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On the Road

annacitrino
On the road near Buffalo, Wyoming

 “To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey, Chaucer, Ulysses—that isn’t explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don’t actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I’ve seen.”–Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere. Random House, 2004

I love the way travel enlarges us, makes us asks questions about ourselves, our habits, values, and what we take for granted in the world we travel from. When we travel, we enter unfamiliar landscapes and places unlike our home. Travel helps us become more aware that there are many ways of being, many ways of organizing life. Our way isn’t the only way. Isn’t one of the reasons we travel because we recognize we want to enter a world unlike the one we’re used to? We want to hear different ways of speaking, discover new scenery, explore a bit, learn some new things about people or the world around us, and see life through a different lens.

On my journey last month through Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska, over and over road signs indicated fossils could be found in the area. Museums throughout the region had numerous fossils on display. Fossil beds aren’t common in the area where I live, but to drive through the landscape in these states is to repeatedly be reminded that of the long, evolutionary process of life on Earth. Existence is rolled out on such a vast scale of time. It’s challenging to conceive of a time stretching over such immense periods as the era long ago where dinosaurs lived. Life forms on this planet were so different then from those found on Earth today.

I viewed dinosaur bones in museums I visited. I read the information about them and the plants they ate. I learned somethings about the climates that previously existed in the region and how very different they were from what we experience today. The visit to the area and the museums there reminded me that human presence and consciousness is a recent occurrence in the enormous developmental cosmic process we live inside. Things have been changing on Earth since its beginning. The planet is constantly in transformation, ceaselessly remaking and renewing itself.

View outside of Thermopolis, Wyoming

As I drove through Wyoming’s long stretches of open sky and wide, sandy plains filled with sedges, I noticed how the landscape continued to hold the impression of its history eons previous to our current time when much of the state rested beneath enormous ancient seas. The Western Interior Seaway in the late Cretaceous period 100 million to 60 million years ago divided the North American continent between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean. Previously, in the Jurassic period, 165 to 120 million years ago, a portion of the Arctic Ocean spread down in a shallow sea named Sundance from western Canada into what is now the US that includes portions of Wyoming. Above the Sundance Formation near present day Thermopolis (also a geothermal site) lies a sedimentary layer that holds one of the world’s richest areas in dinosaur fossils. The dinosaurs walked along the shorelines of the ancient sea. It’s possible to see their tracks at Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite. Native people of the area have known about Wyoming’s fossils for thousands of years and those who first came across them must have been astonished. I’m still astonished by them.

World Fossil Finder Museum, Hot Springs, South Dakota

Two other sites on my trip, Worland, Wyoming, and Hot Springs, South Dakota also are sites abundant with fossils. Fossil sites can give us new understanding about how the ecosystem responded to climate change previously in Earth’s history so we can better understand how changes to climate are happening now and how to better make wise choices about our future way of living. Carlo Levi wrote, “The future has an ancient heart.” When thinking of Wyoming and South Dakota, in the future, we can also bring to mind the ancient, primordial past held in the dinosaur bones buried there that were part of the process that brought us into the life we have today.

Travel isn’t only about where we take ourselves to on a holiday. It’s also about our travel through time on the journey of understanding about ourselves and the world we inhabit. A new territory we’re traveling into now is the growing information people are gaining about plants. Zoë Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters tells us in her interview with Romany Williams in Atmos magazine, plants don’t have a central nervous system like humans, nevertheless, science is showing us plants have language, family structures, and make allies with enemies. They also have preferences, plan ahead and can remember. Plants have been doing these things all along, but humans weren’t aware of it. We thought only humans did these things based on the way we typically have categorized information.

Milkweed plant at Thermopolis, Wyoming

As we reexamine what we think we knew about plants, we now have questions to ask about how we relate to the world around us. “Science indeed has no agreed-upon definition for life, death, intelligence, nor consciousness,” says Schlanger. Travel often raises questions in our minds that we didn’t have before and this new territory of information about plants is creating fresh debates about consciousness. The new information about plants encourages us to open the boxes that previously contained our thinking and to look at our relationship with the world of plants in a larger, more complete map. New inquires arise about our connection to the world around us and how we the environment is something greater than background scenery. Vegetables and fruit are used for mass consumption but Native cultures have long thought of plants as sacred. “I understood them to be relatives and living beings with emotions and lives of their own. I learned that they are part of my life as well and that I should always care for them,” writes anthropologist and ethnobiologist from the Rarámuri culture, Enrique Salmón. “Cultural perception, language, and thought are related to both the land and cultural histories…Beliefs help people recognize their links to the natural world and their responsibility to ensure its survival…There is little distinction between our world and that of nonhumans.” New understandings about plants can give us new ways of speaking about the natural world that influences our thoughts and actions as we travel into the future, and perhaps will connect us in new ways to old understandings about the land we walk on and the vegetation growing there. “You come to understand yourself as just one product of the unending, riotous, messy experiment that is evolution,” Schlanger says. “We’re all trying to find a way to make it in this environment. It’s not a spiritual concept but it comes close to recognizing this unifying truth that evolution is not a hierarchical process.”

Travel places us in a kind of liminal space between worlds–we’re frequently arriving somewhere new but are also soon to depart. Journeys are circular. In between those two points, we gain new understandings, find new words to explain our experience, and we’re changed. But we also circle back to old understandings, old pathways with the ability to see them from a different angle with new light. A further fairly recent significant discovery is the pathways of the interstitium, the spaces between the body’s tissues and cells that’s filled with fluid. This fluid moves nutrients and waste around. It also connects and cushions cells. This fluid route in the body has always been there, but people didn’t notice it because they weren’t looking at the body’s interconnected parts. “There are very specific laboratory reasons why the interstitium was not discovered until a few years ago – the histological method was hiding the canals. But there are also psychological reasons we could not ’see’ the fascial system or the interstitium because we tend to think in parts, not wholes,” explains Tom Myers author of Anatomy Trains. “We’ve known about interstitial fluid for years; we just didn’t know about its ‘organized” nature until we could 1) see in vivo, and 2) think in terms of whole systems instead of discrete ‘organs’… systems are not simply a sum of all their objective parts. Systems are also the rules that govern the relational behavior.” (Read more here.) This pathway of fluids supporting and moving between the body’s organs seems to be a metaphor for the journey of the era we’re traveling through at this time. We’re in the midst of a shift between an old way of thinking that viewed the world as filled with separate objects to be managed and brought under control, and are moving into new world connected in thinking to an ancient one that recognized the world is built of relationships where people sought to acknowledge and respect them.

Opening of spring water at Thermopolis, Wyoming

The road Earth has journeyed from the primordial past is still present with us, even if not always visible or obvious. Traveling down new roads, new ways of thinking can motivate us, like Galileo, to think in new ways. What we observe can be confusing, difficult, and uncomfortable, but we learn things that change us. The presence of fossils, recently expanded understandings about plants, and the discovery of the interstitium–all help us see that we are part of an enormous net of interwoven realities. The world is full of wonders and we live inside of mysteries wrapped around further mysteries. Traveling into these unfamiliar territories provokes interesting queries about how we’re connected to the larger whole of life and who we are as humans in the midst of that expansive unfolding existence.

Travel writer Susan Orlean suggests that travel is always a journey. When traveling, she immerses herself in something she doesn’t know much about then journeys toward grasping what she’s seen. There’s a whole lot humans don’t understand. We’re all on this journey traveling through time together. Things can be painfully difficult if we miss a flight when traveling or if our vehicle slides around on a road threatening our safety because it’s snowing unexpectedly. Things can be challenging when you thought you understood the way things worked, where you were going, what was true and real, only to discover something that wasn’t on the road map you were using and you end up in an unexpected situation. Sometimes that unexpected situation turns out to be a delightful one, one that changes your life for the better. Whatever the experience, it’s often eye opening and allows us to see ourselves and the world from a different stance.

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita,” writes Dante, “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” It feels like humanity has arrived at a new place, one that’s asking us to confront our ways of living and thinking that are preventing us from living together well. The planet along with the bulk of humanity is struggling for survival and to live together peacefully while others have far more than would be needed in a thousand lifetimes and are creating enormous disruption to human cooperation and thriving, exponentially exacerbating people’s emotional pain, and needlessly causing death for entire groups of people, along with a plethora of other griefs and losses. We won’t be on this road forever. Everything changes. People in Galileo’s era thought his theories were incorrect, but new understandings and time proved differently. Our present culture is caught in division over many things. We often reject what our minds can’t comprehend or that are outside of our habitual way of seeing things. But if we’re realistic, we can recognize that though we try our best based on the knowledge we have, our reasoning can be faulty. What is the meaning of the whole trajectory of life on earth and the cosmos itself? It’s a complex mystery.

Whether embarking on travel that takes us to a new location in the world or traveling into new understandings brought about through scientific or personal inquiry, the questions we hold as we travel will move us into new territory. What if we purposely assumed the mindset of a traveler and sought a transformation of mind as we move through this unpredictable time we’re living in? Rather than clinging to ideas that keep us stuck, what if we recognized we can’t reason our way through to make sense of everything and valued the journey, even the painful bits? What if we let what provokes and discomforts us become our adventure, if we allow what disorients us to be our exploration, our encounter with something that calls us further into the depth of our being?

On the road in June over Powderhorn Pass, Wyoming, 9,660 feet elevation

Ada Limón in her poem “Salvage” writes about a madrone tree that’s half-burned from the fires. Half of the tree is ashen and burned, the other half green. She writes,

…I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

We’ve been journeying on this road of sorrow for what feels like a very long time now. I don’t know how much more disappointment grief we can bear. My hope is that the sorrow takes us on a journey where we hear the ripples of Wyoming’s ancient ghostly seas telling us, yes there was terrible ice flows, great droughts, and fire. The waters receded. But the plants went on talking amongst themselves. The world flowered, moved through the eons building mountains, creating icebergs and rivers, plants and animals, gave birth to humans and histories. Sands shift across the ancient shore where the dinosaurs once walked. You wonder how it’s all going to go. But the truth is, even now a spring flows through the interstitum pathways between Earth and humanity, working to bring life out of the recklessness. Together, we can make a different life possible.

Let this poem of Anthony Machado encourage you on your journey “Last Night As I Was Sleeping.“

poetry, Uncategorized

In the Garden of Our Making

annacitrino

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.“–Frederick Buechner

National Poetry Month has ended, but I’m continuing to consider the work of creating poems that speak from my life the way the pink rhododendron in the photo above speaks from its life. I’ve loved poetry since childhood when I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry in a book on our home’s bookshelf. I loved the way his poem, “The Swing,” expressed so well my experience of the world when rocking back and forth on a swing. In grade seven A. E. Houseman’s “Loviest of Trees” opened a whole new world to me in his description of a cherry tree. I don’t think I’d ever seen a cherry tree up to that point in my life, but I loved poem’s fabulous image of a tree hung with blossoms like snow. I didn’t live in a place where it snowed but the description created in me a picture of how wondrous that would be to behold. The summer of my seventh grade year my family lived in Monterey, California. As it was nearby, we went to the seaside often. I’d sit on the cliffs above the shore for long periods of time, mesmerized by the waves’ endless movement. About this time, I discovered John Masefield’s poem, “Sea Fever,”

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

The sound of the words and rhythm in the lines stirred in me a longing for adventure and a love for the ocean, made the idea of heading out across the sea on a boat feel utterly compelling. The first poem I remember writing was about the sea.

Poetry connects the inner world with the outer one, encourages us look at the world closely, and to find words for what is difficult to name. E.E. Cummings wrote, “feeling is “first.” Poetry makes space for the heart and humanizes us. My father wrote poems that sometimes told stories. As a child, they showed me the power of words to touch the heart. Some of my father’s poems made me laugh, like the one called “Heebeegeebees” that described what he went through when as a boy he convinced his mom he was sick so he could stay home from school. Other of his poems were heartbreaking, like the one he wrote about a having to send to the market a lamb he’d raised, comparing that to the young men who were sent off to war. These poems helped me to experience poetry as a way to hold life in both its pain and beauty, as Buechner writes about, to enter into life and touch it in its difficulty, wonder, and mystery.

Writing poetry is to nurture the garden of one’s own life experiences. Poetry stands between the concrete world of the senses and the world of the spirit, feet in both places at the same time. Poet Peggy Robles Alvarado says, poetry is a “catalyst for gracefully stretching, rather than breaking in the face of unexpected changes. It is a portal to new ways of seeing and being, a way to celebrate yourself into existence.” Every poem I write I view as a kind of practice. To write poems is to step inside myself and listen deeply, opening the inner self that uses words while reaching for the life hidden within. It is to rest in alert attentiveness, and wait to be led by a voice that says “Notice this. Now write.” In the Radiance Sutras, a translation and contemporary rendering of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, an ancient Kashmiri text translated by Lorin Roche, I read words that describe what writing poetry is like for me.

All around you in every moment the world is offering a feast for your senses
Songs are playing, tasty food on the table, fragrances in the air…  

You who long for the union
Attend this banquet with loving focus.

Honor the power of speech
and with every breath 
bless the life that surrounds you.

How we use words is important. They can heal or harm, and have power to change a life as well as a world. Words that are honest and true, that are given from a heart that is open, strengthen us. In a world that is torn, poetry is a kind of invisible thread that in naming and shaping experience with words, helps reweave experience into a new cloth we can wear that allows us walk out into the world with new presence, and keep going.

