04 Saturday Jul 2015
Posted in Nature/Environment, Wildness
A certain quality of light infuses my days, and I can’t help but fall into it.
These mountains we live across from pour the evenings over us, wash us in mists and sunsets, reflect the first light of each new day’s dawn.
This is summer, this letting go of extraneous matters and responsibilities, this filling up of light, this wordless pull to the outside that quiets the core of my being.
22 Friday May 2015
Tags
earth, environment, land, sexual assault, sexuality, women, women's rights
All over the news are stories like this, and this, of sexual assault. Some stories end with a woman raising her voice, some end with a woman losing her life.
This American Life recently aired an episode in which college boys talk about how they learned about sex and what women like (from other boys and porn, not from actually listening to women).
All over the news are stories of drilling, fracturing, contaminating, spilling, plowing, spraying, of people doing what we will to the earth in the name of economics and power.
The way we treat the land and the way we treat women and their bodies are inextricably connected.
Society’s history is built on stories of men in power, of women and land as property.
There are other histories to be re-learned. As my eighth-grade history teacher taught us, there are herstories and ourstories, too.
It’s time to reconcile the record.
22 Wednesday Apr 2015
{In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem each weekday through the rest of April, and I invite you to join me! Leave a link to your poem of the day in the comments section below.}
Last night spring peepers
sang, the pluck-pluck of their notes
rising into night
finally bridging
late winter to spring, each note
rejoicing in mud
frog in rice paddy, summer 2012
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in Nature/Environment
Tags
The weight of water. How heavy it feels when I lug it up the hill. And how heavy it feels when it’s gone–the sinking realization that the well has run dry. Two years ago when we moved onto this land, we found a spring and developed it as a shallow well–10 feet down was all we dug and it has kept our thirst (and the animals and vegetables) quenched. But when the overflow stopped a few weeks ago, Edge forgot about it and I didn’t even notice. And we’ve had just enough single days of rain sprinkled through the last few weeks to disguise the dryness of late summer. And then there’s this fact: we use up to 400 gallons of water per harvest day to wash the vegetables, though our well’s storage is 300 gallons. And so we look to ourselves, at the ways we could have conserved if only we had thought to have foresight.
There have been countless times I’ve been thankful for our water, for the fact that it is gravity fed to the barn and that we don’t rely on electricity to run a pump. I once moved into a house during a wind storm that caused a three-day power outage, and aside from what we bought, we had no water until the electricity came back on. This kind of system has always seemed so fragile to me. I’ve laughed with a friend who also hauls water at the reactions we get from those that can simply turn a faucet–how we each think the other is crazy. You mean you carry all your water?! You mean your water source is gone if the power goes out? Now I wish for a deep well and a pump, when simplicity and a shallow well feels fragile.
I am kicking myself that we hadn’t thought of this possibility and made plans for it sooner. If we didn’t need potable water to wash our vegetables with tomorrow, we might mull over the solution a bit longer–the animals can drink the pond water, and we have enough water reserved from Monday’s harvest to water the seedlings–but the fact is we need more than a few 5-gallon buckets of potable water by tomorrow. So today: buy a 1000 gallon tank, pay for a bulk water delivery.
We live in a state where floods have filled the disaster headlines, where the word drought brings up images of California, not our own farms, and so perhaps I have taken it for granted that water will always flow out of the well. For all the inconvenience of the situation, though, I am grateful that we can buy water, that the restrictions we face are nothing compared to seriously drought-stricken areas of the world. Given the forecast is accurate, tomorrow it will rain, with a chance for more on Saturday and Sunday. With the rain, and with patience, comes replenishment. Until then, I’ll feel the weight of water that’s run dry.
10 Tuesday Jul 2012
Posted in Nature/Environment, Writing
Tags
It’s amazing how summer sweeps me up. I forget about computers, internet, email. I forget to check messages and return phone calls. There is so much life constantly bursting open and singing around me, that all I have time to do is run wild with it. What other way is there to celebrate the world? So this morning, before I step back outside, I share this quote with you:
“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.” ~ Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds
May you find joy today and celebrate.
11 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Nature/Environment, Writing
Tags
I sit outside in the morning and listen. Close by, birds jump between branches and fly from tree to tree, gliding, dipping and rising in the open space between the sugar-woods and white pines in this small protected clearing where we live. They all sing: tweeting, chirping, whistling. Birdsong flies around me, gentle and alive, calling me to this day. I remember the bobolink I saw in the field yesterday, and the bright yellow bird with black wings, and I almost stand to get my bird book so I can learn its name. But I don’t. I stay sitting outside, watching the birds here right now, wondering if I even know the bobolink, wondering if naming something actually brings knowledge, wondering if knowledge without experience is worth anything at all.
