Turtle Island

Turtle Island was the name for Earth according to many Native American traditions. Or should I say is the name--these traditions are still alive, even if the the actual people who created them and sustained them for eons are gone. They are being sustained by people everywhere who want to reconnect the earth--people like me who are reconnecting and wanting to teach others how to do the same out of a desire that is sometimes not easily understood. Does it matter on the cosmic level if the earth is saved or not? Everything decays and dies--I say what matters is how this decay and death occurs. All of us wish a good death, free of illness, in our sleep at a ripe old age after years of loving and learning. Don't you think the earth would wish the same? One of the things that Turtle teaches us is that all things ripen slowly over time. If we push the river the banks will collapse, the fields will flood, there will be nothing to eat. Important lessons for me this week as I resist being caught up in the summer rush to make money that captures Block Island's soul this time of year and puts it in a shark cage for a few months. The shark cage is what the locals jokingly call the jail here. I want to be free to live without fear. This may mean I will displease a lot of people who are expecting me to come through, to perform, but it is my own fault for capitulating to the system. Is it more important for me to make a hundred dollars or to write the following letter to the editor of the Block Island Times about the carnage I have noticed on the roads as I bike to my job sites? The earth does not need to be saved, in the sense that we are all already saved, but I do believe that we should act from good intentions, that to spread positive energy, to give voice to those who can't speak and who need to be heard, is part of eradicating the fear that keeps us in the shark tank, afraid we'll be devoured alive if we venture outside the bars. As the dimensional shift approaches,we have the opportunity to create much good karma on an individual and cosmic level by making conscious choices that show our respect for the bodies we've been given, and for our home Earth. I pray every day for the strength to act with right intention in all matters. I ask that my fears about survival be dissolved. I felt lighter after writing the following letter. I know people will laugh at me, but I also know I did the right thing.

To The Editor,

While riding my bike on Corn Neck Road over the past week I have noticed a blackbird, a box turtle and a goldfinch, dead - smashed or stunned by cars. I have also heard of two island dogs killed by cars in the past month. Many will say the dogs should have been tied up, or that the birds and turtle were in the way, but this doesn’t change the fact that these animals would most likely be alive if the drivers had been more conscious of what was in front of them, perhaps in less of a rush to get to the beach or to work.
The turtle, its shell cracked down the middle, was particularly upsetting to me. According to Native American teachings, Turtle is the oldest symbol for planet Earth, a symbol of the eternal Mother who provides us with all we need. With its slow pace, Turtle teaches us to be grounded, to stay connected. The smashed turtle - and this is not the only one I’ve seen – makes it apparent how easily disconnected we become from the island during the busy summer months.
While my heart aches at the current state of our planet due to our rapacious need to conquer and consume, I have hope. More than once, I have seen people stop to help turtles across the road. I don’t expect everyone to abandon their cars for bikes, but I ask you all to show respect for the creatures of the island, and thus the earth, by slowing down. The gifts you’ll receive by connecting with nature will be manifold and renewable. No act is too small to rebuild a sustainable Earth.

With respect for all creatures great and small,
Jen Lighty
Corn Neck Road

Summer Solstice

Today is the longest day of the year, tomorrow we will begin the descent into darkness again--yet winter seems so far away as summer begins, the blackberry blossoms and wild roses blooming frothy white as I race past the stonewalls on my bike. The sun enters Cancer today and we have a full moon in Capricorn, a union which asks us to try to balance our inner and outer worls. "The world is too much with us, getting and spending we lay waste our powers, " wrote William Wordsworth over two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, before capitalism became the world's religion. Still, I try to find a moment where I resist every day. I noticed goldfinches flashing by my bike and the ripple of moonlight on the duck pond on Old Town Road as I rode home from my catering job serving sailors gourmet meals for a week straight. Half the food gets thrown in the trash at the end of the night and none of the bottles are recycled. No one notices or cares about the waste except for me, but I don't care enough to go back and recycle all their bottles. All I can do is not take jobs like this I guess--or when I do realize it is a test. An opportuniyt to look beyond judgement, to let go of my resentment of the rich, to further my dedicaiton to serving humanity by transforming our world.....my worms are churning in the bin out behind my yard. Worm tea to make tomoroow, when it is supposed to rain, and I can retreat to my inner life, regroup and reconnect with who I am in stillness. Blessed be.

Letter To The Editor

I wrote my first letter to the editor to the BI Times last night. Actually, it's my first ever. I thought I would share it here with you. Note the application of problem is the solution thinking.

