We Are Close In The Distance

Don't we all feel the need occasionally to step outside upon the stoop, on the garden's edge and call out to the other? I know I do. For some reason on certain days I feel more alone, isolated on this planet. Perhaps it's the memory of a loss that I never fully recovered from but had to go on, none-the-less, across a bridge, beyond the field, behind the wall and finally in to the garden.

After this bit below, I've including the poem that someone posted to the artnews list serve.

When I read this poem I immediately feel connected to my fellow human and not in an abstract way, but instead I feel a very specific akin to suffering's cavernous locality that bring together young-old, rich-poor, sick-well, cowardly-courageous. We've all sauntered there.

I am the Indian on the road. The sun's dry heat seeps through my poncho; bleaching it a further shade of white; beating down what's left of the spirit; knowing this fallen man's plan like the back of my hand. I have plans too. All too often they've been shoved or pushed aside for a lover's plans. Haven't you done this? Maybe it's the landscape that tackles my mind in the poem, I'm crumpled, and only hear muffled church bells' tones for my troubles push me toward turf; for, this is a poem of the land. A road. He's traveling. I'm traveling. He's on foot. I'm on foot... bare, such as it is, in the (the land between here and there) dolomite soil. I look to my right (I am heading west) and the field of wildflowers, grasses swish an arid wind's cheek. The Land is what remains and It is what connects us. To be Human comes from the humus of the Earth, after all. It's the salt of the Earth; I'm fascinated with the salts. They're clingy and the variety of salts boggles my mind. A salt farmer rakes water's solids to the berm on the side of a road in France. The salt has been this way for hundreds years, it's a way of life around enriching foods' flavors, some may say making life worth living. I've tasted a floral after taste with this salt. Like the old Indian on the road, Culture moves toward extinction but for this we have stone memorials, don't we? But is that enough? "WHY DO I HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THAT POOR MAN ON THE ROAD? WHITE EYES LOOKING AT ME? I OFFERED YOU AN APPLE! ISN'T THAT ENOUGH? WHY CAN'T I JUST DRIFT, BACK INTO MY CAVE? WITH ITS COLD ROCK FLOOR BENEATH MY FEET. I MEAN, WHY DO I CARE ABOUT HIM?" Isn't it the Earth, that's the answer. The soil. In the middle of a work day, 'flipping' about my Inbox between blog posts, my bookmarks, an unexpected reminder, my link to my fellow human reads true in the second stanza. I am called to action. As I drift off I smell the memory of a country I've only visited in books. I look through the window of a great manor house I've never owned. It's a view of a garden beyond the green rolling hills. 'Look!' I'm there in the field making an angel in the wheat.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is,
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend. -Naomi Shihab Nye

Living With the 'Vast Green Wave' : part 1

July 2 2009
It’s well known that plants have developed many strategies for survival. Some may distribute toxins that keep away predators, some may attempt to flood an area with seeds, others develop spines, while many have developed co-operative evolutionary strategies with the species, including animals, around them to help them survive. Sometimes this may happen on a greatly compressed evolutionary scale, e.g., corn and orchids to take the two most spectacular success stories, when evolution and ‘adaptation’ seem to move at hyper speed under the guidance of human hands. Corn especially threatens to become a global monocrop under the guidance of genetic engineering, displacing and warping whole sectors of ecology, economy (think of bio-fuels) and the whole dietary regime of us humans (it has been estimated that a quarter of the 45,000 foodstuffs in the supermarkets contain corn; even George Will, conservative pundit, seems to have been swayed by the facts and statistics of Michel Pollan and others. There is no need to rehearse Pollan’s very persuasive work, a pretty good, short interview with him here in The Christian Science Monitor boils it down succinctly).

I particularly like Pollan’s phrase ‘the totalitarian landscape’ when referring to the omnipresent lawn. I’ve found it not really very possible to discuss the problem of lawns with many folks because it’s really not a question of facts of logic, more questions of psychology and sociology (same sorts of questions that have to do with ‘economics’, though much darker and deeper there) and how we feel that we have to exist in a larger community.

Certainly Homo sapiens sapiens has become by far the most successful living group on the planet, utilizing every strategy for survival possible and then some, including releasing toxins, flooding the planet with ‘propagules,’ as the DNA packets called seeds are called by botanists, and manipulating all species to be subservient to needs, wishes, and desires. It would seem however that the human sphere may be reaching a limit as to how far manipulations can proceed without a planetary structure ‘feeding-back’ in a negative way. James Lovelock, inventor (or discoverer) of the earth as ‘Gaia’ or an integrated phenomena (some would say ‘organism’) thinks we may be past the point of any turning back with the damage done to the bio-sphere with as little as twenty years left of life as we know it now. (recent article here, a biography here)

Well, in a way I guess that’s neither here nor there since we’re going to do what we want to do regardless of consequences .... and besides that all of us have a notorious short attention span, seems to be built into our life styles now. The Vast Vegetative Wave operates on different frequencies than do we now. Our buildings are sealed and air conditioned. Our access to that world is measured in the minutes or seconds it takes to get to the car or to the front door. (yes, there are exceptions but I’m not talking about you or me ;-).

At any rate, we know there is a relationship between the way we live, the choices we make, the ethics we have, and, not even last or least, the environment we live in, our dwellings, and the vegetable kingdom. But, like the animal kingdom now, it’s a thing that we try our best to relegate to the dim corners of life.

Soooo…what if we could incorporate that Vast Vegetative Wave …what would it look like?