It's rare that I find a contemporary poem that seems absolutely necessary to my existence. A poem that makes "the top of my head feel like it's going to explode" to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. I came upon this Robert Bly poem in a flyer for The Great Mother/New Father conference on the sale table at the BI Poetry Project. I knew immediately that I'd found exactly what I needed--what I'd been searching for for months. I felt like the poet was not only speaking to me, but that it was written for me. These are the best poems I think, for they enter our bloodstream and our breath. The become part of us; they link us to a continuum it is all too easy to forget.
Growing Wings
It's all right if Cezanne goes on painting the same picture.
It's all right if juice tastes bitter in our mouths.
It's all right if the old man drags one useless foot.
The apple on the Tree of Paradise hangs there for months.
We wait for years and years on the lip of the falls;
The blue-gray mountain keeps rising behind the black trees.
It's all right if I feel this same pain until I die.
A pain that we have earned gives more nourishment
Than the joy we won at the lottery last night.
It's all right if the partridge's nest fills with snow.
Why should the hunter complain if his bag is empty
At dusk? It only means the bird will live another night.
It's all right if we turn in all our keys tonight.
It's all right if we give up our longing for the spiral.
It's all ri ght if the boat I love never reaches shore.
If we're already so close to death, why should we complain?
Robert, you've climbed so many trees to reach the nests.
It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down.
----Robert Bly
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Building Bridges
Believe it or not, I've been asked the question, "So where's the bridge?" by people who want to come to Block Island. I worked for years in a B &B and had to answer all the mundane questions of people who were so obsessed with the details of planning every minute of their holiday, it was obvious they were in need of a vacation. One of the best things about living on Block Island is that there is not a bridge! Islands like Jamestown, RI or Key West, islands you can drive to, are just not the same as one's you actually have to try to get to, islands that you can't get to on some days (today for example, the boats and planes are canceled due to high winds), or that you can't get off. This is a good test if you're an island person or not. If you get stuck on Block Island and are glad, you are an island person. If you fret and curse the weather, you're not, or are just not ready to be one yet. What are island people like? John Donne famously wrote "No man is an island," meaning we are not alone, that all of us are connected through our mortality. No matter where we go, we end up in the same place, a place we can't see with our physical eyesight (yet.) An island person knows one has to build bridges between people in order to survive. Many island people also have a deep propensity for solitude, a feeling that one is actually an island, separated from the rest of the world from the thousands of moods of the sea. How to live with this conundrum? I will admit this has been difficult for me. I have removed myself from mainland reality because I could not cope with the mass cultural brainwashing I saw taking place. This was not a conscious choice at first, just a natural resistance, a preservative instinct. I wanted to generate my own images, not be told what to see. After many years of connecting to myself, of exploring who I am and why I am here, of taking internal risks while playing it safe on the outside (many island people could care less about "careers." We know that what you do is often a cover up for what you're doing inside), it is time for me to build the bridge that will connect my vision to a larger reality, to be of service in whatever way I can.
In 2002, Suzi Brown, a girl who grew up on Block Island, killed herself by jumping from the Newport Bridge. Suzi jumped the day before the first anniversary of 9/11. I remember sitting on the beach that day wondering what the waves would bring, knowing that something was going to happen again. I never thought it would be something from within our community. Like most of America, I thought it was going come from outside.
In 2003, Rachel Tonner, another island girl, overdosed on heroin and died in the Port Authority in New York City. I view her death, which the whole year round community witnessed, as a slow form of suicide. Throughout the writing of Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary, I felt deeply connected to these two. I began writing the book the week Suzi died. I knew Suzi a little bit, and Rachel was a good friend of mine who I loved. You know the saying that deaths come in threes? Well I felt all along as I wrote the book that I was the third person in this trifecta. I was aware that what I wanted to achieve was a spiritual death that would help me bridge their deaths for other people--I never wanted to physically die. I wanted to examine why they chose to die--what their souls were saying to us by making this seemingly unexplainable choice.
However, when you ask for a vision, you sometimes receive more than you bargained for. As I went through this process, I lost my way. I was scared and my fear made me confused that I would physically die too. Yes, one could say that my biochemistry was screwed up and made me go over to the dark side (I just skimmed the totally reductive Against Depression, by Peter Kramer, and disagree with his assessment of depression as simply a physical disease that can be treated like any other. Why? Because I don't believe that any disease is simply physical).
All I can say is that the intensity of the experience was what was needed to complete the book--this is what was wanted from me. This is what my soul needed. I know what my soul needs from how powerfully something grips me. When I am drawn towards something so powerfully that to resist feels like I'm dying, I know I have encountered what my soul needs, which is so often contrary to the needs of my ego, sometimes of my body itself. It doesn't matter if anyone reads Bluebell, because I embody this journey now, but I do plan to publish the book at some point in the near future so I can share my journey directly--telling the truth is important and a necessary step in healing.
Healing is a word I have had some issues with recently, since to me it implies that there is something wrong in the first place. If you believe, as I do, that everything one experiences is something one attracts because it is necessary for the soul's growth, then there is no such thing as sickness. Just an imbalance that needs to be corrected in order for the experience to be fully integrated. So I have been trying not to use this word lately, since, if you believe, as I do, that our words create our reality, that using the word healing will stop me and others realizing that we always receive what we need.
There are many bridges to build--forgiveness is a key material in the construction of them, and acceptance is a key component in the construction of forgiveness. I do my best to accept where others are in their lives and ask the universe that they do the same with me. (I ask the universe because sometimes asking actually people doesn't go over well. One has to be "on the same page" as they say sometimes in order to not be misunderstood, thus creating more anger.)
ne of the bridges I am building now is a writing workshop based on my alchemical journey. I will be teaching this workshop next April at the Block Island Poetry Project founded by my friend Lisa Starr. I will also be offering it at some point at a wonderful new bridge being built on Block Island right now. My friend and spiritual teacher Maria DeMarco has brought her non-profit Concordia, Inc., to the island. She is transforming the Beach House B & B, the home of the amazing Ccopaccatty family, into a center for health and art. I am incredibly excited about what she will bring to the community through Concordia, and am looking forward to participating in the center. The first thing I will be doing at the Beach House is a permaculture site analysis. Maria and the Ccopaccatty's want to turn the property into a permaculture site! For someone with no hope of buying property on this island, this really proves that dreams do come true, that to imagine one's life richly, as the Lakota say, will bring your dreams into fruition.
In 2002, Suzi Brown, a girl who grew up on Block Island, killed herself by jumping from the Newport Bridge. Suzi jumped the day before the first anniversary of 9/11. I remember sitting on the beach that day wondering what the waves would bring, knowing that something was going to happen again. I never thought it would be something from within our community. Like most of America, I thought it was going come from outside.
In 2003, Rachel Tonner, another island girl, overdosed on heroin and died in the Port Authority in New York City. I view her death, which the whole year round community witnessed, as a slow form of suicide. Throughout the writing of Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary, I felt deeply connected to these two. I began writing the book the week Suzi died. I knew Suzi a little bit, and Rachel was a good friend of mine who I loved. You know the saying that deaths come in threes? Well I felt all along as I wrote the book that I was the third person in this trifecta. I was aware that what I wanted to achieve was a spiritual death that would help me bridge their deaths for other people--I never wanted to physically die. I wanted to examine why they chose to die--what their souls were saying to us by making this seemingly unexplainable choice.
However, when you ask for a vision, you sometimes receive more than you bargained for. As I went through this process, I lost my way. I was scared and my fear made me confused that I would physically die too. Yes, one could say that my biochemistry was screwed up and made me go over to the dark side (I just skimmed the totally reductive Against Depression, by Peter Kramer, and disagree with his assessment of depression as simply a physical disease that can be treated like any other. Why? Because I don't believe that any disease is simply physical).
All I can say is that the intensity of the experience was what was needed to complete the book--this is what was wanted from me. This is what my soul needed. I know what my soul needs from how powerfully something grips me. When I am drawn towards something so powerfully that to resist feels like I'm dying, I know I have encountered what my soul needs, which is so often contrary to the needs of my ego, sometimes of my body itself. It doesn't matter if anyone reads Bluebell, because I embody this journey now, but I do plan to publish the book at some point in the near future so I can share my journey directly--telling the truth is important and a necessary step in healing.
Healing is a word I have had some issues with recently, since to me it implies that there is something wrong in the first place. If you believe, as I do, that everything one experiences is something one attracts because it is necessary for the soul's growth, then there is no such thing as sickness. Just an imbalance that needs to be corrected in order for the experience to be fully integrated. So I have been trying not to use this word lately, since, if you believe, as I do, that our words create our reality, that using the word healing will stop me and others realizing that we always receive what we need.
There are many bridges to build--forgiveness is a key material in the construction of them, and acceptance is a key component in the construction of forgiveness. I do my best to accept where others are in their lives and ask the universe that they do the same with me. (I ask the universe because sometimes asking actually people doesn't go over well. One has to be "on the same page" as they say sometimes in order to not be misunderstood, thus creating more anger.)
ne of the bridges I am building now is a writing workshop based on my alchemical journey. I will be teaching this workshop next April at the Block Island Poetry Project founded by my friend Lisa Starr. I will also be offering it at some point at a wonderful new bridge being built on Block Island right now. My friend and spiritual teacher Maria DeMarco has brought her non-profit Concordia, Inc., to the island. She is transforming the Beach House B & B, the home of the amazing Ccopaccatty family, into a center for health and art. I am incredibly excited about what she will bring to the community through Concordia, and am looking forward to participating in the center. The first thing I will be doing at the Beach House is a permaculture site analysis. Maria and the Ccopaccatty's want to turn the property into a permaculture site! For someone with no hope of buying property on this island, this really proves that dreams do come true, that to imagine one's life richly, as the Lakota say, will bring your dreams into fruition.
Friday, May 20, 2005
The Internal Tsunami subsides
I apologize for upsetting people with my blog about my suicidal thoughts. For some reason I am being pushed to be as honest as possible. Some people might wish I would just not talk about the way I feel maybe, but I had really reached a point where I could not do that any longer. Transparency has always been a word that comes to mind when I think of how I want to be. No secrets. An open heart. As for feeling suicidal, it is not abnormal as some have said to me......it is something that many people I know feel, most of them artists or activists who are deeply engaged in the processes the earth is going through. I agree, the death of this cycle we are going through is exciting and intellectually I am curious to see what is going to happen, but emotionallly, this is not so. The thing that separates artists from other types of people is their emotional engagement with the world. It is hard to separate the feelings one has from one's self. I became my feelings to such an extent that I lost objectivity. I am not sick. I do not have an illness. I may have a disease--as in "dis-ease," or a lack of ease....but I am only a symptom of the dis-ease the earth is suffering right now. Artists are teachers. Have you ever had a teacher tell you write what you know? I took that to heart.....I had no other choice if I did not want to be insane--which I define as being off-balance. Being insane is just as valid a reality as any other, it just makes those who are more balanced, or off-balance in another direction uncomfortable. All diseases are diseases of the mind. They may manifest on the physical level, and we can treat them on the physical level by rebalancing our bodies--which I recommend doing wholistically rather than through the medical model, which does not even believe in the world I live in. So yes, when asked to admit I had a mental problem, I had to say yes, even though I knew that my definition of a mental problem was not the same as the person who asking. My mental problem was that I, in full knowledge of the power of the mind, could not find the strenght in my mind to bend my thoughts toward balance. I think what I'm goign through may be akin to the alchemical process--in order to make gold the alchemist burns the dross off lead---the dross was my negative thoughts. I think I took this on to such a large extent that I did actually internalize the tsunami that was predicted. If so, then I saved thousands of lives possibly. (I'm sure there were others involved. I'm not that egotistical.) I have also been thinking,based on a vision of a green serpent that appeared to me in meditation, and on some other factors, that I am in the beginning stages of the awakening of kundalini. This awakening also requires the burning off of negative thoughts and energies, a process which I've read is far from pleasant. As a Capricorn, I am a person who has incarnated to bridge the material and spiritual realms. Also, a person who is tested often. Capricorn is ruled by the Devil. Not to say the Devil is evil, it's more like the Devil is the voice of doubt that stops one from being one's fully self, from living authentically. Again, I apologize for upsetting people. It is especially hard to know that even these words of explanation may not be understood by some who love me, that they will make people think I am even more delusional and insane, but I offer them in the hopes that they may create a bridge of understanding between my side of the see-saw and theirs, in the hopes that we can find balance.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Creative Recovery
The following words are from The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, a book that teaches the art of creative recovery, loosely based on the principles of 12 step programs. I came upon them in an old journal and wanted to share them as something that helps me--the key to contentment is all about remembering--who we are and why we came here. All of us are creators of the dreams that we lead. All of us are Gods.