To The Editor:

This letter is in response to Bicycle and Moped Safety Commission member John Leone’s statement in the June 11 edition of The Block Island Times that there is no opposition to the proposed town ordinance mandating that all bike riders on Block Island be required to wear helmets.
While I am wary of placing myself in opposition to anyone, especially the Police, who will be handing out $40 tickets to those in violation if the ordinance passes, I feel that this proposed ordinance reflects larger cultural issues in regard to our personal freedoms, freedoms which are rapidly eroding under the Bush administration under the guise of our supposed need for protection, a need created by casting a cloud of fear over all our daily activities, over a simple pleasure like riding a bike. I believe we have reached a point where this fear is so pervasive that most don’t even realize they are being controlled by it, certainly hardly anyone questions the need for its existence in the first place.
While I acknowledge that accidents do and will happen, I don’t feel it is the obligation of our government to regulate the personal choices of its citizens when the results of these choices will primarily harm only themselves. I realize the ramifications of not wearing a helmet effects members of the dedicated rescue squad and the personnel at the Medical Center, but do we suggest an ordinance banning diners at island restaurants from eating burgers and fries because they cause heart attacks? And we as a community, certainly avoid looking directly at the hordes drinking themselves into a blind stupor in the island bars.
Instead of giving the law further control over our lives, I suggest we apply some creative thinking to the problem by viewing the problem itself as the solution. Bikes aren’t the problem - it’s the presence of too many cars that creates accidents, cars often driven by people under the influence of alcohol. Instead of penalizing carefree, environmentally-conscious bikers, we need to come up with creative solutions that will reduce the number of cars driven on the island during the busy summer months, as well as address the issue of drunk driving, which I fear is often ignored in this community.
While this issue may not seem important in comparison with the larger political issues of our day, or just not important at all to those whose prime concern is capitalizing on the brief tourist season, I think it is worth examining on a deeper level in order to determine why we feel the way we do as members of a society who has elected a federal government that feels we need to enact more and more laws to protect us from ourselves. The traumatic head injury this proposed ordinance is supposed to protect us from is indicative of what I see as an injury to the collective brain of the United States itself. We are a brain-damaged nation numbly accepting whatever our government tells us instead of a union of self-empowered citizens able to determine what is best for us on both an individual and collective levels according to our local needs.
I considered not writing this letter in the hopes that the Police would let the ordinance, if it passes, slide for locals, but know that this attitude reflects the hypocrisy I wish to dissolve on all levels of our society. It’s true that we must think globally and act locally if we want to create a sustainable society based on respect and cooperation instead of fear. No issue is too small or undeserving of our attention.
I encourage the Town Council and members of the various town commissions to think creatively instead of on a reactionary level that creates the potential for hypocrisy in its citizens. As we examine our collective decisions, no matter how trivial they may seem on a global scale, I think we’ll find that the truth really will set us free.

Joni Mitchell Morning

Today my sadhana included listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue, speaking the words love and gratitude over the water I drank, water doused with lavender, skulkcap, and st. john's wort to soothe my nervous system, summoning the spirit of those plants to aid me (I read recently that we don't even need to ingest the plants to enlist their aid, all we need to do is ask. Amazing), practicing several rounds of the Swimming Dragon, a form of tai chi I taught myself from a book when I was 22 and which I was surprised to discover Maria also practices, saying fading away as I breathed in and thank you, as I breathed out, as taught by poet Li-Young Li, a brief series of shoulder and back stretches and four rounds of sun salutations, after which I recited the mantra given to me by yoga teacher Jeff Davis and recited the Tube of Light as passed on to me by Maria. Afterwards I mixed ultimate green food powder with some O.J. (green food powder oxygenates the brain and is good for depression), ate some whole wheat toast with soy margarine and drank a gourd of organic yerba mate. Then I sat down and starting writing this litany, with which I complete the daily goals I set for myself with Maria the other day: To meditate and do yoga daily, to eat one organic thing, and to express myself creatively. I have done it all in the first hour of being awake! There are probably lots of days when I do this, but I am not mindful of it, rushing to get to work instead of giving myself credit for the work I am always doing. The work of being good to one's self in small ways is very important. I tend to become so focused on the larger goals of how I want to be that I give up on my daily practice, my sadhana slides into the dung heap and I follow it, wallowing in my self-perceived filth. I am part of a culture that knows deep inside that the way of life it is promoting is wrong, a culture that lies to itself, which means it is not authentic. However, I have the ability through my choices to separate myself from that culture. This is not the same as rebelling, which requires an antagonist. In my heart I am at peace with those who go along with the mass hallucination, although in my mind I grow frustrated sometimes and perhaps speak words that people are not ready to hear. This was an issue that came up in my soul retrieval. One of my wounded soul parts was an Amazonian woman who was trading some sort of fiber from her tribe to white colonialists. She paddled her canoe alone to their settlements. She saw what the white people were going to do to her people and spoke of it, but the men wouldn't listen to her. She even came up with a plan to expand their trade so that they would be more self-sufficient, but they wouldn't listen. They weren't ready to hear about their imminent destruction. One day as she was paddling, her canoe overturned and she became tangled up in the fibers and drowned. She died angry and feeling unheard and as her soul has traveled, finally entering my body, this need to speak and this anger has traveled through its new hosts. During the soul retrieval Tomma, the shaman who performed it along with Maria, went into the water and saved the woman. Tomma watched her go back to the village and live out the rest of her life. This time she stayed silent because she knew that her people were not ready to hear what she had to say. She had respect for where they were at, she operated from a place of non-judgment, which is much more difficult that judgment because it requires letting go of fear. Non-judgment means one accepts whatever happens as what is meant to be. Non-judgment means one dies in peace when the time is right and accepts the death, even terrible violent untimely death, as part of a pattern that must play itself out in order to balance dark and light. Tomma blew this healed soul part back into my heart. I am not surprised that this issue of speaking out when I should be silent is coming up so forcefully for me now. Integrating a soul part takes time and practice, and as sages so sagely say, things are often at their worse right when they are about to be released.

