Wildflower Stew

@C.C.Lockwood

I just want to pass this on from Alice Walker’s blog. This is the non-sensationalized news from Haiti:

Alice Walker’s Blog
Today, January 22, 2010, 5 hours ago

With love from Port au Prince,
Sasha

I’m a stay at home writer now after many years of traveling and publishing, writing and doing art. I have lived in the Northwest where I was born, in the Southwest in Arizona, New Mexico and the hill country of Texas, in Florida on the Gulf Coast for awhile and spent some time in California on the Central Coast and in upstate New York. I spent five years living and traveling on a converted school bus from ‘96 to ‘01. I’m writing a book about that trip and another one about growing up and growing old as a nature mystic in this changing world.

This is what I have to pass on. How we got from there to here - or one small piece of that story. I was lucky enough to know two of my great grandmothers and all of my grandparents when I was growing up. I heard stories from the late 1800s and early 1900s. In my own lifetime, I remember a world where we ate from the garden, drank from the river and could lay on the grass on a summer night and see all the stars (and only stars).

Why is this important? Because life is all of a piece. We existed before cars and planes and TV; we can exist beyond the way it is now. We can change. Growth is not necessarily acquiring new stuff or even new technology.

We all need food, water, shelter, and joy. Whatever threatens these is the manifestation of a death wish. That is why I tell my stories. Life is good. Everywhere I have traveled, I have found people who manifested the goodness of life and shared it with joy.

No one is going to save us but us. May we all find our place in the web of life and live in harmony with each other and the natural world.

I just realized that I have learned something from the crows. Since I have unexpectedly found myself stuck in the city, I have struggled to keep my connection to the natural world. Especially since I live in a very urban neighborhood. Most days the only birds I see are crows and grackles and starlings with the occasional sparrow thrown in. Now I don’t have anything against crows but I’ve always gotten a kick out of cardinals, mockingbirds, hawks, eagles, seagulls, pelicans, pink flamingos for pete’s sake. The magic of the bird world (who could imagine a hummingbird!) has always been a delight to me.

Now here I sit, trapped between a shopping center and a busy street, in my little apartment building with the little courtyard and the crows. I guess I shouldn’t be a snob. I probably look like an old crow too, in some people’s eyes. Where is the young woman who went out to tend her garden and looked up to see a red tail hawk in the sky, who watched the hummingbirds come right up to the hollyhocks by the front door, who laughed as the blue jay screamed at the skulking tom cat?

Those things live only in my memory. My reality is the crow. Me and the crow. Think about this - what if the crow didn’t show up? That would really be bad. I guess as long as there’s one bird, there’s hope. Even if it’s a tough old bird. I always thought the crow was a trickster anyway. We used to have our little jokes about crow. One day I was sitting on a rock on a beach near Port Angeles, Washington and a crow flew over my head and dropped a small unopened bag of potato chips on the rock beside me. The brand name on it was “Good Luck” and it had a four-leafed clover on it. I cracked up laughing. I kept that bag for years. It was my crow talisman.

The crows are still with me. I laugh when I watch them hop off the fence down into the enclosed patio of the Tex-Mex cafe and snatch a fallen nacho chip from the floor and swoop back out with their prize - perching on the fence and looking just as witty and wise as an old eagle who had just swept down in all his majesty and scored a shimmering silver trout from a cold mountain stream. I am seeing them knowing how much more there is but the children who are city-bound are only seeing the crows. Crows teach them birdness. Crows teach them about creatures that fly, feathers, things that are not bound by gravity. They teach them that there is air-space and not just ground-space and a whole freedom of motion no earthbound creature will ever know.

I can’t give my grandchildren the world I knew as a child. But I can teach them to attend to what is now, to watch the crow, and to learn.

I’ve been away for awhile. Actually I haven’t physically been anywhere, just shifted my focus to a book I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. Working title is “The Garden of Delight” and I’ll probably be sharing bits of work-in-progress on here from time to time in addition to a few passing comments. For now, here’s a poem I unearthed recently . . . .

It Is Only Natural

It is only natural
That your beauty should draw me here, beloved.

An eaglet makes tight circles
above my sightless eyes
and I rise and fall evenly
with the hum of your breath.

R Swan
1979

This is a poem I wrote when I was spending a lot of time hiking alone in the Cascade Mountains. It’s a love poem to a large granite boulder beside the Skykomish River.