A few weekends ago, I was at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City to participate in events related to receiving the Western Heritage Award for Stories We Didn’t Tell (the fourth one I’ve received for the book.) While visiting the Museum, I was received with generous and genuine welcome by the event organizers and other employees. It’s clear that those working at the museum love their work and love sharing the histories of the West the museum holds in its abundant artifacts of sculpture, paintings, ceramics, and other items representing both the people indigenous to the area and those who came later as settlers. You can see a few of the museum’s items here:

We need beauty to help us through difficult times. There’s plenty of hardship in this world. I want to make something meaningful with my life that reflects in my writing so I can give something of beauty and value to others. A couple of days ago someone wrote to tell me how she doesn’t normally read poetry but when reading Stories We Didn’t Tell, she “savored the words,” feeling they were carefully chosen. Another of my readers wrote a while back to say, “The first time I began to hear Adah’s voice in the prairie wind, see her laundry blow in the same wind, see her in her blue dress twirling in her own wind, feel the same wind on her skin in her garden, taste the salt of her silent tears, smell the earth twirling in her prairie dust devils, touch her hands in the water of her wash tub, feel the same hands make dough for pie lattice, or stitch a quilt with her sister…When my immersion into Adah ignited every sense into her world, I knew I loved her!…You created a masterpiece and heroine for not just pioneer women to be remembered, but for all women to be acknowledged who continue to create worlds for those whom we love! For women who can make adversity the driving strength to build even more courage to continue! Thank you for bringing Adah to the world.”

The characters in Stories We Didn’t Tell persevered through difficult times and found ways to endure and transform. When writing the book, I focused on telling the story. Upon publication, my publisher encouraged me to apply for awards. I had no idea I’d be invited to speak on an author panel discussing poetry and story with the amazing writer and wonderful person of Nancy Bo Flood or that I’d be standing in front of an audience some estimated to be somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people to give an acceptance speech as a recipient of a Western Heritage Award.

It was new for me to be in the room on the Friday evening event before the award ceremony where the majority of men wore Stetson hats and the most of the women wore elaborately tooled leather cowboy boots. The Museum is an amazing place with a large representation of artifacts from both Native people of the West as well as items representing early settlers and a current exhibit about the development of Route 66. The weekend at the Western Heritage Museum is not an experience I will forget. From teachers to friends, family members, students, fellow writers, colleagues, and the many places in the world I’ve walked, as well as the challenges, griefs and sorrows I’ve encountered–all I have experienced has worked toward helping me be able to write. The life of everyday people and our commonplace experiences all touch a deeper place of being. I wanted to lift these up in the book, and to show how the thread of life that runs from those before us touches our lives now, though we may be unaware of it.

For more than two and a half decades I lived and worked abroad as a teacher in different countries, entering into each world with the aim to learn from the various cultures what they had to teach me. It was an amazing life. I’m grateful for the experiences and the way they expanded my understanding of the world’s abundant ways of seeing and being, and how the cultures and land we live on works to shape us. When I finished my last year of teaching, I determined to write the story of my ancestors and I’ve done it, along with two other books, A Space Between, Buoyant, and a chapbook (To Find a River) as well.

Now that I’m living again in my home country, I’m enjoying learning about my own culture in more depth, and nurturing the land where I have my home. Together with my husband, I’m growing a garden with flowers, vegetable, and fruits. We enjoy giving from its abundance to neighbors and friends. Digging into the soil, observing plants’ behavior, nurturing their growth, paying attention to what they need to bear blossoms, fruit, or make seeds is different work than teaching, but the effort is rewarding.

Every paradise has its weeds as well as creatures that want to eat what has taken many hours of sweat, sore muscles and generous effort to grow. Paradise doesn’t come easily. Writing, too, is labor. But as with gardening, there’s deep satisfaction in the act of doing it. To receive awards for the effort is an unexpected gift that feels like grace. As Stuart Kestenbaum writes in his poem, “Holding the Light,”

In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together 
what beauty there is, stitch it 
with compassion and wire. 
See how everything 
we have made gathers 
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.

Screenshot
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Lifting the Voices of Women

annacitrino
Anna in the Red Sea

In Praise of Women Divers

This is for the woman who took her children 
to the Red Sea to paddle through water their father
had never touched, though he grew up beside it
every day looking into its face.

This is for the woman who became a divemaster
though told it was dangerous and she’d be seen
in a wetsuit, how she led other women underwater
though it was illegal, teaching them the ways of fish,
discovering together another world, finding 
every day is a good day to dive.

This is for the women who wore abayas
atop their wetsuits as if they were merely
onlookers while meeting the Coast Guard,
and the men on the boat the only divers.

This is for the friend who stood on the boat deck
wearing her snorkel and mask, black robe
flapping with wind, smilingly determined to explore
what lay beneath the sea’s sun-smoothed surface— 
all of us others planning to join her. 

This is for the women who broke the law 
by choosing to dive, who probed shipwrecks 
and gazed at their gaps, who entered through holes
blasted into steel holds—how vessels once so strong
no water could enter, are now broken open, sunken,
propellers forever halted, going nowhere.

This is in celebration of the women who saw wrecks
in water clear as windows, the happiness engendered when
something so big, so seemingly sturdy, in its destruction
became a place of beauty decorated with soft corals, animated
with angel and broom-tailed filefish sweeping through.

It’s Women’s History Month. I will be reading with authors, Jean Gordon Kocienda, and Pamela Reitman and Elaine Rock, lifting the voices of women from cultures across the world, celebrating them with readings of poetry, nonfiction, and story.

Come share a meal March 26 at 5:00 pm at the Aqus Cafe in Petaluma, Sonoma County, CA and listen to a few stories of some amazing women.

Seating is limited. RSVP is required: see: https://aqus.com/communitydinnerRSVP/

Hope to see you you there!

Uncategorized

Celebrating Women’s Voices

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I hope you can join me to hear women’s stories through the voices of these writers in March. If you have a problem with the above link, try using this

And a poem from Stories We Didn’t Tell

MY MOTHER’S HANDS

Chugwater, Wyoming, 1923
Adella, age 66

Fingers curled, knuckles swollen with arthritis,
her head encircled by lamplight, I see my mother
bent over her hands, embroidering flowers
on tablecloths, then rubbing at the pain,
though there was little she had to relieve
the aching tenderness that came
from work she did all day
for years
as she milked and mended,
hauled water, and lugged hay.

Despite the hurt, she kept her hands moving,
shaping and reshaping her world, not deterred
by the pain, handing on what she could to me.

When young, I didn’t comprehend her aches—
how age alters a woman. Old now, I notice joints
that ache when moved, the hidden places
worn enough for tenderness to emerge.

When Jasper died, the life I lived died too.
Married now to Joel, a blacksmith, I’ve entered
a different world. Things break, and Joel
remakes and fixes them. Taking damaged saws
and wagon wheels, worn out horseshoes,
ruined tools, he heats the metal from dark carnelian
to opal white, and then strikes the steel over
and over, sparks flying as he reshapes
with his hammer. Form renewed,
he quenches it with water.
Restoration can be brutal.

I’m not a blacksmith but know something
about hammers. I’ve given birth nine times,
had two children and a husband die, known drought,
hunger and ongoing uncertainty—so many
unanticipated ways things wear down
before they fall apart.

It’s true, Joel drinks. Some may say that’s a fault,
but I’ve given him my hand in marriage, worn as it is.
He knows about broken things and tenderness.

Hearts and habits stiff as iron can be melted, renewed
when there’s someone who knows how to mend them.

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Imagining Beyond The Days of Winter

annacitrino

We’re in the midst of January, spring’s burst of buds and flowers are some way off, but when I went for a walk in the late afternoon alongside oaks bathed in yellow light and looked out across fields lit with a fluorescent green glow as if spread with peridot jewel, I couldn’t help but think about resurrection. Yes, it’s cold and the willows’ branches are bare. My backyard garden is bare now too—the peach, sour cherry, fig and apple all stand bereft of leaves. It’s winter. The layers of leaves have fallen away and we see the exposed structure of things. The dying back is necessary. But harbored beneath the soil and inside the roots and trunks of trees life is at work beneath surface of what looks dead, rebuilding what it needs to recreate spring. 

Culturally speaking, the US is living through a harsh winter. There’s a lot of cold. The leaves have fallen away exposing a structure previously covered over. We see behind the curtain. In the streets of the US today, as Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz has described, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have gone door to door asking neighbors to tell which of their neighbors are immigrants and minorities. ICE agents have deported people without due process of law, have grabbed people, stuffed them in cars and taken them away, shot innocent people dead, wounded others. People in government positions mislead the public regarding events that occur and attempt to control others through intimidation, violence and fear. The media has likened ICE’s tactics to the Nazi gestapo in WW2. The Nazis, however, as Sarah Al-Arshani’s article in Business Insider learned from racist thought and tactics used in the America’s Jim Crow south. “Some Americans,” writes Al-Arshani, “including ones as prominent as Henry Ford, Helen Keller, and Alexander Graham Bell, began championing eugenics — a pseudoscientific ideology arguing that genetically “inferior” people should be sterilized to prevent offspring with undesirable traits…Historians said the eugenics preached in the US gave Nazis a blueprint of sorts.” Today, the US is looking and experiencing directly a resurfacing of perspectives left over from the country’s past that were never fully transformed into the country’s ideals of liberty and justice for all.

All growing things need tending. It’s important for our interior lives as well as the systems and structures we’ve created. This time of living through days of minimal light and meager foliage have me thinking how death and life are closely entwined, and how what looks like death can also be the beginning of a new life in the making.

A short time ago I attended an evening with vocal activist Melanie DeMore and the Joyful Noise choir leader Benjamin Mertz, musicians steeped in the tradition of African American spirituals. From the concert’s first moment DeMore brought the entire audience of several hundred people together in song, the whole place hummed with a life-filled felt presence. A sense of peace fell over the room. Something deeply restorative was at work in the music, as if collectively we had simultaneously come home to ourselves. Spirituals like “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Balm in Gilead” arose from the lives of people long oppressed who found a way to keep going despite grinding circumstances that otherwise might drive them to despair. The songs embody a sense of perseverance and determined focus to and be free, to rise up out of the quagmire of an environment that wanted to press them down, and to instead embrace the fire of hope for a new and better life. As the words in the spiritual sung by the Golden Gospel Singers “Oh Freedom!” state, “Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom / Oh freedom over me / And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave / And go home to my Lord and be free.” Belief in an afterlife a world beyond the current bleak one is a hope that allows one’s spirit to press on in an austere world where comfort and ease are difficult to come by. That afterlife can be right here on earth in a new world we create together where each person has dignity and the world we live in actively works to support our wellbeing.

Winter’s cold months are the time to trim the grape and berry vines and thin the fruit trees’ branches so when spring arrives the plants get more light and can better hold the weight of the fruit that’s to come. What builds community, enables people to thrive, nurtures their spirit? What nurtures life-giving resources? In winter we can see more clearly where we might trim back the branches preventing us from viewing each other heart to soul. In the midst of winter, we can sing of resurrection, dream of what it would take to allow people to reconnect human to human. We can stand together with others in protest of ICE’s violence, share a dinner with new neighbors, vote for those in the next election that support our constitution and stand by the rule of law. There is life beyond the death we’ve seen. Now is the time to proclaim resurrection.

Continuously learning from our experiences, we are all students of life. The school I worked at in New Delhi, India holds the following statements as the community’s focus:
–nurturing the intellectual, physical, social, and emotional development of each student
–fostering each student’s potential to achieve and to make a difference.
–developing a service ethic and practice.
–protecting nature and the environment.
–improving student learning through research, reflection, and innovation.
–practicing transparent and collaborative decision-making while maintaining effective governance.

Aiming to live together by making the above statements foundational to our actions goes a long way toward enabling everyone in a community feel they belong and have something valuable to offer each other. They are values good to hold through all seasons and beyond days of formal schooling.

In the poem “Barn Dance With The Family” in my book Stories We Didn’t Tell, family members attend a barn dance. Day to day, they are quiet people focused on their labors. They haul hay, fix fences, do laundry, cook for ranchers, milk sheep. No matter the weather or physical challenges, sore muscles, arthritic joints or exhaustion, with resolve they carry out their tasks. But when there’s a barn dance, they show up for joy and for each other. As Avery, a character in the book who loves to dance describes at the end poem’s end,

The bass keeps rhythm as guitars strum in harmony 
while the mouth harp whines and moans
and spoons keep beat. Banjo players’ fingers
fly like bird wings and I soar, my feet 
slipping back and forth across the floor. 

A fiddler’s bow races up the scale, transports 
the crowd, spinning and sliding into a world 
of dizzy motion. The guitarist strums out 
“We Shall Rise.” Humming along, I find
an empty bench to stretch out on for a rest,
“On that resurrection morning when death’s 
prison bars are broken, we shall rise,”
the last words I hear before drifting off to sleep.  

Dancing, singing, gardening, taking time to share life and joy with those around us to build community–these, too, are resurrection activities. Dreaming and imagining are important. During the year’s dark days when hope for a different world seems far away, consider these words from Alberto Rios’s poem  “We Are of a Tribe” to keep your hope of our resurrection into new life together alive,

We plant seeds in the ground
And dreams in the sky,

Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.

It has not happened yet.
We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:

Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,
Even as we stand on uncertain ground.

…

The sky is our common home, the place we all live.
There we are in the world together.

The dream of sky requires no passport.
Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime.

…

Friends from my days of working there at the school in New Delhi, India recorded “We Shall Rise,” for me. I’m including it here.

“On that resurrection morning when death’s prison bars are broken, we shall rise.” Let’s set our vision on the world we wish to see.

Nature, poetry, Uncategorized

A Way to Endure

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Today I was out wandering the coastal path along Bodega Bay here in Sonoma County. The sky was as blue as dream, the light clear as cut glass. My eyes stretched across the bay about 35 miles to the Point Reyes headlands while above me sea gulls careened through the air in drifts of white. I always look forward to visiting Bodega Bay to walk along the cliffs. It’s the landscape that convinced me I could move away from Santa Cruz County. Here in Sonoma County I could still be near sea and trees and beauty. My soul would be well. 

Perhaps you, too, have landscapes that have spoken to you or fed your soul. I remember standing years ago on the red earth outside of Wheatland, Wyoming. I climbed up on a piece of red sandstone and looked far across dry horizontal landscape to the distant horizon. Not a person or building in sight. Dark clouds hovered above and it began to rain. Thick drops splatted hard against the stone and earth. Everything around me felt absolutely elemental. I thought of my mother whose hair was red like the earth around me, and how durable a person’s body and spirit would have to be to hold up in such an environment, how resilient. Standing there on that land I understood my mother in a way I had never had before. 

The land can teach us things when we listen attentively. Recently, I learned that researchers have noticed that birdsong seems to reduce stress-related hormones in the tree. Additionally, recent studies hypothesize that birdsong “acts as a natural “sonic bloom,” providing acoustic stimulation that enhances plant physiology.” Just as we affect the natural world, the natural world affects us. 

When people settled the West in America, they plowed up about half of its native grasses, approximately 5.2 million acres in the Great Plains and effectively destroyed the soil, leading to the Dust Bowl. Our interactions as Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee states in his talk, “Enraptured with Earth,” “…union is the state in which the world really functions.” People in the past may not have understood the land they were living on, how it needed to be treated and whether or not it was capable of providing people with the nurturance and productivity settlers of the era sought. In our day, however, we have an abundance of information to help us understand what creates a healthy relationship with the environment. We know now that time spent in nature can improve our physical and mental health, as well as our thinking, creativity. This is encouraging and affirming news for human well-being.

For the character Adah in Stories We Didn’t Tell the land is a steady friend that helps her endure through difficulties and trauma.

During Drought
Beaver Creek, Weston, Wyoming
Adah, 1908
(age 19)

Earth crackled underfoot, hot winds 
peeled the skin, crops shriveled 
and collapsed, banks floundered, 
farmers sold their livestock.

Some lost their farms, others their homes. 
Then, on the brink of famine at the end 
of a decade of drought, 
I was born. 

The ghosts of the world that came before 
and what was coming next
rose from the soil to the fever-weary air. 

Parched earth’s despair eventually passed, 
but a new drought arrived when I got pregnant. 
Barely past childhood, 
I was living in one world, 

then woke to realize 
I was living in another. 

Arid wind evaporated my life, 
withered thoughts of any restful future. 

Heat exhausts. 
Lack of water alters the mind. 
We need rain, streams, lakes. 
We need rivers’ soft arms to hold us. 

I understood little about anything.
Except thirst. 

So, I went to the fields and meadows, 
days and months walking alone
through wave-thick grass, green and gold pastures
under gentle skies strewn with clouds. 
Flowing forth as if a spring, crested penstemon 
and desert buckbean grew out of cracks in rocks. 

Shadows shifting and lifting in crests across the prairie, 
I journeyed into fields, the earth’s wordless voice 
entering slowly through my feet and eyes, 
seeping through the silence, whispering within 
the perseverance of its expansive presence 
that I was more than the hurt and harm I felt, 
larger than what had happened to me, 
and that like the earth, I, too, 
would find a way to endure. 

I wish for you a relationship with the natural world that allows you to absorb through your eyes, or skin, or to feel beneath your feet the earth’s expansive presence. Even if your connection is simply attentively noticing the color of leaves through your morning window, the architecture of a tree’s branches in your neighborhood, or the weight of your cat resting on your lap, spend some time with the natural world. As you listen attentively over time to that connection, you’ll find how without words it speaks to you and works to support you, assists in allowing hurts or harms you may have experienced or are experiencing now to move through you. Like Adah, I hope you will find in that connection what you need to endure.

This coming Tuesday, 16 December, I’ll be giving a reading from Stories We Didn’t Tell on Zoom in connection with North Bay Poetics. I invite you to attend. The time listed below is Pacific Time.

(You can find the poem above, “During Drought” in Stories We Didn’t Tell, published by Shanti Arts.)

Uncategorized

Stepping Into the Warmth of the Day’s Full Sun

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“History is not to shame you. It’s not to guilt you. It’s a part of what makes us who we are. The good, the bad, the ugly. Our nation is like a family—we have stuff that nobody wants to talk about, nobody wants to deal with. But the problem is as long as we keep burying it or try to take it out of the public conversation and take it out of the public square, then we can never heal.”
—Dr. Wylin D. Wilson.

When I read Wilson’s above statement I couldn’t help but think about its connection to the stories my ancestors held but didn’t want to talk about either because it was too painful, they didn’t have the words to describe their experience, because there was no available container to safely hold such experiences, or a variety of other possible reasons. While I imagine what my ancestors may have wanted to say about their experiences in Stories We Didn’t Tell, I didn’t write the book without concern for how readers might receive the words. As Ursula K. LaGuin has stated, “Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls… And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.” Many of the stories in my new book are difficult ones. My hope is that through imagining ancestors’ voices, buried stories can be heard and a healing occur.

There are truths about life we wouldn’t know without the imagination ignited through books and through writing. Reading and writing are portals where we can enter into other worlds to commune with people and places we might not know otherwise, ways of thinking, being and living we’d find difficult to understand if we’d not taken that journey as a reader or writer.  Imaginatively stepping into the circumstances of my characters’ lives in my book and the historical circumstances they lived in allowed me to understand with greater depth the kinds of challenges my ancestors faced and especially how certain social structures functioned in oppressive ways for women in the past century. Walter Brueggemann writes, “You can’t make nice with injustice. This requires fierce, brave confrontation–which is difficult for those taught to be nice.” I was taught to be nice. But I want to live in ways that enable both myself and those I interact with to live into greater wholeness. I’m realizing that sometimes growing into greater wholeness means recognizing when it’s the right time to be brave, and when the situation requires me, to be fierce.

One of the reviewers for my book wrote that Stories We Didn’t Tell “is full of characters who are brave, resilient, and flawed.” I appreciate that comment because aren’t we all flawed? I hope for the book to honor both people’s struggles as well as strengthen readers who might identify with the challenges characters in the book face. In exploring the book’s themes, I’ve sensed my own need to be brave in facing up to some of the things I became aware of in my country’s history and in the past of those who came before me.

Writing a book requires serious and sustained effort. Birthing it into the world asks for an entirely different set of skills. Like my book’s character, Adah, who asked her sister to sew her a dress that ended up changing her life, I asked my friend Ann Pervinkler, of AnnsSilksofHawaii, if she would sew a kimono-type top for me and paint my book cover on it. Enfolded in an image of the book’s landscape, and enveloped in the silk of her friendship and care, I believed I could summon what I needed to introduce the book to audiences and give it the opportunity to speak.

“My art is a combo of skill, silk painting fun, and letting go. I’ve been sewing since childhood. Fiber arts since 1970,” Ann tells me. Below is her process for the kimono she made for me.

I’ve wanted to write the story contained in Stories We Didn’t Tell for decades. What an enormous gift of generosity it is to have a friend’s help in the effort to step more fully into my own becoming. Opening the package Ann sent the kimono in, I pulled away layer by layer the delicate tissue she’d wrapped it in, saw her husband’s colorful photo of a spring tree she’d enclosed with it, and lifted it’s cloud-like essence. What beauty her hands had made!

I wore the kimono for my book launch in Sebastopol, California, as well as to the reading I had a few days later in Fort Collins, Colorado, and felt wrapped in the support of not only of my friend Ann, but so many others on my writing journey. From my husband Michael’s many hours of listening to my poems in their draft form, to those who read portions of the manuscript, friends playing music at the book’s launch, and my friends the Fraziers generously opening their home and inviting friends over for a reading, my publisher’s belief in the manuscript at Shanti Arts Publishing in Brunswick, Maine, as well as my many teachers, publishers, fellow writers and readers over the years, and countless other people’s supportive efforts on my behalf, it’s very clear to me that though I might have my name on the cover, the book is but a thread in a long fabric of people’s nurturing effort and attention to my life that has allowed this book to become a reality. Ann’s generous gift to me of the kimono is a symbol of all those who have stood by me and affirmed me through the years in my effort to find a few well-considered words to say something that might add to the good of people’s lives. Thank you to all of you who take the time to read what I write.

We are meant to transform. Our flawed and incomplete selves can learn from those who bravely stepped toward creating a different future. Because we’ve lived through experiences of hurt, have known harm, been pushed aside, or discredited, because we know grief and loss, we can recognize in someone else the bravery it takes to step beyond boundaries we’ve been given or assigned ourselves to. This is what happens when my character Adah learns about the news in the town she came from in the following poem from Stories We Didn’t Tell.

LISTENING LONG AND FAR
Mesa, Arizona, 1957
Adah, age 68

I was doing laundry, scrubbing stains from
last night’s napkins when Litton came in with news
from Arkansas, “Governor Orval Faubus surrounded
Little Rock’s Central High School with the National Guard.”
Litton opened the paper and read, “Soldiers, armed
with rifles and carbines, turned back nine Negro students.”

I put down the napkins and took up the paper showing
Elizabeth Eckford in her crisp, clean clothes walking
away from the crowd that pushed her along, and the girl
behind her with the scrunched-up vinegar face,
bared teeth, and lips curled into a snarl.
That girl’s warped face pierced me.

I looked up from the paper to gaze through
the window remembering cactus’ sharp spines,
how I once accidentally backed into one
and it took a pair of pliers to remove its barb.

The steadfast set of Elizabeth’s face
is what sticks with me most, the small furrow
in her brow above her dark glasses, her head
tilted slightly down, watching where she’s going.

I don’t know Elizabeth’s story,
but recognize the look of a woman
silently holding herself together
beneath what can’t be said.

It’s not just today’s angry crowd that girl
suffers from. She’s moving into history’s
windstorm when trying to enter that school—
a cyclone, a hurricane, a blowing over
of the million little rocks men mortared together
and are used to standing on.

People can demand control, bring out their
armed guards, their tractors and chemicals,
make the world we live in a giant factory, can
process people through a convoluted system.
They can storm and shout, show up as vigilante
crowds with their curses, guns and rope.

But people like Elizabeth don’t do things solely
to keep their days happy. They do things
because beneath a desert’s angry heat
and the rigid rock weight of hard-hearted rules, life
begs to break through and rise from dry soil
with the surprise of color from land
believed to be barren.

How she’s able to walk through the crowd’s mass
of churning ire, I don’t know, except that her vision
must be as expansive as the sky, clear
as the water that streamed from the rock
Moses struck to slake the thirst
of multitudes.

I’ve traveled into the desert here
outside Mesa where I now live, sat
on a slab of sandstone and listened
long and far to the land’s
deep silence.

The sky’s expansive blue settles over me.
A wordless voice
drifts down
gentle 
as a feather—
says Earth
is borderless
belongs to itself.
Holds everyone.

I’m old, worn as a sandstone slab.
Don’t have Elizabeth’s courage
to walk through doors I’ve never entered,
but ache for the strength of a spring desert flower
to stand like Elizabeth, the open petals of her humanity
set on absorbing the warmth of the day’s full sun.

I hope you’ll read Stories We Didn’t Tell and that in its pages you’ll discover more of how you want to step into the day’s full sun of your own story.

Uncategorized

Among The Trees

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Recently, I visited Colorado where I gave a reading in friends’ backyard from my recently published book, Stories We Didn’t Tell. Leaving Denver’s airport, my friend drove me through the mountains where we viewed the aspen quilting the hillsides in gold between patches of green. Walking amongst the aspen, I felt I was wandering inside the glittering gold of a Klimt painting. Such astonishment of color! What life autumn brings. Clouds filled the sky as we drove and lighting let loose its ecstatic bolts of electricity, but the hills overflowed with vibrant yellow, leaves fluttering and swiveling in the brisk air. What a gift to be alive.

I’m grateful to live near trees. As I write, I look across an empty field. At the far end rests a line of redwoods. My great aunt, the central character in my new book, was raised on the prairies with its ocean of grass. Like her, I didn’t grow up with trees, but am grateful for their presence. Daily, they add beauty to my life. Landscapes shape our way of seeing the world. A walk in the woods can literally affect our sense of happiness, health, and wellbeing.

September 29 would have been my great aunt’s 135 birthday. Here’s a piece from Stories We Didn’t Tell in honor of her.

THE TREES
North Little Rock, Arkansas,
1946 Adah, age 57

A short time ago this town held four thousand
German prisoners of war. Things are calmer now,
thankfully, so this morning Litton and I
drove around Little Rock to explore Autumn.

Sweet gums at the capitol dressed themselves
in topaz and copper. Maples on riverbanks
huddled together beneath red and amber blankets.
Up north, oaks wore suits of rust.

The cold that brings these gifts of color is a sign
the trees soon will lose all they hold.
Seems I should feel sorrow standing beneath
their branches, knowing their loss grows daily,
but the War is over, and it’s my birthday.
Mostly, I feel embraced.

I’m a woman of the prairies and open skies.
When I speak, my accent tells the story:
I’m an outsider here.
Sugar maples, hickory, dogwood, and gum—
trees in general are foreign to me.
My history is from a different world, one made of grass.

Life here has comforts I enjoy.
Same as for others who live nearby,
Litton and I have electricity, indoor toilets,
heat, a toaster, refrigerator, and a radio.
Now and then, though, I take off my shoes,
walk barefoot to remember what it feels like.

Every place has something important it wants to tell us.
In spring, Little Rock’s magnolias lift
their flowers like cups to gather the afternoon’s
blue, and redbuds grow blossoms on their trunks.
In fall we ride roads curling through trees aflame
with brilliant color. Still, sometimes I wish
to hear the fields of prairie grass sigh
when the wind moves through.
I long for its voice
whispering in my ear.

Arkansas isn’t my forever home, but likely
I’ll miss people’s accents, sweet tea,
and the city’s abundant trees when I leave.

All of us in the family, including Mama, Father,
their parents and great grandparents too—everyone
left the land they were born on, and I have too.
Don’t know if I’ll ever return to Nebraska
or will want to.
For now, I carry my home with me,
choose the parts to keep.

Today I stood beside the river
in the afternoon’s gold light, opened
my arms to a maple’s leafy blaze,
and made my birthday wish:
to be like these trees—
the way they allow their beauty to burn
and burn and yet don’t die, even after
losing all that allowed them
to live into their fullness,
even as every colorful leaf
drifts down to earth.

May this autumn season bring you beauty, a deep sense of wellbeing, and an awareness life’s fullness meeting you as you savor color wherever you meet it.

Uncategorized

The Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary People

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Stories shape our lives, yet sometimes people hold their stories inside and never tell them, perhaps because they are too painful, they fear might bring shame, or words simply can’t be found to tell them. Sometimes the dominant culture we live in doesn’t allow certain stories to be told or heard. When we hear them at last, those stories can be transformative.

Born in California, I had little contact with relatives living where my parents were born and raised on the Great Plains and in South Dakota. Curious about my origins, I wrote to relatives and traveled to interview them. Those interviews, together with further research of US history deepened my understanding of what it means to be a descendant of settlers, as well as the difficult social expectations and restrictions women of my ancestor’s era confronted as they worked to create lives they wanted to live. My new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, released in September is the result of this research. Told in the voices of a family living on the Great Plains, Stories We Didn’t Tell begins when the US wars with Wyoming and Nebraska’s Native people have ended and concludes in the mid 1980s. 

Spanning an era of extraordinary change, people on the Great Plains played a significant role in creating the America we live in today. Told in interconnected narrative poems, Stories We Didn’t Tell explores stories that reside inside and beneath the surface of our country’s history. The book opens during a time when women were expected to be wives and mothers and where the working world held few options for women. Farm women were to be mothers and housewives, President Theodore Roosevelt told the public in 1907, “whose prime function it is to bear and rear a sufficient number of healthy children.” While not suffragettes or feminists, the book’s female characters are perseverant and resilient as they seek to create the lives they want within the constraints of the time they live in.

“A masterful book with sweeping scope and depth, Stories expresses the courage, daring and despair of Americans settling the west. The themes in this book are as relevant today as ever. I can’t imagine a more wide-ranging history of western expansion with its undercurrents and repercussions… Stories is an important and powerful book that offers hope to the human spirit.” —Susan G. Wooldridge, author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words.

Join me to celebrate the publication of my new book, Stories We Didn’t Tell, Saturday 27 September, at 1000 Gravenstein Hwy N, Sebastopol, CA 95472 Fellowship Hall 3:30 to 5:30 for readings from the book, music, food, and book signing.

Living on what was previously called the Great American Desert, Adah’s family of homesteaders and ranchers seek to eke out a life on the Great Plains amidst the effects droughts, economic depression, two World Wars the mechanization of farming, and the forging of modern America. Confronting the many challenges, Adah, seeks to define a life for herself larger than the confining one she was born into.

Books will be available beginning September 2 on the Shanti Arts website as well as other common locations for finding books.

Uncategorized

Invitation to a Reading

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 Making a home while living between worlds can fulfill dreams. It can also cost you your life. Enter San Francisco’s turn of the century world through the eyes of an immigrant Italian family as they cope with complex challenges to their traditional way of life during a time of speakeasies, government corruption, natural disaster, the opening of the Golden Gate, and neighbors being sent to internment camps. For those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area, I will be reading poems from A Space Between, a story in narrative poetry showing an Italian family’s decision to leave Calabria and move to the US, and their challenges after their arrival. If you live in the San Francisco Bay area, I hope you can attend.

As a bit of background, the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was an era of populist politics and political bosses were a central part of the political setting. People from widely diverse backgrounds were living together without shared sense of community, common history or articulated shared beliefs and values. Political bosses rose in urban settings such as San Francisco. They manipulated voting, and were not opposed to using bribes or violence, and used people’s tight connection to their national origins to their own advantage to gain wealth and power. People flocked to the San Francisco after gold was discovered in 1848. Before the earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco was the center of industry on the West Coast and also one of the largest centers of population.

The hardships and challenges immigrants faced in the world they entered a century ago is similar to those people are facing today as the poem from A Space Between below illustrates.

GAETANO’S VIEW OF PROTECTION

With five bambini and a wife to care for, I’ve cut more
than corners to own my barber shops. I saved for years

to bring Luisa from Calabria. Worked hard after the quake
when people needed an extra hand to help rebuild. This city

is home now. I don’t need any papers to become American,
didn’t want to crouch in a trench during the War to prove it.

Luisa, the children, they needed me more
than the government. I’ve got friends, attend mass.

I don’t want to pay any protection people. The men
keep coming by asking for their dues. Sure, I’m Italian,

and every Italian doing business owes them. You can’t stand
alone, but those guys are crooks—gun running loan sharks,

gambling on the money they take from me to run their business.
They’re the ones I need protection from.

When Schmitz was mayor, boss Ruef demanded bribes from businesses.
Now that Ruef is in jail and Rolph is mayor, the new crime kings,

the McDonough brothers, run the police department with bribes.
The bosses crave their cut.

“One way or another, you’ll pay,” my cousin Amadeo reminds me.
“It may be America, but earthquakes come. Storms.

You need protection.” It might be prohibition, but San Francisco
isn’t dry. Irish, German, genovese or calabrese, for us, alcohol

isn’t evil. Back in 1906, Italians helped put out the Great Fire
with the wine they’d made in their basements.

The government disregards its own rules, though.
Prisons fill with those who drink while gangsters gain

from politicians who want their alcohol. Politicians’ power—
it’s a big show. They buy people like objects, play them

for what they can get or get away with.
Mayor Rolph invents stories for the press, makes money

from the prostitution house he owns.
I’ve given what I’ve had to to keep the business going.

My second shop on Market Street is doing well.
The bosses don’t like it. I pay the rent,

but they want more. Prohibition has made them
greedy. Things aren’t simple.

I don’t need to be handed a Mano Nera letter
from the Black Hand to feel the threat of harm.

I don’t fit with the Irish, can’t compete with the bail bond king,
McDonnough, his police and politician friends.

I’m not blind. Winds rising off the ocean can turn.
Gangsters might chase me down, wait for me

in some hidden hole, but I’m creating a future
for my children. Call me a hard-headed

testa dura calabrese, but isn’t this America?
I came to work. Let me do it.

Life is hard.
In Italy, our firstborn fell from a chair and died.

Every healthy man suffers. Food, family, home.
I’m not asking more than this for the work I do.

I’m a barber. I know what to cut and where.
Let me have what’s mine.

I stuff today’s earnings in my pocket, shut the shop,
step into the damp and dark. It’s December 5,

St. Nicholas eve. Nicholas, he knew about protection.
He was a real Godfather. He dropped those sacks of gold

down the chimney for that family so the parents
wouldn’t have to sell their children into slavery.

I’ll stop at the Shamrock Saloon like I was asked,
have a drink. Got to keep friends on every side.

(originally published in A Space Between by Bordighera Press.)

Southern Italian immigrants were skeptical of government because they had often been overlooked or mistreated by the various countries and governments that had occupied the land that had little consideration for its inhabitants. This past history encouraged a generalized distrust of government authority, leading to Gaetano’s reasoning of not needing to go through the paperwork to become an American citizen. People who came to the US at the turn of the last century weren’t required to become US citizens to live and work here. It wasn’t until 1978 that an amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that it was unlawful to leave or enter the United States without a passport.

Leaving one’s country to move to a place you’ve never seen and enter a life with an uncertain future is a hugely difficult decision in any time period, including today. Immigrants from the past century helped build the America we live in today, despite the difficulties they faced.

Public concern and fears of the previous century about immigrants hasn’t gone away, however. On July 1, the US Senate passed a bill that increases the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget threefold, a 265 percent annual budget increase, “the largest investment in detention and deportation in U.S. history,” according to the American Immigration Council, even though “In 2022, people without a documented status paid an estimated $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes. And a 2013 report by the Social Security actuaries concluded that earnings from immigrants without a documented status have a net positive effect on the Social Security trust fund, finding that they contributed a net $12 billion into the Social Security trust fund in 2010.”

US immigration policy has not had a major update for current social and economic realities since 1990. The immigration system we function under today in the US was never built for asylum. Instead of addressing the need to update the system, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program has been suspended, and asylum seekers are being turned away. Additionally, backlogged cases can take years to move through the system, in part because there aren’t enough people working on the cases. The current US immigration system needs adequate funding so it can process people’s paperwork at the border in a timely manner and prevent delays in obtaining a visa.

Italian immigrants made significant contributions to the US in service, agriculture, construction and fishing industries. They cut stones for many of San Francisco’s buildings and laid the cobblestones the city’s streets. You may recognize some of Italian American’s other contributions: Actors/film producers: Frank Capra, Jimmy Durante, Rudolph Valentino. Artists: Attilio Piccirilli, with his five brothers: carved the Lincoln Memorial, Roger Morigi & Vincent Palumbo: carved the sculptures at the Washington National Cathedral. Joseph Barbera, cartoon artist. Inventor: Frank Zamboni—ice resurfacer. Singers: Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tettrazzini, Mario Lanza, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra composer Henry Mancini, Nick La Rocca first jazz recording. Sports: Joe DiMaggio: baseball player, Rocky Marciano, boxer, Mario Andretti, car racing. Government: Angelo Rossi, Samuel Alioto. Workers: Carlo Tresca, labor organizer, Rose Bonavita: “Rosie the Riviter” Writers: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Diane DiPrima. Businesses: Amadeo Giannini: founded Bank of Italy–became the Bank of America, Barnes & Noble, Chef Boyardee (Ettore Boiardi), Ghirardelli chocolate, Gallo, Italian Swiss Colony, Jacuzzi,  Robert Mondavi vineyards, Tropicana.

Like citizens of any particular country, immigrants want to provide for themselves and their families, but they also significantly benefit the places they live. When looking through just the economic lens, immigrants today contribute billions to the US economy. According to the American Immigration Council, “In 2023, immigrant households paid over $167 billion in rent in the housing market, and held over $6.6 trillion in housing wealth” among other significant contributions. As in the previous century, immigrants’ skills, cultural gifts, and offerings add exponentially to American cultural richness and life as well. (You can read more about the impact of immigration on the US and the many other ways immigrants benefit the US here.)

Years ago, I attended the Flight of the Mind writing workshop at a retreat center on the McKenzie River outside of Eugene, Oregon where Lucille Clifton was my workshop leader. Her statement of how poetry humanizes us has come back to me many times over the years. Now, as much as ever, we need to embrace those thoughts, practices, and actions that humanize us and bring us to a recognition of our mutual interdependence on each other.

None of us has all the skills or time needed to completely provide for even our basic physical needs of water, food, clothing, shelter and transportation. We need each other. My hope is that when reading A Space Between people will gain greater insight into the challenges immigrants face, that the book will open hearts and minds to see themselves in their neighbor’s faces.

Overview of San Francisco

In his statement about the book, Nicholas Samaras wrote, “A Space Between” is a massive, ambitious effort of epic proportions that rewards with its interweavings of history, consequence, heritage and legacy. How heartening it is to witness in these poems the resonance through generations of immigration and sacrifice to provide for living, surviving, prospering. As the author smartly observes in her tight oxymoron, “Light hauls its weight from stone to stone,” it is refreshing to see forward in appreciation by looking back into the past that never leaves us.”

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I hope you will come to the August 9 reading at 6:30 pm at Telegraph Hill Books, 1501 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA. Register online here to reserve your space. If you can’t make it to the reading, I hope you will read the book.

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco