Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

John O'Donohue, Irish poet and philosopher

For a rich perspective on John O'Donohue's life and work, see www.johnodonohue.com. Many of the selections below are taken from that source.

He was a remarkable man, "born in 1956, into a native Gaelic speaking family, on the farm inhabited by previous generations in the Burren Region of County Clare, Ireland. As the oldest of four children, he learned to work alongside his parents and uncle, developing a close kinship with the wild landscape, framed by an ethereal view of a limestone valley and the beckoning waters of Galway Bay. This valley was the shell of John's soul, forging a deep and powerful connection with the elements shaping him. He was educated at the local primary school, alternating his studies with the farm chores of tending livestock, raising crops and carving peat for fuel, in his youth. John later described the profound influence of his childhood home as, "A huge wild invitation to extend your imagination…an ancient conversation between the land and sea."

"My earliest memories are of the landscape of The Burren in the west of Ireland. The Burren is an ancient kingdom of limestone sculptures carved slowly by rain, wind and time."

"John's insights into the Self as an unfolding journey of consciousness, memory and spirit reconciled our contradictory human existence as both Individual Person and Person in Relationship to Other."

"In 1997, Anam Cara [Gaelic for "soul friend"] was published, instantly becoming an international best-seller and propelling John onto the world's stage." While he continued to speak publically on social justice issues, in 2000 he retired from public priestly ministry, living and writing in a remote cottage in Connemara. Two days before his 52nd birthday, he died suddenly in his sleep on 4 January 2008 while on holiday near Avignon, France.

"John's legacy directs our search for intimacy to crucial thresholds: tradition and modernity, past and future, life and death, the visible and the invisible world. At the heart of John's awakened beliefs was the premise that ancient wisdom could offer desperately needed nourishment for the spiritual hunger experienced in our modern world. John is fondly remembered by an international readership as one who could blend critical analytic thought with imaginative evocation, enabling people to release themselves from the false shelter of the familiar and repetitive to become agents of transformation and change."

 Just a few months before his death, O'Donohue was interviewed by Krista Tippett for her program "On Being," likely the finest single source for revealing the man and his work.

The following poem is entitled Beannacht, the Gaelic word for blessing. Another Gaelic word embedded in the poem is currach. A currach is an Irish boat much like a canoe, with wood frame and, depending on its age, the frame overlaid by animal skins or canvas.

 

 

Bennacht

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets in to you,

May a flock of colours,

Indigo, red, green,

And azure blue

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

 

 

An Elegy for Trees

When I was a child and imagined being a grown-up, there were two vocations about which I dreamed: I would be an architect or a forest ranger. The architect I imagined was a designer of homes, each of three sides, surrounding a capacious patio, looking out upon wild greensward, bushes, granite and tall trees. My family moved often during those years, and I think I was designing a home where we would stay.

As a forest ranger I lived at the top of a tower surrounded on all sides by endless forest, and my task was to watch keenly for the danger of fire.

Both of these visions of a future life looked out upon trees. For as long as I can remember, I have felt a deep kinship: climbed them, talked with them, swung under their boughs, softened in their shade, sat reading against their trunks. Trees have been my brethren. No surprise, surely, that I find myself living in a community called The Redwoods.

 

And no surprise, either, to find my wise age-mate Parker Palmer discovering later in life a similar kinship. I have no doubt of the answer to the question he asks himself: "I wonder if trees photosynthesize the soul as well as sunlight?"

 

An Elegy for Trees

by Parker J. Palmer

Some of you will wonder what took me so long, but in recent years I’ve developed a deep appreciation for trees.

I used to take trees for granted. But these days I know that sitting in their presence for a while will leave me refreshed and renewed. I wonder if trees photosynthesize the soul as well as sunlight?

Part of what calls to me is the complexity and beauty of trees. As Annie Dillard wrote, if you want to understand how complex a tree is, try making a scale model of one! As for beauty, few sights can rival yellow leaves dancing in the wind against the backdrop of a “blue true dream of sky,” to quote e.e. cummings.

But most of all, I’m drawn to trees because of something W.S. Merwin says in this lovely poem — the way they slowly and quietly cycle through the seasons “as though nothing had happened” while our individual and collective lives whirl madly around them.

 

Elegy for a Walnut Tree

by W.S. Merwin

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language
and all these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world

 

Eagle Poem - Joy Harjo

We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.

 

 

Eagle Poem

 

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River.  Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

 

~ Joy Harjo ~

 

 

 

(How We Become Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001)

Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photographs, February or March, 1936

It was February or March of 1936. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson. She was 32 years old, caring for her seven children, eking out a living at that moment picking peas in fields near Nipomo, California. Twenty-four years later Dorothea Lange wrote of her memory of their encounter in front of the tent in which the family lived:

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."

Lange's documentary photographic work during the Depression was funded by the Farm Security Administration.

 

Migrant mother and children

"Here, take it, it's yours." William Stafford's poem, "The Gift"

Waiting, praying, breathing without pain,

It is called happiness.

Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."

 

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come − maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours."


by William Stafford, from My Name is William Tell, 1992

 

Sharing silence

Last week, as I wrote here on Sunday, March 5th, our meditation together focused on the meaning of sanctuary. I've always loved, as I remember writing here many moons ago, the deeply intimate resonance, the sense of safety and nourishment, the diversity of experiences and places, that word evokes. I recall my wise age-mate Parker Palmer movingly capturing its evolution, nuance and importance in his own life. "Sanctuary," he wrote, "is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival... [The sanctuary] I need may not be in a church, but in the silence, in the woods, in a friendship, in a poem, or in a song [like that of Carrie Newcomer in her album "The Beautiful Not Yet."]

Used as a noun most commonly, derived from the Latin sanctum, sanctuary typically describes a sacred or holy place, a refuge. Although I find that quality in church and temple services, I like also to sit in churches when no service is occurring, treasuring in silence just those qualities of refuge. And like Palmer, I've found sanctuary among trees, along barely perceptible trails, and in shorelines.

When I first thought about vocation as a child, my two ambitions were forest ranger and architect. In the first, I imagined inhabiting a tower, a simple square room above the forest, and caretaking for the silent arboreal surround, requiring both a soft alertness and a keen eye. In the second, thinking of what I would draw − and later working with board, drawing paper, T-square and triangles − I had most in mind homes, open and U-shaped like a three-sided square or rectangle, with the fourth side a courtyard or patio open to the natural world beyond.

My current home, an apartment in a community of folks sharing with me the later stages of adult life, has close kinship with both of those early images. I look out − through sliding glass doors − upon greensward, a courtyard with trees now in early spring coming into leaf and flower. The courtyard, in turn, leads into marshland with circuitous tidal streams, trails and walking bridges made of salvaged redwood, and hills beyond.

The community part of my circumstances is a relatively new experience for me: starting in Norway at Modum Bad, the last home that Leigh and I shared before her final illness; and then, fortified by the gift of those years and guided by the wisdom of my family, I came to The Redwoods. I occasionally say to others that I taught about community for thirty years before I knew what I was talking about. I wasn't way off the mark, thankfully: a gift of God.

Which brings me finally to my subject, sharing silence. As I recall, The Buddha himself is said to have said that of the triad central to Buddhism − the sangha, the Buddha, and the dharma, the first among equals is sangha: the community of practice.

Gunilla Norris − to whom my teacher sent me − puts it well: "Sharing silence with others is a profound act of trust, love and courtesy. It is a gift, a necessity, a helping hand, a path, and a discipline." I've wished since childhood, in my heart, that I had been raised a Quaker, because its tradition embodies shared silence in community, and is deeply, compassionately political. As Parker Palmer writes, "For centuries Quakers — though few in number — have been disproportionately represented in movements for peace, truth, and justice." Norris says, in words worthy of careful meditation (read contemplatively, as one would a fine poem, more than once):

Within each of us there is a silence
—a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it…and we long for it.

When we experience that silence, we remember
who we are: creatures of the stars, created
from the cooling of this planet, created
from dust and gas, created
from the elements, created
from time and space…created
from silence.

In our present culture,
silence is something like an endangered species…
an endangered fundamental.

The experience of silence is now so rare
that we must cultivate it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.

Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act.
When we can stand aside from the usual and
perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen.
Our lives align with deeper values
and the lives of others are touched and influenced.

Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,
to our selves. It locates us. Without that return
we can go so far away from our true natures
that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves.

We live blindly and act thoughtlessly.
We endanger the delicate balance which sustains
our lives, our communities, and our planet.

Each of us can make a difference.
Politicians and visionaries will not return us
to the sacredness of life.

That will be done by ordinary men and women
who together or alone can say,
“Remember to breathe, remember to feel,
remember to care,
let us do this for our children and ourselves
and our children’s children.
Let us practice for life’s sake."

 

 

Today is The Winter Solstice

The winter solstice

In the Northern Hemisphere, today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It's officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest-known holidays in human history.

Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Some ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires. In ancient Egypt and Syria, people celebrated the winter solstice as the sun's birthday. In ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even wars were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

(courtesy of Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac)

November, 1967 − by Joyce Sutphen

Sometimes, with unsought grace, it is a lovely poem that enlivens heart and spirit.

 

 

Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount

Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon,

we went into Russia,

and when we came out, the snow

was falling—the same snow

that fell in Moscow.

The sky had turned black velvet.

We’d been through the Revolution

and the frozen winters.

In the Chevy, we waited for the heater

to melt ice on the windshield,

clapping our hands to keep warm.

On the highway, these two things:

a song from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

and that semi-truck careening by.

Now I travel through the dark without you

and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful

the way you were, no matter what.

 

 

 

 

"November, 1967" by Joyce Sutphen

from First Words.

© Red Dragonfly Press, 2010

Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac

A Conumdrum

Louis Jenkins calls it an unfortunate location. It could as well be called a conundrum. In any event, it's a fine prose poem.

 

Unfortunate Location

by Louis Jenkins

In the front yard there are three big white pines, older than any-
thing in the neighborhood except the stones. Magnificent trees that
toss their heads in the wind like the spirited black horses of a troika.
It’s hard to know what to do, tall dark trees on the south side of the
house, an unfortunate location, blocking the winter sun. Dark and
damp. Moss grows on the roof, the porch timbers rot and surely
the roots have reached the old bluestone foundation. At night, in
the wind, a tree could stumble and fall killing us in our beds. The
needles fall year after year making an acid soil where no grass grows
We rake the fallen debris, nothing to be done, we stand around with
sticks in our hands. Wonderful trees.

 

 

 

 

October 10 - Wendell Berry

For today, October 10, and for nearly a lifetime, the poems, stories, novels and essays of Wendell Berry have been a model for me, a testament and witness to a full life in thoroughgoing relationship with others and with the earth.

 

October 10

by Wendell Berry

Now constantly there is the sound,
quieter than rain,
of the leaves falling.

Under their loosening bright
gold, the sycamore limbs
bleach whiter.

Now the only flowers
are beeweed and aster, spray
of their white and lavender
over the brown leaves.

The calling of a crow sounds
Loud — landmark — now
that the life of summer falls
silent, and the nights grow.

 

 

Sanctuary - Parker Palmer

I've always loved the deeply intimate resonance, the sense of safety and nourishment, in the word "sanctuary." My wise age-mate Parker Palmer movingly captures its evolution, nuance and importance in his own life. "Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival... [The sanctuary] I need may not be in a church, but in the silence, in the woods, in a friendship, in a poem, or in a song [like that of Carrie Newcomer in her album "The Beautiful Not Yet."]

Seeking Sanctuary in Our Own Sacred Spaces

by Parker J. Palmer

When I was a kid, “sanctuary” meant only one thing. It was the big room with the stained glass windows and hard wooden benches where my family worshipped every Sunday. Church attendance was not optional for my sisters and me, so that sanctuary was where I learned to pray — pray that the service would end and God would release me back into the wild. I also learned that not all prayers are answered, no matter how ardent.

Today, after 77 years of life in a world that’s both astonishingly beautiful and horrifically cruel, “sanctuary” is as vital as breathing to me. Sometimes I find it in churches, monasteries, and other sites designated as sacred. But more often I find it in places sacred to my soul: in the natural world, in the company of a trustworthy friend, in solitary or shared silence, in the ambience of a good poem or good music.

Sanctuary is wherever I find safe space to regain my bearings, reclaim my soul, heal my wounds, and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the storm: it’s about spiritual survival. Today, seeking sanctuary is no more optional for me than church attendance was as a child.

We live in a culture of violence. Even if we’re not at daily risk of physical injury or death, as are so many in the gun-obsessed U.S., our culture relentlessly assaults our souls with noise, frenzy, consumerism, tribalism, homophobia, racism, and more. It’s common to become desensitized to these assaults. We “normalize” them in order to get on with our daily lives, disregarding our need for sanctuary as we do. But at times something happens that makes us hypersensitive to all that threatens our souls.

Three deep dives into clinical depression were such “somethings” for me. For long months, I lived in closed rooms with the shades pulled down. When a friend insisted that I get outside more, I said,

“I can’t. The world feels like it’s full of knives.”

In my fragile mental state, casual encounters felt perilous, and reading the news of the day made me feel utterly unfit for life in this world.

Depression made me exaggerate life’s dangers and underestimate my own resilience, of course. But recalling the bad old days when my world was “full of knives” reminds me that it’s easy to die the death of a thousand cultural cuts without even knowing we’re bleeding.

People have different ways of dealing with cultural violence. Some turn to escapism by, for example, embracing world-rejecting religious or political beliefs. But this can easily lead to deepening isolation, a siege mentality, and paranoia about how “those people” or “the government” are trying to control us and destroy our way of life. There’s a lot of that going around these days.

Others jump into the mosh pit, seeking wealth or power or notoriety, contributing to the world’s violence as they do. There’s a lot of that going around as well, despite endless warnings like the one Wordsworth famously issued two hundred years ago:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Others try to call our culture back to sanity and make the world a better place. But even they can get caught up in the violence of the very culture they want to change: we not only live in it, it lives in us. To quote Thomas Merton,

"There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence."

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her)…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Merton puts his finger on our deepest need: to protect and nurture the “root of inner wisdom” that makes work and life itself fruitful. Fed by the taproot some call the soul, we need neither to flee from the world, nor exploit it. Instead, we can love the world with all of its (and our) flaws by trying to live in a way that models life’s finest possibilities.

That kind of love is possible, I believe, only if we know when and where to seek sanctuary, reclaiming our souls in order to engage the world in life-giving ways. When service emerges from whatever kind of sanctuary nurtures the root of one’s inner wisdom, it’s much less likely to be distorted by the violence of activism and overwork. Once we understand that, we are moving toward the heart of nonviolence — the only way of being that has a chance to transcend and transform the violence of our culture.

I was reminded of this fact in March of 2011, when I went on the annual three-day Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage led by Rep. John Lewis. On the first day, we visited movement sites in Birmingham, Alabama; on the second day, in Montgomery; and on the third day — the 46th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” — we marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis once again in the lead, as he had been in 1965 at age 25.

Rep. John Lewis walks across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

During our three-day pilgrimage, two things struck me about the history we were revisiting. The first was the fact that so many young people were so well schooled in the disciplines of nonviolence that they were able to sustain ferocious attacks from sworn “public safety” officials without striking back. By refusing to succumb to the violence of our culture, they transformed a movement that might have become armed warfare into a moral witness that altered the lay and the law of the land.

The second was the fact that most of the Civil Rights sites we visited were sanctuaries like the one I sat in as a restless kid — sanctuaries in which generations of African Americans planted the seeds of the movement that flowered in the mid-20th century. I was especially moved by Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma. That’s where peaceful protestors prepared for the first march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and in which they sought refuge after being bloodied and broken on the other side.

As a person who aspires to live nonviolently — knowing I will forever fall short — I know I need sanctuary if I want loosen the grip of our culture’s violence on me. I also know that there are many Brown Chapels. The one I need may not be in a church, but in the silence, in the woods, in a friendship, in a poem, or in a song.

An American tragedy: why are millions of trees dying across the country?

The tragic combination of their beauty, their name and their death: the live oaks of California. The state has seen more than 66 million trees killed in the Sierra Nevada alone since 2010. It's a quiet crisis playing out in US forests as huge numbers of trees succumb to drought, disease, insects and wildfire – much of it driven by climate change.

 

 

 

 

 

From today's New York Times (Oliver Milman in Oahu and Alan Yuhas in San Francisco):

 

 

JB Friday hacked at a rain-sodden tree with a small axe, splitting open a part of the trunk. The wood was riven with dark stripes, signs of a mysterious disease that has ravaged the US’s only rainforests – and just one of the plagues that are devastating American forests across the west.

Friday, a forest ecologist at the University of Hawaii, started getting calls from concerned landowners in Puna, which is on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s big island, in 2010. Their seemingly ubiquitous ohi’a trees were dying at an astonishing rate. The leaves would turn yellow, then brown, over just a few weeks – a startling change for an evergreen tree.

“It was like popcorn – pop, pop, pop, pop, one tree after another,” Friday said. “At first people were shocked, now they are resigned. “It’s heartbreaking. This is the biggest threat to our native forests that any of us have seen. If this spreads across the whole island, it could collapse the whole native ecosystem.”

Almost six years later and nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected with rapid ohi’a death disease. Rumors abound as to its origin: did it emerge from Hawaii’s steaming volcanoes? A strange new insect? Scientists still aren’t sure of where it came from or how to treat it.

Lisa Keith, researcher in plant pathology at the US Department of Agriculture, said that when she analyzed the disease “right away Dutch elm disease popped into my head.” But this was unlike anything she, or anyone else, had ever dealt with.

“I’m not sure if there’s been anything else like this in the world,” she said. “The potential is there for major devastation.” Keith said the disease hadn’t yet spread to crops, like coffee, but it threatens a whole family of metrosideros trees and shrubs found mainly in the Pacific.

But the plight of the ohi’a is not unique - it’s part of a quiet crisis playing out in forests across America. Drought, disease, insects and wildfire are chewing up tens of millions of trees at an incredible pace, much of it driven by climate change.

Forestry officials and scientists are increasingly alarmed, and say the essential role of trees – providing clean water, locking up carbon and sheltering whole ecosystems – is being undermined on a grand scale.

In northern California, an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death is infecting hundreds of different plants, from redwoods and ferns to backyard oaks and bay laurels. The disease is distantly related to the cause of the 19th-century Irish potato famine, and appears to have arrived with two “Typhoid Marys,” rhododendrons and bay laurels, said Dr. David Rizzo, of the University of California, Davis.

“We’re talking millions of trees killed, whole mountain sides dying,” Rizzo said.  

Despite its name, the pathogen slowly saps the life from oaks over the course of two to five years, turning them sickly brown. The disease spreads mostly through water, like rain splashing off an infected leaf on to a healthy neighbor. Rizzo said wind-driven rain could carry it miles at a time, and that it already ranged from the Oregon border down through the forests of Big Sur.

The pestilence appears to have arrived in the US through nursery plants in the 1980s, said Matteo Garbelotto, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who researches the genetics of the disease and trees that resist it. Garbelotto said researchers have found three distinct “subspecies” of the pathogen in the US – only one of which has escaped into the wild.

“There’s a bit of concern here that maybe we’re not doing enough to prevent introduction of other two lineages,” he said. Authorities have quarantined 15 counties to keep infected plants from leaving, but Garbelotto fears that authorities lack the resources to do more.

“It’s a little bit like talking about mosquito abatement and malaria,” Garbelotto said of efforts to protect some trees by isolating them. “You try to reduce the number of vectors, eliminate immediate neighbors, a bit like putting a mosquito net around the tree.”

Five years of drought in the west have not only starved trees of water but weakened their defenses and created conditions for “insect eruptions” across the US, said Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. Bark beetles and mountain pine beetles, usually held in check by wet winters, now have more time to breed and roam. The latter have already expanded their range from British Columbia across the Rockies, to the Yukon border and eastward, into jack pine forests that have never seen the bug.

The outbreak is “something like 10 times bigger than normal, I would argue a lot more than that,” Six said. “Basically a native insect is acting outside of the norm, because of climate change, and become an exotic in forests it’s never been before. We haven’t seen very good outcomes of exotics moving into native forests.”

Boosted by climate change, various beetles and the fungi they carry have already wiped out millions of acres of trees, and Six and Rizzo both warned of cascading effects. In the redwoods, Rizzo said, the loss of tanoaks and their relatives would strip away nut-producing species, leaving birds and mammals that rely on them without food. The loss of mountain pines, Six said, threatens grizzly bears and the critical snowpack that supplies water to life below.

 “There’s virtually nothing you can do to stop the beetles, either, unless they’ve killed everything and run out of food,” Six said. “Or unless the climate cools, and I don’t think anyone is expecting that anytime soon.”

In Hawaii, warming temperatures have helped spread four types of beetles that bore into ohi’a bark to feed. The beetles carry disease spore on their wings, in their guts and in the sawdust of burrows, spreading it from tree to tree.

“They are exploding around the world due to global warming,” he said. They appear unstoppable: spraying each tree with insecticide would be time-consuming and made futile by rain, and pheromone-laced traps also appear ineffective. The university’s arboretum has started collecting ohi’a seeds in the face of a doomsday scenario that was recently unimaginable for such a common tree.

Scientists in Keith’s lab have made some progress, finding that the fungal disease was part of the common ceratocystis family. It was probably imported to Hawaii by an ornamental plant, but a global DNA database drew a blank; this was an entirely new strain.

 “I would’ve thought that with the extensive information there, there would’ve been a match,” Keith said. “It’s a worry.”

The spores look golden under the microscope and give off a fruity smell. Once they grip a tree the fungus clogs up the vascular system that trees use to draw water upwards. Leaves die, then the tree itself.

If you slice right through an infected tree, you find a starburst of dark fungus at the core. “It’s like someone’s arteries filling up with plaque and then they keel over,” Friday said.

While research continues for a treatment, scientists’ current priority is containment. Movement of ohi’a between islands is prohibited, but with an uncertain source, there’s little else to do other than cut down infected trees and burn them.

In western valleys of dead trees, a few still stand unharmed. Six said genetic research has begun to try to understand why some survive the swarms of millions of insects. “The only thing that’s really going to help our forests move into the future with climate change is adaptation,” she said. “Forests need to actually adapt with genetic change.”

 

Perserverence is willingness, not will - Tracy Cochran

Tracy Cochran's lovely reflections remind me of so much: my deep aspiring witness of and companionship with trees, my struggles and resolutions in finding my voice, my experience of the intimacy and infinite expansibility of sangha and true community, that is like concentric circles always still, always in graceful movement, the portal of humility and the path of reverence, gifts received and nourished by passing them on.

 

“If we could surrender to Earth’s intelligence, we would rise up rooted, like trees.”

―Rainer Maria Rilke

One day recently I woke up with no voice, just a breathy whisper. This is challenging under ordinary circumstances. But on this particular day it felt like catastrophe. I was scheduled to teach mindfulness meditation and give a talk at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. Still under the covers, I tried talking. Nothing, just air rushing out no matter how hard I pushed to make my vocal chords work.

Terrible images flashed before my eyes; faces looking up at me with dismay and incomprehension, people stampeding for the exits. Fear has a mind of its own. I am shy under the best of circumstances. Preparing for public speaking can feel like suiting up for battle. But in recent years, I have also developed Spasmodic Dysphonia, a rare voice disorder that can make my voice wax and wane. On good days, this can give my voice an interesting, husky quality. The last time I led meditation at the Rubin, someone said I sounded like the sultry movie star Anne Bancroft.

People have actually asked how long it took me to develop this gravelly, smoky voice, finding it soothing for meditation, maybe picturing lots of whisky and cigarettes. Yet on bad days, just before and after treatment, the voice is breathy and strangled. It is as if you are in one of those movies where you can see and hear people but they can’t see or hear you, as if you are a ghost or a captive whose shouts can’t be heard. In a culture in which words are everything, to be voiceless is also to be invisible. I also felt strangely defenseless.

“I can’t go on,” writes Samuel Beckett. “I’ll go on.” Naturally, I thought of cancelling. But the Rubin Museum event was long scheduled, and it was about something more than my sitting up on a stage talking and being entertaining. The weekly mindfulness meditation sessions at the Rubin offer people to sit and meditate surrounded by sacred art in the middle of the big city. Who was I to cancel? Besides, I was supposed to be talking about determination and perseverance. I decided I had show up. Even if I couldn’t be heard at all, I would show determination.

When most of us think of determination, we think first of imposing our will on the world, insisting on a particular outcome, our vision. Yet real determination appears when we keep going, surrendering what the ego wants, which is always to look good, to sound good, to win. Real perseverance is willingness, not will. Really determined people are willing to give up what the ego wants and to go on, no matter what is going on around them. Persevering does not mean being rigid and fixed, but flowing like water, willing to meet the conditions at hand yet never giving up.

I boarded the train, headed for a true unknown. Naturally, at times I was gripped with uncertainty. In those moments, I discovered how fear narrows the focus. When I shifted my attention away from my thoughts and projections about others to my own experience in the moment, my tunnel vision broadened and softened. My view became more generous. By myself on the train, practicing without witnesses, I experienced how giving space and acceptance to my fear brought courage and grounded me.

Things happen all the time in this world that can make you feel as if the ground is giving way beneath your feet. Things that you think are solid and unchanging are not. The body that seemed so reliable, the relationship you thought would last for life, the narrative about your life you took to be reality, everything is subject to change. What can we trust in such a world? It turns out we can trust our deeper wish to wake up and see just this. It turns out that at under the ego there is an earthier essence that wishes to be part of a larger world. Touching this earth allows us to open and be more aware.

At the Rubin I was met by kindness. A cup of tea was fetched. A powerful hand microphone was supplied. After the introduction, as I mounted the steps to the stage and took my seat, I kept the focus of attention on yourself that you can be selfless, only by focus on what is happening inside and outside you that you can be generous…practicing without witnesses, by giving space and acceptance to your fear, your grasping, your anger, you can be free to help others.

I encouraged people to use my breathy voice to listen as if the speaker was on her deathbed and about to impart the secret of life. The secret wasn’t in me but in the listening. The more closely we listen, the more we hear, especially the wordless aspiration and knowing in ourselves. All but one person stayed. Afterwards, more than one person assured me they could hear me very clearly. Partly, this was the excellent sound system. But it was also because the way they listened. More than one person told me they were more touched by my willingness to show up than by anything I might have said about determination under other circumstances.

In the great myth of the Buddha’s journey, there came a point when he is completely overwhelmed. As he sits meditating under the Bodhi tree, the devil Mara sends temptations to distract him from the wish of his deepest essence. Mara flashes images of the Buddha as a great leader, as a huge success in business with mountains of money, surrounded by beautiful women. He shows the Buddha that can make India great again if he would just give up his quest to awaken, and get up and do something. The Buddha will not move.

When temptation doesn’t work, Mara tries fear, conjuring visions of terrible armies howling for his blood. These armies are external and also internal, legions of anxieties and fears. But the Buddha does not flinch. Slowly, he reached down and touched the earth. The classical explanation is that he is asking the Earth itself to bear witness to his many life times of effort. Not his blinding brilliance or his unique talent, mind you, but h.is effort, his perseverance, his willingness to show up no matter what. His willingness to fail and fail again. “Ever tried. Ever failed,” writes Beckett. “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The Buddha understood what the Christian author G.K. Chesterton meant when he wrote, “Everything worth doing is worth doing badly. “

Touching the Earth symbolizes humility, coming down out of our thoughts, out of the busy hive of ego, to join the rest of life. The Latin word humus, the rich living earth, is related to the word humility. When difficulty arises, it creates a clearing in the deadening trance of habit. We remember that what really matters the things that we spend so much time thinking about every day. What matters is much more essential. Being alive, for example. Taking part in life, having a chance to give and receive in the most elemental ways, taking in the beauty of the world and giving back where we can.

At moments when the ground gives way beneath our feet, it’s good to remember the power of touching the earth, descending from our racing thoughts and fears to an awareness of the present moment. When words fail, we can sometimes discover a new voice and a new kind of determination. We can rise up rooted, like trees. ♦

 

Tracy Cochran is editorial director of Parabola.

Thistle

The most ordinary of flowers, the thistle is widely considered a weed. Maude Grieve indicates in the book noted below, "It has always been a plant of ill repute among us." I took a photo yesterday while wandering in the woods near Point Reyes.

What a delight, also, to discover Mrs. Grieve's book, A Modern Herbal, published in 1931, still available in book form, as well as online: a marvelous compendium of information on the medicinal, culinary, cultivation and folklore of herbs.

Mrs. Grieve's brief introductory discussion of thistles is delightful:

Thistle is the old English name - essentially the same in all kindred languages - for a large family of plants occurring chiefly in Europe and Asia.

In agriculture the Thistle is the recognized sign of untidiness and neglect, being found not so much in barren ground, as in good ground not properly cared for. It has always been a plant of ill repute among us; Shakespeare classes 'rough Thistles' with 'hateful Docks,' and further back in the history of our race we read of the Thistle representing part of the primeval curse on the earth in general, and on man in particular, for - 'Thorns also and Thistles shall it bring forth to thee.'

Thistles will soon monopolize a large extent of country to the extinction of other plants, as they have done in parts of the American prairies, in Canada and British Columbia, and as they did in Australia, till a stringent Act of Parliament was passed, about twenty years ago, imposing heavy penalties upon all who neglected to destroy Thistles on their land, every man being now compelled to root out, within fourteen days, any Thistle that may lift up its head, Government inspectors being specially appointed to carry out the enforcement of the law.

The growth of weeds in Great Britain, having, in the opinion of many, also reached disturbing proportions, it is now proposed to enact a similar law in this country, and the Smallholders' Union is bringing forward a 'Bill to prevent the spread of noxious weeds in England and Wales,' the provisions being similar to the Australian law - weed-infested roadsides, as well as badly-cleared cultivated land, to come within the scope of the enactment.

Among the thirteen noxious weeds enumerated in the proposed Bill, the name of Thistle is naturally to be found. And yet in medicine Thistles are far from useless.

When beaten up or crushed in a mill to destroy the prickles, the leaves of all Thistles have proved excellent food for cattle and horses. This kind of fodder was formerly used to a great extent in Scotland before the introduction of special green crops for the purpose. The young stems of many of the Thistles are also edible, and the seeds of all the species yield a good oil by expression.

Two or three of our native species are handsome enough to be worthy of a place in gardens. Some species which flourish in hotter and drier climates than our own, such as the handsome Yellow Thistles of the south of Europe, are cultivated for that purpose, and have a classical interest, being mentioned by Hesiod as the flower of summer. This striking plant, crowned with its golden flowers, is abundant throughout Sicily. The Fish-bone Thistle , from Syria, is also a very handsome plant. A grand Scarlet Thistle from Mexico was grown in England some fifty years ago, but is now never seen.

 

The thistle is the national flower of Scotland. Legend has it that an invading Norse army was attempting to sneak up at night upon a Scottish army's encampment. One barefoot Norseman had the misfortune to step upon a thistle, causing him to cry out in pain, thus alerting the Scots to the presence of the Norse invaders.

 

 

 

I have no idea which one of the many varieties of thistle I photographed yesterday, but many of their names belie their characterization as weeds. For example, there are holy thistles, melancholy thistles, creeping plume thistles, woolly-headed thistles, milk thistles and dwarf thistles, as well as the yellow thistles, fish-bone thistles and scarlet thistles mentioned by Mrs. Grieve above. Here is my photo (double-click to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on a Zen Buddhist Parable

Here is a well-known parable told by the Buddha:

 

A man, crossing a field, encounters a tiger. The man flees, the tiger pursues. Coming to a cliff top, the man grabs the root of a vine and swings  himself down below the tiger's reach. The tiger waits. Looking down the precipice upon which he precariously swings, the man sees another tiger looking expectantly upwards at him. As if this were not sufficient cause for peril, two mice begin to chew the root from which he hangs. As he digests his unenviable condition, the man sees a ripe strawberry within his reach. Releasing the vine with one hand, he gently picks the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

______________________________

 

 

Teaching tales are a wonderful part of many other wisdom traditions, including Sufism, Taoism, Hasidic Judaism, the life of Jesus in the New Testament, and the stories of the desert fathers of early Christianity. Like this Zen parable, they lend themselves to meditation and revisiting.

When I first read this story, in my twenties, I took it at reasonable face value: a doomed man's capacity to pluck a last moment of pleasure before imminent and certain death. Having no experience of such, I nonetheless imagined that there was nothing like such inevitability to focus and heighten one's sensibilities.

Years later, ruminating on the story again while preparing to discuss it with a group of students, I wrote in my journal, "Can I, in the midst of all that distracts and destroys, with no hope of release from such circumstances, reach out to taste the fruit of life? I have a fierce and, I think, irredeemable tendency to hold on tighter to what I've learned to know as dear life. Perhaps, if I will not let go, I can at least learn to grasp with only one hand, leaving the other to reach out freely."

Now, later in life, I am more inclined to hear the tale as a nudge towards recognition of the evanescence of time in contrast to a world more and more compelled by the tyranny of time's presence and precision. None of my readings is lost. I live, as Stanley Kunitz writes elsewhere, "in the layers," and I too am not done with my changes.

There is a brief Sufi tale whose characters are not unlike those of this Zen parable:

A man being followed by a hungry tiger turned in desperation to face it, and cried: "Why don't you leave me alone?" The tiger answered: "Why don't you stop being so appetizing?""

 

Thoughts on Abiding

Well over a decade ago I wrote the lines that follow below the photograph. The landscape they portray I keep in memory on my wall. I remember it vividly, as I remember the companionship that accompanied the days I lived nearby, grateful for the love I received, wishing that I had offered in return more of the fellowship I found and felt in the beauty of that natural world.

 

 

 

I linger beside a familiar granite boulder and small juniper in a pasture. I am drawn to their simplicity, common juniper (even in Latin: Juniperus communis) and common granite, united in lasting companionship. They aren't rare. We will find them on many of our walks. They thrive everywhere in our landscapes. Even after suburbia has invaded and overrun,  a keen and patient eye can see evidence of pastures, old fields, rocky slopes. There's strength in these two fellow creatures, a sense of lasting through whatever elements they meet. The granite boulder isn't especially dramatic or remarkable, but it was too large for the farmer to move aside when he cleared the pasture. So it was left, perhaps just where a receding glacier dropped it ten thousand years ago. The juniper, of course, came later, but its gnarled tenaciousness—like its cousin cypresses on the California coast—makes for fitting fellowship. These two rough textured green gray souls live together in satisfying complementarity. One can't imagine them losing each other.

 

 

Love as Ethical Insight − Arthur Zajonc

Arthur Zajonc is a physicist and a contemplative. His long practice of those disciplines − his wide-ranging thinking, writing and teaching − have brought fascinating integrative presence to diverse realms of human endeavor. He is emeritus professor of physics at my alma mater, Amherst College, where he taught from 1978 to 2012, as well as former president of the Mind and Life Institute and former director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. His publications include Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love; The Dalai Lama at MIT; and with co-author Parker Palmer, The Heart of Higher Education: A Call for Renewal.

In addition to those resources, I want to highlight here two very accessible documents that provide readers and listeners with a fine introduction to his work.

The first of those is a recorded conversation with Krista Tipppett in 2013, called "Holding Life Consciously," available on Tippett's website, On Being.

The second is a short (3-page) essay titled "Love as Ethical Insight," available here.

Zajonc's own website, containing much additional information, is here.

To re-imagine love as ethical insight is not a self-evident phrase or practice. Consider its persuasiveness in two paragraphs drawn from Zajonc's brief essay noted above. The first is a quotation from Nelson Mandela's remarks at the trial that sent him to prison in South Africa for 20 years. The second paragraph contains the essence of Zajonc's understanding that love is embedded in our empathy for others.

This is Mandela at his trial: "During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

And here is Zajonc on love as moral insight and imagination:

"We are empathic beings. As such we are profoundly connected to other human beings, as well as to all of nature. We can feel the joy and suffering of others, and as innately moral beings, we seek to mitigate suffering and promote the flourishing of others, even at a cost to ourselves. True morality carries the marks of insight and imagination.... In my view this is the moment in which love takes on the character of knowing. Love allows us gently, respectfully, and intimately to slip into the life of another person or animal or even the Earth itself and to know it from the inside. In this way, love can become a way of moral knowing that is as reliable as scientific insight. Then our highest challenge and aspiration is to learn to love with such selflessness and purity that love becomes a way to true moral insight, one that transcends social construction and biological imperatives."

____________________

Jim Wallis: When is America great?

Jim Wallis is president of Soujourners, a thoughtful and wise soul, and author most recently of America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America. He wrote today, in relation to the bevy of political references to America's greatness at the two recent conventions:

 

 

America Is Great — When America Is Good
Jim Wallis

Last night, Hillary Clinton made history as the first woman to accept the presidential nomination of a major party. She also answered the important question of why she has committed her life to public service.

In her acceptance speech, Clinton spoke of the values her mother passed on to her, values that she has passed on to her daughter, Chelsea, who in turn said they are the values she seeks to pass on to her young daughter and 5-week-old son. They are the values of the young Methodist woman outside of Chicago, whose youth leader took her into the city to hear a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. That was the moment that changed the direction of her life and led her to learn and steadily embrace perhaps the best-known motto of her Methodist faith, a quote often attributed to its founder John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Significantly, she quoted that in her speech last night, possibly the first time the words have been quoted in a Democratic convention. That message is what the nation needs to hear and see now if it is enough to overcome the political cynicism that now obscures our best values.

Our shared values — it was also the best part of President Barack Obama’s remarkable speech Wednesday night. When he said what it means and doesn’t mean to be an American, my 17-year-old son said, “That was awesome.”

 

From Obama’s speech:

“… my grandparents … didn't respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, what they valued were traits like honesty and hard work. Kindness. Courtesy. Humility. Responsibility. Helping each other out. That's what they believed in. True things. Things that last. The things we try to teach our kids.”

And he said these were the exact same values that his wife Michelle’s parents taught and raised her with on the south side of Chicago, values she talked about in her own magnificent address she gave to the nation the night before.

Political commentators from both the Democratic and Republican sides responded that these are indeed the values that make America its best — and they are the values that must always overcome our worst impulses. Despite substantial policy differences about the size of government, the strategies for economic growth, or the best paths to national security, many of the pundits in a rare moment of agreement affirmed these American values.

Many on all political sides agreed when Obama said that the previous week’s Republican convention “wasn't particularly Republican – and it sure wasn't conservative. What we heard was a deeply pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other, and turn away from the rest of the world.”

He continued:

 

“ … anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end ... That is America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don't fear the future; we shape it, we embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.”

This election will be all about values: which values are best for America, and which values most threaten it. Most Americans believe in the separation of church and state, but that doesn’t mean the segregation of moral values from public life.

Last night at the convention, Rev. William Barber called for moral values to prevail over partisan politics. He expressed concern for the “heart” of America and called us to become the “moral defibrillators” that must “shock” the nation’s sick heart to its best moral values of love, mercy, and justice.

That’s what faith and faith communities do best in our public life — bring their societies back to moral values for the sake of the common good. That’s a mission that both conservatives and liberals who care about moral values can embrace.

It’s the values Sen. Tim Kaine, a Catholic, expressed as he accepted the nomination for Clinton’s vice president. Kaine has always been unafraid to put his faith forward publicly (something Democrats are sometimes hesitant to do) and consistently commit himself to social justice as a consequence of his faith. When Kaine said (in Spanish) that the priorities he learned as a missionary with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Honduras were “Faith, Family, and Work,” he resonated with many people.

 

How faith is used and abused and what values are chosen will determine the outcome of this election, and it will shape the future of America and the world in decisive ways that we have not seen for many years.

Last week, Donald Trump said “Make America great again,” without saying what time he would like to go back to — without admitting how “great” America was for diverse people and women then. And last night, Hillary Clinton said “America is great because America is good,” without honestly reminding us that America is not always so great. So I would revise the two and say, America is great, when America is good. What it means to be good will be the moral values debate in this election.

My prayer for this election season is the same as Rev. Gabriel Salguero, who used these words to close the convention Wednesday night:

“Lord, help us transcend the nefarious traps of cynicism, despair, and division with the courageous work of hope and love. Teach us to continuously cherish and fervently defend the dignity of all our sisters and brothers. Help us never to tire in the work of compassion and justice. Instruct us to be ever-mindful of the most vulnerable among us: the child, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. Dios, danos la valentia de confrontar nuestros desafíos con amor. Help us to hew the future of our Republic from the bedrock of love.”

 

Kate Barnes: "Old Roses" and a life of writing poems

Old Roses

by Kate Barnes

When my father met my mother
at a dinner party in a garden of very old roses
on Beacon Hill one hot evening
in early June, he said to his friend, F. Morton
Smith, that night, “Morton, I have met
the girl I’m going to marry!”
                                                   (We have Uncle Morton's
testimony for that, the certified word
of a Boston lawyer.)
                                     My mother
said my father had looked handsome, yes,
and talked delightfully, but what she remembered
were the mosquitoes. “If you stopped slapping at them,
even for a second, you were eaten up
alive.”
            My father courted her
for the next ten years, whenever they found themselves
in the same place. It was the twenties then,
heyday of ocean liners, and she might be
in Paris, or maybe off getting
run away with by a hairy, two-humped camel
in the Gobi Desert, while he was crossing
the Pyrenees on foot; but, at last, on another
steamy hot day in Massachusetts, as she,
still wet from the bath, lay naked upstairs
on her sister’s bed, she heard the wedding march
start up on the grand piano
directly below her. She sprang to her feet,
threw on her cream-colored dress with a dipping hemline,
and flung herself down the narrow old staircase
straight into the arms of matrimony—which were wearing
an English jacket of dark blue wool for the occasion,
splendid, but unendurable.
                                                    Would anyone say
the marriage was a happy one? I don’t think
I know. Sometimes. Perhaps. I can’t imagine
either of them with anyone else. Years later, I,
a greedy child, crouched in the dark cabinet
under the attic stairs, and wolfed down
the last slice of their wedding cake, dried out fruitcake
in a little box covered with silver paper
and lined with paper lace, a keepsake
for wedding guests to slip under their pillows
that night so that they, too, would dream the bright moon
rolling her way through silver light, singing stars
clustering under the clouds.
                                                     Those crumbs
became the bones in my seven-year-old body—
and they’re in there yet—while the dreams
sing on in my head forever, like mosquitoes
whining among the leaves of thorny old roses.

 

 

Kate Barnes was Maine’s first Poet Laureate. And rightfully so. There is an incandescence to her work -- a delicacy of touch, utter clarity, and lightness that you carry it home with you and think about it for a while. Often, Kate writes about the natural world as a metaphor for the human experience of intimacy and loss. She is greatly influenced by the Chinese poets she admires. And, there is a humor in her writing, not a belly laugh but a chuckle of recognition. She spent much of her youth in Maine at Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, a farm that she says “only grew words” – her parents were writers. Her father, Henry Beston, was a naturalist. Her mother, Elizabeth Coatsworth wrote poetry and many children’s books.   Selected Publications: Talking in Your Sleep, Blackberry Books, 1986 Crossing the Field, Blackberry Books, 1992 Where the Deer Were, Godine, 1994 Kneeling Orion, Godine, 2004

Excerpts from an interview with Kate Barnes at her home in Appleton, Maine, October, 2007

Kate –Very often you get a first line and you can keep it for half a year or more. And the time comes when it is right and the rest of the poem comes out. It’s not a completely, in NO WAY, is this a completely conscious process. I remember being in my late teens thinking “Gee, the ones I like of my own poetry are the ones that tell me something that I didn’t know.” And that is still true.

Rob – But if they came from you, how could they tell you something you didn’t know?

Kate – Because we all have a big unconscious in there. Laughs… I remember being in my late teens and getting the line “In the February sliver of our lives” and I went around with that for about six months. And then I got the poem. That’s the only one I remember but it’s happened many times.

Rob – What is it that happens during those six months.

Kate – You live! [Laughs] You live along. And when the right time comes it comes of itself. I don’t think I’m going to make a poem out of that line today. You maybe you are just feeling good that day, you’ve had a good cup of coffee and away you go.

Who was it who said “The first version doesn’t matter. What you first write down is like the froth on the lips of a medium.” Then in time, you work and work and work and you make it right. I would often have 40 or more revisions.

I will say one other thing about me in poetry. I’ve had a great luxury in my life. I was brought hearing a great deal of poetry thanks to my mother who read aloud an enormous amount. And read lots of story poems to the children, exciting ones. Then when I went off to boarding school at 13, I was very lonely. I just read poetry all the time. I had a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse. I was such a dolt that I didn’t even notice that it was done in terms of time. For me they were all existing at the same time. All my life poetry has been my – sigh – I don’t know, the thing that I turned to and read all the time. That’s still true. That’s a great luxury in somebody’s life. I’ve been very lucky about that.

Earth Day by the numbers

I'm a few days late, but I just came across the following informative and sobering numbers in the Nutrition Action Healthletter, which I unreservedly recommend to all.

Earth Day by the Numbers

66 is the percentage of grain fed to animals, 4500 is the number of gallons of water needed to produce a quarter-pound of beef.

Michael F. Jacobson • April 22, 2016

 

Today, April 22, is the 46^th annual Earth Day, when more than 193 countries celebrate their love and care for our planet. Here are some numbers to consider as you contemplate the future of our one Mother Earth:

1 pound: the amount of fertilizer needed to produce 3 pounds of cooked beef

5 times as much: the irrigation water used to grow feed grains compared to fruits and vegetables

5 tons: the soil lost annually to erosion on an average acre of cropland

7 pounds: the amount of corn needed to add 1 pound of weight to feedlot cattle (some of that weight gain is not edible meat)

19 percent: the proportion of all methane, a greenhouse gas, emitted by cattle and other livestock

41 percent: the share of irrigated land planted in livestock feed crops

66 percent: the proportion of grain that ends up as livestock feed at home or abroad

331: the number of odor-causing chemicals in hog manure

4,500 gallons: the rain and irrigation water needed to produce a quarter-pound of raw beef

8,500 square miles: the size of the “dead zone” created in the Gulf of Mexico by fertilizer runoff carried by the Mississippi from the upper Midwest

33 million: the number of cars needed to produce the same level of global warming as is caused by the methane gas emitted by livestock and their manure

22 billion pounds: the amount of fertilizer used annually to grow feed grains for American livestock

3.3 trillion pounds: the amount of livestock manure produced annually

17 trillion gallons: the amount of irrigation water used annually to produce feed for U.S. livestock

Source: Six Arguments for a Greener Diet  by Michael F. Jacobson, Ph.D., and the Staff of the Center for Science in the Public Interest

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