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.
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 inStories We Didn’t Tellthe 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 Tellon 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.)
“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 thatStories 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.
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.
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.
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, RobertMondavi 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.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”—Albert Einstein
Fascinated by their colors, shapes and textures, my attraction to the mineral world began as a child. My family lived in a house where the driveway’s earth contained an abundance of mica. I loved its sparkle, the glints of light shining up from the ground and found it wondrous. “It’s fools gold my older siblings informed me,” as if to explain away its marvel. But I went on finding it magical. Real gold, wouldn’t have made it more fantastic. In my five year old eyes, the glints in the sand were marvel enough as they were.
Throughout my life I’ve loved looking for stones that call to me to notice them. I scanned the landscape for rock crystals in the Saudi desert, searched the ground for amethyst in Thunder Bay, Canada, and hunted for rose quartz on my grandmother’s property in South Dakota’s Black Hills. The gift of rock salt from Colombia and pebbles from the beach in the town in Calabria, Italy where family ancestors were born, these are precious treasures connected to a larger story reaching far back through time.
The beginning of my childhood rock collection
Living amidst the world’s current disruptions, fear expanding in explosions like July fourth fireworks from news headlines, recently I’ve been thinking again about rock hunting and the quiet pursuit of the beauty’s solid expressions that have been forming and residing in the earth since its foundation.
Foundational writings in historical US documents has promoted the idea of pursuing happiness, felicity achieved by independent effort and the belief in “pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps,” as the saying goes. Happiness for some is food on the table, water to drink and bathe in, clothes to wear, and heat when the day is cold, and the rent paid. For others the pursuit of happiness includes the comforts of fine dining, vacation time in far off places, brand name clothing and the newest gadgets and the ceaseless busy pursuit to pay for it all. People have different definitions and expectations for happiness.
Meanwhile, amidst the endless chase to live happily, U.S. institutions that provided public good such as schools, consumer protection agencies, and emergency assistance programs, are being dismantled. The world U.S. citizens once lived in is crumbling. Chunks of stability and support people once counted on are falling away. What’s needed now for the long term social good and happiness is something far greater than fine food at a restaurant or a week or two holiday. We need a new way of being together that promotes the flourishing of all lives. Whether we want to or not, it’s important now to swim across the river of change we’re in the midst of, and to imagine into being the different shore we want waiting there to receive us.
Spring Lake, Santa Rosa
Imagining that other shore, the quality of its shape, texture is important. What does it look like to reconcile our nation’s inherited past with a vision of one where reparations are made for injustices and the common person doesn’t have to live in fear of not being able to sustain their own lives. How would we live differently if we consciously saw the natural world as wondrous, not just when gazing at a waterfall or a super bloom of wildflowers in spring, but as a daily foundational awareness as we went about our everyday lives?
To imagine that world, what it means for us personally to embody the world we want to live into it, it’s valuable to step away from cultural mandates that encourage us to be continuously productive and to do something different. In my book Stories We Didn’t Tell coming out later this year with Shanti Arts, the character Avery goes rock hunting in the Wyoming outback with his brother Leith. The ending portion of the poem reads:
After miles of flatland and shrubs, we climb
from the car to inhale the earth’s rich scent. The ground stuffed with stones like chips in a cookie, buckets in hand, we comb the earth looking for agates’ lacy plumes, snail-shaped fossils, red jasper, and petrified wood.
No specific purpose needed when rock hunting. No timeline or agenda to fulfill, just walking the land with the possibility of reaching into the soil to find something formed several million years before we touched it— something solid, beautiful and unrelated to any need for productivity.
Productivity isn’t the measure of life. As Mary Oliver writes, “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” Finding moments in our day and our week where we disengage from productivity, where we wander out into the desert, forest, lake shore, or prairie without a particular goal is important. It restores us, brings us back to our bodies and our connection to the life that both births and sustains us.
from top left to right: rose quartz, Colombian rock salt, amethyst, pudding stone, gypsum rose
Rocks and stone are both solid and the physical result of great change. They are, so to speak, the physical embodiment of the earth’s imagining. Like rocks, we are people of this earth. Maybe it’s time to go out rock hunting to find the rock you can carry in your pocket as a reminder of solidity amidst change. As Byrd Baylor writes in her children’s book, Everybody Needs a Rock. You want to be able to look your rock right in the eye and chose a rock that fits comfortably in your hand.
Quiet spaces, such as one might find while rock hunting are valuable to our inner lives. I hope you find a place where you might see the wind turn the leaves of trees, watch the ocean waves’ ceaseless motion, sit and savor the flavor of fresh peach, or just plain sit and stare off into space. Wherever it is you can sense your life is part of the earth’s great body, let that place hold you. Be present with it.
Imagination takes time to form. It might take time to hear what it has to say, like it takes time for a stone to form. Listen for what rises there.
Overlook of Pomo Canyon, Sonoma County, California
So many voices are clamoring for attention these days. I’ve felt the need to go into my garden pull weeds all day, go out on long walks and long bike rides to be in the green world, the world that is growing, generous and lifting from heavy earth in wondrous color and life. Recently, I attended an online poetry reading with Shanti Arts. At the end of the reading one person asked. “What are people taking from poetry or going to poetry for in the environment…we’re living in. What can poetry do for us?” One of the central values of reading poetry for me at this time is the reminder that there’s a larger world than the circles of fear that want to take hold in the mind. Life that has been waiting for months and months is pushing up from the earth. There is pain, oppression, loss, grief, yes, so much grief in this world. Let them be acknowledged and known. But notice also green life is there pushing through into the light of day. Earth’s continuous effort is to sustain life. Including ours.
Blue-eyed grassSuncupsBaby Blue EyesRedwood sorrel Douglas iris
I like to go walking most any time. But when my heart feels heavy, I especially appreciate getting out for a hike in the hills. I need to be in the natural world to remind myself that the experience of being alive, and life itself is larger than the things that work to remove the structures that enable the world’s flourishing. Looking out across the ocean or gazing up into the sky, I can literally see the universe is vast. My understanding will always be limited. We may have maps of the world’s geographic landscape but there are worlds within worlds we don’t understand.
A number of years ago when visiting St. Petersburg, Russia, I remember a Russian man at a restaurant we were eating at ask where my husband and I were from. When we said “The U.S.,” he told us, “You can go where you want. You have no idea what it’s like to not have that freedom.” He was right. To some extent I could imagine the limitation of movement, but the emotional and psychological impact of that is an entirely different thing. Choosing to stay in a particular place versus knowing you’re not allowed to move beyond an authority’s set boundary is different.
Back in the mid 90’s I was speaking with a student’s mother in the hallway at a school in Kuwait where I was teaching at the time. The family had came to Kuwait from Bosnia and Herzegovina to escape the war that was going on there. My students were collecting oral histories and traditional tales from family and community members from the cultures the students were connected to and sharing them with Inuit students in Alaska and high schoolers in Sandy, Utah. I don’t now remember what my student’s mother and I were specifically speaking of, but suddenly the mother choked-up and said, “You have no idea what it’s like in my country right now, what is going on there, what is happening.”
She was right. I didn’t know. The Bosnian War “was characterised by bitter fighting, indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns, ethnic cleansing, and systematic mass rape,” I read in Wikipedia. “The massacre of over 8,000 Bosniak males by Serb forces in Srebrenica is the only incident in Europe to have been recognized as a genocide since World War II.”
Sarajevo, photo courtesy of CFaZeSarajevo, photo courtesy of CFaZeSarajevo, photo courtesy of CFaZeSarajevo, photo courtesy CFaZe
“Estimates suggest over 100,000 people were killed during the war. Over 2.2 million people were displaced, making it, at the time, the most violent conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. In addition, an estimated 12,000–50,000 women were raped, mainly carried out by Serb forces, with most of the victims being Bosniak women.” (source: Wikipedia) How could a person find the strength to speak of such atrocities or to ever absorb the emotional trauma and horror behind those statistics?
When I think of the conversation with my former student’s mother as I consider the growing ways people in my country are now being dehumanized and deprived of rights, the fear people around me express for their sense of safety, it’s extremely sobering. What seeds and sun inside our collective social structures need to be watered and nurtured so we can clearly see and care about each other’s humanity, build on common values, and begin to trust, respect and appreciate each other more?