So I have had the sublime Joni Mitchell as my guide on this gray looks like it will rain morning. She is the ultimate musician to me. She sees right into my soul and sings it, unafraid to be naked and bleeding. In her new book the critic Camille Paglia says Mitchell's song "Woodstock" is one of the great poems of our era. She's right. Sometimes when I read contemporary poetry I think it is dull, has its head in the sand like an ostrich when it should be looking at the stars, that its antenna aren't working, that they arent' picking up the signals shooting across the galaxy, that most poets are so dulled by processing their own grief that they can't see the full spectrum of the possibilities available to them about which to write. Maybe that's the function poetry serves for us now--poetry as therapy--and that is well and good, not to be lamented, just accepted. Those who see beyond the word as therapeutic, who see it as a multidimensional tool to create reality, we can invent a new art form. We don't have to call it poetry, just as Jeanette Winterson says she doesn't write novels. She writes books. I don't write novels either, which is probably why my books don't sell. I have recenlty decided to call the book I wrote about Hawaii a mythological memoir. Just calling it a different name is enabling me to break free from the structural constraints of the novel, of what I thought it was supposed to be, and express what the book needed, my wild mind snarling like a tiger in the sugarcane.

Eat one organic thing, meditate, express myself creatively. The day has just begun. Who knows how many more times I will be able to do these things? But if I don't, it's ok. I kept my commitment to myself and can spend the rest o fthe day doing what needs to be done. However, I have a feeling that this commitment, if I stick to it, is going to open doors into new ways of being, that will enable me imagine my life richly, as the Lakota (and Jeff Davis) say.

Troubled Water

Troubled Water

Who told you?
Did you see it live on TV?
The surf finally came that day
after a flat summer.
I had just learned to look
beneath the surface of the waves
I’d been riding since childhood days.
Peace reigned in the kingdom of striped bass
who patrolled the borders of our island,concealed behind rocks and curtains of seaweed.
Sometimes, when I came upon them,
I could have sworn they were asleep.
I shot them through the eyes to prove
they were alive, holding my breath
till my lungs almost burst.
I drove my spear
until it pierced the socket
and came out on the other side.
It’s just instinct--
fish don’t feel pain,
was the general consensus
of everyone on the beach.
I wanted to believe anything.
The surf finally came that day
after a flat summer.
I sharpened my spear tip with a file
and cursed the waves
which made the water cloudy.
I didn’t want to ride, I wanted to sink,
but I swam out to meet them anyway.
We watched to see if clouds of smoke
would blight the sun.
We weren’t that far away.
You might have thought we were crazy.
Our hair was matted and our wetsuits chafed.
You might have thought we should be locked away.
Some of us joked we lived in the mental hospital already.
All of us knew there was no escape.
A year later, we were ready
to defend ourselves
from the Second Coming.
We had clams.
We had lobsters.
We had bunkers
of Budweiser.
None of us thought
the attack would come
from within
our own ranks.
Did you hear?
The counter girl asked
when we rolled into town,
laughing and hungry for sushi.
There must have been
a raw silence
that rose up to meet her
when she leaped.
Most of us thought
bridges were built
to carry us across
the water.
She really believed
there was no escape
from the falling tower.
Someone should have told
all of us are crazy.