***
I have a friend, Kathy, who told me the story of her daughter’s birth. After two days of intermittent contractions, an exhausting night, and the final push, a baby lay on her chest, and Kathy and her husband looked at the child in awe. After a few moments, someone said, “would you like to know the sex of your baby?” And they learned they had a daughter. But imagine those moments before—those moments of knowing another being so intimately, of knowing another being out of raw experience, of knowing another being without naming it, and therefore knowing it purely, void of expectations and assumptions, knowing it purely and letting yourself be known as well.
***
“People think that when they turn their eyes from the earth to the sky they see the heavens. They set the orange fruit apart from the green leaves and say they know the green of the leaves and the orange of the fruit. But from the instant one makes a distinction between green and orange, the true color vanishes,” writes Masanobu Fukuoka in One Straw Revolution. He goes on to say, “People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself—the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect, the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally.”
***
In college writing classes I learned that it is the job of the writer to put into words the things that are impossible to describe. As a writer, I must always reach further into expression until I find that one combination that elicits an unnamable feeling. I love this challenge. I love the way words can bend or stay strong. I love how the subtraction or addition of a single word can change the meaning of a sentence. The most amazing thing, though, is how the most powerful part of a written piece is often what is left out— not written, not described, not named at all.
***
I sit outside in the morning and listen, surrendering my desire to know. I watch the birds fly from tree to tree and see how the branches bow so slightly to catch them, how the play of the breeze moves along their wings, how the sun exposes the color of their feathers, and how the dappled shadows of leaves hide them. I sit outside, anchored to the ground, a maple tree behind me, a field of buttercups, dandelion, clover, fleabane, and grasses before me, all of which have been named, none of which can be known singularly, for they grow together in a shared landscape, and I am here, too, unraveling the knowledge of twenty-five years so I may know this one moment here and now.
24 Tuesday Apr 2012
I spent the weekend in Woodbury, Vermont at Wisdom of the Herbs School. For two days we walked on the land, slowly, meeting early spring wild edibles and flowers.
On Sunday, George, one of our teachers, put this idea out to the class:
There is nothing wrong with the world.
For two days, I have not been able to leave this thought. Wild leeks, corn lily, blue
cohosh, trillium, spring beauty, marsh marigold, American dwarf ginseng, trout lily, wild lettuce, coltsfoot, and dutchman’s breeches–these plants are evidence. There is nothing wrong with the world.
And yet, how quickly that notion can become lost in anxiety during conversations of genetically modified food, habitat destruction, and carbon levels. How strong the pull of sadness can be–so strong that I sometimes find myself grieving for the world.
And yet, yellow-bellied sap-suckers, chickadees, red-winged black birds, robins, goldfinches, white-breasted nuthatches, crows and ravens–these birds are evidence. There is nothing wrong with the world.
Annie, our herbal teacher, said to us: Humans do belong here. We have a special place in the world–our feet are rooted in the earth and our heads are in the heavens.
We do have the power of balance.
We can remember this.
There is nothing wrong with the world.
There is nothing wrong with the world, so let us look deeply and ask, what is it that really needs to change? And then let us remember how to balance.
19 Monday Mar 2012
Tags
environment, gardening, nature, photography, seeds, spring, Vermont, writing
This time of year is for starting seeds. I sow mine into flats in the greenhouse, where the soil stays warm and perfectly moist. We learn to seed from nature, though, and wildness has sown itself over and over, starting long before greenhouses ever came along…
This time of year is for starting seeds, and this weekend we found some that started themselves along a hiking trail:
What will you find if you look?
20 Monday Feb 2012
Posted in Nature/Environment, Seasons, Writing
As I drove North along Lake Champlain on Friday morning, I was ready to admit my mistake—I had written that Lake Champlain is not yet frozen over, leaving an empty stretch of water where ice-fishers and skiers should be—when I saw the trucks, shanties, and people spread across the ice. I smiled, happy to see I was wrong, until I looked ahead to open water, deep dark blue textured by the wind, and felt a small flip in my stomach. There is an empty stretch of water. My eyes shot back to the blue truck parked on the ice. Yes, it was still there, and all the bodies on the frozen part of the lake seemed patient and at ease as they watched their lines for bites. Though there were no skiers, though the lake is not completely frozen over, and though the car thermometer read 41°F, the ice fishers prove that winter has not conceded to spring just yet. There is still strength in the cold nights.
Today I take the dogs to the river, looking for ice. The Green River’s current is too strong for a solid sheet to form, but everywhere I look in the forest, crystals and long columns of glass appear. I slide my fingers along the cool smooth surfaces; I lean in close to see the way the ice connects with a quality of movement that makes it seem as though it has paused in the middle of dancing.
Down at the river, thin sheets of ice balance on rocks, adorning them like lace, and amidst the steady pulse of the water and quiet stillness of the ice, I feel the conflict of a winter caught between melting and freezing. There is no turmoil here, though, and I learn once again that opposites always coexist—beneath the ice there is always water, and with the stillness there is always energy expanding or contracting, but moving just the same. Sometimes these opposites are hidden, and sometimes they are in plain sight: fishermen on a half-frozen lake, a summer-green fern caught in ice. The question must not be do we look at them, but what do we do? Conflict and opposites will not go away, but I know from the river there is a way of living that bears witness without judgment, and a way that allows for change and consistency at once. So what do we do?
Look. Deeply.
And then ask again, what do we do? The answers come one step at a time.
13 Monday Feb 2012
Posted in Nature/Environment, Seasons, Writing
Tags
change, climate change, earth, environment, life, local, love, nature, writing
I had seen a recent picture of them in the paper, and I had heard on the radio of several sightings around Vermont, but still I was surprised on Sunday morning, as I walked across the UVM campus, to see a flock of robins playing in the wind and bouncing about on the thinly veiled ground. My teeth chattered as I headed toward the Davis Center, where the Northeast Organic Farming (NOFA) conference was gearing up for its second day, and in the single-digit air I felt my neck stiffen, my arms shiver, and my feet quicken their pace. In this winter that has been so mild, all of the sudden 9°F sends a deep cold into the bones. Then I think of the robins and wonder at their agility and speed on a day like this, when they should be at least in Massachusetts, if not further south, where food is more abundant and temperatures are warmer.
Food, though, it seems is one of the reasons some Robins stuck around: there is enough food to be found this winter, due in large part to the warmth of the season. Last week, Jane Lindholm, host of Vermont Edition on VPR, spoke with experts and callers about the effect this winter is having on Vermont. One woman called in to ask why the variety of birds at her feeder has decreased, and the answer was because there is more wild food readily available right now. Another reason we’ve seen more Robins is due to the subtle but steady climate shift. In his essay “Bear”, Craig Childs states: “Climate zones are shifting north across the globe at a rate of a few feet every several hours, and species are steadily following, sending out scouts to find fallbacks and future niches.” Though we’ve known about climate change since at least the 1980s, and though I studied it in college and have seen the graphs and charts, these physical reminders—robins and the flow of sap in early February, a tropical storm ravaging Vermont land, an autumn posing as summer—these are the things that shock me into knowing how deeply we have altered the world we depend on.
It takes a few moments for the warmth of the Davis Center to seep into my bones, softening my neck and relaxing my arms. I welcome the heat into my body, and see others streaming through the doors to find relief as well. As a species, we have adapted to cold climates through clothing and shelter, and as a society we have designed vacation packages to Oceanside resorts, where we can lay in the sun and absorb its energy. Sometimes I wonder if the American people would care more about climate change if we were going into an ice age instead.
I walk up the stairs to the fourth floor, where Wendy Johnson, a Buddhist meditation teacher, gardener, and environmentalist, is waiting to give the Key Note speech on resiliency. I take a seat in the front row, and when Wendy stands up to the podium, she looks out with clear blue eyes and says, “Gratitude. First I want to start with gratitude.” She then asks us all to stand and face east, and leads us through the four directions, grounding us in place. “It takes groundedness in to be present in this world,” she tells us. When Wendy speaks of resiliency, she speaks not only of the physical earth, but also of the necessity for we as people to slow down, to go deep into life, and to “plunge into bearing witness.”
I share this with you now, in part to bear witness to changes that may devastate the world, and in part to bear witness to the beauty of the world. Both are at hand. Robins and winter, cold and hot, harmony and discord. Like all animals, we depend on this climate, and as it shifts so does our food, our livelihoods, and our home. Let us bear witness together, share in gratitude for this world and our lives, and ground ourselves like trees into the earth.