It feels particularly important to find ways to enter the quiet spaces within us so we can consciously, purposefully listen to not only the truth our own inner voice wants to tell us, but to the voices of with those we interact with. We need to listen for the words and the life that wants to come forward underneath what is spoken and aim to hear and see the humanity in each person we interact with. I’m reminded of Sherman Alexie’s recent poem, “Bad Back” (March 16, 2025, Rattle) where he writes,
I know, as a writer and an Indian and an Indian writer that I am
expected to offer advice. But I have nothing but this consolation: Everything you’re feeling now
is what I’ve always felt as a reservation-raised Indian.
What is currently happening in the US with the disrespect for the rule of law, the mistreatment of fellow humans, the reckless unconcern for the abuses of the natural world–our forests, oceans, natural habitats, and our very air is a reflection of the stories we hold about the world inherited from the past. The stories we carry with us affect the way we treat each other and the way we treat the earth. The two are connected. Every country has their histories to confront. Transformation is a continuous process. We all benefit from allowing ourselves to grow into new ways of thinking and being. Alexie ends his poem “Bad Back” saying, “I’m going to press / my bad back against the earth / and wait for everybody’s rebirth.” Rebirth is, indeed, what we need right now.
The stories we hold ripple through our actions and way of speaking. If we listen beneath the chatter in the daily news and the chatter in our minds, what new story and new life wants to come forth? We can purposefully pursue to renew our minds and actions. Pascha, Passover, Ramadan, Easter. These ancient traditions remind us there is life beyond slavery, and that we can be renewed. We have the opportunity to teach ourselves what it’s like for others to go without basic necessities such as food and clean water. In doing so, we can water seeds of empathy and grow toward deeper recognition of all people’s need for social justice.
We’re not meant to stay on the very same path we were born onto. Just as the earth renews itself and the cells of our bodies renew, we too are meant to transform our minds, renew our stories. What better time than spring to start? I appreciate the way Billy Collins emphasizes this willful act of spring renewal in his poem, “Today.”
If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day.
Source: Poetry (April 2000)
Wild roseWild hyacinthShooting startrillium
Spring is calling you outside. The earth reaches out to renews you! Check out the ways! If you can, go for a walk, a swim, or a bike ride.
If you can’t do any of those things, find someone whose hand you can hold while staring up into the forever sky. In the midst of despair life is there, present, waiting to give itself to us. We can turn toward it at any time.
I went for a brisk walk in the wind today before the rain began. Branches twisting and turning wildly, I wondered if the redwood tree in a neighbor’s yard would continue to hold fast to its roots. Palm trees flailed their long limbs. Grasses bended and waved. Here and there, lichen covered branches that fell from the oaks above lay along the path. Gray light covered the sky. No sun in sight, and everything was astir. Though the morning news was bleak, walking in such air felt utterly invigorating, and made me consciously aware of the aliveness of everything around me.
The flood of current changes in the US have consequences for neighboring countries and countries throughout the world. Many have lost their jobs, and many others have died as a consequence of the current government administration’s activities. The natural world is suffering as well. It’s ugly and utterly heartbreaking. What can be said that doesn’t further emphasize the devastation and add to the information stress? What might bring insight or release?
Reflecting on these questions, Barry Lopez‘s essay, “Drought,” found in his book River Notescame to mind. Lopez tells the story of during a time of severe drought where a man dreams of a large fish that had fed himself too much and grew too large to escape the pool as the river receded around it. The river is slowly dying and the large fish stuck a shrinking pool in the river is dying as a consequence. The man wakes from his dream, goes to the spot in the river the dream depicted, and rescues the fish. The man doesn’t know if the river will return to life or if the drought will continue and cause the river will go completely dry. But he believes his relationship to the river is important and that responding to the dying fish’s needs is necessary.
“There’s power to dying,” writes Lopez, “and it should be done with grace.” After releasing the fish, the remaining larger stream of water in the river, because it was the most beautiful thing he could offer the river, the man does a dance like that of long-legged birds on the river’s shore. “A person cannot be afraid of being foolish. For everything, every gesture is sacred.” Though the dance seems an absurd, irrational act, he does it anyway. Doing something selfless, perhaps even silly so that we remember how to live is important.
Gradually, the river returns to fullness. Reporters talk about the change, offer factual information about the river’s return, and people carry on their former way of living. But the dance the man did by the river sticks in the mind and changes the way we see not only the river but our way of living. When so many things we may have cherished and held dear are dying, Lopez reminds us of the importance of recognizing our relationship to the world around us. “Everyone has to learn how to die, that song, that dance, alone and in time. … To stick your hands in the river is to feel the cords that bind the earth together in one piece,” writes Lopez. Despite our ignoring the natural world’s ongoing generosity, despite differences in culture, values or beliefs we hold, we share this world together.
When we feel we’re going through a severe drought, when everything around us feels as if it is falling apart or appears in decline, it’s important to pay attention to dreams that call us to remember our connection to what brings life and to respond. When we see ourselves in a connected living relationship with the world, we respond to the world differently. The world is no longer an object to be used solely for utilitarian purposes.
Relationships are reciprocal. We take care of what we love and listen to those we love so that we can respond with care. How might I listen to the quality of my relationship with the world? Following Lopez’s narrative as an example, what beautiful thing might I offer the life around me today that will help me recognize my relationship to all that is and my responsibility toward it, even though it might seem silly? Making an offering, to the lives that sustain us might come in the form of a dance, a flower, a letter, a song, art, or a variety of other possibilities. It might feel awkward or silly, but such an offering is a way to remind ourselves that we’re in relationship with a world wider than our human effort, and that the choices we make ripple out to affect everyone, including the more than human world.
May my mind come alive today To the invisible geography That invites me to new frontiers, To break the dead shell of yesterdays, To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer But do at last what I came here for And waste my heart on fear no more.
In the midst of storms where winter feels it will never end, I wish for you to listen to the dreams of your heart, to go out on walks, to sit outside, or somewhere where you can simply stare at the sky, and listen for how you might respond with some gesture toward what is dying that you’ve long loved. Let us have the courage to risk being disturbed and changed, so that in the words of O’Donohue “we waste our hearts on fear no more.”
You can listen to a moving recording of Lopez reading his piece, “Drought” with David Darling playing the cello in the background here.
There are so many thresholds to step through on a given day. May you choose the doorways that lead to kindness and peace, speaking only when you can say the most loving thing. Face each fear, doubt, and wish for your life to be other than it is right now
from “Blessing for a New Year“ — James Crews
We’ve all passed through a lot of doorways over the years. Some doors are inviting like those in the photos above that suggest something comfortable or beautiful that might wait behind them. Other doors are invisible, or nearly so, and you might not realize until later that you’ve actually entered a different space. I recognize I’ve passed through one of those invisible doors now, along with many others. I’m trying to recognize and orient myself to the room I’m standing in and what I am to do there. James Crews’ lines in the above poem ask me to face each fear, doubt, and the wish for my life to be other than it is. How might I embrace the challenges on the other side of doors I’ve walked through in the past with rooms that still haunt me, as well as the various doors I sense I’m standing in front of currently, not liking the sounds I hear emerging from behind them? How do I enter all doors carrying kindness, being peace?
Some people don’t have a choice regarding the door they’re walking through. For some their home has burned to the ground and the door they thought they’d be walking through is no longer there. For some their home was flooded and the door pulled off its hinges as the house filled with water. Someone right now is walking through the door of learning they have a terminal disease or that their partner does. For some their door disappeared in an instant when the place they called home was bombed. Some people are walking back home after living in exile hoping there is a door to find.
Fear shuts down the brain and closes people off from each other. What we need more of as things fall apart is to purposely choose a way to respond to fear with a boldness of heart and open spirit. We need this response so that we can react to challenges calmly and wisely, and so that our communities will be ones characterized by kindness and care. How might we envision activities in our neighborhoods such as sharing tools or skills, creating community gardens, movie nights, book groups, neighborhood gatherings, or other activities to nurture people’s feelings of belonging, trust, and sense of responsibility toward each other’s well being? And how might we offer care to the natural world and gratitude for the expansive gift it is?
Too long American culture has led us to think that we have to struggle against others to “make it,” that “self-reliance” is what we need to get us through hard times. But as storyteller and scholar Michael Meade suggests, the rugged individual should by now more appropriately be called the “ragged individual.” Humans aren’t meant to solve everything on their own. People are meant to live in community offering support and help to each other as we move through life.
Many cultures throughout the world still value community as central to their way of life. In South Africa, people hold the concept of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” East Asian cultures carry the sense of responsibility toward family as well as the larger community. The same is true in Latin cultures. In Italian and Mexican towns, for example, people come out in evenings to take a walk around the plaza and greet each other. In India, family members often live near each other or in the same household providing assistance to each other in various ways.
