Filaments: I am here to follow these threads

Hanging It Out to Dry

2008-09-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

"They told me to put $3000. aside each month for my
retirement. I told them that if I did that, I wouldn't be able to pay my bills."
--investment firm ad
The New Yorker

Yesterday I picked up a carton of apples from the Cactus Wren used
book store. The fruit was a gift from a man I have never met in
person. He had not been able to ship the apples to my post office
box. He is a writer and a teacher of writing, so he did the most
sensible thing: he googled bookstores in Yucca Valley, called the
Cactus Wren and asked if he could send them my apples. The owner said
yes, without hesitation. She called me a day later.

The bookstore could have been the late Aradia in Flagstaff. Books
filled shelves, tables and most of the floor. While there was no resident
white cat., there was a black poodle. The owner and I opened
the box. A letter was tucked between the apples.
The scent of the fruit was as redolent as its names: Honey
Crisp, Gala, Aurora. I was, for an instant, not in a little town in
the Mojave Desert. I was 2538.68 miles and sixty years distant...
...I wandered in the old orchard behind my northeastern
childhood home. I was eight. The scent of apples drifted in the late
afternoon light. There was no need to steal the fruit. The farmer and
his wife gave the apples away. I heard my mother calling me to come home
for supper. Her voice was gentle. It was not stretched tight by her
fear. This Autumn she was home and she was not "sick". I picked four
apples, red for my mother, red-green for my father, yellow-red for my
baby brother and yellow-green for me. I took one bite out of mine.
Juice flooded my mouth. Sweet and sour...

Later I write to the friend I have never met. His letter tells me
that the apples are from the Auvil Research Orchard. "The fruit has
never been spayed with malathion, Alar or any chemicals; the apples
are sprayed with water and clay at just the right times to prevent bug
damage."

"Dear brother," I write, " The Mahakala prayer flags tremble in an
invisible breeze. Mahakala is Kali is Time is That Which Eats
Everything. Mahakala lives in the west.
I sit in the shade at the west side of my cabin. I eat grated
apple and chunks of pepperjack cheese. Mahakala has eaten the harsh
times of my former year. Mahakala does, as is his nature,
continue to eat. I think He finds the stock market particularly delectable.
Others also find your apples delectable: The staff at the
Angelview second-hand store; the women who work the super-market
check-outs; whatever scurried in last night to nibble the damaged
apples I'd scattered under the mulberry trees.
Yesterday I heard two of the wealthy talk of being terrified that
the stock-market would eat "everything they had worked so hard for."
I remembered my own terror in 2007 as my world fell apart. Then I
understood: Everything I have worked so hard for will never be lost -
that is the blessing of knowing how to be poor, of choosing time over
safety. As long as memory serves me, I will carry a hundred millions
riches: the moon in a slot canyon of sky over a desert gorge; basalt
shredding my fingers as I haul myself up an impossible slope; the
scent of apple as a prayer moves out from my breath, "For the
furthering of all sentient beings, and the protection of earth, air
and water."
Sunday I hung wash on the new clotheslines. Thirty minutes later
it was dry. The only resources used were my muscles, sun, wind and my
delight. I made the bed with clean sheets and I thought of another
prayer:
gate gate paragate. gone gone completely gone
Sun-scented cotton, aching shoulder, wind eaten by twilight. Woman
breathing fully alive toward her death.
---Mary

From the open air--what a delight! Brings up memories of childhood--
spending time in the back yard, Mom's good days, hanging the clothes out to dry
and me making a tent with old blankets and the clothesline for a ridge pole.
Fresh scent on the clothes coming inside, and the hiss of the iron on clothes
my mother sprinkled with water from her fingers, dipped in a pan placed by the ironing board.
Good memories. Yes,
yes, yes, it is healing indeed! Healing for us and healing for our system
of depending on electricity when nature is ready to help us not only to do
things like dry our clothes, but to also refresh our senses and renew our
souls.

I'm back in Petoskey after getting Jane started on her latest course of
treatment. She's doing well, and is in good hands with family down there.
I'm going to put in a week here at the office, and also tend to things at
home and get caught up in both places...
...Meanwhile, fall has arrived. I marked the equinox quietly down in Chelsea
with Jane and her folks, but this morning was a real celebration: as I
crested the hill on Mitchell, headed east on the way in to the office, the
sun was hovering just barely over the horizon, due east, red-orange in a bit
of morning haze, but huge and present and seemingly making the statement:
"look here, it's equinox time; I rise due east to show you." It was one of
those beautiful moments.