Another day in a long long line of bone-dry, heat-wavey, pavement-baking days. The August sun comes up, the August sun goes down. No rain.

I wake up with a headache, I think from being dehydrated even though I drink plenty of water. I sit at my window and watch the sweet hill country sunrise; the dirty steel-grey city is like a veil over the sunrise that goes on anyway, pink over peach over rose-blush horizon, diamond morning star in the dark-fading to pale-blue sky. Pristine and perfect in itself, veil or no veil, the sunrise is there behind and beyond our unnatural constructions.

Some corner of me expects the veil to lift so I can see the whole sunrise unimpeded and all the stars at night, too, down to the horizon like in the desert, millions and millions of tiny sparkling lights, always there behind the sickly orange and green glow of mercury vapor lamps.

They are all still there. I know this. I look at the night sky and I see the absence of all those stars. I can’t look at the sky without remembering what’s not there. That’s why I see the city as a veil when I look at the sunrise. I know what it’s like without the buildings and the dirty air.

But what do the children see? Do they know about all the stars, not from some TV show but with their own eyes? Have they felt the hush and miracle of standing on flat ground in the desert and feeling the stars surround them like a jeweled shawl? Have their spirits been lifted from sleep into wakefulness on the wings of a perfect sunrise? Will they have these touchstones to go back to as they try to navigate their way through the rough years ahead?

What more could we give our children than the sense of all life on this planet moving in harmony with the sun coming up, the sun going down, all the rivers flowing, the pounding surf, the magnificence of a snowstorm, the obliteration of a heat wave, the whimsical winds of change, the enduring serenity of the mountains? Will we encompass it all and find our true place once again?

In Gabon, a country without a culture of civic engagement, Marc Ona led efforts to publicly expose the unlawful agreements behind a huge mining project threatening the sensitive ecosystems of Gabon’s equatorial rainforests.

Marc Ona Essangui, 45, is president and founder of the environmental NGO Brainforest and president of the network of NGOs called Environment Gabon. Wheelchair-bound due to childhood polio, Ona also works for handicapped rights and Internet availability for Africans.

In December 2008, Ona and several other civil society leaders were arrested and held without charge and without access to legal representation in deplorable conditions in a basement cell for five days. Ona was later transferred to prison and charged with possession of documents allegedly for dissemination and propaganda with intent to incite rebellion against the state authorities, a charge which he denies. After media reports about the unlawful arrest from outlets in Africa, the EU and the US, the government released Ona, though the charges have not yet been dropped.

Ona and five other activists were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize—the world’s largest award for grassroots environmental activists, which this week celebrated its 20th anniversary in the San Francisco Opera House.

You can read the rest of the story and see a video about the Ivindo National Park, a 3,000 square kilometer park with forest elephants, western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, and forest buffalo. The park is cherished by the Gabonese people. The park is also home to the Kongou and Mingouli Falls, the most admired waterfalls in the equatorial forests of Africa, drawing international tourists to the rural West African country.
: http://goldmanprize.org/2009/africa

Good news. As I look around on this earth day, I see plenty of reasons to feel good. From where I stand, I see more and more people participating in a positive way in the community around them.

More gardens are being planted, more voices standing up for the planet, more children being reunited with the natural world, more care for the world that still remains.

Maybe the way I’m looking at it is a matter of a glass half-full or half-empty but it’s also exponential the way one act can touch off a chain reaction. When I moved into this urban apartment after living in remote rural places most of my life, I felt totally cut off from the natural world. I got a few houseplants and put them around my apartment and then I expanded to a little potted garden on my balcony and now I feel like I live in a jungle! And my neighbors have started growing flowers and food, too. Now we are looking for a place to have a real garden.

People in the town where I live are taking more interest in what happens to the parks, the quality of the air, mass transit, bike lanes - a lot of issues that have been languishing for years. More people are finding ways to interact with the community to support themselves. What I see is people regaining their sense of self-determination and self-respect, willing to work for what they believe in.

To do the things we must do to survive as a species and as a society, it is going to take collective action. But first it is going to take heart. And I believe that each seed we plant and each cause we take on nurtures the heart of change. So I wish you the best in all your endeavors. May we all find peace and abundance in harmony with each other on this blue pearl in the vastness of space.

The pear tree reaches out for light. A little bird ate all the tiny pears. We caught him just as he was finishing off the last ones.

My narrow sliver of growing space . . . .

Organic Italian pole beans!