Though change is difficult, we can become each other’s support. As stone sculptors like Zimbabwe’s Dominic Benhura understand, with vision, skill and focused effort, hardened stone can be sculpted into solid expressions of joy as seen in “Swing Me Mama” and Benhura’s many other sculptures. Bernini’s sculpture Apollo and Daphne in Rome’s Galleria Borghese demonstrates how even painful, fearful, and sorrowful moments aren’t necessarily bereft of beauty. Often they are part of each other. Effort to create the sense of a supportive village in our neighborhoods isn’t impossible. Intentional communities around the world are doing it. “You got to put one foot in front of the other and lead with love,” sings Melanie DeMoore. “Don’t give up hope, you’re not alone.”
In ending his poem, “Blessing for a New Year,“ Crew writes about emptying your life of the things that clutter it. learn how to empty it all out, let in only what frees you this new year, what keeps the heart clear.”
Our thoughts can sometimes be a kind of prison that traps us in fear and worry. But we can be people of peace by choosing to respond differently to fear. In “A Community of the Spirit” the Persian poet Rumi writes, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being.” Stepping through the door of fear, and allowing silence to surface, allows us to touch again the source of our own presence and of life that is much bigger than our losses or anxiety. A wider community of being is there for us to connect to when we turn to it.
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ― Gustave Flaubert
Though I’ve lived in mega cities for decades, my family heritage is from small town rural America. I lived 25 miles from the ocean when growing up but my family rarely went there as my parents grew up in inland states where oceans and swimming in general, were foreign to their way of being in the world. My parents’ worlds were consumed with work and with keeping the family afloat. As a result, our family stayed at home and rarely went anywhere. Our big weekly event was the trip to the grocery store. We didn’t go camping or head out on a vacation to explore new areas. We didn’t go out to dinner. Our lives were simple and we accepted it.
Anna at home on her trike at 4 years old
But I had an uncle who retired early, traveled abroad, and who walked across England and rode a train across Russia. And I have a brother who worked in places like Germany, Brazil and Japan. These were worlds unknown to me, entirely different than the world I knew, and I was curious.
As a young adult I imagined that if I saved my money for years I might be able to travel abroad for a couple of weeks once in my life. I wanted to be more than a tourist though. I wanted to be able step inside another world the way one steps into a lake, let it soak into me and experience it in depth.
Reading can take one into worlds while sitting in your living room chair. I moved half way across the country to live in a snowy environment that was foreign to me. After college, I went back to school again and took the courses to become an English teacher. I read what Anais Nin wrote about Morocco’s labyrinthine city of Fez, stepped inside the pages of Dickens’s London, traveled in my imagination to Paton’s South Africa in Cry the Beloved Country, and Cisnero’s Hispanic neighborhood of Chicago in House on Mango Street.
Then I learned I could live and work abroad as a teacher. Using most of the money in the bank for airline tickets, my husband and I flew to Boston for interviews hoping to go anywhere at all in Latin America, as I wanted to learn Spanish. Instead, we got job offers in Turkey. We’d seen no photos of the campus, our housing, or of the city where we’d be living. We spoke no Turkish and the salary was minimal, but we accepted the employment opportunity and the adventure of our lives began. Living and working in Turkey opened the world for me, and was the start of twenty-six years of living and traveling abroad.
Socrates & me in Turkeyat Falika Island, Kuwaitin Singapore classroomat poetry event, Riyadhin Dharmshala, Indiain a UK field of bluebells
Sometimes people travel for adventure, work, to reconnect to family or attend an important event, other times to step away from a difficult environment or experience. In the Middle Ages the main reasons for travel were for trade, warfare, diplomacy, and religious pilgrimage. The Old Latin word for a pilgrim is “peregrine,” as in the peregrine falcon that takes a year to fly from the Arctic Circle to South America and back again. The word peregrine also means “foreigner.” Certainly, when traveling outside of your normal habitat, you are a foreigner in a world that functions in a variety of unique ways different from what’s familiar. The change of one world for another is what makes travel exciting though sometimes is also what can bring on what Paul Fussell in his 1988 essay “From Exploration to Travel to Tourism”identifies as travail. The etymology of the word traveler, is travail, one who struggles or labors, likely because travel in the Middle Ages when the word entered English from Old French, travel was extremely difficult. It’s often the travails of travel, missing a flight, getting trapped in an elevator when the electricity goes out, or getting lost while trying to get to a particular location, that make for the best travel stories.
Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Holy Envy, writes quotes John Philipp Newell who tells how early Christians sometimes described pilgrimages as “’seeking the place of one’s resurrection,’” because such a journey meant dying to their old boundaries in order to find a new life out beyond the buoys.” In our own day a time widening our boundaries of understanding and compassion in order to gain new ways of and living with people different from ourselves could be extremely beneficial. Experiencing environments other than what we are familiar with often opens up new ways of seeing ourselves and new questions to live with and be curious about.
Living in India for nine years made me much more conscious of the extravagant privilege of having a home, water, warm clothes, and food to eat. Living in India humbled me. The experience raised for me persistent questions I don’t have adequate answers for and made me grapple with how to live in a world that holds so much despair, loneliness, and greed, yet at the same time offers such profound beauty and astonishing expression of tender human care and generosity. I may not have found the place beyond the buoys of my old life, but I am certainly changed, and far more aware of how challenging life can be for people, as well as how kind people can be in the midst of those challenges.
The medieval Irish monk, St. Brendan’s went on a pilgrimage in a l traditionally constructed leather boat, or a curragh. His venture is one of astounding courage. The boat was made of either a wooden frame or wattle covered with ox hides tanned in oak bark then softened with “grease” which was likely lanolin. The monks set up a mast and sail, then went searching for the legendary island of Paradise around the North Atlantic for seven years, reaching as far as Iceland and possibly beyond according to details written down in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis. Cramped in tight quarters of the small boat with periods of intensely cold weather, gales, pack ice, uncertainty regarding food, and lacking modern communication or maps, the monks most certainly experienced the travail Fussell writes about. (You can read more about Tim Severin’s 1976 reenactment of a route along the outer Hebrides of Scotland then onward to Newfoundland here.) Travail forces us to notice our boundaries of comfort and to move beyond them. They require us to imagine a larger world, and to reach out for connection beyond what we already know.
Wiring in Old Delhi
“Before tourism, travel was conceived to be like study,” says Fussell, “and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgment. The traveler was a student of what he sought. One by-product of real travel was something that has virtually disappeared, the travel book as a record of inquiry and a report of the effect of the inquiry on the mind and imagination of the traveler.” Approaching travel as inquiry, allows one to enter into other cultures with a sense of openness to see what they might teach us. We can intentionally provoke our curiosity about places we want to travel to and arrive with questions about things we want to better understand from perspectives other than our own. Alternatively, the place we travel to encourages questions to arise. “Humility,” writes David Brooks, “is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.” Because we’re not in a familiar world when traveling, we rely on others more. Observing other people’s ways of doing things, we can be brought to an awareness that our way of seeing the world is but one way of viewing reality, and that there can be equally valid ways of responding to and interacting with life. Or at least become aware of how our own ideas might be limited or in need of revision.
Letting go familiar territory to travel into unknown lands is not the same as being a tourist, according to Fussell. “Tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism required that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way. Tourism can operate profitably only as a device of mass merchandizing, fulfilling the great modern rule of mediocrity and uniformity.” We live in a world of global interconnection and communication, relying on each other for resources and exchange of goods. In multicultural societies where people of different religions, languages, economic and social backgrounds rely on each other for basic societal functions, open communication and cooperative interaction–seeking to see others from the perspective of their own eyes and the world they live in seems essential. Aiming to reach beyond what is comfortable, and conventional is a worthy aspiration. What a benefit it could be for us to move beyond a tourist’s way of being in the world and instead invoke the spirit of a traveler, one who is willing to step inside their questions about worlds different from their own, willing to let our views of what we identify as the “other” open and be ruffled a bit, and the curtains of our unconscious or misguided conceptions pulled back so that we see each other more fully and discover how to befriend new understandings of worlds beyond our own and the people who inhabit them.
To gain a new perspective or open ourselves to new world we don’t necessarily need to get on an airplane or train. We can simply travel to a side of town we’re not familiar with, visit a place that’s different from one’s habitual territory such as a mosque, cathedral, or temple where people aren’t those you typically identify with. The idea is to put one’s feet into a world not one’s own, and to listen to and interact with people you don’t usually interact with—to intentionally invite in the stranger. There are whole worlds coexisting right around us, the world of plants and animals is one that we often don’t notice. “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world,” reads the introduction to science journalist Ed Young’s book, An Immense World. “…Because in order to understand our world we don’t need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.”
