughter. The child walks around rhyming to herself out loud. The woman wanted to know how to encourage poetry in a child. Did my parents do anything to encourage me? My answer was that it all began with Mother Goose.

My mother read me nursery rhymes. and I turned pages and looked at pictures. I mem- orized them and walked around the house sing-songing “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean.” I thought I was Little Miss Muffet and worried about spiders, and I tumbled down a nearby hill like Jill of Jack and Jill.

It was a living world, but I created my own world as well:

They teach her the easy trick
of a tricycle
she imagines her way
around the block
she’s the sheriff
and the bike is her horse
she tracks down bad guys
and rescues a child
dressed in her own clothes

       My mother taught me how to read and write on a blackboard easel when I was 4. She was a great believer in thank you notes. Bernie Birnbaum, our pediatrician, made house calls for measles, chicken pox, ear infections, and each time he came I was encour-
aged to write a thank you note on folded construction paper covered with stickers and stars - and those notes, with mother’s help, became little rhymed verses. Not that this is unusual. Those who teach poetry in the schools know how naturally creative children are with language.

      But there was aloneness in my childhood too, as there were no other kids to play with until I was eight, and I was sent outside to play by myself. I say aloneness rather than loneliness, because it did not feel bad to be alone.

She is left in the yard
that is nowhere
and there is nothing
but the mist and the vine
she sees herself
in a morning glory
and hears the sound of a train
it is calling her
she thinks the whistle
must be her name

      The ability to tolerate and even enjoy being alone - to turn it into creative solitude - is crucial. The most talented young poet I’ve ever known hated being an only child, threw herself into social life in high school, and has not written since. I’m hoping that someday she will be captured by the Muse and carried back to poetry.

      Before I started kindergarden I had my own library card, and later I went to the Sherwood Forest library once a week on my blue Columbia Paratrooper, (it folded in the middle, the handlebars collapsed, and it was a child’s version of the bikes used in WWII. As it aged, it would fold in the middle while I was riding it.)

I brought home 5 or 6 books. In winter I hoped for new snow to track through as I walked to the library muffled and galoshed and gloved.

      We did not have a television until I was 8, and I already had the habit of reading. Until then we listened to the radio. With books and radio you have to fill in the missing visual and or auditory dimen- sions to have a satisfactory experience. TV and video do not require the imagination for sense or enjoyment, and continual activity seems to fill kids’ lives, so I’m not sure how the imagination develops now. I do know that my college students who never read for pleasure could not visualize the narrative or characters.

      I was given a diary with a lock and key when I was 8, and I used it to write stories, and play with words, and confide secrets, and I created names for myself in pseudo-Indian languages, since
I did not like the anglicized version of Leah my parents insisted on using. I don’t remember the name I gave the diary, but it was my Best Friend.

     And I still keep a journal. Sometimes what begins as a couple of lines in my journal turns into a poem. I can add images to Pages, and I’m often inspired by art, and music, neither of which were a part of my parents’ lives. I told the woman who asked the question which began this blog, that art, music, and nature, introduced early, will not disappear. And even if what is experienced is lost, there is always the chance it will return later. Sometimes I believe that nothing is ever lost.

The poems in this blog are from my chapbook A Flash of Angel, published by Blue Light Press.

Sleigh Bells and Ink Wells Blog Hop

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:01:00 +0000

                                                  Gathering Light

      There were only a few Christian families on our block when I was growing up. One evening before Christmas, the McCarthys invited all the Jewish kids in to see their tree. I was enchanted. Tinsel, icicles, colored lights, angels - and under the tree there was fluffy cotton snow, and a glass skating rink with tiny gliding figures.

    We knew the appeal for a Chanukah bush would be ignored, but my brother and I tried anyway. To my parents chagrin, Mrs. Dunbar, Bagley School’s music teacher, taught us the words to all the carols, and we delighted the McCarthys by singing along to Perry Como’s Greatest Christmas Songs.

     I loved to light the Chanukah menorah, adding one more candle each night, and singing the prayer with my mother. Somehow I understood that we must bring light into the winter darkness. I remember asking a teacher if The Early People Who Lived in Caves and The People Who Lived in B.C., knew that the light would come back as it got darker and darker in winter.

      Many years later I began studying the mythological traditions that answered my question. I learned of the Great Mother, the God of the Dying Year, and the Sacrifice that brought back Light in the spring. I learned the cycles of death, rebirth and resurrection and taught myth and symbol, among other things, to my college students.

       Since Bill was raised with trees, lights and carols, we have both a tree and a Chanukah menorah, or candelabra. Late at night I like to sit alone in the living room across from the lighted tree, and experience the awe and mysterious silence in which I am totally present. The Chanukah candlefire provides a different experience - a meditation that takes me back though centuries - through millennia. I return to the great synagogue of Prague, to Sepharad, where Jews, Muslims & Christians created a great culture together. I enter the study house of Damascus, and the temple of Jerusalem and all the while there is the murmur of prayer - the ancient unchanging prayer.

      We not only need and seek light at the darkest time of the year. Light symbolizes the work of a lifetime, in the form of insight, epiphany and clarity. For me, those are the rewards of the soul’s lonely journey, which often passes through darkness and shadow. Both nature and culture rely on the light. Here is a poem that combines both, which I wrote in New Mexico last June.

Moonrise, Truchas Peak

     Gathering Light

I.
At Truchas Peak
the blood red sun
drops
below the barns
the horses
the tired earth
just as the moon
balloons upward

II.
At the Santuario de Chimayo
the girl in the gift shop
tells me she’s out of
St. Anthony
she has other candles
       (What can it mean
       to be out of St. Anthony?)

El Santuario de Chimayo

III
In a hallowed corner
of the deep adobe walls
rows of glass votives
flickers of colored fire
from the painted saints
Touch a tapered stick
to the wick
and kindle
The Holy Family

Candlefire in El Santuario de Chimayo

Light comes in so many forms. The love and connection to an amazing family and wonderful friends, the arts that inspire me, and the connection to the Self that comes from writing. The result of that writing is my poetry book, After the Jug Was Broken, published this year by Fisher King Press - (if you are looking for a light- gathering poetry book to give as a gift). Light also comes from writing this blog - which allows me to share whatever I value. I invite your comments and your subscription.

I wish you a holiday season filled with light.
To continue on our blog hop
go to Smoky Talks: Smoky Zeidel's blog

The Other "Bloghoppers"

Patricia Damery http://patriciadamery.com/
Debra Brenegan http://debrabrenegan.blogspot.com/
Malcolm R. Campbell http://KnghtOfSwords.wordpress.com/
T.K. Thorne http://tkthorne.wordpress.com
Anne K. Albert http://Anne-K-Albert.blogspot.com
Elizabeth Clark-Stern http://elizabethclarkstern.com/wordpress/
Collin Kelley http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/
Sharon Heath http://www.sharonheath.com/
Melinda Clayton http://AuthorMelindaClayton.xanga.com
Ramey Channell http://SweetMusicOnMoonlightRidge.blogspot.com

Not Research, But MeSearch

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:12:00 +0000

I am on Level D in U. C. Berkeley’s main library. This is where the art books are kept. I reach into the backpack I use for book runs, but the notebook with the title and call number of the book I want isn’t there. I’ve left it at home in my purse. OK, I’ll look it up on Oskicat, the online resource. But what’s the artist’s name? I can’t remember. One of my favorite living artists, gone! Now what? Do a search under contemporary German artists? Ah, at least I remember where he’s from. But that search might take forever. The name Hundertwasser keeps repeating in my head but it’s not him. My artist is alive and German, and Hunderwasser is Austrian and dead. Then suddenly it comes to me - Anselm Kiefer!! Yes! Except that I’ve just said Yes! out loud in a study area and 5 students look up at the crazy lady. I pantomine an apology that may or may not translate across cultures.

I start a title search, don’t rem -ember the title, change to an author search, and start down the long list of books by and about this prolific artist, till I recognize the one I want. But I don’t have a pen to write down the long call number. I will have to ask the least forbidding, least intently focused of the students to borrow pen or pencil. The one
I choose looks at me as though I’d asked for her colorful earflap hat, or her laptop - or something antique, like a quill. She finally fishes a pen out of her backpack. I realize I don’t have any paper either, and I can’t bring myself to ask for anything else. Ah, but I do have gum! I can take out a piece, and write on the white side of the wrapper. I do that, return the pen, and find the book, blessing John Dewey and a lifetime of libraries for making this part easy. I take the elevator back up to the exit level. I did remember to bring my library card. I can check out my book. Victory is mine.

Collaboration, Occupation & The RSVP Cycle

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:47:00 +0000

           Finally finished! The art Bill and I collaborated on for 5 months is now up on the wall. His art, my poetry, and artistic decisions made by both. Though we each create independently, we learned so much from collaboration, that we couldn't working on our own, How to blend, without diluting. How to speak up for what doesn't work in a loving, non-alienating way. How to assist and take direction from each other. How to work with new processes (beeswax!) in a really patient way that respects that one of us is faster than the other. How we are both gentled and transformed by the process.

     It is almost too obvious to write of our highly competitive global economy, and how that com- petitive spirit trickles down to our relations with one another: Who has the best and latest? How even an art form as remote from popular culture as poetry can become a competition for prizes and positions - trophies on a mantle, as one poet wrote.

           I’m very interested in collaborative models, and I turned to one called the RSVP Cycle, created by Lawrence Halperin in the 1960s. I have written about the Halperins before - Lawrence, the legendary landscape architect, and his wife and collaborator Anna, my 91 year old equally legendary dance teacher.

       The RSVP cycle was a way to make the process of design and the choreography of a performance less autocratic, and more inclusive of those involved - the clients, community and dancers. I think it is adaptable to many other activities as well.

      R is for resources, “both human and material.” The question is what’s available? For example, what is available to the Occupy movement? Computers, internet, Twitter, cell phones, open space, human ingenuity, and common concerns. If you can’t use amplifiers, the combined force of the human voice repeating the words of the speakers creates community as well as amplification. The intangible must be continually addressed: What are the objectives?

Larry Halperin at his completed Levi Plaza in San Francisco

       S is for Score, and the focus is on “design, participation, events and activities.” As a choreographer, Anna tells her dancers what she wants them to achieve; the vision she has - but not how to achieve it. The dance itself arises from the internal and group process of the dancers. Adbusters, the Canadian group that first put out a call for activity like the Occupation, did not specify content or process. The Assembly of the Occupation, which meets daily, decides issues.

      V is for Valuaction. People’s feelings and belief systems must be incorporated into the process. The needs and desires of the clients, community or dancers, must be part of the process and the decision making process itself, must “respect, acknowledge, and incorporate these values”. We can see this operating in the Occupy movement.

    P is for Performance. The result of R, S & V is the product, and how it evolves over time. If we think of the cycle as a problem to be solved, the solution should be organic and “non-static,” and defined by those who use it, experience it, and appreciate it.

    Despite the highly competitive global economy, I pray for more and more collaboration on so many levels - it is our key to survival on this planet.

   All quotations from the web site Bridge Over the Abyss
   http://redseven.wordpress.com/rsvp-cycles-lawrence-halprin/

Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:04:00 +0000

       I just finished putting up our Day of the Dead altar. Candles, marigolds, a sugar skull wearing a mariachi’s sombrero, and traditional Mexican figurines - skeletons dancing, teaching, sitting in a booth at a restaurant, death in normal places, because in Mexico death is normal, not something to fear.

     The photos are up: parents, grandparents, the recent dead, like our dear friend Aldo who could go nowhere without music. For a week after he died, both Bill and I kept hearing his favorites. The sound so filled the house that when a group of women arrived I actually warned them that the house was haunted by music. There is a group photo on the altar of that extraordinarily lively bunch, my father’s family. Though I haven’t seen many in decades, they are instantly present - and thoroughly themselves. I miss them and mourn them.

     You know I’m not Mexican, so why do I have an altar? Is it mimicry, Latina-wanna-be, the spread of Day of the Dead ceremonies throughout Northern California? It began in Mexico
in 1963, in late October -

     My friends at the national university (UNAM) tell me it is time to purchase calaveras de sucre, sugar skulls, for those I'm close to, with their names written in frosting. They are in the windows of every bakery. Julio and Rosana tell me we will be going to the island of Janitzio in the state of Michoacan for Día de los Muertos. Then I might really begin to understand their country.

    We take a second class bus to Patzcuaro, and a boat to the island. The sun is setting. The silvery lake turns orange, the color of this holy day. A parade of torch-lit fishing canoes passes us. The fisherman are performing a ritual of gratitude, and we watch a ballet of butterfly shaped nets.

     After Mass, a crowd of the P’urhépechas, as the people call themselves, emerges from the church, and immediately a group of men grab sticks from a pile, use them as canes, and begin the Danza de los Viejecitos, the little old men. They are very convincing, and very funny, and my friends tell me this was a Pre-Columbian dance to the sun god. I don't ask them why this particular dance was used to honor the sun god, and I still don't know the answer.

      And then the procession begins. Men, women and children are carrying torches, candles and tall wooden arches covered with cempasuchil flowers, the orange marigolds that have been used to honor the dead for milennia. The color symbolizes the earth, and it is these flowers that will guide the spirits to both the home altar, and the one they are now creating on the graves of their ancestors.

   Baskets of fruit are placed next to the grave, the wooden arches, like blossoming sculptures, are erected over it, and tall tapers placed around it. And then the chanting and singing begins - the night is all and only candleglow and sound.

    There is only this place, and those voices. It will last till dawn, and we will remain, without sleep, but not the least bit tired. And the light and song are no longer outside us, we are no longer curious observers. The ritual has entered into me, become me - and it has remained there ever since.

Tonight I will light orange tapers on my altar, and sing to my dead.

The Land of Chac Mool, the Rain God

noreply@blogger.com (Leah Shelleda) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 23:39:00 +0000

We have friends who travel the world looking for people who still follow the old ways, play ancient instruments, and dress in something handmaid, bright colored, patterned, beaded or embroidered. They have visited the Omo of Ethiopia who decorate their faces and bodies with minerals and plants and flowers every day, and the Tuareg of the Sahara, swathed in dyed blue cloth the color of parrots.

Omo of Ethiopia

     You could call it voyeurism if they didn’t care so much about endangered cultures - which they all are. We’ve done some of that travel ourselves. I was able to go to Rajasthan because I promised my husband we would find the Rajput gypsies, whose music and dance he had fallen in love with in the film Lacho Drom. And we did.

      But after Christmas we will travel in our own hemisphere, to the places I first explored in 1963 as a student and volunteer - places where temples and pyramids, costumes, languages, song and dance are as unique, and “exotic” as anywhere I’ve been: the states of Yucatan and Chiapas in Mexico.

      In the fall of 1963, a friend and I traveled on third class buses, bush planes, and the “camioneta” - a specially outfitted vehicle used by the planning dept of the museum of anthropology. We purchased embroidered ‘huipiles’ from Chamula women for their full value. We bounced down the dirt roads of Chiapas in ancient jeeps and pick-ups, and watched the Chamula men in their ribboned hats go off to town,

Chamula of Chiapa

while the women carried great loads of firewood back to the village. We traveled with monks who had studied the Mayan codices in the Vatican library, and were warned by Gertud Blom, the aging European “empress” of San Cristobal de las Casas, not to seduce them - her way of insulting our American youthfulness.
We saw the ruins of temples adjacent to waterfalls, and realized that acres of surrounding hills were unexcavated ruins. We were volunteers, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the forest people to stop getting their water from the rivers infested with onchocerca volvulus, a nematode that causes blindness. We were unsuccessful because they laughed at our “scientific method”, which was culturally inappropriate - and I still feel guilty about it.

I couldn’t learn enough about the Yucatec Maya - their hieroglyphics, now deciphered, their architecture, art, religion - and their calendar, whose wrongful interpretation by Westerners has led to the belief in a 2012 apocalypse. The Mayans were one of the subjects of my graduate oral exams - though a great deal of what I learned has been refuted, but I’ve managed to keep up.


Maya of Yucatan

I so look forward to introducing Bill to “my” Mayan world - and to explore with him. I hope to take the boat trip on the Usamacinta river to the ruins of Yaxchilan, which I did not see in 1963, and has been calling to me since. I don’t know what it is about that river and those ruins that I have to go to, but I will find out.

Meanwhile, let me introduce you to a poem by a Quiché Mayan poet from Guatemala, Humberto Ak'abal.

The Grandmother

The night begins, 

when the moon

—Grandmother of the villages— 

comes out with her lime-white candle 

to light up the silence.  

The darkness 

hides in the canyons,

the small birds 

roll up their songs

and the trees 

lie on their own shadows.

The grandmother 

who hasn’t slept for centuries 

sinks 

into the eyes of the night. 