#Alberto Rios – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

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.

“…she knew her memory was failing and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If
I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’” –Anne Berest, The Postcard

Moving back to the United States after living abroad in six different countries for over two and a half decades, I now want to get a better understanding of the country I live in and the land I live on. Something I’ve noticed in adjusting to living in different cultures and in visiting countries occupied by various other cultures over long periods of time is that people who have left one region of the world for another carry the world they came from with them.

When early settlers from the East Coast came to the western states, they learned that the land there had different needs and requirements. The soil and climate were different. More land was needed to achieve the amount of food production desired. The world one arrives at after a move is not the one that is left behind. It takes time to understand and adjust to a world not your own and cultures that function with different organizational structures, have different ways of seeing and follow different rules. The environment in one area isn’t the same those in other areas, and the needs aren’t always understood when moving to a new area.

When I moved to Sonoma County two years ago, I encountered a part of American history I was formerly unaware of–that portions of the county were formerly a Russian colony. Years ago, I visited Sitka, Alaska, and learned of its history as a Russian settlement. Called Novo-Arkhangel’sk by the Russian colonists, Sitka came into existence for the purpose of expanding Russia’s fur trade in the area. (Read more about the history here.) What I didn’t know when visiting Sitka, was that Russia had also set up a colony on native people’s lands north of San Francisco in the early years of the 1800s. Because of the cold climate, it was difficult to keep Russian colonies in the northwest adequately supplied with provisions. As a result, the Russians sought a settlement further south on the American continent’s western coast.

Russians used Bodega Bay’s outer waters as a harbor and renamed it Rumiantsev Bay, and built a fort further north on the Sonoma Coast using building styles similar to those in Sitka and in Siberia. The stockade, blockhouses, and log buildings were completed on August 30, 1812. Cannons were placed in the stockade and blockhouses and the flag of the Russian-American Company was raised. Known now as Fort Ross, its name likely coming from the fort’s connection with Russia, Rossiia, being an alternative from of the word Russia, and Ross a shortening of Rossia, is now a California State Park.

Craftsmen at the fort made barrels, plows, and built ships and boats. People at the fort gardened and raised cattle. A chapel was built at the fort in the Orthodox style where weddings, baptisms, burials, prayer and other religious practices were held. The fort’s inhabitants carried out experiments in farming. Grape stock was brought from Peru and peach trees from Monterey, as well as apples, cherries, pear, wheat, corn, beans, and tobacco–all of these crops and activities familiar to their own culture.

Icon at Fort Ross, Sonoma County, California

According to the Sonoma Index Tribune, Russians brought Gravenstein apples to the Fort Ross area. Later, in 1850s, the apples were brought to the area around Graton in Sonoma County. More orchards were planted in the area, and apple production was a central agricultural product in the area, giving Sebastopol a nation-wide reputation for its apples.

The architectural forms the Russians’ buildings took and the way they were made are unique to their culture as well. They didn’t use the structural methods of the people native to the lands they were occupying. Additionally, the Russians hunted for otter along the coast until their presence was exhausted, leading to the collapse of the Russian colony.

Though stories of the Russian colony on the US western coast is one we may be unfamiliar with, it nevertheless helped to make the world we walk around in. There can be a variety of reasons for our not knowing the stories of the land we inhabit. The people who came before us may have endured such hardship that it was too painful to tell the stories, alternatively, sometimes shame surrounds how the land we live on was acquired and people don’t want to tell the story or create an alternative story or simply keep silent about the story, as Louise Dunlap suggests in her book Inherited Silence. Other people are so caught up in their own daily story that they haven’t considered the story of the land they live on. Nevertheless, as Berest writes in The Postcard, “I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory.”

Author Dale M. Kushner, in her blog post, “The Things We Carry: How Our Ancestors’ Traumas May Influence Who We Are,” explains how research findings in the field of behavioral epigenetics, “have documented that trauma can affect the expression or suppression of certain genes, not only for the person involved but also for succeeding generations,” as can experiences of familial shame, guilt, despair, rage, hopelessness, evidence suggests,” says Kushner, but she goes on to explain how Jungian psychologist James Hollis suggests we “look to our imaginations as a portal to healing,” to the “arts of ceremony and ritual, and to our in-dwelling creative spirits that remain alive no matter what terrible thing has happened to us.”

Sunset looking toward Fresno, California

Alberto Rios in his poem “A House Called Tomorrow” writes

When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.

It’s important to consider what we bring to the communities we interact with so that we co-create the kind of world we want to exist. Though it’s not humanly possible to know every culture’s perspective, we can be aware that our way of seeing is but one way and that there are others that may be more fitting. As Rios says, what we bring into the new day, every day is ourselves and that is what we need to start and to keep going. We don’t live separate lives. Many cultures and ways of seeing and acting form our world. We each participate in making the world we inhabit as well as the one those after us will live in.

The natural world is one of generosity and community. Trees, for example, give shade to anyone who walk beneath them. Rivers give water to all who drink from them without withholding. Charles Eisenstein states in his article, “The Relationship Between Gifts and Community: on the Daily Good website offers a beautiful way we can begin to create community and a more generous world. “Community is woven from gifts,” Eisenstein states, and suggests creating gift circles where people gather to express their needs, share with each other something they would like to give, and then later gather to give gratitude for what was given. As Rios points out in his poem, “we can make a house called tomorrow.” That tomorrow begins with becoming gifts to each other and recognizing the gifts that abound everywhere in the around us.

Tag: #Alberto Rios

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