Whether traveling to a foreign country or to a different part of our own city, moving beyond the borders of familiarity to encounter ways of thinking and interacting different from our own can help us to see ourselves more clearly, gain a vision for how we might discover our interconnectedness to other lives, and to discover an energy that helps us imagine a larger, more caring and inclusive world to participate in and nurture. This coming year, I want to expand my heart and vision further. I want to live in a world where I see the radiance in others I encounter, am a mirror of their brightness, where I my heart is open to a world that is full of wonders. As Rumi has written, “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.” Here is my song for you in this liminal space between the ending of this year and the start of the next. Barbara McAfee
When researching for my book A Space Between, I learned histories, geographies, and perspectives I was previously unaware of. Though born an American citizen, there are many histories I am unaware of even in my own place of birth. Locations we inhabit today are the crossroads of many histories and people. As Italo Calvino showed in his book, Invisible Cities, the place we live contains many worlds.
Recently, I visited Sturgeon’s Mill in Sonoma County where I observed the mill, in operation a only few days a year, that cut redwoods that provided the lumber for rebuilding houses after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent great fire where over 3,000 people died and 80% of the city was destroyed. To date, that quake remains the deadliest in US history. According to Redwood Ed: A Guide To The Coast Redwoods For Learners and Teachers, in 1905 85-90% of the redwood forests were not yet logged. (You can view several astonishing historical photos of loggers cutting redwoods on this site when scrolling down.) The mill is steam powered, and still operates four weekends a year run by a group of volunteers.
A visit to Sturgeon’s Mill allows observers a glimpse of how redwood was processed into lumber used for building during the era before and after the 1906 San Francisco quake and fire. Old-growth redwood forests store at least three times more carbon above ground than any other forest on earth,” says Altea George. When traveling through San Francisco’s neighborhoods today, however, the disappearance of much of California’s redwoods in the effort to rebuild the city after the quake isn’t something we often think about.
Though the value of preserving forests is better understood now than it was in the last century, following WW2 between 1945 and 1948, sawmills around the Bay Area more than tripled. A further housing boom in the 1960s added to the demand for redwood and fir lumber. “Today over 95% of the original redwood forest area has been logged at least once.”
Redwood stump at Armstrong Woods State Park, California
Our homes today are the result of ideas and products from many origins we’re often not conscious of. As Kamala Harris has stated, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Wherever we go, we carry our histories with us. Our ancestors’ histories and modes of thinking have shaped our lives and way of being in the world. Those living in California’s wider Bay Area still inhabit many houses constructed with redwood taken from forests after the 1906 quake. The quake led to changes in the way commercial buildings are made. Previous to the quake, concrete buildings were thought ugly. Because concrete is an inflexible material, people didn’t want to use it in an earthquake zone. One building that didn’t fall during the quake, the Bekins building , was made of steel reinforced concrete. This observation led to a change in building codes in 1908 influencing the way urban structures are built in cities today.
A California native, I grew up on a hillside strewn with granite boulders and covered with yellow grass. Evenings, I listened to cricket throb and coyotes calling across the valley. Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause tells us, “Every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information.” Not only does the built environment help us understand where we are, the land itself speaks in a way that helps us recognize where we are, and I’ve loved the way the land I was born on has sung its shape into my heart.
I’ve also stood on a red rock resting outside the small town of Wheatland, Wyoming where my mother was born, the plain stretching far into the distance, and sensed its solid presence rise through my feet. Outside Chugwater, Wyoming where my great grandparents and great aunts and uncles lived and worked, I’ve stood in a field between the thick grassy strands of wheat and felt its welcome, touching vicariously the land of my origin though I’ve never lived there.
Driving down roadways, we move with the traffic’s flow, all those around us carrying their own histories and stories. Whitman wrote, “(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” We don’t have to have lived in a place to sense a connection to it. Many homes coexist in us. There’s the home of our native tongue, the home of our way of seeing and thinking, and the home of particular clothes we wear that allow us to feel relaxed. There’s the home of foods that comfort us such as spaghetti, or tom kha gai soup, the home of routines with morning tea or coffee, for example, and the home of habits we follow such as reading the morning news, sitting for a morning meditation, or taking an evening stroll.