I am a channel for God's creativity, and my work comes to good.
My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.
As I create and listen, I will be led.
My creativity heals myself and others.
I am allowed to nurture my artist.
Through the use of my creativity, I serve the goddess.
My creativity always leads me to truth and love.
My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.
There is a divine plan of goodness for me.
There is a divinge plan of goodness for my work.
As I listen to the creator within, I am led.
As I listen to my creativity, I am led to create.
I am willing to create.
I am willing to learn to let myself create.
I am willing to let God create through me.
I am willing to be of service through my creativity.
I am willing to experience my creative energy.
I am willing to use my creative talents.
I am a channel for God's creativity, and my work comes to good.
My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.
As I create and listen, I will be led.
My creativity heals myself and others.
I am allowed to nurture my artist.
Through the use of my creativity, I serve the goddess.
My creativity always leads me to truth and love.
My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.
There is a divine plan of goodness for me.
There is a divinge plan of goodness for my work.
As I listen to the creator within, I am led.
As I listen to my creativity, I am led to create.
I am willing to create.
I am willing to learn to let myself create.
I am willing to let God create through me.
I am willing to be of service through my creativity.
I am willing to experience my creative energy.
I am willing to use my creative talents.
Monday, May 16, 2005
The wave didn't come yesterday. Well, there were lots of waves touching the island, more than anyone could ever count, but The Wave is of another sort. It was supposed to wash us all clean, to sweep us all away, to leave behind those who were meant to be here now on earth to embody the new consciousness that has been birthed here in the energetic realms. I'm still not sure what would have happened to me if the wave had come. I still don't feel like the earth is my home. I still dont' know if this makes me a failure or if I am just supposed to accept that I have no work left to do here and move on to somewhere else. All my life I have felt an exile. A lone wolf. A former lover, also an artist, says that's just how all artists feel. We represent that feeling of exile and go through it for all of humanity, who feels it to some extent, just not as strongly. All I know is that I have reached a point where feeling like an exile is unbearable. Nothink makes me feel at home. Not even my art. My words just take me further out into to the open sea, but the sea is not the right metaphor, because the sea, while alien, is of the earth. My words take me into the complete unknown. Into black holes. Dark matter runs through my veins, not the hot red blood I know would gush out if I took a knife and slashed my self open, and I have been angry enough to do this in the past couple of days, barely holding the anger in--why--because I judge even my own anger. I don't want to make a mess or disappoint anyone. I see myself as absolutely pathetic. As a person undeserving of love who has failed whatever my mission on earth was. I can't even just enjoy the simple pleasures that come with every day. I am a complete fraud, walking around making small talk to forget how lonely I am and saying yes to things I dont' want to do and don't believe in. I don't care about anything.
The wave didn't come yesterday. Or did it? Has it been coming for months now as I slowly let go of all doubts and fears, so slowly I don't know they're being swept away? It would be easier if they were washed away by something as obvious as a tsunami. To die is easier than to live in some ways. Does anyone else feel these things? Are you being swept away and are you struggling against the current that wants to erase you becuase you are the only thing you have to hold onto when you go to sleep at night?
The wave didn't come yesterday. Or did it? Has it been coming for months now as I slowly let go of all doubts and fears, so slowly I don't know they're being swept away? It would be easier if they were washed away by something as obvious as a tsunami. To die is easier than to live in some ways. Does anyone else feel these things? Are you being swept away and are you struggling against the current that wants to erase you becuase you are the only thing you have to hold onto when you go to sleep at night?
Friday, May 13, 2005
How To Commit To Life
How To Commit To Life
You head toward the mud. It’s a habit.
You’re not a great blue-heron, you just
like the way it feels between your toes
and the challenge of staying upright.
The mud is full of dead things,
most of them unrecognizable.
Under the bridge, no one can see you.
For once, the water doesn’t reflect anything.
You’re safe. You push your thoughts away
before shame sends you running back to the
yellow house looking for some errand that has to
get done right away or the world will fall apart, right?
You pray for instinct to lay its hands upon you.
Your hands reach down and pluck three bits of broken
china from the mosaic of oyster and clam shells
decorating the mudflats.
The air is thick as water, if you didn’t know better
you’d think you had gills and could flash by this scene
like the schools of minnows who flee under this
bridge when the sun is bright in summer.
The blue willow painted on the surface makes you weep.
Champ plunges a clam rake off the dock to your right.
No distractions, you say to yourself.
You close your mind to the gentle humor in his face.
You don’t let yourself think of how you love to watch the seals
get knocked off the rocks by the waves.
On the left, two great black-backed gulls squabble over
a flounder, plucked live out of the shallow water.
They tear its guts out as it flaps on the flat
with their livid yellow beaks.
You’ve been careful to hide what you’re feeling
as you went about your daily business, maybe
with a little less purpose than everyone else,
but with enough verve that no one suspects you
when you hoist yourself up on to the bridge and
look down at the current, your eyes seeking
the center of a whirlpool for a clear sign.
You don’t see the surface, only what’s beneath.
All of you calls to the rocks, to the ripples,
to the currents crashing at the tip of the island,
to every wave that has broken on every beach.
You raise your face.
The wind from the north blows through you.
A dissonant chord rings.
You move closer to the edge as it dissolves,
clashing against the solid walls of guts and liver and kidneys.
But then they break down--your organs--and your
rebellious cells pull you back from the edge with a will
you hadn’t known they had. You have.
Silence arcs toward you in the form of a gull as sure of its way
as a boomerang that flies out into space and turns back without resisting.
The gull returns to the flounder, still flopping on the mudflat.
It won’t be long now.
How will you ever be able to say what made you
step off the bridge and walk back to the yellow house on the hill,
past the rock painted with the American flag,
where for the first time, the word freedom isn’t ironic?
All you can say is the mallard with the emerald green head
swam side by side with his drab mate.
All you can say is my heart is not these three bits
of broken china plucked from the mud by instinct.
You head toward the mud. It’s a habit.
You’re not a great blue-heron, you just
like the way it feels between your toes
and the challenge of staying upright.
The mud is full of dead things,
most of them unrecognizable.
Under the bridge, no one can see you.
For once, the water doesn’t reflect anything.
You’re safe. You push your thoughts away
before shame sends you running back to the
yellow house looking for some errand that has to
get done right away or the world will fall apart, right?
You pray for instinct to lay its hands upon you.
Your hands reach down and pluck three bits of broken
china from the mosaic of oyster and clam shells
decorating the mudflats.
The air is thick as water, if you didn’t know better
you’d think you had gills and could flash by this scene
like the schools of minnows who flee under this
bridge when the sun is bright in summer.
The blue willow painted on the surface makes you weep.
Champ plunges a clam rake off the dock to your right.
No distractions, you say to yourself.
You close your mind to the gentle humor in his face.
You don’t let yourself think of how you love to watch the seals
get knocked off the rocks by the waves.
On the left, two great black-backed gulls squabble over
a flounder, plucked live out of the shallow water.
They tear its guts out as it flaps on the flat
with their livid yellow beaks.
You’ve been careful to hide what you’re feeling
as you went about your daily business, maybe
with a little less purpose than everyone else,
but with enough verve that no one suspects you
when you hoist yourself up on to the bridge and
look down at the current, your eyes seeking
the center of a whirlpool for a clear sign.
You don’t see the surface, only what’s beneath.
All of you calls to the rocks, to the ripples,
to the currents crashing at the tip of the island,
to every wave that has broken on every beach.
You raise your face.
The wind from the north blows through you.
A dissonant chord rings.
You move closer to the edge as it dissolves,
clashing against the solid walls of guts and liver and kidneys.
But then they break down--your organs--and your
rebellious cells pull you back from the edge with a will
you hadn’t known they had. You have.
Silence arcs toward you in the form of a gull as sure of its way
as a boomerang that flies out into space and turns back without resisting.
The gull returns to the flounder, still flopping on the mudflat.
It won’t be long now.
How will you ever be able to say what made you
step off the bridge and walk back to the yellow house on the hill,
past the rock painted with the American flag,
where for the first time, the word freedom isn’t ironic?
All you can say is the mallard with the emerald green head
swam side by side with his drab mate.
All you can say is my heart is not these three bits
of broken china plucked from the mud by instinct.
Thoughts on home
Is the earth my home? This is the question I have been asking myself over and over again for the past couple of months. It seems funny to ask, since I have been weeding for a living and the earth is right in my face. I inhale it. I dig my fingers into it everyday. My fingers are so dirty I can't scrub the dirt off. Sometimes the earth smells so good I think of course I belong here, and when I open my heart to the robins and gulls who chirp and swirl around me I know the earth is my home. It is only when I look up and reenter the world of people where things go awry. Maybe because it is people who I blame for making the earth into a place that I don't want to live. I know though, that I must let my mind soar like a hawk. That I have to see everything that is happening on earth now as part of a natural cycle of decay, as natural as the decay and death of my own body, or of a beetle I unearth with my spade. And I must fully accept that I was born at this time for a reason to witness and be a part of what is going to happen to the earth. I must accept reincarnation in my heart, not just as intellectual idea, and that above all, I must remember that I choose and create every experience that comes my way. I have been living with the psychic pressure of tsunami building in me ever since I read that one was predicted to hit the east coast on May 15. ACtually, I 've been living with this pressure my whole life. May 15th is in two days. Everything has fallen away. I have reached a point where I don't care what happens really. This isn't because of despair, but because I feel like I at least accomplished two things that I was sent here to do. Wrote and published Siren, awakening people who read it to the possibility of apocalypse, and finishing Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. No one's read it yet, but I am the living embodiment of its ideas. We are waves of sound and light. My wave touches all of you. Will it crash and break on the beach? Probably. But it will also sneak up on the shore like a lover's kiss as you sleep.
Thoughts on home
Is the earth my home? This is the question I have been asking myself over and over again for the past couple of months. It seems funny to ask, since I have been weeding for a living and the earth is right in my face. I inhale it. I dig my fingers into it everyday. My fingers are so dirty I can't scrub the dirt off. Sometimes the earth smells so good I think of course I belong here, and when I open my heart to the robins and gulls who chirp and swirl around me I know the earth is my home. It is only when I look up and reenter the world of people where things go awry. Maybe because it is people who I blame for making the earth into a place that I don't want to live. I know though, that I must let my mind soar like a hawk. That I have to see everything that is happening on earth now as part of a natural cycle of decay, as natural as the decay and death of my own body, or of a beetle I unearth with my spade. And I must fully accept that I was born at this time for a reason to witness and be a part of what is going to happen to the earth. I must accept reincarnation in my heart, not just as intellectual idea, and that above all, I must remember that I choose and create every experience that comes my way. I have been living with the psychic pressure of tsunami building in me ever since I read that one was predicted to hit the east coast on May 15. ACtually, I 've been living with this pressure my whole life. May 15th is in two days. Everything has fallen away. I have reached a point where I don't care what happens really. This isn't because of despair, but because I feel like I at least accomplished two things that I was sent here to do. Wrote and published Siren, awakening people who read it to the possibility of apocalypse, and finishing Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. No one's read it yet, but I am the living embodiment of its ideas. We are waves of sound and light. My wave touches all of you. Will it crash and break on the beach? Probably. But it will also sneak up on the shore like a lover's kiss as you sleep.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
The Worm Bin
While flipping over rocks at Three Sisters today, I was delighted to come upon several red wrigglers! I had been searching through manure the past few months for the critters to no avail. Now that spring has sprung they are everywhere, wriggling through the wet soil up into the sun. Now I can start my worm bin. What is a worm bin, you may ask? I certainly had no idea before I went to EAT. The purpose of a worm bin is to create worm casings which you can use fertilizer, either putting them directly onto your plants or by brewing worm tea. They are easy to make. Just get a garbage can and poke some holes in it so the worms can breathe. Toss in some newspaper and some food scraps and some red wrigglers, and the worms will do their thing, digesting your food scraps into succulent casings. It sounds grosser than it is. The casings actually look and feel just like soil, not like the manure which they actually are. A worm bin is more practical than a compost pile if you live in a city. You can put it in your basement or under your kitchen sink. The worms should be red wrigglers, not the larger earth worms. Red wrigglers can be mail-ordered, purchased from a bait shop, or dug yourself--horse manure is a good place to look. To make worm tea take a handful of casings and add it to a five gallon bucket of water. AT EAT we dumped in two bottles of blackstrap molasses as well, since the sugar promotes bacterial growth. The tea should be aerated by stirring it for an hour or by hooking it up to a pump (like for an aquarium) if you don't want to do it yourself. Here on BI, a wormbin is economical as well, since we have to pay for our trash by weight at the dump. Plus you get to have pets!
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Sadhana
Sadhana is a Sanskrit work meaning spiritual practice. It is doing the same thing day after day until it becomes an unconscious habit, like tying your shoes, only sadhana relates to more intangible things like the emotions. My hope is that if I do my sadhana every day I will be able to deal with my emotions the same way that I tie my shoes.
Sadhana
A scent upon the surface.
A dew covered mountainside at dawn.
Insects pass their mantra on to the bush birds
twittering as the sun strikes the far side of the valley.
Callused fingertips. A shaky hand.
Not many years left of doing.
A stooped woman leans forward to pick tea leaves.
Heavy basket slung across her shoulders. Crooked hips.
Who do you belong to the same way
the leaves belong to the branches?
The air is so humid she pretends she is swimming.
Nobody ever taught her, but she knows how anyway.
The game is to forget what you’re doing her mother told her.
When she was a girl she used to believe clouds had faces.
Do the branches wonder if they belong to the roots?
She’s lived her whole life in this valley.
At the end of the day she sits on her porch drinking tea.
The insects take up the mantra as the moon peaks.
Her children have all moved to a far distant city.
If she could write, she’d tell them how the earth turns when
she stands in place.
Vultures draft on currents of air she can’t feel so close to the ground.
There’s a road leading out of the valley.
I still might take it, she thinks.
I still might learn to write.
One last sip.
What do the leaves at the bottom say?
Go to sleep, old woman.
There’s work to be done in the morning.
Sadhana
A scent upon the surface.
A dew covered mountainside at dawn.
Insects pass their mantra on to the bush birds
twittering as the sun strikes the far side of the valley.
Callused fingertips. A shaky hand.
Not many years left of doing.
A stooped woman leans forward to pick tea leaves.
Heavy basket slung across her shoulders. Crooked hips.
Who do you belong to the same way
the leaves belong to the branches?
The air is so humid she pretends she is swimming.
Nobody ever taught her, but she knows how anyway.
The game is to forget what you’re doing her mother told her.
When she was a girl she used to believe clouds had faces.
Do the branches wonder if they belong to the roots?
She’s lived her whole life in this valley.
At the end of the day she sits on her porch drinking tea.
The insects take up the mantra as the moon peaks.
Her children have all moved to a far distant city.
If she could write, she’d tell them how the earth turns when
she stands in place.
Vultures draft on currents of air she can’t feel so close to the ground.
There’s a road leading out of the valley.
I still might take it, she thinks.
I still might learn to write.
One last sip.
What do the leaves at the bottom say?
Go to sleep, old woman.
There’s work to be done in the morning.
The Internal Tsunami
It is rainy on Block Island. Ducks splash in roadside puddles, water pools on the street and the ground is soggy at Three Sisters, where I've been making sandwiches for the past few days. So much has been going on for me internally that I haven't been able to channel my thoughts into a permaculture focus, so I haven't written in a while. Maybe I should anyway. Restricting myself to permaculture only is in a way, focusing on product over process. With permaculture as my umbrella, the frame which guides my thoughts, then everything I go through is part of the process and equally valid, even if I don't relate specific permacultural facts in every post. This makes me realize how sensitive I am to criticism, how much I need approval. When I first started this blog someone wrote to me and told me I should have more ecological information and not so much personal information. I have felt self-conscious ever since if I don't write some "facts" in every post, which is ridiculous considering this is my blog! Self-censorship is an issue that has come up a lot in the poetry seminars I have been participating in at The Block Island Poetry Project. I like to think that I don't censor myself, that I go as deep as I can and don't fear what my audience will say or think. Compared to some, I think I don't, but I know that I do censor myself sometimes. Not because I'm afraid what I say will shock others. I've gotten over that. But because I'm afraid of the emotions I raise. Afraid of what they will do to me. Will they burn all that consumes me away so I will be free of the pain they cause? Or will they destroy me? This is where being an addict comes into play. Everytime you take a drink or eat or have sex in a non-sacred way, or whatever it is that you repeat over and over to numb your pain, you are stamping down that emotion so you don't have to feel it. I do this with food every day, and it is very painful for me. Recently I realized why I crave salty food so much. Most people seem to crave sweets, which signifies a need for nurturing. While I do need to be nurtured, I seem to act out my addictive impulses with salty food. What does salt do? It asbsors water. Water represents emotions. Every time I eat salt I am soaking up the emotions I am afraid to express. More and more I feel rage and despair building in me, like they are gonig to burst out of my body, like my body is not large enough to hold these feelings. I go about my daily business as best I can, but the strain is very difficult and exhausting. I feel like I am leading a split life. Like there are two of me walking around. I bet everyone feels this way, but I have a feeling that most people just push the feeling away and keep numbing themselves. Recovery is a process.....not a product. We are never "fixed." There is always a new door that appears before us. A new room calling to us in our dreams.
I call what I have been going through for the past month my internal tsunami. I got word from some folks on the Breaking Open The Head forum that an east coast tsunami was predicted for may 15th of this year. Many synchronicities made me feel that this was going to happen, that I was going to die in a tsunami. My name--Whitewave--the asian tsunami, which occurred on my birthday--the name of my publishing company, Tsunami. The name of my first book "Siren" and my second "The Apocalypse Diary." --and the many poems I have written in the past three years that feature a great wave sweeping everything away. I have since shifted focus to an internal tsunami, experiencing everything being swept away inside me, which is a more productive thing to do ultimately than to worry about finding higher ground on May 15. I am at a point where I almost don't care if I die, which isn't as bad as it sounds. There is actually peace to be found at this point, especially since I know intellectually we are all one--all part of one energy--an endless wave-but to know something intellectually is not the same as to know it in your heart. In my heart I feel separate, disengaged, despairing. Thoughts of killing myself come every day. I am lucid enough to know that these thoughts are part of the wave that wants me to let go--so dont' worry, I am not going to actually kill myself. I am just being honest with my words because my goal is to become transparent, to grow as much as I can, to be as simple as a bluebell blooming amongst lily of the valley at the foot of an ancient oak tree. I don't know what I have to do to feel the union I know intellectually. I learned something very important from the yoga teacher and poet Jeff Davis, who came to BI to teach at the Poetry Project. I asked him what one should do when one is experiencing dark emotions. He said the thing to do was to not attach one's self to them. To recognize that one is experiencing them, but not to fully identify with them. He said that this applied to what we perceive as positive emotions as well. Emotions are our teachers and the more we experience of all of them, the more our hearts grow, and the deeper our souls become. I asked him what I should do since I couldn't disengage and observe my emotions. He said "practice." And that is where things like yoga or meditation or AA come in. I have written here I think about how I think addiction is a substitution for ritual. It makes sense that practicing yoga or going to an AA meeting is something that would lead the ego out of attachment and suffering. Since that weekend I have been doing yoga again everyday, and while the dark emotions are still with me, I do feel better that everyday I am practicing. I knwo that if I stick with it this will work,because the one time I was uniequivocally happy was when I did yoga everyday for four months. Jeff Davis was a great teacher. I recommend his book "Journey From The Center To The Page."
Well, I planned to write a blog today about bio-remediation at Abby's behest. She actually said she missed me! All the rain inspired me.......but I had to get to all this other stuff for some reason. All I can say is that it is part of my process. If people want info about ecoology there are plenty of places to get it right? Anyway, bioremediation, in a nutshell, is a process of treating contaminated water or cleaning up waste through natural means. It can be done by building marshlands to treat wastewater (marsh plants are masters at cleaning water) instead of having to chemically treat the water, or through using fungus. Did you know that mushrooms can break down toxic wastes, including nuclear waste? If you're interested in learnign more google Paul Stamets. He is a researcher in the pacific northwest who is doing amazing things with mushrooms that gives solutions for even the most dire environmental problems. The great thing about bioremediation is that it is another way to get off the grid. Cheaper and more efficient and better for the earth and the body. And aren't we the earth's body too? It even says so in the Bible. God created man out of clay, and Adam created woman out of his rib. While I would argue with the order of events here, not that it matters on a spiritual level, but on a political matter it certainly does, I find it kind of funny that the fundamentalists who claim to interpret the Bible literally are very often the ones who are so disconnected from the earth that they are the ones most invested in destroying it. George Bush anyone?
No more words left today, but I will try to write through what I'm feeling, because if I'm not sharing it, then what good am I?
I call what I have been going through for the past month my internal tsunami. I got word from some folks on the Breaking Open The Head forum that an east coast tsunami was predicted for may 15th of this year. Many synchronicities made me feel that this was going to happen, that I was going to die in a tsunami. My name--Whitewave--the asian tsunami, which occurred on my birthday--the name of my publishing company, Tsunami. The name of my first book "Siren" and my second "The Apocalypse Diary." --and the many poems I have written in the past three years that feature a great wave sweeping everything away. I have since shifted focus to an internal tsunami, experiencing everything being swept away inside me, which is a more productive thing to do ultimately than to worry about finding higher ground on May 15. I am at a point where I almost don't care if I die, which isn't as bad as it sounds. There is actually peace to be found at this point, especially since I know intellectually we are all one--all part of one energy--an endless wave-but to know something intellectually is not the same as to know it in your heart. In my heart I feel separate, disengaged, despairing. Thoughts of killing myself come every day. I am lucid enough to know that these thoughts are part of the wave that wants me to let go--so dont' worry, I am not going to actually kill myself. I am just being honest with my words because my goal is to become transparent, to grow as much as I can, to be as simple as a bluebell blooming amongst lily of the valley at the foot of an ancient oak tree. I don't know what I have to do to feel the union I know intellectually. I learned something very important from the yoga teacher and poet Jeff Davis, who came to BI to teach at the Poetry Project. I asked him what one should do when one is experiencing dark emotions. He said the thing to do was to not attach one's self to them. To recognize that one is experiencing them, but not to fully identify with them. He said that this applied to what we perceive as positive emotions as well. Emotions are our teachers and the more we experience of all of them, the more our hearts grow, and the deeper our souls become. I asked him what I should do since I couldn't disengage and observe my emotions. He said "practice." And that is where things like yoga or meditation or AA come in. I have written here I think about how I think addiction is a substitution for ritual. It makes sense that practicing yoga or going to an AA meeting is something that would lead the ego out of attachment and suffering. Since that weekend I have been doing yoga again everyday, and while the dark emotions are still with me, I do feel better that everyday I am practicing. I knwo that if I stick with it this will work,because the one time I was uniequivocally happy was when I did yoga everyday for four months. Jeff Davis was a great teacher. I recommend his book "Journey From The Center To The Page."
Well, I planned to write a blog today about bio-remediation at Abby's behest. She actually said she missed me! All the rain inspired me.......but I had to get to all this other stuff for some reason. All I can say is that it is part of my process. If people want info about ecoology there are plenty of places to get it right? Anyway, bioremediation, in a nutshell, is a process of treating contaminated water or cleaning up waste through natural means. It can be done by building marshlands to treat wastewater (marsh plants are masters at cleaning water) instead of having to chemically treat the water, or through using fungus. Did you know that mushrooms can break down toxic wastes, including nuclear waste? If you're interested in learnign more google Paul Stamets. He is a researcher in the pacific northwest who is doing amazing things with mushrooms that gives solutions for even the most dire environmental problems. The great thing about bioremediation is that it is another way to get off the grid. Cheaper and more efficient and better for the earth and the body. And aren't we the earth's body too? It even says so in the Bible. God created man out of clay, and Adam created woman out of his rib. While I would argue with the order of events here, not that it matters on a spiritual level, but on a political matter it certainly does, I find it kind of funny that the fundamentalists who claim to interpret the Bible literally are very often the ones who are so disconnected from the earth that they are the ones most invested in destroying it. George Bush anyone?
No more words left today, but I will try to write through what I'm feeling, because if I'm not sharing it, then what good am I?
Friday, April 01, 2005
Breaking Open The Head
The words have been coming in different ways for the past couple of weeks. I apologize to anyone who has missed me! I am almost done with my poetry manuscript--or at least I think I am. It is hard to tell when one is done in poetry. I would like to direct people to a really incredible forum at www.breakingopenthehead.com. I have been writing a lot here lately. Click on discussion when the website comes us. It is based on Daniel Pinchbeck's book, Breaking Open The Head: A Contemporary Journey Into Psychedelic Shamanism. I highly recommend the book and the forum. I have been learning a lot from the people on the forum...I will get back to permaculture soon, but right now, I would like to say that it is OK to feel angry. Any of you who feel angry, let it out! Just don't hurt yourself or anybody or thing.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
I have been pretty overwhelmed lately. Definitely not together enough to tie anything I'm doing or feeling into permaculture, thus the long silence. I went through the supposed last stage of my initiation this past weekend. Initiation into what, I kept thinking? This question is what kept me from feeling inititiated I think. In the past, we had actual tribes to be initiated into. Now we have the feeling of the tribe,which is much harder to understand. I'll admit, I couldn't feel it in myself. What I was supposed to be feeling, according to my teacher, was a feeling of unity. A realization that everythign I have experienced so far, and that everything we have created no earth has been an illusion--what she called "playing in the backyard." The end of the initiation process was supposed to bring me "home," where all the concerns and games we play in the material world drop away. I couldn't get over my anger at the material world. I couldn't let go of my personal frustration at being a poet in a culture that doesn't care about or value poetry. I couldn't let go of my anger at the rape of the earth. What I have realized, is that I need to feel these emotions first, or again rather, I have felt them before, but somewhere along the way they became intellectual concepts before I had released them fully. So now I've been crying a lot and trying not to gorge myself on nachos when I'm depressed. I found out an interesting thing this weekend. My teacher was talking about why we crave sweet foods, saying it is because we feel a need to be nurtured. I asked her why one would crave salty food, since this is what I crave. She said that eating a lot of salt is a way to avoid feeling emotions--think of the way salt dries up water, what a cracked piece of land looks like after days of drought. So I am accepting that I need to feel some ugly things before I can feel at "home." And I encourage you to do the same, and to realize that something we see as ugly is also beautiful if it enables us to become fully present and whole.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Initiation, 20th Century
Hello to anyone who has missed me. I'm sorry I haven't been posting as much--my energy has been drawn toward poetry and to organizing an initiation workshop out here on BI this weekend, hosted by my spiritual teacher Maria DeMarco. Initiation, according to Maria, is an essential part of the soul's growth. The soul craves repetition--if it does not get it, addictions manifest. Many of the traumas we who came of age in the 20th century in the U.S. have experienced were the result of botched attempt at self-initiation, not that we (or at least me) are aware of it. This is why we need "healing," a term which I am going to do my best not to use any more, since it implies there is something wrong with us in the first place. When we realize that everything that we experience is what our soul needs to grow, we realize that we are all right. We don't need to heal from anything. Perhaps readjust is a better term to use.
In any case, I just read a great book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, by the Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Estes uses fairy tales to trace the stages of a woman's initiation. Unfortunately for me and many I know, we grew up in a culture that had forgotten these ways. This is nobodies fault. It is just part of our self-realization. What we are given to work with in these times. What the collective good ultimately needs as part of its cycle of growth. Using the stages outlined by Estes, I wrote a poem about the botched initiation many of us experienced coming of age in the 20th century. Each stanza is supposed to take seven years, thus each is seven lines long. See how many of the stages you can identify.....and know that it is never too late to go through any of them. They are not chronological.
Initiation, 21st Century
No.
Because I said so.
Stop that!
You should be ashamed of yourself.
You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.
Don’t tell anybody.
Don’t be scared. It’s just a dream.
Get back here!
Hold still, for God’s sake!
Santa Claus isn’t real.
Neither is the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
That only happens in fairy tales.
This is real life, you know.
You’ll get over it.
Training bra
Deodorant tampons
Don’t tell Dad, please.
Blood-stained pants
Spin the bottle
Truth or Dare
You only live once.
Nobodies a virgin anymore.
Stealing from your parents’ liquor cabinet.
Getting stoned
Frat parties
One-night stands
Tripping at a Dead Show
Shooting up in a room with no windows
Overdose
Getting knocked up
Getting rid of it
It was no big deal
Fuck off, I don’t need your help
Going it alone
Is there anyway else?
Drinks are on me until last call.
God is dead.
There’s nobody out there listening.
It’s all in your head.
Get a job.
What’s wrong with you?
Did you think your life would be any different?
This is all there is. Work, Eat, Sleep. Repeat.
She used to be hot. Now look at her.
Stretch marks
Saggy tits
Gray hair
Wrinkles
Past her prime.
She's going home alone tonight.
What do you have to be depressed about?
You’ve got it all--a big house, a new car...
Lots of women would envy you.
Take this: Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Valium.
You used to have so much energy.
You’ve put on a few pounds, eh?
I want a divorce. You’re not the same woman I married.
You’re too old to go back to college.
No, we’re not selling the house and moving to Costa Rica.
If you don’t like it, then leave.
Why can’t you be content? I’m retired now.
I just don’t see a place for you in today’s competitive job market.
It’s already been done before.
Too late.
Get out of the way, lady
We’ve got work to do.
We don't have time for this.
I don’t know, your eyes aren’t so good these days.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that story before.
Nobody cares about what your grandmother said a million years ago.
Aren’t you over that by now?
Look at her, trying to dress like a teenager.
Somebody should stop her from making a fool out of herself.
Did you see how she flirted with that waiter?
Pathetic.
If only she could see herself.
It must suck to get old.
Better off dead, I say.
Everything’s so confusing.
I don’t recognize my town anymore.
There’s no place for me.
No one can see me.
It’s always foggy now.
I’m a burden.
Why was I ever born?
My life has been a waste.
What’s the point of it all?
I keep forgetting everything.
Senile.
How did I end up in this place?
Nothing makes sense anymore.
When do we go play bingo?
Poor grandma, she can’t speak since her stroke.
She didn’t have a whole lot to say anyway.
I’d hate to be stuck in that room with the TV always on.
She probably doesn’t even notice.
Yeah, she’s totally out of it.
Shoot me if I ever end up like that, OK?
A waste of space.
Open wide, they keep telling me.
Breathe in, breathe out. The stethoscope is always cold.
She’s seizing!
Tubes down my throat.
Serves her right, she should have quit smoking .
In out, in out, in out. I wish they’d just go.
Hell is other people. I should have changed my will.
Do you think she can hear us?
Nah, she’s a vegetable.
Should we pull the plug?
We can’t. She asked us not to.
She would if she could see herself now.
When will she die?
When the power goes out.
In any case, I just read a great book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, by the Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Estes uses fairy tales to trace the stages of a woman's initiation. Unfortunately for me and many I know, we grew up in a culture that had forgotten these ways. This is nobodies fault. It is just part of our self-realization. What we are given to work with in these times. What the collective good ultimately needs as part of its cycle of growth. Using the stages outlined by Estes, I wrote a poem about the botched initiation many of us experienced coming of age in the 20th century. Each stanza is supposed to take seven years, thus each is seven lines long. See how many of the stages you can identify.....and know that it is never too late to go through any of them. They are not chronological.
Initiation, 21st Century
No.
Because I said so.
Stop that!
You should be ashamed of yourself.
You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.
Don’t tell anybody.
Don’t be scared. It’s just a dream.
Get back here!
Hold still, for God’s sake!
Santa Claus isn’t real.
Neither is the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.
That only happens in fairy tales.
This is real life, you know.
You’ll get over it.
Training bra
Deodorant tampons
Don’t tell Dad, please.
Blood-stained pants
Spin the bottle
Truth or Dare
You only live once.
Nobodies a virgin anymore.
Stealing from your parents’ liquor cabinet.
Getting stoned
Frat parties
One-night stands
Tripping at a Dead Show
Shooting up in a room with no windows
Overdose
Getting knocked up
Getting rid of it
It was no big deal
Fuck off, I don’t need your help
Going it alone
Is there anyway else?
Drinks are on me until last call.
God is dead.
There’s nobody out there listening.
It’s all in your head.
Get a job.
What’s wrong with you?
Did you think your life would be any different?
This is all there is. Work, Eat, Sleep. Repeat.
She used to be hot. Now look at her.
Stretch marks
Saggy tits
Gray hair
Wrinkles
Past her prime.
She's going home alone tonight.
What do you have to be depressed about?
You’ve got it all--a big house, a new car...
Lots of women would envy you.
Take this: Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Valium.
You used to have so much energy.
You’ve put on a few pounds, eh?
I want a divorce. You’re not the same woman I married.
You’re too old to go back to college.
No, we’re not selling the house and moving to Costa Rica.
If you don’t like it, then leave.
Why can’t you be content? I’m retired now.
I just don’t see a place for you in today’s competitive job market.
It’s already been done before.
Too late.
Get out of the way, lady
We’ve got work to do.
We don't have time for this.
I don’t know, your eyes aren’t so good these days.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard that story before.
Nobody cares about what your grandmother said a million years ago.
Aren’t you over that by now?
Look at her, trying to dress like a teenager.
Somebody should stop her from making a fool out of herself.
Did you see how she flirted with that waiter?
Pathetic.
If only she could see herself.
It must suck to get old.
Better off dead, I say.
Everything’s so confusing.
I don’t recognize my town anymore.
There’s no place for me.
No one can see me.
It’s always foggy now.
I’m a burden.
Why was I ever born?
My life has been a waste.
What’s the point of it all?
I keep forgetting everything.
Senile.
How did I end up in this place?
Nothing makes sense anymore.
When do we go play bingo?
Poor grandma, she can’t speak since her stroke.
She didn’t have a whole lot to say anyway.
I’d hate to be stuck in that room with the TV always on.
She probably doesn’t even notice.
Yeah, she’s totally out of it.
Shoot me if I ever end up like that, OK?
A waste of space.
Open wide, they keep telling me.
Breathe in, breathe out. The stethoscope is always cold.
She’s seizing!
Tubes down my throat.
Serves her right, she should have quit smoking .
In out, in out, in out. I wish they’d just go.
Hell is other people. I should have changed my will.
Do you think she can hear us?
Nah, she’s a vegetable.
Should we pull the plug?
We can’t. She asked us not to.
She would if she could see herself now.
When will she die?
When the power goes out.
Friday, March 11, 2005
A Poem For "Criminals
The End Days
Hello.
Nice to meet you.
You look kind of familiar,
like someone I knew when I lived
above that dry cleaners in Cincinnati.
Yeah, I know the toxic fumes will probably
give me cancer some day.
Yeah, I know people are always telling me
I look just like someone they know, too.
Maybe I remind you of your sister’s best friend?
No? Maybe it’s that guy your rode the ferry with
last summer when you went on vacation
to that island everyone was always saying was the
best place to get drunk in the northeast.
Yeah, those days are over for me, too.
The only good thing I can say about the blackouts
is thank God the memories are blurry.
Maybe I’m that person who freaked you out so bad
when you looked in the mirror on LSD.
I bet you’ve wondered if you’re possessed ever since, right?
Maybe I remind you of the priest your mother called
to exorcise your demons.
The one who took you behind the altar--
don’t worry you don’t have to confess anything to me.
We both know there’s an infinite supply of demons
making the rounds, we may as well make friends with the bastards
because they’re not going away.
Yes, I’m the bastard child of a pirate and a barmaid.
He bent her over the bar one night and I popped out
nine months later.
My mom tells me there’s no shame in being a bastard,
not in this day and age.
In this day and age I’m a pregnant fourteen year old
from the Dominican Republic who lives in South Providence.
South is the direction of the innocent child on the Medicine Wheel.
Providence is the power conceived by God to guide human destiny.
That’s right, destiny is coming our way.
Don’t listen to the President of the United States or the priests.
Hell is a sound bite.
The day the Twin Towers fell waves which had been galloping
toward our island for centuries struck the southwest point.
What a relief.
I know I sound callous and cold-blooded.
Believe me, I weep.
I am another yourself, says the Mayan code of honor.
In a way, the terrorists are right,
we do have one face,
except they don’t have another.
They look just like you and me.
Looks are always being accused of deceiving.
I’m here to say you’re not fooling anybody.
That was me you saw chopping down that mighty
redwood tree.
Everything is hard to believe.
Nobody loved that tree more than me.
You probably despise me.
Some redneck who doesn’t know the world needs to be saved.
Let me tell you, it ain’t easy feeding a family these days.
So whatta you want to do about it?
Throw stones?
Or plant seeds?
Hello.
Nice to meet you.
You look kind of familiar,
like someone I knew when I lived
above that dry cleaners in Cincinnati.
Yeah, I know the toxic fumes will probably
give me cancer some day.
Yeah, I know people are always telling me
I look just like someone they know, too.
Maybe I remind you of your sister’s best friend?
No? Maybe it’s that guy your rode the ferry with
last summer when you went on vacation
to that island everyone was always saying was the
best place to get drunk in the northeast.
Yeah, those days are over for me, too.
The only good thing I can say about the blackouts
is thank God the memories are blurry.
Maybe I’m that person who freaked you out so bad
when you looked in the mirror on LSD.
I bet you’ve wondered if you’re possessed ever since, right?
Maybe I remind you of the priest your mother called
to exorcise your demons.
The one who took you behind the altar--
don’t worry you don’t have to confess anything to me.
We both know there’s an infinite supply of demons
making the rounds, we may as well make friends with the bastards
because they’re not going away.
Yes, I’m the bastard child of a pirate and a barmaid.
He bent her over the bar one night and I popped out
nine months later.
My mom tells me there’s no shame in being a bastard,
not in this day and age.
In this day and age I’m a pregnant fourteen year old
from the Dominican Republic who lives in South Providence.
South is the direction of the innocent child on the Medicine Wheel.
Providence is the power conceived by God to guide human destiny.
That’s right, destiny is coming our way.
Don’t listen to the President of the United States or the priests.
Hell is a sound bite.
The day the Twin Towers fell waves which had been galloping
toward our island for centuries struck the southwest point.
What a relief.
I know I sound callous and cold-blooded.
Believe me, I weep.
I am another yourself, says the Mayan code of honor.
In a way, the terrorists are right,
we do have one face,
except they don’t have another.
They look just like you and me.
Looks are always being accused of deceiving.
I’m here to say you’re not fooling anybody.
That was me you saw chopping down that mighty
redwood tree.
Everything is hard to believe.
Nobody loved that tree more than me.
You probably despise me.
Some redneck who doesn’t know the world needs to be saved.
Let me tell you, it ain’t easy feeding a family these days.
So whatta you want to do about it?
Throw stones?
Or plant seeds?
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Process Over Product
My grandmother just sent me a heartening article from the Orlando Sentinel that demonstrates that process is becoming as important in U. S. culture as product, perhaps at a mainstream level. The article was about recent college graduates who are deciding to have adventures before entering "the real world." She sent it to me because this is what I have been doing for so long that this is real life to me--I don't have to put it in quotes! The article did operate under the assumption that these young adults would go into the mainstream job market one day, but I suspect that many of them won't. I know from personal experience, that once they get a taste of freedom, it will be difficult to put themselves back in the cage. Not to make anyone who participates in what is called the real world by cultural consensus here in the U.S., meaning the 9 to 5, forty hours a work week, feel bad about what they are doing. I know many people are happy doing this and find fulfillment in their jobs, while also being of use to society. But not everyone is the same, and when your culture tells you you have to be a certain way in order to view yourself as successful, it can be very difficult to follow a different path. Human beings are as diverse as Kinsey's gall wasps--none of us are the same--"the real world" as we know it just doesn't have a place for all our diversity. I find it encouraging that a mainstream newspaper is acknowledging this "taking a year off" as a trend, because this means more and more people are following their dreams, that wild and woolly realm where anything can happen, and always does. The more we experience, the more we grow.
The valueing of process over product is something I learned from working in groups at Earth Activist Training. We were given projects in which we were to re-design sites at the Black Mountain preserve according to permaculture principles. When my group first walked around our site we were pretty overwhelmed. We had only a few days to come up with a design that would be publically presented to the other groups, our esteemed teachers, and the Black Mountain staff. The pressure was on, and over the few days that we worked on these projects, much moaning and bewailing was heard from the groups, much of it from having to work in consensus. In consensus, each member has a voice in the decision of the group as a whole. It is not that the group has to agree with everything, which I thought consensus meant before EAT. A person can block a decision only if she or he has a strong ethical reason for doing so, and should voice her or his concerns early on in the process, instead of waiting until the end, so that the group has the opportunity to come up with alternatives ways to solve that person's issue. If it sounds easy, it is not. There is actually a well-developed protocol to follow when working in consensus that can definitely smooth out the kinks in the process if the facilitator can get everyone to follow it. The facilitator is the person who runs the meeting. It is her or his role to make sure that everyone who wants to be heard gets a chance, in due process, and to bring out the voices who may perhaps be more quiet in the group, also to help figure out how to use the talents of a person who is throwing wrenches in the process, to the best advantage of the group. Here's a list I wrote down at EAT of things a good facilitator should do:
1. show respect for each person in the group
2. experience-reflection-insight (it is the facilitators role to move the group through this process)
3. creating dialogue (facilitator stays neutral)
4. Engage the whole person
5. Recognize injustice and deal with it
6. Bring out the creativity and joy of the group.
Why do we want consensus decision making to be part of the world we want to live in? Hierarchical decision making is much more effective. The problem with hierarchical decision making for me, is that it doesn't allow for the growth of the soul. It is great for getting things done, but I don't think the soul starts to grow until we engage in all the emotions that come up as we work with people to get something done. Some people may not care about the soul's growth. They just want to get that garden design done and move on to the next project. Working in consensus will make you angry. It will make you happy. It might make you cry, but I guarantee you will be more fulfilled by it than if you just did the job and walked on to the next one. That's what happened to me at Earth Activist Training. Sure, I thought my group came up with a great design that I was proud to present to the community, but I was more proud of the things I realized about myself by listening and observing others in the group, even when the things I learned were faults. For the first time ever in a work situation, I was able to let go of worrying about what we were creating, and just enjoy the process. That's called living life to the fullest.
Finally, I just want to comment on something that has been on my mind this week. I saw Michael Jackson, who as most know is being tried for child abuse right now, on TV tonight. He looked like he was being consumed from the inside out. I felt sorry for him, although I imagine many Americans think he is sick and should be punished, even though he has not been declared guilty yet in a court of law. Michael is a sensitive, beautiful person who is absorbing all our shadow energy. This realization was made in conjunction with a conversation I head earlier in the week with a friend about our local "bogey man" here on Block Island. The Times had just run an article annoucing that he had been let out of jail, and that part of his parole was that he could no longer come to Block Island. I'll admit, this man scares me, but I think the level of invective directed at him doesn't take into the consideration that he is a scapegoat for aspects of our society that we don't want to deal with. I am taking a Jungian perspective here--viewing individual traits in people as part of our collective soul. If we revile those who act out these shadow traits, we only feed the shadow, giving it more strength to consume us. Criminals are scapegoats. People who are taking in that shadow energy and bringing it out into the light of day. I am asking you to reach through your fear and have compassion for them. By doing so, you show compassion for yourself. I'm not saying that people who violate the law shouldnt' be brought to justice. I am saying that we should reconsider our motives in agreeing to the laws themselves. This is not something that I see changing quickly, although it could if we let go of the illusion of separateness and perceived ourselves as whole, first on an individual level, then on a societal, spiralling outward to the planetary level, then the galactic, and who knows beyond that. To be honest, I think this is going to happen on a mass level very soon. If you open your hearts through compassion now then you will be ready to make this transition into whatever dimension this experience of unity brings us.
The valueing of process over product is something I learned from working in groups at Earth Activist Training. We were given projects in which we were to re-design sites at the Black Mountain preserve according to permaculture principles. When my group first walked around our site we were pretty overwhelmed. We had only a few days to come up with a design that would be publically presented to the other groups, our esteemed teachers, and the Black Mountain staff. The pressure was on, and over the few days that we worked on these projects, much moaning and bewailing was heard from the groups, much of it from having to work in consensus. In consensus, each member has a voice in the decision of the group as a whole. It is not that the group has to agree with everything, which I thought consensus meant before EAT. A person can block a decision only if she or he has a strong ethical reason for doing so, and should voice her or his concerns early on in the process, instead of waiting until the end, so that the group has the opportunity to come up with alternatives ways to solve that person's issue. If it sounds easy, it is not. There is actually a well-developed protocol to follow when working in consensus that can definitely smooth out the kinks in the process if the facilitator can get everyone to follow it. The facilitator is the person who runs the meeting. It is her or his role to make sure that everyone who wants to be heard gets a chance, in due process, and to bring out the voices who may perhaps be more quiet in the group, also to help figure out how to use the talents of a person who is throwing wrenches in the process, to the best advantage of the group. Here's a list I wrote down at EAT of things a good facilitator should do:
1. show respect for each person in the group
2. experience-reflection-insight (it is the facilitators role to move the group through this process)
3. creating dialogue (facilitator stays neutral)
4. Engage the whole person
5. Recognize injustice and deal with it
6. Bring out the creativity and joy of the group.
Why do we want consensus decision making to be part of the world we want to live in? Hierarchical decision making is much more effective. The problem with hierarchical decision making for me, is that it doesn't allow for the growth of the soul. It is great for getting things done, but I don't think the soul starts to grow until we engage in all the emotions that come up as we work with people to get something done. Some people may not care about the soul's growth. They just want to get that garden design done and move on to the next project. Working in consensus will make you angry. It will make you happy. It might make you cry, but I guarantee you will be more fulfilled by it than if you just did the job and walked on to the next one. That's what happened to me at Earth Activist Training. Sure, I thought my group came up with a great design that I was proud to present to the community, but I was more proud of the things I realized about myself by listening and observing others in the group, even when the things I learned were faults. For the first time ever in a work situation, I was able to let go of worrying about what we were creating, and just enjoy the process. That's called living life to the fullest.
Finally, I just want to comment on something that has been on my mind this week. I saw Michael Jackson, who as most know is being tried for child abuse right now, on TV tonight. He looked like he was being consumed from the inside out. I felt sorry for him, although I imagine many Americans think he is sick and should be punished, even though he has not been declared guilty yet in a court of law. Michael is a sensitive, beautiful person who is absorbing all our shadow energy. This realization was made in conjunction with a conversation I head earlier in the week with a friend about our local "bogey man" here on Block Island. The Times had just run an article annoucing that he had been let out of jail, and that part of his parole was that he could no longer come to Block Island. I'll admit, this man scares me, but I think the level of invective directed at him doesn't take into the consideration that he is a scapegoat for aspects of our society that we don't want to deal with. I am taking a Jungian perspective here--viewing individual traits in people as part of our collective soul. If we revile those who act out these shadow traits, we only feed the shadow, giving it more strength to consume us. Criminals are scapegoats. People who are taking in that shadow energy and bringing it out into the light of day. I am asking you to reach through your fear and have compassion for them. By doing so, you show compassion for yourself. I'm not saying that people who violate the law shouldnt' be brought to justice. I am saying that we should reconsider our motives in agreeing to the laws themselves. This is not something that I see changing quickly, although it could if we let go of the illusion of separateness and perceived ourselves as whole, first on an individual level, then on a societal, spiralling outward to the planetary level, then the galactic, and who knows beyond that. To be honest, I think this is going to happen on a mass level very soon. If you open your hearts through compassion now then you will be ready to make this transition into whatever dimension this experience of unity brings us.
Monday, March 07, 2005
On-Site Resources
Something amazing is happening.
Permaculturists believe in using as many on-site resources as one can, instead of going out and buying new things. For example, scrap metal dumped in an abandoned lot could be used as fence posts or for a sculpture instead of dumping them into a landfill. Once again, it involves thinking like a creature of the forest. A squirrel doesn't go to the supermarket to get her dinner, she turns to the trees around her for food, and for storage too, stowing away acorns to get her and her brood through the winter.
People are also on-site resources. At EAT we were advised to look around our communities and see who our allies were. I had actually been planning to make a list of people I thought would be "on my side," meaning people I could recruit in the future to work with me on whatever projects I come up with to further my goal of creating a sustainable world.
The amazing thing is that I haven't had to make a list. My on-site resources are making themselves known to me without my speaking. Every day I make a new connection with someone who gives me that piece of information I've been needing, or who surprises me by making a comment that makes me realize we are less different than I thought. My aunt and uncle and I have been connecting much more than usual lately. Yesterday I was at their house helping them install a new printer for their computer and my uncle said it bothered him that we live in a culture where we just throw perfectly good stuff away. My aunt said she was goign to look for someone who could use her old printer cartridges that didn' t fit her new printer, and that she recycled her used cartridges. These comments showed me that they are not the people I thought they were, which helps me get out of my own sphere by realizing that I am not the only one who is changing, and that as I change, as I expand my energy, I create opportunities for people to reveal unknown aspects of themselves to me. This helps us create common ground, and gives me hope that if we can reclaim this common ground within our hearts than we will be able to reclaim the earth in common.
These are little things, but to me they show a big shift in our society. They have the feel of revelation. I am seeing more and more every day, my inner vision expanding, my senses enhanced, and I am now overjoyed to say that my on-site resources now include angels! I have connected directly with angelic energy. It is there for all of us all the time, but can't perceived clearly unless our filters--our bodies and the energy around them--is clean enough to let them in. I have reached this point by freeing myself from physical addictions, from doing energy work with a shamanic healer, and by intensely examining my thoughts and reforming them to support the world that I wanted to live in, not the one I thought was "real."
Permaculturists believe in using as many on-site resources as one can, instead of going out and buying new things. For example, scrap metal dumped in an abandoned lot could be used as fence posts or for a sculpture instead of dumping them into a landfill. Once again, it involves thinking like a creature of the forest. A squirrel doesn't go to the supermarket to get her dinner, she turns to the trees around her for food, and for storage too, stowing away acorns to get her and her brood through the winter.
People are also on-site resources. At EAT we were advised to look around our communities and see who our allies were. I had actually been planning to make a list of people I thought would be "on my side," meaning people I could recruit in the future to work with me on whatever projects I come up with to further my goal of creating a sustainable world.
The amazing thing is that I haven't had to make a list. My on-site resources are making themselves known to me without my speaking. Every day I make a new connection with someone who gives me that piece of information I've been needing, or who surprises me by making a comment that makes me realize we are less different than I thought. My aunt and uncle and I have been connecting much more than usual lately. Yesterday I was at their house helping them install a new printer for their computer and my uncle said it bothered him that we live in a culture where we just throw perfectly good stuff away. My aunt said she was goign to look for someone who could use her old printer cartridges that didn' t fit her new printer, and that she recycled her used cartridges. These comments showed me that they are not the people I thought they were, which helps me get out of my own sphere by realizing that I am not the only one who is changing, and that as I change, as I expand my energy, I create opportunities for people to reveal unknown aspects of themselves to me. This helps us create common ground, and gives me hope that if we can reclaim this common ground within our hearts than we will be able to reclaim the earth in common.
These are little things, but to me they show a big shift in our society. They have the feel of revelation. I am seeing more and more every day, my inner vision expanding, my senses enhanced, and I am now overjoyed to say that my on-site resources now include angels! I have connected directly with angelic energy. It is there for all of us all the time, but can't perceived clearly unless our filters--our bodies and the energy around them--is clean enough to let them in. I have reached this point by freeing myself from physical addictions, from doing energy work with a shamanic healer, and by intensely examining my thoughts and reforming them to support the world that I wanted to live in, not the one I thought was "real."
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Stacking Functions
Before I went to EAT I had an abstract idea of what permaculture was, but if someone had asked me to define it verbally I wouldn't have been able to (at least very clearly.) This indeed happened a couple of days before I left. One of my customers at work asked me what permaculture was. I started fumbling for words and decided to defer to my friend who was also sitting at the counter. Since she is an organic gardener, I thought she would be able to do it better than me. "Isn't it just common sense?" she said. "Planting and organizing things so they work together." Yes, in a nutshell, but as I discovered at EAT, permaculture is far more than a system of gardening, it is an entire system of thought, a way of thinking that is based on common sense. Unfortunately, many of us in our disposable culture have lost this common sense. Permaculture gives a chance to return to our instincts, to form our thoughts by connecting with the needs of the earth instead of the needs our disembodied minds create.
Stacking functions is common sense. I bet you probably do more of it than you already realize, even if it is just downcycling things. For instance, I use plastic shopping bags as bathroom trash bags. Obviously this doesn't take care of the problem of trash in the first place, but it is a beginning in changing the way we think. If we see everything as having more than one potential use, (the definition of stacking functions) we are creating a shift in our thinking which can lead to the sustainable world more and more of us want to see.
I used to argue with my friend who worked at the dump about recycling. He said it was just a band-aid. Something cooked up to make people feel good that they were doing something about "the environment." He was the first person who pointed out to me that we were in deep shit. Since he worked at the dump, he definitely had some earned authority. He was the first to tell me it was our current system that had to go. I was shocked at first. At the time I hadn't really perceived how deep our problems were. I was naive--meaning I didn't know the facts, and believed in the inherent goodness of my action. Now I am innocent, meaning I know the facts, but still believe in this goodness. So I recycle, knowing it is not going to make the difference I once thought it would, but that my action is a motion toward shifting the world toward sustainability, even if it is only in a symbolic way.
A lot of things we can do are like this. The Kyoto Accord, for example, which for those who don't know, is an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even though the amount of reduction it calls for is so small it would be purely symbolic in light of what our atmosphere needs in order to be healthy, it is still important because it sends a message to the citizens of the world that the governments of our nations care about the air we breathe, no matter what country we live in. The U.S., the greatest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet, has refused to sign the accord, which went into effect in January.
Stacking functions is something I do in every blog. I disseminate information and I clarify my own thinking about the world and myself. Isn't this what an essay should do? The word essay comes from the French essayer, to try. Try and look for ways to stack functions. I bet your common sense will find lots of ways, and then eventually you'll start designing your life so that everything will have more than one function. That's my plan, at least.
Here's a way I stack functions on a daily basis. Every time I chop vegetables I throw the stalks or skins that I'm not going to eat in a bag I keep in the freezer. When I have enough I boil them down to make vegetable stock. I still don't have a wormbin or compost yet, but when I do I will toss them in, thus getting three uses out of them.
Just a note--there is another meaning for stacking functions that relates specifically to garden design. Otherwise known as vertical stocking, or multi-tiered garden design, e.g. creating a canopy of plants with trellising or espaliering trees. Espaliers are trees that are pruned to grow out instead of up, forming a hedge of fruit. The idea is to have your garden look like nature, which generally does not grow in horizontal rows like the gardens we are accustomed to planting.
Stacking functions is common sense. I bet you probably do more of it than you already realize, even if it is just downcycling things. For instance, I use plastic shopping bags as bathroom trash bags. Obviously this doesn't take care of the problem of trash in the first place, but it is a beginning in changing the way we think. If we see everything as having more than one potential use, (the definition of stacking functions) we are creating a shift in our thinking which can lead to the sustainable world more and more of us want to see.
I used to argue with my friend who worked at the dump about recycling. He said it was just a band-aid. Something cooked up to make people feel good that they were doing something about "the environment." He was the first person who pointed out to me that we were in deep shit. Since he worked at the dump, he definitely had some earned authority. He was the first to tell me it was our current system that had to go. I was shocked at first. At the time I hadn't really perceived how deep our problems were. I was naive--meaning I didn't know the facts, and believed in the inherent goodness of my action. Now I am innocent, meaning I know the facts, but still believe in this goodness. So I recycle, knowing it is not going to make the difference I once thought it would, but that my action is a motion toward shifting the world toward sustainability, even if it is only in a symbolic way.
A lot of things we can do are like this. The Kyoto Accord, for example, which for those who don't know, is an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Even though the amount of reduction it calls for is so small it would be purely symbolic in light of what our atmosphere needs in order to be healthy, it is still important because it sends a message to the citizens of the world that the governments of our nations care about the air we breathe, no matter what country we live in. The U.S., the greatest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet, has refused to sign the accord, which went into effect in January.
Stacking functions is something I do in every blog. I disseminate information and I clarify my own thinking about the world and myself. Isn't this what an essay should do? The word essay comes from the French essayer, to try. Try and look for ways to stack functions. I bet your common sense will find lots of ways, and then eventually you'll start designing your life so that everything will have more than one function. That's my plan, at least.
Here's a way I stack functions on a daily basis. Every time I chop vegetables I throw the stalks or skins that I'm not going to eat in a bag I keep in the freezer. When I have enough I boil them down to make vegetable stock. I still don't have a wormbin or compost yet, but when I do I will toss them in, thus getting three uses out of them.
Just a note--there is another meaning for stacking functions that relates specifically to garden design. Otherwise known as vertical stocking, or multi-tiered garden design, e.g. creating a canopy of plants with trellising or espaliering trees. Espaliers are trees that are pruned to grow out instead of up, forming a hedge of fruit. The idea is to have your garden look like nature, which generally does not grow in horizontal rows like the gardens we are accustomed to planting.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Relinquishing Control
It came to me last night that another great thing for me about this blog is that it enables me to practice relinquishing control, an important permaculture principle. When a permie designs a garden the idea is to design a system that works so well that the gardener can step back and let it flourish on its own. Anyone who writes or paints or performs knows how difficult this can be. We want the audience to "get" what we're doing--we want their interpretation to match our own. Of course not every artist thinks this way, but it has definitely been part of my development as a writer. We even talked about this in college in literary theory classes. It was called reader/response criticism, which believed that every meaning came from the interaction of writer and reader. As a writer this was much more appealing than the death of the author posited by Roland Barthes, or deconstructionism, which says that ultimate meaning is not possible because language is an arbitrary system of sign and system. Alas, I was seduced by these French philosophes, mostly I think, out of intellectual pride. Their works were so obtuse, my brain swelled when I was actually able to decipher what they were saying. Reader/response seemed so simplistic and banal because it was so direct. This elevation of complication eventually led me into deep despair. I gave up my dreams of wanting to be a word artist for a few years, but like a meandering river, I found my way out of the silt clogged byways and made it back to the sea, where I have been floating and catching waves ever since.
When I am able to relinquish control of my writing, I am able to let go in a multitude of ways. First, I stop caring what people will think and write whatever comes out of me. Second, I get the fascinating opportunity to get to know other people by hearing how my work has affected them. One can learn much when one views opinion as a character study instead of taking offense or feeling wounded that one has been misunderstood. As a creative writer, I have not had too many opportunities to relinquish control of my writing. I have published a book of poems, had poems published in lots of journals, and had a couple of people read the manuscripts of my two novels. I have also been in writing workshops. However, this is just a tip of the iceberg considering how much I have written! I'll admit, I have a desire to be heard by a large audience. Part of this is ego, of course, but part of it is also because, for a long time, I have felt that I was receiving messages that people needed to hear. One of my totems is the hawk, considered a messenger between the spirit world and this one. The hawk is far-seeing, flying high above the earth. It can detect a tiny mouse from a vast height and plunge down to clutch it in its talons. The mouse is also one of my totems, scurrying around in the grass investigating everything. Mice see the details. This ability to see the details and to see the big picture is a potent combination. I see a lot and I have a lot to say. As a poet, I have emphasized artfulness over transparency,--poetry is indirect, the language of the soul, like dreams. To me, the best poems don't give up their meaning easily. They have to be earned, like a lover, they flood through the body like ecstasy. However, I try to make myself transparent in my poems, which I do by exposing my vulnerability. Poetry is a paradox. An art form of words in which the best poems can't be explained in words. Interpreting poetry often reduces it, or more likely, reduces the interpreter, instead of expanding their soul until it feels, as Hildegard of Bingen wrote, a feather on the breath of God. In our culture of instant gratification and insistence on the existence of objective truth, poetry has been pushed to the fringes. Many people don't have the time to read it, or if they do, can't relate to language in this way. Poetry is not empirical. To me, it reflects the structure of the universe itself, each word in a good poem tolls like a bell, is a vibration that can't be contained, has infinite meaning as it opens up doors in our body and mind, poetry is the chariot on which the soul rides.
I think people who write do so because they have a desire to communicate. Naturally a poet, I sought out audiences in other venues as a writer because I have a compulsion to express myself. For a time I wrote for The Block Island Times, a good training ground for relinquishing control. However, because journalism is supposed to be unbiased, as writers we had to anticipate what would happen when our work was released to the public every Friday. I found this frustrating and deadening after a while. Sometimes when I wrote a feature I really liked, my soul got a snack, but newspaper writing never gave me a feast!
I've debated whether or not I should be so honest with the ups and downs of my daily emotional life in this blog. Is my primariy intent to encourage people to create a new world through permaculture? If so, then detailing my emotions may not be the best way if my feelings end up inoculating them, so that they feel the same way. I feel a responsibility. I want my words to encourage change. Language is such a mysterious creature. Where does it come from? On a physical level it is the product of teeth and tongue and voicebox. Language is our body. And where does our body come from? Our body is the earth. This is not metaphorical. There is nothing in our bodies that doesn't come from the earth. Except our soul--if you believe in the soul. Many believe that the seat of the soul is the pituitary gland. People have even weighed the body right after death and discovered that it loses a small amount of weight that may be the result of the soul's departure. Of course this could be gas leaving the body. People who are long-winded with words are sometimes said to be full of gas. But being long-winded can also be a form of play. For example, I am having fun with words right now, rolling them out, letting one connect to the other as my fingers dance--however language came into being, it is what structures our consciousness. Our mind is built on words. Do we want to build a house with a shaky foundation? No! I'm still up in the air about my intent with this blog, because to be frank, it is such fun to just write everything out, such a relief to unburden myself of my emotions, more fun than simply spreading information about permaculture. Whatever I decide, I will be aware of you my readers, and that by relinquishing control of these words I may form galaxies in universes I've never heard of.
When I am able to relinquish control of my writing, I am able to let go in a multitude of ways. First, I stop caring what people will think and write whatever comes out of me. Second, I get the fascinating opportunity to get to know other people by hearing how my work has affected them. One can learn much when one views opinion as a character study instead of taking offense or feeling wounded that one has been misunderstood. As a creative writer, I have not had too many opportunities to relinquish control of my writing. I have published a book of poems, had poems published in lots of journals, and had a couple of people read the manuscripts of my two novels. I have also been in writing workshops. However, this is just a tip of the iceberg considering how much I have written! I'll admit, I have a desire to be heard by a large audience. Part of this is ego, of course, but part of it is also because, for a long time, I have felt that I was receiving messages that people needed to hear. One of my totems is the hawk, considered a messenger between the spirit world and this one. The hawk is far-seeing, flying high above the earth. It can detect a tiny mouse from a vast height and plunge down to clutch it in its talons. The mouse is also one of my totems, scurrying around in the grass investigating everything. Mice see the details. This ability to see the details and to see the big picture is a potent combination. I see a lot and I have a lot to say. As a poet, I have emphasized artfulness over transparency,--poetry is indirect, the language of the soul, like dreams. To me, the best poems don't give up their meaning easily. They have to be earned, like a lover, they flood through the body like ecstasy. However, I try to make myself transparent in my poems, which I do by exposing my vulnerability. Poetry is a paradox. An art form of words in which the best poems can't be explained in words. Interpreting poetry often reduces it, or more likely, reduces the interpreter, instead of expanding their soul until it feels, as Hildegard of Bingen wrote, a feather on the breath of God. In our culture of instant gratification and insistence on the existence of objective truth, poetry has been pushed to the fringes. Many people don't have the time to read it, or if they do, can't relate to language in this way. Poetry is not empirical. To me, it reflects the structure of the universe itself, each word in a good poem tolls like a bell, is a vibration that can't be contained, has infinite meaning as it opens up doors in our body and mind, poetry is the chariot on which the soul rides.
I think people who write do so because they have a desire to communicate. Naturally a poet, I sought out audiences in other venues as a writer because I have a compulsion to express myself. For a time I wrote for The Block Island Times, a good training ground for relinquishing control. However, because journalism is supposed to be unbiased, as writers we had to anticipate what would happen when our work was released to the public every Friday. I found this frustrating and deadening after a while. Sometimes when I wrote a feature I really liked, my soul got a snack, but newspaper writing never gave me a feast!
I've debated whether or not I should be so honest with the ups and downs of my daily emotional life in this blog. Is my primariy intent to encourage people to create a new world through permaculture? If so, then detailing my emotions may not be the best way if my feelings end up inoculating them, so that they feel the same way. I feel a responsibility. I want my words to encourage change. Language is such a mysterious creature. Where does it come from? On a physical level it is the product of teeth and tongue and voicebox. Language is our body. And where does our body come from? Our body is the earth. This is not metaphorical. There is nothing in our bodies that doesn't come from the earth. Except our soul--if you believe in the soul. Many believe that the seat of the soul is the pituitary gland. People have even weighed the body right after death and discovered that it loses a small amount of weight that may be the result of the soul's departure. Of course this could be gas leaving the body. People who are long-winded with words are sometimes said to be full of gas. But being long-winded can also be a form of play. For example, I am having fun with words right now, rolling them out, letting one connect to the other as my fingers dance--however language came into being, it is what structures our consciousness. Our mind is built on words. Do we want to build a house with a shaky foundation? No! I'm still up in the air about my intent with this blog, because to be frank, it is such fun to just write everything out, such a relief to unburden myself of my emotions, more fun than simply spreading information about permaculture. Whatever I decide, I will be aware of you my readers, and that by relinquishing control of these words I may form galaxies in universes I've never heard of.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Message From Hopi Elders
This message from the Hopi elders was received in December 1999. The Hopis have an ancient petroglyph called Prophecy Rock which outlines the fate of humanity. They believe that humanity is now almost at the point of the Great Purification that will mark the end of the fourth world. Just before the purification there will be many natural catastrophes like the tsunami, earthquakes, global warming, trees dying, land sinking and rising. According to the Hopi, the world, meaning the world of humans, has ended four times already. Many believe that the last time was by water, the great flood recorded in so many traditions worldwide, from the Old Testament to the myth of Atlantis. After the Hopi message is a permaculture poem called "The Problem Is The Solution" which looks at the ending of this phase of human existence as a positive thing.
TO MY FELLOW SWIMMERS:
There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. We must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history we are to take nothing personal, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do our spiritual growth comes to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over--gather yourselves!
Banish the word "struggle" from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
WE ARE THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.
The following poem was constructed from phrases and words I culled off the top of my head. The form is an adaptation of a Kato creation myth. The Kato is a northern California tribe. No research was done to write this poem. I'm sure there are many things you could add to it. Feel free, but remember the function these problems can serve when see them as a solution. The italicized lines are from the Book of Revelation.
The Problem Is The Solution
The witches must burn, they say Off with their heads!
Strap them to the rack, they say Thumbscrews, they say
Gouge out her eyes Cut off her breasts, they say
Bread and water, they say Don’t let him sleep, they say
Shove a burning rod up his ass He’s a faggot, they say
They say make him squeal Rape his wife, they say
Rape his daughters Fucking cunts, they say
Sodomize his mother, they say The witches must burn, they say
Cut off his tongue He’s a thief, they say
It’s deportation or the gallows, they say Let him hang
Put his head on a spike at The Tower, they say Drag his dead body through the streets
Lower her into boiling water, they say Stun guns, they say
Brainwash them, they say Your friends betrayed you, they say
We killed your family Cut off one finger at a time till he talks, they say
No blacks allowed, they say Whip her till she bleeds
Eventually you’ll say anything Lynch the niggers
Bomb the gooks Fuck off Mom, I hate you, they say
They say electrocute They say lethal injection
They say line up Fire
Videotape the beheading, they say We’ll send the tape to your wife, they say
This way to the gas, ladies and gentleman, they say You can choose one to save
Strip We want the gold in your teeth, they say
Your skin will make a lovely lampshade Fling her over the battlements, they say
The Inquisition, they say Auto da fe
Auchswitz, they say Incinerate
Hang, draw, and quarter her, they say Crucify
And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the Throne a book written within
and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.
Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?
Chronus was the first god, they say Zeus killed his father Chronos, they say
They say Odysseus, Hector, Aeneas Agamemnon, Thor, Hercules, they say
Mars and Aries, they say Indra and Ku, they say
Arthur, Lugh, Bran, they say The Vikings are coming! Run, they say!
Beowulf, they say, Cuchulainn Roland, El Cid, Sir Gawain, they say
Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they say Enki, Osiris, Seth, Jahweh
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow;
and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
The Trojan War, they say They say, The Holy Crusades
The Hundred Years’ War, they say The War of the Roses
We need an Empire, they say King Philip’s War against the Mohawks
They say The French and Indian War They say no taxation without representation
The Revolutionary War, they say Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, they say
Newport, Rhode Island was the largest slave market in the colonies, they say
The largest plantation in the colonies was in Narragansett, they say
They say there were slaves on Block Island They’re not human, they say
War is a necessary evil, they say They call it Civil
They call it The War Between the States Then it’s Spanish-American
Then it’s The Great War, they say World War I, they say
The War To End All Wars WWII, The Big One, they say
Remember The Alamo, they say Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, they say
The Long March, they say Eminent domain
Here’s your reservation, they say The Ghost Dance is forbidden, they say
We’re taking your children, they say Re-education, they say
Communists, they say Korea, The Conflict in Vietnam, they say
The Cold War, they say The Soviets are going to nuke us, they say
We have to save Kuwait Desert Storm, The Gulf War, they say
We don’t understand why they hate us, they say Jihad, they say
Babylon must fall, they say Every American must die, they say
Go home United States! Bomb Afghanistan, they say
You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists, they say Ayatollah Khomeini
Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein Eradicate Al Qaeda, they say
The Iraqis will welcome us as liberators Weapons of mass destruction, they say
Islam is a religion of peace An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, they say
The Golden Rule, they say Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
We will hunt them down and kill them, they say Orange alert today
The War in Iraq, they say The War at Home, we say
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat there
to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Peron, they say Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pinochet
They say Charlemagne They say Alexander the Great
They say Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero, they say I am a god, they say
Song Jong Kim, they say The Axis of Evil is preparing to strike
Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Omar Qadafi Franco, Stalin, Ceacescu, they say
Rwanda, they say Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, they say
Fundamentalists, they say Terrorist cells, they say
Cortes, Custer, Napoleon, Henry VIII Richard the Lionhearted, they say
They say Papa Doc, Noriega, Fidel Castro Christopher Columbus, we say
Himmler, Eichmann, Goering, they say Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney
Condoleeza Rice, we say George W. Bush and every President of The United States of America who has dropped a bomb in my name Homeland Security, they say
And I beheld, and lo a black horse: and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
Justice will be served, they say All men are created equal, they say
No to the ERA Innocent until proven guilty, they say
No child left behind A thousand points of light, they say
Give me your tired, your poor, they say Genital mutilation isn’t grounds for asylum, they say
He had a gun, the police say They say we made a mistake
Mumia killed one of ours, they say Leonard Pelletier killed an agent, they say
Repent, they say Karla Faye Tucker must die, they say
It’s a hard knock life Rest in peace
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth,
to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
By axe, sword, spear, and mace, they say Smallpox, syphilis, influenza, ebola, AIDS
Catapult, crossbow, cannon, they say Crack, crystal meth, heroin, they say
Longbow, rifle, shotgun, bayonet, they say Strip mine, clear cut, drill, they say
Rape is an effective weapon, they say Slip her ruffies, she’ll pass out, they say
Revolver, machine gun, pistol, they say Napalm, Agent Orange, Round-up, Drano
Automatic weapon, they say Genetically engineered foods are perfectly safe
Grenades, mines, shells, they say They say no civilians were killed
B-52, rocket propelled, hummer, they say We’re cutting funding for the EPA, they say
Suicide bombers, they say We’ve trained dolphins to blow up ships for us, they say
Fighting machine, they say Cancer, famine, acid rain
We break them down in boot camp, they say Prozac, Xanax, Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s
The Atom bomb, they say Chernobyl, we say
Smart weapons, they say We say, there’s no such thing.
The end of this world is nigh, they say Hallelujah, we say!
TO MY FELLOW SWIMMERS:
There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold onto the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. We must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history we are to take nothing personal, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do our spiritual growth comes to a halt. The time of the lone wolf is over--gather yourselves!
Banish the word "struggle" from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
WE ARE THE ONES WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.
The following poem was constructed from phrases and words I culled off the top of my head. The form is an adaptation of a Kato creation myth. The Kato is a northern California tribe. No research was done to write this poem. I'm sure there are many things you could add to it. Feel free, but remember the function these problems can serve when see them as a solution. The italicized lines are from the Book of Revelation.
The Problem Is The Solution
The witches must burn, they say Off with their heads!
Strap them to the rack, they say Thumbscrews, they say
Gouge out her eyes Cut off her breasts, they say
Bread and water, they say Don’t let him sleep, they say
Shove a burning rod up his ass He’s a faggot, they say
They say make him squeal Rape his wife, they say
Rape his daughters Fucking cunts, they say
Sodomize his mother, they say The witches must burn, they say
Cut off his tongue He’s a thief, they say
It’s deportation or the gallows, they say Let him hang
Put his head on a spike at The Tower, they say Drag his dead body through the streets
Lower her into boiling water, they say Stun guns, they say
Brainwash them, they say Your friends betrayed you, they say
We killed your family Cut off one finger at a time till he talks, they say
No blacks allowed, they say Whip her till she bleeds
Eventually you’ll say anything Lynch the niggers
Bomb the gooks Fuck off Mom, I hate you, they say
They say electrocute They say lethal injection
They say line up Fire
Videotape the beheading, they say We’ll send the tape to your wife, they say
This way to the gas, ladies and gentleman, they say You can choose one to save
Strip We want the gold in your teeth, they say
Your skin will make a lovely lampshade Fling her over the battlements, they say
The Inquisition, they say Auto da fe
Auchswitz, they say Incinerate
Hang, draw, and quarter her, they say Crucify
And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the Throne a book written within
and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.
Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?
Chronus was the first god, they say Zeus killed his father Chronos, they say
They say Odysseus, Hector, Aeneas Agamemnon, Thor, Hercules, they say
Mars and Aries, they say Indra and Ku, they say
Arthur, Lugh, Bran, they say The Vikings are coming! Run, they say!
Beowulf, they say, Cuchulainn Roland, El Cid, Sir Gawain, they say
Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they say Enki, Osiris, Seth, Jahweh
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow;
and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
The Trojan War, they say They say, The Holy Crusades
The Hundred Years’ War, they say The War of the Roses
We need an Empire, they say King Philip’s War against the Mohawks
They say The French and Indian War They say no taxation without representation
The Revolutionary War, they say Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, they say
Newport, Rhode Island was the largest slave market in the colonies, they say
The largest plantation in the colonies was in Narragansett, they say
They say there were slaves on Block Island They’re not human, they say
War is a necessary evil, they say They call it Civil
They call it The War Between the States Then it’s Spanish-American
Then it’s The Great War, they say World War I, they say
The War To End All Wars WWII, The Big One, they say
Remember The Alamo, they say Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, they say
The Long March, they say Eminent domain
Here’s your reservation, they say The Ghost Dance is forbidden, they say
We’re taking your children, they say Re-education, they say
Communists, they say Korea, The Conflict in Vietnam, they say
The Cold War, they say The Soviets are going to nuke us, they say
We have to save Kuwait Desert Storm, The Gulf War, they say
We don’t understand why they hate us, they say Jihad, they say
Babylon must fall, they say Every American must die, they say
Go home United States! Bomb Afghanistan, they say
You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists, they say Ayatollah Khomeini
Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein Eradicate Al Qaeda, they say
The Iraqis will welcome us as liberators Weapons of mass destruction, they say
Islam is a religion of peace An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, they say
The Golden Rule, they say Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
We will hunt them down and kill them, they say Orange alert today
The War in Iraq, they say The War at Home, we say
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat there
to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.
Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Peron, they say Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pinochet
They say Charlemagne They say Alexander the Great
They say Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero, they say I am a god, they say
Song Jong Kim, they say The Axis of Evil is preparing to strike
Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Omar Qadafi Franco, Stalin, Ceacescu, they say
Rwanda, they say Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, they say
Fundamentalists, they say Terrorist cells, they say
Cortes, Custer, Napoleon, Henry VIII Richard the Lionhearted, they say
They say Papa Doc, Noriega, Fidel Castro Christopher Columbus, we say
Himmler, Eichmann, Goering, they say Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney
Condoleeza Rice, we say George W. Bush and every President of The United States of America who has dropped a bomb in my name Homeland Security, they say
And I beheld, and lo a black horse: and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
Justice will be served, they say All men are created equal, they say
No to the ERA Innocent until proven guilty, they say
No child left behind A thousand points of light, they say
Give me your tired, your poor, they say Genital mutilation isn’t grounds for asylum, they say
He had a gun, the police say They say we made a mistake
Mumia killed one of ours, they say Leonard Pelletier killed an agent, they say
Repent, they say Karla Faye Tucker must die, they say
It’s a hard knock life Rest in peace
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth,
to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
By axe, sword, spear, and mace, they say Smallpox, syphilis, influenza, ebola, AIDS
Catapult, crossbow, cannon, they say Crack, crystal meth, heroin, they say
Longbow, rifle, shotgun, bayonet, they say Strip mine, clear cut, drill, they say
Rape is an effective weapon, they say Slip her ruffies, she’ll pass out, they say
Revolver, machine gun, pistol, they say Napalm, Agent Orange, Round-up, Drano
Automatic weapon, they say Genetically engineered foods are perfectly safe
Grenades, mines, shells, they say They say no civilians were killed
B-52, rocket propelled, hummer, they say We’re cutting funding for the EPA, they say
Suicide bombers, they say We’ve trained dolphins to blow up ships for us, they say
Fighting machine, they say Cancer, famine, acid rain
We break them down in boot camp, they say Prozac, Xanax, Budweiser, Jack Daniel’s
The Atom bomb, they say Chernobyl, we say
Smart weapons, they say We say, there’s no such thing.
The end of this world is nigh, they say Hallelujah, we say!
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