May you have many of those in the desert, and may the fresh of air-dried
laundry refresh your senses and your spirit!!

Blessings on blessings to you
---Tom Bailey

Welcome to the Age of Nugacity

2008-08-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

We are living in the Age of Nugacity. This, from a word-a-day service
a friend once gave me:

nugacity

PRONUNCIATION:
(noo-GAS-i-tee, nyoo-)
MEANING:
noun: Triviality; futility.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin nugax (trifling), from nugari (to trifle).

Last night, after I had read in the LA Times and on Yahoo about Adolf
Hitler's Olympics unfolding in Beijing, I took myself out to the
Joshua tree and watched the moon's slow progress toward the mountains
(which is, more accurately, the earth's falling into day) and I said
to That which contains us, "I am so sorry."

It is astonishing to me that the moon, the old tree, even the lights
of human dwellings slowed my breathing and brought a little peace. I
was able to sleep.

I woke this morning to sadness. Immediate. Inexorable.

Later I read this poem:

All night I could not sleep
Because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered 'yes.'

- Zi Ye, translated by Arthur Waley, *A Hundred and Seventy Chinese
Poems

How much we have all forgotten---the Chinese, the Americans, every
global victim of the Great Hypnosis...

Bailey

2008-08-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Reflections...
...Tom Bailey

In a recent conversation with a colleague who is a veteran of many years in conservation policy work, we found ourselves looking at parallels between the early 21st century and the early 20th. Among other things we talked about Teddy Roosevelt, long identified as a hero and patron saint of the conservation movement. As the 20th century dawned, TR was advocating conservation as a national responsibility. “Conservation,” Roosevelt said, “is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of ensuring the safety and continuance of the nation.”
While it is probably safe to say that there was no talk about things like global climate change in TR’s day, it was none the less a tumultuous period. The frontier was gone, the American West was being settled and explosive growth in industry and the technology of the day brought a feeling of change to the nation. As we read in on-line news services today about the influence of large multinational corporations, newspapers in Roosevelt’s day reported concerns about big business, too. In fact, the nation’s youngest president made a name for himself through “trust busting.” Though Big Oil has replaced Big Railroads in the headlines, for those who look back to TR’s legacy in conservation, “what would Teddy do?” might be a question for today.
Perhaps. But while history teaches us that it is important to avoid forgetting our past, nature teaches us that the world moves relentlessly forward, not backward. We can learn a great deal from Teddy Roosevelt and other giants of conservation–John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson to name but a few. However, the question most relevant to our times, I believe, is not so much what these legendary figures of the past might do today, but what we will do, given our knowledge of conservation, our ability to know much more about what is happening worldwide to natural resources, and the lessons passed down to us by the legendary figures of the past. It is, after all, the “information age.” We have more information at our disposal than any generation before concerning the state of the earth’s natural systems and the effect which human activity has upon those systems. We have seen the earth from space, and as never before, we understand that the earth has its limits.
Science has probably been the single most potent force propelling conservation and the environmental movement forward over the past century, and it certainly has a great deal to offer. We can instantly view almost any part of the earth from space. We can access and process more information in minutes than all the libraries on earth contained in Teddy Roosevelt’s day. We can make models and projections and computations that tell us what is likely to happen in the atmosphere, the oceans and on the land.
But we’re far from knowing it all. In fact, the more we learn, the more there is to learn. And just when we think we have “the answers” to some of the Big Questions facing us in land and resource management, Mother Nature throws us a curve, teaches us new things and sends us back to scratching our heads and re-programming our computer models. As Jack Ward Thomas, former head of the US Forest Service put it, “ecosystem management is not only more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can think.”
Nicely put. Because even though science enables us to know more than we ever have about the complex workings of the earth’s systems, science has its limits and is, after all, only one way of looking at the world. Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold all seem to me to be people who valued the importance of science in conservation, but they saw the conservation cause as having more diverse dimensions. From Muir’s soaring prose to Roosevelt’s “moral issue,” Carson’s concerns of what a “silent spring” might be like and of course Leopold’s Land Ethic, these great leaders saw things in a broader context than just the reductionistic view of science. I think it was best put by Rolf Peterson, who played a key role in conducting the longest-running predator-prey study on earth. In his book, “The Wolves of Isle Royale: A Broken Balance,” he referred to viewing our National Parks both as laboratories and cathedrals. He elaborated, saying that “there is genuine creative tension between science and soul, reason and myth... Science simply illuminates in a modest way that which invigorates the human soul.” He added, for emphasis, “let no park manager or scientist forget the importance of the latter!”
So. Times have changed, yet some things have not. We have more scientific information and more capacity to process that information that at any time in human history. We have more universities, more researchers, more studies, more research projects and more computer modeling of the earth’s systems than ever before. TR would barely recognize much of the world today. Yet in our literature and in our hearts, we still celebrate the spirit which moved Roosevelt to declare, in dedicating the Grand Canyon as a National Park, that we should “leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only diminish it.” We may know more about the meteorology, limnology, biology, zoology, ichthyology, entomology and even the cosmology that affects the Great Lakes, but when we gaze out over the water to see the power and majesty of an approaching storm with towering clouds, rumbling thunder and blazing bolts of lightning, our visceral reaction is no different than that of our ancestors hundreds of generations ago.
The centuries roll on, and the outset of this one partly mirrors and partly contrasts with the dawn of the last one. I can’t say what TR would do about the issues we face today, but I can work as a citizen, a voter, a conservation professional, a community member and a father to try to ensure that we learn well the lessons of history, even as we develop our own ways to apply that knowledge in a world that offers its own challenges, as well as its own opportunities.
---Tom Bailey, Little Traverse Conservancy

I Offer

2008-06-24T15:26:00.001-07:00

I am a free-lance writer, editor and writing teacher. I begin to think about credentials and balk. You can google Mary Sojourner to find my books and articles, my NPR commentaries and writing conference gigs. Here is what is important:

Last night I walked out over the desert, into light that went from too much to burnished to cool gray. I was heading back when I saw a jade-green snake coiled in a perfect circle. Its head was slightly raised, its tongue testing the air.

A few seconds later I found a delicate feather, downy white near its spine, barred cream and brown toward its tip.

I had spent the day fighting various ghosts of "what if". The snake and the feather slowed my heart.

I bring to publishers, writers and students my willingness to walk out over the desert alone; to watch the ground; to look up; and to fool the various ghosts of "what if". Those phantoms block beauty. I teach my students how to float with them.

I teach for writing conferences, in private circles (will travel throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado; you organize your circle and bring me in), and one-on-one through e-mail, phone and/or face-to-face meetings. $175. for an initial individual consultation (my written suggestions on maximum of 20 double-spaced pages) and 30 minutes phone time. I work with fiction, essay, poetry and the transformation of journal writing into what comes next... My fee for writing circles depends on location, number of writers and length of time.

I edit that which needs a razor's edge and respect.

You can reach me at bstarr67@gmail.com

Down the road

****

WORDSMITHING: they say

Father, father, we don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
What's goin' on what's goin' on, what's goin' on - what's goin' on
Heah, what's goin' on - what's goin' on, oh, what's goin' on - what's
goin' on...
---What's Goin' On?
Marvin Gaye, 1971

I fall in love with the old times
I never mention my own mind
Let's f..k the world with all it's trend
Thank god, it's all about to end...

They say it's all about to end...
---They Say
Scars on Broadway, 2008

"Thank god, it's all about to end..." That's got to be an old broad
talking or an angry geezer. Daron Malakian just turned 33. He was
lead singer for hard rock band, System of a Down. He now fronts SOD.
They Say registered 100,000 downloads when it went up free on ITunes.
Four years ago, Big Dog publisher, make that rabid Big Dog publisher,
Scribner's released my memoir, Solace:rituals of loss and desire
(this excerpt records a reading in Denver in 2002):

I paused and asked for questions or reactions. A young woman
in a bright red t-shirt raised her hand. "Something has been
troubling me for a long time," she said, "long before your reading. I
have two small kids. I am terrified for their future. I've been
taught that life moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. I see
growth exploding. Will there be a contraction? Are the cycles still
in place?"
I wanted to to say easily, " Yes, we move in cycles, our earth and
our huge little species are moved in cycles. It will all come out
just fine." But I remembered a moment from the day before and could
not. At an off-ramp gas station in Colorado Springs, a furious kid in
a pick-up truck had squealed out of the lot, his back tires tossing
rock like shrapnel. Ev had vice-gripped the door handle of his truck.
"I want to go after that kid and beat the shit out of him," he said,
then shook his head. "Which makes me him. We are all spinning out."
I lsat on the edge of the stage.
"I'm deeply afraid," I said, "that the incredible speed at which
most of us are moving is carrying us out of the natural spiral. We
have exceeded some inner and outer gravitational pull. We are flying
out of control."
"But, where," she said, "is the hope?"
Before I could answer, her friend stood. She was a woman in her
early forties,
impeccably groomed, hair cut beautifully, her feet in polished
top-of-the-line cowgirl boots. I would have said we were about as far
apart as two women can be. And then I saw the pain in her eyes.
Her words came slowly. I had heard them three other times on this
trip, once at the Albuquerque reading, once during a radio interview,
once between old friends. "My only hope," she said, "is that some
day, maybe even soon, our species will be gone."

Four years since Solace was published. Six since I listened to
those mothers longing for hope. Thirty-six years since Marvin Gaye looked
deep into the terrified heart of America and asked, "What's Goin' on?"
Every day I hear someone say: "It's coming apart. This cannot
continue." They speak about home foreclosures, gas gouging,
unemployment, food banks stretched as thin as Depression potato soup,
the obscene flaunting of wealth by them that got it...
You can say "It's coming apart." Or you can say "It's goin' down."
And, the question I ask myself every day is this: "Where do I stand?
And, when it's gone down, where will any of us stand?"
A friend read my last column and wrote: Your last column in LIVE
troubled me. Your current sojourn in the desert sounds more like an
austere and lonely exile than a fresh start set some distance from a
casino. Is there anything I can do to help you?
His last sentence is the beginning to the answer to the question:
Where will any of us stand?
For all of us.

************
WORDSMITHING: with all due respect

The planet isn't going anywhere; WE are!
---George Carlin
by way of old comrade, Bob Katz (Lippman)

Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.
---Sogyal Rinpoche

I am lazy. I am compulsive. The real issues hung out with me for a couple years. They would not go away. I couldn’t. The real issues worked on me.. They used sand-paper and evisceration. When they were finished I was a parchment bag of bones and not knowing.
I cast my bones into the future. They brought me here. This place is merciless. Molten. These times even more so. No work. Frightened people.
And still, around 6:30 in the evening, the light cools. I step out my door and am immediately in the presence of radiant sand, dark mountains and human debris. I am in the Mojave Desert.. I set out.
Three nights ago I came across a pale yellow cabin. The windows were boarded up. One nail held the door shut. There were words painted in flamingo pink on the door:

PEOPLE! If you are the ones that stole the chair,
go ahead and break in again. There is nothing left to
steal.
Hey, Dougie, here’s the phone number...
...call...
...if you want...a shower.

BEWARE OF SNAKES!!!

I began to try the door and stopped. It was not the possibility of serpents that stayed my hand. It was the certainty that the lives of the people who had written on the door were none of my business. It was the dozens of abandoned shacks, houses and trailers I’d found near Twentynine Palms, the currents of lost hope and despair that seemed to wind through those phantom neighborhoods and the stories I knew needed to belong to people who might have lost everything.
I walked east. I’d gone no more than fifty yards when I saw a ripple of jade and gray gleaming in the sand. The snake lifted its head. It flicked its tongue and tasted what might be coming toward it.
I stepped back. “Sorry,” I said. “This is your neighborhood.”

I went through old papers that evening. I hunted nothing. What I found was an invitation as big as the hopes of people building a homestead cabin and as precious as light swimming along a rattlesnake’s curves.

January 1, 1990: On January 14, I will turn 50. Please join me and a few friends for a birthday witness at the proposed uranium mine site near Red Butte. No present, please. Bring music, food and the willingness to stand outside the wire fence that still encloses the intentions of a Denver mining company, a company a few of us stopped cold. Love and Respect, Mary

There was the the hand-drawn map still incised in my heart. And, there were the memories of a miracle. A few of us had caravanned over frozen dirt roads. Bob Katz drove his truck. I drove mine. We parked outside the concertina wire. The head-frame and the workshed had not been taken down---in case the price of uranium went up, in case the Havasupai and a few of us forgot.
We heard dogs barking. I walked up to the locked gate. Bob opened the truck doors. “Let’s do it,” I said.
I’d brought two tapes: Aretha Franklin singing “R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and the Gaden Shartse monks chanting a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for the Earth. Bob slid in a tape and turned up the volume.
“Wait a second, “ I said.
A door opened. Two dogs barrelled out of the workshed. Their fangs were bared. “Hit it,” I said.
The low thunder of the monk’s chant moved out into the air. In that instant, the dogs went silent. They dropped to their bellies. They crossed their front paws, lowered their heads and looked calmly up at me. They did not move, even when their owner walked up; even when he asked us what we were doing and we said, “Praying.”; even when he said, “O.k.”; even when the chant faded out and the black diamond of Aretha Franklin’s voice glittered over our heads---and we began to dance.

The herons are back

2008-04-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

…I saw them as Jane and I drove down to Ann Arbor a few days ago. There’s a large rookery west of Houghton Lake, right off the highway, and in every nest was at least one heron, standing on those seemingly spindly stilt-legs. They didn’t seem to be sitting and incubating yet, so I guess they just arrived and are preparing for egg-laying. (Maybe a little he-ing and she-ing going on around those nests??) The buzzards are back, too, patrolling the skies of the North Country once again as the snow retreats before the onrush of spring.

At this time of year, I like to make a little twist on the old “hope springs eternal” saying and note that “spring hopes eternal.” It’s a hopeful time of year for me, full of promise. The reports we got from the docs in Ann Arbor were good for Jane, and while the prospect of “heavy-duty chemotherapy” is not the greatest thing to look forward to, we both have a sense of optimism that between the masterful work of the surgeon and the chemical wizardry of the oncologists, “Jane’s cancer” will be a thing of the past. So in that biggest of looming challenges, for now, there’s hope. And there’s more.

We’re losing snow by the ton each day, and many areas are clear of it now. I had a wonderful walk down the road near the office yesterday, in the 66 degree warmth. Snowmelt water is rushing into Round Lake and that gurgling, bubbling sound is music to my ears. Not even the leftover litter or the condoms lying on the roadside could dampen my joy in walking through the sun and warmth (hope it was good for both of them…). The ice on Little Traverse Bay is showing signs in areas of turning what we call “rotten,” indicating that a stiff east wind might be able to loosen some of it up and drive it out into the open Lake. A couple of ponds are thawing these days, and before long the inland lakes will be blue instead of white. There’ll be more snow, for sure, but not of any consequence. As if to emphasize that we’re not out of the proverbial woods yet, I walked into the local newspaper office for an interview in 66 degree sunshine—and emerged scarcely 40 minutes later to find spitting rain and 44 degrees. Yes, it’s still April in the north. But the Pleiades are sinking lower and lower in the western sky each night at dark, the Summer Stars are making their first appearance in the wee hours and the seasons are marching on.

And as Jane marches on through her challenge, I’m learning about what it means to “march on,” too. Lessons I need. Lessons about accepting where I am along the road, and about how narrow my view of it all can become at times. I can’t say that I know for sure what’s trying to happen for me right now, but things are in motion and I am a long way from the “stuck” feeling that I had through the fall and early winter. Whirling and tumbling like spring runoff water. So much yet to learn!!

May Spring hope eternal...

---Bailey (personal correspondence)

Hunting the Moon

2008-01-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

"Each generation receives a little capsule of
instructions, says Eisley, that passes through the
eye of the needle like a blowing seed. They are
carried "through the molecular darkness of a minute
world below the field of human vision and of time's
decay."
"They are tranmitted from one generation to
another in invisible puffs of air known as
words---words that can also be symbolically incised on
clay. As the delicate printing on the mud at the
water's edge retraces a visit of autumn birds long
since departed, so the little tablets in perished
cities carry the seeds of human thought across the
deserts of millenia.
---Loren Eisley, The Star Thrower"
in Richard Wentz' The Contemplation of Otherness:
the critical vision of religion.

Barn's burnt down
now I can see the moon.
---Masahide

All wisdom is rooted in learning to call
things by the right name.
---Kung-fu Tze

I write on a tablet of light from a perishing city.
In its outskirts I could be anywhere: Phoenix, Chapel
Hill, Seattle, Flagstaff. In their outskirts, the
cities have perished. Or been transmuted by the kiss of vampires.
Still, instructions drift through the eye of the
needle. From Masahide. From my younger self. He
tells me there is radiance beyond charred black. I
fore-tell my future.
I once wrote: "That double light of story and
connection has shone true---on the levelling and
subdividing of the hills and creeks of my childhood
home; on the gentrification of the neighborhoods we
hippies re-built in the heart of an Eastern city; and
even now, on Western towns and earth disappearing
before our eyes, eaten by insatiable hungers as
thoroughly as bone by cancer.
Under that light, in pure gratitude, I offer story
and the possibility of connection, delicate and
essential as Desert Big Horn bones in an un-named
Mojave wash---or any first meeting."
Over the last four years, the double light of story
and connection began to fade from my life. In the
last year I came to doubt that it would do anything
but disappear. A few friends; the Sacred Mountains; a
cluster of seven Ponderosa, one of them reduced to a
stump by the busy work of the forest service; the
double-trunked pine behind my cabin---women and men,
stone and trees have been my illumination, my medicine
and fragile tether.
Two months ago I learned that the Hassyampa Insitute
for Creative Writing summer writing conference had
been killed. For ten years or more, writers and
teachers have gathered in Prescott, Arizona for a week
of work and beauty. A month ago, a gifted editor and
even more gifted friend told me that it had become
impossible to publish the books she loved; and then
another equally fine editor and friend said identical
words.
I told myself that as long as my hand moved a pen
over paper; as long as my fingers moved words out
through computer keys, I was where I needed to be. I
walked with friends, sat with the trees. The darkness
grew.
And then, I drove to Twentynine Palms, California to
read and teach writing for the Mojave Desert Land
Trust. I took the I-40 Mountain Springs exit to Amboy
Road. I drove west between blue-black mountains. I
was alone on the little two-lane till a beat-up
Eighties Ford truck appeared on the western horizon.
As the driver passed me, he slowed, grinned and raised
his hand.
I waved back and pulled off onto mosaic hardpan;
climbed out and leaned against the car. The mountains
to the south had begun to catch pink-gold light. It
seemed vital to know their names. There is always a
road atlas on the passenger seat. I opened it and
studied the Eastern Mojave.
Old Woman Mountains.
I smiled as I had not for much too long. Easily,
deeply. I knew the barn was nearly burnt. I knew
that somewhere down a dirt road there was an un-named
Mojave wash, and moon-white bones and an old woman
finding them. I knew it was time to leave what had
once been my home.
It was time to hunt the moon.

Welcome to Our Loom

2007-10-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

We are weavers; we are the web. A few weeks ago I took off on a solo road trip to Denver. I would teach a writing circle at the National Land Trust Rally. Just before I climbed into the car, I stopped to say good-bye to my home. I suspect that is an ancient impulse. Only in the last twenty years have we been able to believe our journeys are predictable, made so by AAA and cell phones and modern illusions.
Red, yellow and green prayer flags danced in the wind. Juniper smoke rose from the chimney. And, Phidippus comatus sat in the center of his web, a fat brown and gray Jumping Spider, his trap a galaxy of shining threads.

When I returned from the road, Phidippus was gone. A deep chill held our Northern Arizona nights. Orion moved across the brilliant midnights. I bundled myself in a blanket and sat on the back stoop. The scent of juniper smoke drifted past me. I thought of elegant traps and illusion. I remembered the mansions I had seen on the hillsides of Colorado. And I thought of jumping spiders and making---and the wonderful sight of seventy people in a hotel conference room, their heads bent over their work, their pens moving steadily.

I am joyful to introduce you to some of those writers. Welcome.

Continue the Gift

2007-10-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

THE GIFT
I am home from teaching at a Land Trust conference in Denver. I stayed with a new friend in Boulder. I drove three round-trips between Boulder and Denver. At the close of each forty minutes on the highway, my eyes felt as though they had been sand-papered.

My friend's home was a haven, her back-yard green solace. The highway, the downtown, the hotel in which the entry-lounge to the Ladies Room was the size of my cabin, were a shrill of not so much white noise, as noise the awful brilliance of burning phosphorus. Only later, driving home somewhere west of Colorado Springs, did I understand the assault I had come through, the assault a million people occupy each day. Thirty years ago foot soldiers in Viet Nam called white phosphorus "Willy Peter". When it slashed down from the sky onto a grunt's skin, it burned clear to the bone.

I thought of the deep-hearted and weary people I had taught at the conference. My writing workshop had been named "Sharing the Passion". Seventy people bent their heads over their notebooks and wrote. They read. Their words were both radiant and fierce. A few of them said, "This is beautiful, but aren't we preaching to the choir? We need to write to reach the people we aren't reaching."

I thought of the choir, of the unreachables, of the people who might be neither, or both. I was grateful to be in the silence of my car and to find myself in the heart of a long valley. South of Saguache I followed a ribbon of last light. The Sangre de Cristos were on my left. They were cobalt. The mountains on my right cast a black shadow across them. The tops of the mountains on my right were covered with indigo stormclouds. All this black and blue. Not bruises, no, anything but bruises.
Red-gold lances of sunset slashed through the clouds. They spotlighted an impossible undulation of pink sand dunes in a dark valley.

I thought of my artist friend Bob Dalegoski, how he might have pulled over and painted. I burned the picture into my mind. And I wondered if preaching to the choir is not a waste, but precisely the gift we can give each other---we who are deep-hearted and weary, we who perservere in believing that if we just try harder, just find the magic words, the tone-deaf will hear our song; the color-blind will see our art.

And those lost in the shrill of busybusybusy and bumper-to-bumper? For them, we bring out the beauty with which we have been blessed---and trust some of them will see, some of them will hear.

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WHY I SAVE LAND AND HABITAT

My Dad grew up in Indiana near the coal mining country. When I was a child he told me about coal mining and the hazards of working in the underground mining environment. The miners would always take a canary down in the mines with them. I thought this was a silly thing to do with a pet bird. He explained that the largest threat to the coal miners was methane gas that leaked out of a seam and would lead to asphyxiation or explosion. The canary was place in its cage on the floor because methane gas was heavier than air it would settle there first. If the miners saw a dead bird it was an urgent warning to get out of there.

Today we, and all living species, are all canaries living in a world with toxins leaking out all around us. Today some species are dying off just like the canary. Are we all so blind that we can’t see where this is leading?

Once a naturalist living in the mountains near Aspen , Colorado said me, “Man is the only species in Nature that can choose to live outside the laws of Nature…but he can only choose to do so for so long.” When we in the land conservation business work to save land we are doing more than that. We are saving habitats. We are protecting God’s world, we are protecting the habitats all species need to survive. It can’t be explained in any other way. We are working not just to save land but to keep species of plants and animals alive. As we lose a species (and we lose many each year) we are marching down the road of human progress towards extinction. When will it become our turn to become one of the extinct species of the year? Why are we all so blind?

Our answers are many and mostly short-sighted and selfish. God deserves a better answer. It is up to all of us to give it to Him.

The talk of global warming, air pollution, water pollution and toxic waste goes on but all we do is talk past each other. The good news may be that when the clean air, blue sky and water, green trees and good rich soils are gone, we will not have to argue anymore. The sweet smell of fresh air and life will be gone and God can start over with new life that hopefully will be more compatible with the environment he gives us.

Why are we all so blind? Hello, I didn’t hear the answer. Hello, Hello…Good Bye for now and maybe forever.

Steve Smith

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I am here to follow this thread. The frog and the pond where I grew up connected. The frog represents so much that was lost over the years. And at some unknown and arbitrary point the balance shifted. An equilibrium was met and I'm now journeying back. Back to the connection to those dear frogs and the wisdom and spirit they foretold in my life.
The frog represents a straddling of and connection to the two worlds of water and land. My similar connection has granted me a power of observation and awareness that can engender loneliness, anger and deep connection to Mother Earth.
Holding a frog as a child and feeling a deep reverence for its beauty and life force gave me the opportunity to be still when around me my peers were tossing balls and burning energy. When the frog let go of its will and succumbed to my tender touch on its belly, our energies merged. Today I can go to that place with eye contact and the foundation of reverence for all living creatures learned at such an early age.
I have pondered and puzzled over the fortitude of Mother Earth to withstand the assault of humankind on her. I know she has the ultimate upperhand and trust she will prevail. That is not an excuse to sit back yet there is comfort in knowing her strength.

Dan Jones, Orient Land Trust

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"We came, we saw, we absorbed a whole bunch of stuff on top of what was already crammed inside our heads." So could be the commentary on attending any number of conferences.

But a different breeze was blowing at Rally 2007. In two different workshops, we came, we relaxed and then we tapped into the amazing energy inside ourselves: our thoughts, experiences, feelings and those all-important threads of connection to the land. We didn't absorb more information, we let things out. Amazing things. Personal things. Profound things.

We wrote silently. It started slowly at first, but our pens began to move more urgently; the expressions on our faces changed and in a very few minutes the room--or the places outside the room which some of us sought out for writing--had about them an air of tremendous release as we poured out elements of our connections to the land, elements of our feelings about our work and elements of our very selves. The energy was palpable, and the feeling profound.

Some of us shared, reading to the group. We were amazed at one another and ourselves. Profound isn't the half of it; it was REAL. We wished there was more--more time, more space, more room for us to share these passions and experiences, all the pent-up energy of loving the land, striving to protect it, seeing that so many do not understand, and wondering what to do next.

There will be more, I am sure, at future rallies and also at future events that many of us will stage in our home communities after this deep experience. Meanwhile, there is this blog site. May it be a place of refuge and release for us. Not a place to load up with more information, but a place to express; a place to share; a place to feel and to be understood.

May it be a blessed and even a sacred place.

May it lead to much, much more to come.

--Tom Bailey,
Little Traverse Conservancy,
Michigan

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(This drought) seconded only by one back in the 1930's, fish stranded in globally warmed pockets of water in our depleted river, temperatures an unending, constant 15 degrees above normal - no autumn, no crispness or snap to the air, no frost on the pumpkin, no rain. People say to me, "Don't stress so much, you can't change the weather."
and I reply, "Oh yes you can, we already have..."

Karen A. Huber
Executive Director
Southbury Land Trust

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LIFE IS IN THE FEET
Summer work builds callouses. I hike with a 50 pound backpack into the
wilderness. Sinking my bare feet into a mountain stream there's
delight in the poke of a sharp rock as surely as in the caress of a
mossy cobble sculpted through eons.
I patter to and from the garden barefoot. The earth connection as I
work with and in Mother is part of the secret to the bounty of my
vegetable harvest.
Temperatures cool. I cover my feet. Callouses crack. They're no longer
nourished by direct contact. They start to hurt and enter my
awareness. I warm them in a hot bath, polish the rough spots and
massage them with oils. All this feels good. It does nothing for my
soul.

It is not a coincidence that everything that leads me away from living
in harmony and in the cycle of Mother Earth, I ultimately label a
neurosis.

There is a false connection in a calendar or datebook. It is a
connection to responsibility and a distraction to living in the moment
and in the natural cycle of our world.

Dan Jones, Orient Land Trust

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NEW ENGLAND LAND TRUST - ANNUAL MONITORING REPORT

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost – NELT Volunteer

Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though
He will not see me standing here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Review Comment: It sounds like you’re not sure if you’re on the protected property or not. Don’t you have your GPS unit with you? Did you check the Parcel ID# and location before you arrived on the site? LTA Standard 11D stresses the importance of landowner communication and relationships. If the residence is off site, arrangements should be made ahead of time.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

Review Comment: Have you read the easement to ensure that equestrian access is permitted? Does an approved, established trail run between the woods and the lake? We need to take care to ensure that you are not harming the established conservation values on the property.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there’s been some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

Review comment: “Lovely, dark, and deep” – are you referring to scenic conservation values? And “miles to go before you sleep” – we should really watch it so that you’re not scheduling too many monitoring visits back to back.

Robert: Thanks for volunteering your time to help with this, but I have to say, after reading your report, I’m a little concerned that you may be outside the bounds of protocol. Your report is vague in places and raises a lot more questions than it answers. Let’s touch base next week. Perhaps you’d be more interested in another volunteer position elsewhere in the organization—say, grant writing?

Mark Patrick, Washtenaw Land Trust, Ann Arbor, MI