We rely on resources from around the world to create homes we live in. What is the value of knowing the history and origins of our way of life that have come together to create a place we call home? I’ve lived in six different countries outside of the US. Each one has left its imprint and came to feel like a kind of home. We can move across the world, to live in or visit a place that has entirely different protocols for how to eat food or negotiate and still can find connections to those around us, to the city, or the natural world. In Vietnam I’ve stood with hundreds of others in Tien Son Cave who lifted their arms with hands outstretched hoping drops of sacred water. In Saudi I’ve shared iftar after Maghrib prayer, and have stood in an empty lot with students in Kuwait, waiting to be cleared after a bomb threat. I’ve worked with fellow divers and a Cambodian family to build house, celebrated the Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival with friends in Singapore, and endured torrential rains in the forests on Mt. Kinabalu. I’ve attended weddings in New Delhi, and funerals in the US. I’ve ridden calmly to my destination with thousands of strangers on subways in London and St. Petersburg, been swept along by undersea currents near Palau. I’ve walked through Columbia’s Catedral de Sal de Zipaquirá carved by miners beginning in the fifth century BC, and have stood on the African continent’s southernmost edge and thought of the many ships that sailed past its windy coast whose voyages changed the shape of history. Each experience and countless others have helped me understand that though I was born in a particular place, my actions are part of a greater stream of life. All that has come before me as well as the variety of ways people interact with the world shape what I experience at any one point in time. What we call home is a collective making. Each of us are part of a greater whole. As Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, “Past and present and future are not disjointed but joined.” Each of us is a continuation of the past, an embodiment of the present. We hold the future in the way we pass on our thoughts and carryout our actions and intentions.
Rock Island, PalauPalauMt. KinabaluDivers who helped build house, Cambodia Anna Citrino, Cambodia Cambodian family
William Stafford, in his poem, “Being a Person,” writes,
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke the owls. Invoke winter, then spring. Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait. A slow bubble rises through the earth and begins to include sky, stars, all space, even the outracing, expanding thought. Come back and hear the little sound again. Suddenly this dream you are having matches everyone’s dream, and the result is the world. If a different call came there wouldn’t be any world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling. How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
Though we are born into a particular place in time and way of thinking, we benefit from expanding our awareness of the worlds and people that create the place we call home. We can renew our lives through choosing to be hospitable to new ideas and ways of being, even seemingly foreign ones. Here’s a few possibilities: Ask relatives about the stories of their lives and the experiences that shaped them. Try taking a new route home or tasting a new food. Listen to a type of music you’re not familiar with. Practice a few phrases in a language you don’t know. Visit an art gallery and read about how that art connects to the thinking of a particular era. Read about the history of your city. Find out the names of plants on your street, which are native to your area and which aren’t. Learn the story of a bridge or building in your area. Have a conversation with someone of a different background, age, or ability level from you. Listen to what they tell you about their lives. Look for new insights and connections. There are many ways to renew and expand our experience of home and to be at home with those around us.
Every day we make use of ideas or rely on inventions passed on to us from elsewhere and previous times. The wheel, the battery, and the telephone–we rely on myriad things that weren’t part of our original human home. Languages borrow words from other languages when there’s no equivalent in one’s own language. For example, the Turkish language has borrowed the word asansör from the French ascenceur (elevator in English) and the Japanese language has borrowed arubaito アルバイトfrom the German word for part-time job arbeit. None of us are the product of a single, unified story. Embracing new words, ideas, and even worlds can enable us to thrive and grow whole.
Lumber mills like Sturgeon’s here in Sonoma County that cut the redwoods that rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 quake changed California’s environment. Ancient redwood forests once occupied 2 million acres. After visiting redwoods near Eureka, California, John Reid in his opinion article “Thinking Long-Term: Why We Should Bring Back Redwood Forests” published on the Yale School of the Environment‘s website writes, “The beginning of the old growth is like a threshold between beauty and magic. The giants make time visible. Which makes me think a thousand years forward. If an entire landscape of this should exist in the year 3023, students of our culture may be tempted to conclude that, in our time, forests were sacred.” We share the world together with our neighbors as well as those across the world. What are your dreams for the kind of home you want to inhabit? Most of us would like to live in a world that is both beautiful and kind. As Stafford says, “this dream you are having matches/ everyone’s dream, and the result is the world…/ How you stand here is important…How you breathe.”
Anna Citrino---Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage 